People without a country. Fathers and mothers trying to hold their frustrated families together by telling and re-telling the ancient stories of the good old days in far-off Jerusalem, now lying in ruins, the smoke of her ashes still twisting to the sky. People trying to eke out the best existence possible under the thumb of their Babylonian overlords.

Those are the people to whom these glorious and triumphant words of Isaiah were first shouted. If you were ever a prisoner of war, or if you were ever someone waiting for a war to be over and a loved one to come home, or if you were in the front lines when the news came, "the war is over," then you can appreciate these words more than the rest of us.

For these words were first proclaimed to a forsaken huddle of Israelites whose city had been destroyed by the Babylonian invaders, whose loved ones had been killed, and who themselves had survived only to live as the POWs of Babylon. And unless you have been in a similar situation, it is hard to imagine how it felt finally to hear the good, great good news that this bleak life was finally coming to an end, that the "war was over," that God was coming to their rescue.

But even if you can’t exactly feel this sort of experience, you can still enjoy the fullness of Isaiah’s message. As Ecclesiastes says, "there’s nothing new under the sun." The Israelites were confused, perplexed exiles. And that makes you and me close kin with these prisoners.

We live in the bewildered, bewildering 20th century. A time when we glory in the magnificent accomplishments of the Apollo space shots, the climax of cooperation and teamwork of thousands of people; and a time when we despair in the continuing struggle to get the cooperation of a few people to work out a continuing peace settlement in Vietnam. A time when world powers must be held in check by comparable nuclear arsenals rather than the beauty of human trust. A time when we are told we must always negotiate from strength, the strength of the most up-to-date military system, rather than as human brothers who share the same planet. A time when the gross national product is up but we still find thousands of underfed people in our country’s backyard. A time when scores of voices are heard and scores of books are written to depict the alienation of persons from each other.

Like the Israelites in Babylon, we need the word of the Lord from Isaiah, "Comfort, comfort my people." A little child is crying like her heart will break. She is lost in the supermarket. The woman who finds her is also lost. A man with a frozen smile in the doctor’s waiting room is crying inside, dreading to hear the results of the lab test. The person on the other end of the phone has a voice full of unshed tears.

A man surrounds himself with the things that make life comfortable, but he is not comforted. He cannot sit still. Another man has grown bitter in his old age. He refuses to be comforted. Another person comes to worship but long ago gave up the ghost of hope that anything good would ever come of it. "Comfort, comfort my people," says your God. We need it.

Comfort begins with what God has done, what God is doing, what God will do. That’s the Christian Gospel - that’s the Word of Advent. It is first a message concerning God and what God is doing. It is never a summons to you and me in our confusion and depression to rouse ourselves and to break our own bonds. That’s like telling a first-grader to look at the numbers two plus two on the board and add those together before ever giving him the method of addition. First God must act in His overpowering way to convince us that we need the Savior and His forgiveness. So our relationship with God begins with God’s action. That’s what Advent and Christmas are about.

How does God comfort us? His comfort comes higher than a pipe and slippers in an easy chair. Linus drags his blanket. Snuffy Smith hugs his jug. But God isn’t supplying us with a pacifier or a crutch. His comfort is like the little girl who came home from a neighbor’s house where her playmate had died. "Why did you go?" questioned her father. "To comfort her mother," replied the little girl. "What could you do to comfort her?" the father continued. His daughter answered, "I climbed into her lap and cried with her."

Into the Bethlehem crib God climbs to cry with us, to live with us, to suffer with us, to laugh with us, to die with us. This is the comfort that says much, much more than simply, "I care about you." This is the comfort that moves into our life and takes over, overwhelming us with His love and mercy.

While the Israelites pined away in Babylon, they faced insurmountable difficulties in even dreaming of the possibility of returning to their homeland, much less being set free. They had no way of removing the obstacles.

And nothing you and I do will remove all our hurdles. It takes the comfort of God. It takes the action of God who levels up the valleys, lowers the mountains, who makes the steep places and rough ridges a smooth plain.

God comforts us by turning our heads and hearts to "Behold your God." Real comfort only comes when we concentrate on what He is doing for us, when we recognize at Bethlehem God climbing into that crib to be part of us and our plight, to live alongside us and to triumph over our deadliest enemies.

Then God turns to us and says, "You, you who have been comforted, you whose lives have been turned upside down and made right side up by my love, you now go and cry this message to those who still need to hear it."

"But what shall we cry?" How many times have you been confronted by a person in great need who is begging you to cry out a message, say something to help him, and you wondered deep within, "What shall I say?"

What shall I say, because human life is like grass - it sprouts up and is bright green and grows - but then in the winter of our discontent it withers and fades and dies.

What shall I say to a generation obsessed by fears: fear of a scientific world capable of mass destruction at the push of a button; fear of the secret mechanics of a government grown huge and heavy at the top; fear of being enslaved by foreigners; fear of the fall of the stock market that would bring our high living standard to a crushing halt; fear of what my neighbors or my fellow church members are thinking of me; fear that I’m not doing things in good taste or according to custom, fear that someone will laugh at me for my fears.

What shall I say to a thinker like Emile Zola who compares human life to a railway train, drawn by a locomotive whose driver has been killed, dashing at headlong speed into midnight. "The train is the world; we are the freight; fate is the track; death is the darkness; God is the engineer - who is dead." What shall I say?

As we look at human life, it’s like being on a teeter-totter. We sit between belief in man’s almost limitless capacity to advance in knowledge and power and disgust at the pettiness, stupidity and cruelty of a race apparently aiming at mass suicide. Tennyson said it: "However we brave it out, we men are a little breed."

What shall I cry out? There’s only one thing worth saying. In the midst of confusion and perplexity and alienation and screwed-up priorities - cry out - "Behold your God."

In the midst of shopping, baking, wrapping, cleaning - cry out - "Behold your God."

In the midst of weeping, laughing, scorning, ridiculing, praising - cry out - "Behold your God."

"Comfort, comfort my people." So we are comforted. We are comforted to offer comfort to others who need it. And our message is not of what men or women may or should be or do. Our cry is "Behold your God" - in the crib, on the road, on the cross, in the tomb, in the sky - Behold your God - He comes, He rules, He feeds, He gathers, He carries, He gently heals, He leads - Amen!