Isaiah 25:6-9 When The Shroud Is Removed
On this mountain the Lord of Armies will prepare for all peoples a banquet of rich food, a banquet of aged wines, with the best cuts of meat, and with the finest wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that covers all peoples, the burial cloth stretched over all nations. He has swallowed up death forever! The Lord God will wipe away the tears from every face. He will take away the shame of his people throughout the earth. For the Lord has spoken. On that day it will be said, “Look, here is our God! We waited for him, and he saved us! This is the Lord! We waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation!”
When this is all over—the pandemic, the social distancing, the restrictions that have changed our worship services and changes that have disrupted our lives—when it’s all in the past, do you think much will be permanently changed from what it was before? Will handshakes ever come back in fashion? Will we decide, “You know, I kind of like wearing a face mask all the time”? They can be quite fashionable. I’m expecting a lot of Halloween costumes this year to incorporate some unique face masks. And with the cold blasts of winter right around the corner, face masks and scarves will do double duty. Maybe the masks will be viewed something like a necktie, a completely useless piece of cloth maybe, but required wear for some occasions, and a colorful addition to your fashion wardrobe.
Or maybe we’ll glad to get rid of them the minute we get the all-clear, and never want to see or wear another face mask and be reminded of the year 2020 as long as we live. Isaiah talks about another piece of cloth that we’ll be glad to get rid of, the burial shroud. It doesn’t come in designer colors or playful patterns like some of the masks we’ve seen. And it’s only got one use—a shroud won’t double as a winter scarf or a warm quilt to throw on your bed.
In our reading today, it almost sounds like they found another use for shrouds, doubling as a table cloth. Our text is describing a banquet, with all these rich and delicious foods laid out on the banquet table, and then, suddenly, it changes direction and explains how God is going to remove the burial shroud. I thought of that magician’s trick, where he grabs a table cloth and yanks it off the table without disturbing all the plates and wine glasses sitting on it—except Isaiah describes it as the shroud that enfolds us, wraps around us, and covers us from head to toe, not one that the banquet sits on.
Yet the day is coming when the shroud will be yanked away, not a trick at all, but a welcome relief. When we finally get to get rid of our face masks, we may not be satisfied with throwing them away; we’ll burn them, we’ll put them through a shredder, we’ll find all sorts of creative ways to rip them up and get rid of them for good. So on the last day, we’re not going to take all those old burial shrouds, look at them, and say, “You know, I think this would make a nice table cloth. We can dye them some bright, happy colors, maybe a floral print. Recycle, reuse, reduce waste. Why not?” Because we’ll never want or need another reminder of what they were originally used for.
A shroud itself is used to cover up what we don’t want staring us in the face. You can’t get rid of death by covering it up, but we don’t have to see it. We can try not to think about it. A shroud lets us pretend that death is clean and tidy.
And yet not even the craziest fashion show has ever featured designer shrouds in a variety of pastels or classic stripes. Death will never be pretty. All we can do is cover it up, hide it, and talk about something else.
But the day is coming when the shroud becomes as useless as the face masks we can’t wait to discard. Isaiah said that God will destroy the shroud that enfolds all people, the sheet that covers all nations. If that’s all he’s going to do—remove the shroud—I’m not sure I like the sound of that. If God’s just going to pull back the shroud, then we won’t be able to avoid facing death, seeing it uncovered. But God has pulled back the shroud to show us that death itself has been destroyed.
You’ve all heard of the Shroud of Turin, a fourteen foot long strip of linen that some people claim is the very burial cloth of Christ, with the image of his crucified body somehow imprinted faintly on its surface. I don’t have any conclusions about the authenticity of the shroud. Scientists have pretty much concluded it’s a medieval fake, but there are still a lot of mysteries and uncertainties about where it came from and how old it really is.
But that’s just it—it gives us nothing but uncertainties and mysteries. Our Easter celebrations don’t draw joy and confidence from uncertainties and mysteries, but from the gospel truth that the shroud that once wrapped our Savior’s body was discarded. Death was truly swallowed up in victory.
And our faith and hope, for ourselves and our loved ones who go on before us, doesn’t come from peeking under the shroud, but from God’s promise to destroy the shroud, not yanking away the cloth so that we must come face to face with death, but so that we can see that he has destroyed death forever.
You know, next week isn’t just Halloween; it’s also Reformation Day. And next Sunday is All Saints’ Day, a day of remembrance of all the saints who from their labors rest. So, while some of us might be thinking about all the candy and treats, sugar and zero-nutrition goodies waiting for us on Halloween, Isaiah says, “Save some room for the real banquet.” The real banquet is both the riches that await us in heaven one day, and the treasure of the gospel that feeds our souls with the richest and most nourishing of fares.
