Isaiah 40: Veterans Week
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A voice of one calling:
In the wilderness prepare
the way of the Lord
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God
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The prophet Isaiah heard the Spirit calling God's people home to a place they had never been before.
God would make a way where there was no way.
Ancestral memory would be their guide.
The Aleutian Islands are volcanic rocks in the Arctic Ocean.
But Indigenous People have lived there, following the ways of their ancestors, for 10,000 years.
In 1942, 44 people lived on Attu Island.
The Axis powers invaded and took all of them prisoner without a shot being fired.
They recognized that the Aleutians were unsinkable aircraft carriers, vital to the outcome of World War II.
It was the first occupation of US soil since the war of 1812.
Twenty-two of those prisoners died of starvation or exposure.
After the war the survivors were never allowed to go home.
Attu was too close to the USSR to defend peaceful people there during the cold war.
But in 2018 their descendants were finally allowed to visit the homeland they had never seen.
They gathered grass from Attu to weave traditional baskets, and handfuls of earth--so others could touch that homeland.
They erected a cross in the ruins of their village church.
They heard the ancestors cheering them on.
I believe 2022 is an invitation to all of us to come home to a place we've never been before.
Our world has changed.
The political climate is strident and dangerous.
But God is still making a highway for us, calling us to come home.
And the ancestors are cheering us on.