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Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord\u2019s hand double for all her sins. \u2026 You who bring good news to Zion, go up on a high mountain. You who bring good news to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, \u201cHere is your God!\u201d See, the Sovereign Lord comes with power, and he rules with a mighty arm. See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him. He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young. (Isaiah 40:1-2, 9-11)

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In the opening verses of these beautiful and familiar words from Isaiah 40, we hear that the Israelites\u2019 exile was directly related to the presence of sin in their lives and in the life of their nation.\xa0 Not only was their hard service completed, but their \u201csin had been paid for.\u201d\xa0

Fine for the Bible to say so, but when we or someone else associates the word \u201csin\u201d with our own losses and griefs, we start to cringe.\xa0 It\u2019s indelicate, insensitive, and not always a shoe that properly fits the story\u2014which is certainly true.\xa0 But it is also true that unless we associate the losses and griefs of our lives on some level with sin\u2014we can\u2019t really hear these words of comfort from Isaiah as words that are addressed to us, either.\xa0

In some sense that\u2019s what Advent is about\u2014meeting the harder, more difficult and painful truths of who we are and how our world is so that we can honestly receive the comfort of our God through the Saving work of His Son.\xa0 Because Jesus was not born into a world that was happily at peace, or a world that was whole.\xa0 He was born into a sin-broken world full of loss, where nothing was as it was supposed to be.\xa0

There was pain, injustice, oppression, addiction, disease, estrangement and more.\xa0 And that was true, because there was sin.\xa0 The sin of one person against another.\xa0 Or the sin of one person that unintentionally affected another.\xa0 Or the sin without any real discernable origin at all that continues to ricochet down the halls of history affecting everyone.\xa0

That\u2019s still world we live in.\xa0 It is sin-broken.\xa0 The drinking, the adulteries, the injustices, the lies, the shouts, the abuse, the mistakes, the theft, the shirked responsibilities\u2014all of them together from all of humanity\u2014ricocheting down the halls of history\u2014bouncing into this person, knocking the legs out from under that one.\xa0

Whose fault is it?\xa0 In some cases, mine.\xa0 In other cases, yours.\xa0 But in other cases, it\u2019s simply ours, as sin-broken people in a sin-broken world\u2014our inheritance from our mothers and fathers before us.\xa0 A place where awful things like death, pain, loneliness, and other forms of tragedy live.\xa0

All this to say: it\u2019s too big for us to handle on our own.\xa0 We need a Saviour to rescue us from this mess.\xa0 We need a Shepherd to gather us up to his heart and bring comfort, healing, and peace when our world falls apart.\xa0 We need, in other words, to see our God\u2014this God of the sin-afflicted\u2014like us\u2014who acts to save and who speaks tenderly to comfort.\xa0 For surely, he is our God, and he is with us.

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