Our gospel lesson this morning was a parable of Jesus that combined two related lessons. It painted for us a picture of God’s wedding banquet and reminded us how we end up there: God invited us. He sent out his invitation, not to the rich and famous, the great and noble, the entitled and deserving ones, but to us, the poor, the needy, and the forgotten. It’s grace, the number one lesson of the Reformation, that we are saved because God invited us, called us, and saved us.
And the second lesson in the same parable is about that one guy who tried to get into the wedding banquet wearing his street clothes. The fundamental question for Martin Luther himself was: “What made him think he belonged in God’s house?” What made this guest think he was a good man who deserved a seat at that table?
Martin Luther grew up thinking that would be him. He was the one God was going to point to and say, “You don’t belong here. Get out.” And it’s a question we’ve all wrestled with, even if we don’t put it in those terms. Am I a good person? What do other people see when they look at me? What does God see, when he sees right past my face mask, when he sees through every veil of pretense, every false front and good face I put on, that I use to hide myself? My shame? My foolishness? My mistakes, that I can’t really call mistakes because I knew full well what I was doing?
One day we will wear a shroud, and one day the shroud will be removed. What then? Isaiah addresses that question, and comes to the same answer Martin Luther finally found, that finally brought him peace. Isaiah says that one day God himself will remove the shroud that covers all peoples, the burial cloth stretched over all nations, destroying death and removing tears and sorrow, removing our shame forever. And how will this be? Only one answer: “For the Lord has spoken.” Period. The Lord has spoken. He said, “This is how it’s going to be.” So, this is how it’s going to be. He made a promise. And the promise itself is why the promise will be fulfilled, and how it will be fulfilled.
It doesn’t depend on what I do to make it turn out that way. It doesn’t depend on me coming up with my own satisfactory answer to the question, “Why should God let me into the heavenly banquet room?” It doesn’t depend on me at all. The Lord has spoken. That’s the answer Luther found in Scriptures when he realized that the righteousness of God is that by which he makes us righteous; the wisdom of God is that by which he makes us wise. The glory of God, the grace of God, the salvation of God are all from the Lord. For the Lord has spoken. And the Lord has done this. And it is marvelous in our eyes.
“On that day it will be said, ‘Surely, this is our God! We waited for him, and he saved us!’” It’s all about what God has done. He saved us. And what did we do? What’s our part in this story? We waited. That’s it. We waited for him to save us.
The waiting Isaiah describes is more than just watching the clock and counting the minutes ticking by. It’s trust. It’s waiting with patience and confidence because we know and fully expect that the Lord who promised will come through for us. We waited for him, and we didn’t give up waiting no matter how long a wait we had, no matter how difficult a time we’ve had to struggle through, because we trusted in him, and he saved us. He came through for us just as he said.
He saved us. For Isaiah that salvation was still seven hundred years in the future, but Isaiah saw it and believed. Later on he’ll describe, in chapter 53, how the Suffering Servant would be stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Now, already in chapter 25, Isaiah can say surely this is our God! “We waited for him, and he saved us! This is the Lord! We waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation!” For the Lord has spoken.
In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.” The Lord spoke, and it was so. And the same God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has “made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ,” as Paul says in 2 Corinthians. Paul was talking in that chapter about the veil that covers men’s hearts, a face mask that we all wear, a veil of unbelief and spiritual darkness and blindness. God has removed the veil that we might see the glory of God, that we might reflect a little bit of that glory ourselves as we are now renewed in the image of God to live in his knowledge and shine like lights in this dark world. With the hope that maybe a little bit of our own light of love and holiness will shine through the veils that still cover those around us, we live in peace and hope and bear all the fruits of faith by the Holy Spirit. By grace alone, through faith alone, with the Holy Scriptures alone, the veil is removed and we look up to see a smiling heavenly Father’s face.
And so Isaiah rejoices and says, “We trusted in God, and he saved us.” We trusted in God and he saved us—why do those words sound so familiar? On the cross, it was said of Christ, “He trusted in God, let God save him now, since he said I am the Son of God.” But Jesus trusted in God, and God didn’t save him. God let him die. The enemies of Christ mocked him because of that. So how can we trust in God to save us if he wouldn’t even save his own Son?
Of course, that question might have bothered us on Good Friday, when we saw Jesus lifeless on the tree. But on Easter, the shroud was removed, death was swallowed up in victory, and we know he lives. We know, not by peeking under the shroud, but by faith in God’s promises and assurance. We know that God did save him, not by keeping him from death but by bringing him through death to life. That’s the heart of our own trust and confidence, not that God will never let us suffer or die, but that he will destroy death and bring us through death to life everlasting.
The Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces. He takes away the shroud to show us that death has been swallowed up in victory. Let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation, through Jesus Christ our living Savior. Amen.
On this mountain the Lord of Armies will prepare for all peoples a banquet of rich food, a banquet of aged wines, with the best cuts of meat, and with the finest wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that covers all peoples, the burial cloth stretched over all nations. He has swallowed up death forever! The Lord God will wipe away the tears from every face. He will take away the shame of his people throughout the earth. For the Lord has spoken. On that day it will be said, “Look, here is our God! We waited for him, and he saved us! This is the Lord! We waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation!”
When this is all over—the pandemic, the social distancing, the restrictions that have changed our worship services and changes that have disrupted our lives—when it’s all in the past, do you think much will be permanently changed from what it was before? Will handshakes ever come back in fashion? Will we decide, “You know, I kind of like wearing a face mask all the time”? They can be quite fashionable. I’m expecting a lot of Halloween costumes this year to incorporate some unique face masks. And with the cold blasts of winter right around the corner, face masks and scarves will do double duty. Maybe the masks will be viewed something like a necktie, a completely useless piece of cloth maybe, but required wear for some occasions, and a colorful addition to your fashion wardrobe.
Or maybe we’ll glad to get rid of them the minute we get the all-clear, and never want to see or wear another face mask and be reminded of the year 2020 as long as we live. Isaiah talks about another piece of cloth that we’ll be glad to get rid of, the burial shroud. It doesn’t come in designer colors or playful patterns like some of the masks we’ve seen. And it’s only got one use—a shroud won’t double as a winter scarf or a warm quilt to throw on your bed.
In our reading today, it almost sounds like they found another use for shrouds, doubling as a table cloth. Our text is describing a banquet, with all these rich and delicious foods laid out on the banquet table, and then, suddenly, it changes direction and explains how God is going to remove the burial shroud. I thought of that magician’s trick, where he grabs a table cloth and yanks it off the table without disturbing all the plates and wine glasses sitting on it—except Isaiah describes it as the shroud that enfolds us, wraps around us, and covers us from head to toe, not one that the banquet sits on.
Yet the day is coming when the shroud will be yanked away, not a trick at all, but a welcome relief. When we finally get to get rid of our face masks, we may not be satisfied with throwing them away; we’ll burn them, we’ll put them through a shredder, we’ll find all sorts of creative ways to rip them up and get rid of them for good. So on the last day, we’re not going to take all those old burial shrouds, look at them, and say, “You know, I think this would make a nice table cloth. We can dye them some bright, happy colors, maybe a floral print. Recycle, reuse, reduce waste. Why not?” Because we’ll never want or need another reminder of what they were originally used for.
A shroud itself is used to cover up what we don’t want staring us in the face. You can’t get rid of death by covering it up, but we don’t have to see it. We can try not to think about it. A shroud lets us pretend that death is clean and tidy.
And yet not even the craziest fashion show has ever featured designer shrouds in a variety of pastels or classic stripes. Death will never be pretty. All we can do is cover it up, hide it, and talk about something else.
But the day is coming when the shroud becomes as useless as the face masks we can’t wait to discard. Isaiah said that God will destroy the shroud that enfolds all people, the sheet that covers all nations. If that’s all he’s going to do—remove the shroud—I’m not sure I like the sound of that. If God’s just going to pull back the shroud, then we won’t be able to avoid facing death, seeing it uncovered. But God has pulled back the shroud to show us that death itself has been destroyed.
You’ve all heard of the Shroud of Turin, a fourteen foot long strip of linen that some people claim is the very burial cloth of Christ, with the image of his crucified body somehow imprinted faintly on its surface. I don’t have any conclusions about the authenticity of the shroud. Scientists have pretty much concluded it’s a medieval fake, but there are still a lot of mysteries and uncertainties about where it came from and how old it really is.
But that’s just it—it gives us nothing but uncertainties and mysteries. Our Easter celebrations don’t draw joy and confidence from uncertainties and mysteries, but from the gospel truth that the shroud that once wrapped our Savior’s body was discarded. Death was truly swallowed up in victory.
And our faith and hope, for ourselves and our loved ones who go on before us, doesn’t come from peeking under the shroud, but from God’s promise to destroy the shroud, not yanking away the cloth so that we must come face to face with death, but so that we can see that he has destroyed death forever.
You know, next week isn’t just Halloween; it’s also Reformation Day. And next Sunday is All Saints’ Day, a day of remembrance of all the saints who from their labors rest. So, while some of us might be thinking about all the candy and treats, sugar and zero-nutrition goodies waiting for us on Halloween, Isaiah says, “Save some room for the real banquet.” The real banquet is both the riches that await us in heaven one day, and the treasure of the gospel that feeds our souls with the richest and most nourishing of fares.
Our gospel lesson this morning was a parable of Jesus that combined two related lessons. It painted for us a picture of God’s wedding banquet and reminded us how we end up there: God invited us. He sent out his invitation, not to the rich and famous, the great and noble, the entitled and deserving ones, but to us, the poor, the needy, and the forgotten. It’s grace, the number one lesson of the Reformation, that we are saved because God invited us, called us, and saved us.
And the second lesson in the same parable is about that one guy who tried to get into the wedding banquet wearing his street clothes. The fundamental question for Martin Luther himself was: “What made him think he belonged in God’s house?” What made this guest think he was a good man who deserved a seat at that table?
Martin Luther grew up thinking that would be him. He was the one God was going to point to and say, “You don’t belong here. Get out.” And it’s a question we’ve all wrestled with, even if we don’t put it in those terms. Am I a good person? What do other people see when they look at me? What does God see, when he sees right past my face mask, when he sees through every veil of pretense, every false front and good face I put on, that I use to hide myself? My shame? My foolishness? My mistakes, that I can’t really call mistakes because I knew full well what I was doing?
One day we will wear a shroud, and one day the shroud will be removed. What then? Isaiah addresses that question, and comes to the same answer Martin Luther finally found, that finally brought him peace. Isaiah says that one day God himself will remove the shroud that covers all peoples, the burial cloth stretched over all nations, destroying death and removing tears and sorrow, removing our shame forever. And how will this be? Only one answer: “For the Lord has spoken.” Period. The Lord has spoken. He said, “This is how it’s going to be.” So, this is how it’s going to be. He made a promise. And the promise itself is why the promise will be fulfilled, and how it will be fulfilled.
It doesn’t depend on what I do to make it turn out that way. It doesn’t depend on me coming up with my own satisfactory answer to the question, “Why should God let me into the heavenly banquet room?” It doesn’t depend on me at all. The Lord has spoken. That’s the answer Luther found in Scriptures when he realized that the righteousness of God is that by which he makes us righteous; the wisdom of God is that by which he makes us wise. The glory of God, the grace of God, the salvation of God are all from the Lord. For the Lord has spoken. And the Lord has done this. And it is marvelous in our eyes.
“On that day it will be said, ‘Surely, this is our God! We waited for him, and he saved us!’” It’s all about what God has done. He saved us. And what did we do? What’s our part in this story? We waited. That’s it. We waited for him to save us.
The waiting Isaiah describes is more than just watching the clock and counting the minutes ticking by. It’s trust. It’s waiting with patience and confidence because we know and fully expect that the Lord who promised will come through for us. We waited for him, and we didn’t give up waiting no matter how long a wait we had, no matter how difficult a time we’ve had to struggle through, because we trusted in him, and he saved us. He came through for us just as he said.
He saved us. For Isaiah that salvation was still seven hundred years in the future, but Isaiah saw it and believed. Later on he’ll describe, in chapter 53, how the Suffering Servant would be stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Now, already in chapter 25, Isaiah can say surely this is our God! “We waited for him, and he saved us! This is the Lord! We waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation!” For the Lord has spoken.
In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.” The Lord spoke, and it was so. And the same God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has “made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ,” as Paul says in 2 Corinthians. Paul was talking in that chapter about the veil that covers men’s hearts, a face mask that we all wear, a veil of unbelief and spiritual darkness and blindness. God has removed the veil that we might see the glory of God, that we might reflect a little bit of that glory ourselves as we are now renewed in the image of God to live in his knowledge and shine like lights in this dark world. With the hope that maybe a little bit of our own light of love and holiness will shine through the veils that still cover those around us, we live in peace and hope and bear all the fruits of faith by the Holy Spirit. By grace alone, through faith alone, with the Holy Scriptures alone, the veil is removed and we look up to see a smiling heavenly Father’s face.
And so Isaiah rejoices and says, “We trusted in God, and he saved us.” We trusted in God and he saved us—why do those words sound so familiar? On the cross, it was said of Christ, “He trusted in God, let God save him now, since he said I am the Son of God.” But Jesus trusted in God, and God didn’t save him. God let him die. The enemies of Christ mocked him because of that. So how can we trust in God to save us if he wouldn’t even save his own Son?
Of course, that question might have bothered us on Good Friday, when we saw Jesus lifeless on the tree. But on Easter, the shroud was removed, death was swallowed up in victory, and we know he lives. We know, not by peeking under the shroud, but by faith in God’s promises and assurance. We know that God did save him, not by keeping him from death but by bringing him through death to life. That’s the heart of our own trust and confidence, not that God will never let us suffer or die, but that he will destroy death and bring us through death to life everlasting.
The Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces. He takes away the shroud to show us that death has been swallowed up in victory. Let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation, through Jesus Christ our living Savior. Amen.
