The Way Home, Isaiah 43:1-7

Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins

March 15, 2026

But now thus says the Lord,
    he who created you, O Jacob,
    he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
    I have called you by name; you are mine.
2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you,
    and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
    and the flame shall not consume you.
3 For I am the Lord your God,
    the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
I give Egypt as your ransom,
    Cush and Seba in exchange for you.
4 Because you are precious in my sight
    and honored and I love you,
I give people in return for you,
    nations in exchange for your life.
5 Do not fear, for I am with you;
    I will bring your offspring from the east,
    and from the west I will gather you;
6 I will say to the north, “Give them up,”
    and to the south, “Do not withhold;
bring my sons from far away
    and my daughters from the end of the earth—
7 everyone who is called by my name,
    whom I created for my glory,
    whom I formed and made.”

______

“We’re all just walking each other home.” There’s so much truth in this quote by Ram Dass, isn’t there? “We’re all just walking each other home.”

There’s a story about a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister and a Jewish rabbi. The priest, the minister and the rabbi are discussing what they would like people to say when they die and when their bodies are on display in an open casket. The priest says, “Well, I want someone to say, ‘He was a righteous man, honest man, very generous.’” The minister says, “Well, I would like someone to say, ‘She was very kind and fair and she was good to her parishioners.’” And the rabbi said, “I would want someone to say, ‘Oh look, he is moving!’”

In the words of one of my favorite theologians, Kenny Chesney, “Everybody want to go to heaven, but nobody want to go now.”

But if “We’re all just walking each other home,” how do we show up for one another? How do we encourage each other on this long, often joyful, sometimes painful, walk home?

The prophet Isaiah gives us a beautiful example in the scripture text we read together a moment ago. He’s writing to the people of Israel in the first person, channeling the very voice of God. The context is that Isaiah is writing to a people in exile: Jerusalem has been destroyed and the best and the brightest among them have been carried off as slaves in Babylon. It’s years after Jerusalem fell: Isaiah is likely writing to the children and grandchildren of the Israelites who experienced first-hand the siege of Jerusalem. He’s writing to remind them that their true home is Jerusalem, as well as God’s promise to return them to their ancestral lands . . . their “true home.”

Isaiah doesn’t sugar coat their experience, he gets how difficult the journey home will be, saying things like, “when you pass through the waters” and “when you walk through fire.” Isaiah acknowledges the suffering of a beleaguered people.

And in the midst of these challenges . . . when the way home seems so, so hard . . . when the path is covered in thorns and the road is uphill the entire way . . . did you catch the overarching theme of Isaiah’s message to the suffering people?

Do. Not. Fear.

But now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are mine.

Do. Not. Fear.

If only it were that easy, right? If only we all could be like Mr. Optimist. You know the story of Mr. Optimist, right? Mr. Optimist is falling off the top of a twenty-story building, and as he passes by the twelfth floor, someone sticks his head out of the window and asks, “Hey, are you OK?” Mr. Optimist yells back, “So far, so good!”

Here’s the thing about fear: we can’t simply decide to stop feeling it. Fear isn’t a character flaw or a failure of faith. Fear is written into our biology. Our ancient ancestors needed fear to survive. When a tiger emerged from the tall grass, the ones who felt a jolt of adrenaline — whose hearts raced, whose legs pumped — those were the ones who lived to tell the tale. Fear kept the human race alive. It is, quite literally, built into our nervous systems.

So when Isaiah — when God — says “do not fear,” we should be honest with ourselves: that is a countercultural, counter-biological command. Our brains are wired to scan for danger. We are exquisitely designed to worry. And while we no longer face tigers in the tall grass, our nervous systems haven’t gotten the memo. We transfer that ancient fear response onto our very modern anxieties: fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of not being enough, fear that the road home is simply too long and too hard.

Isaiah knows this. He doesn’t look at the exiles and say, “Come on, cheer up, there’s nothing to worry about.” He looks squarely at their suffering — the destroyed city, the years of captivity, the long road ahead — and speaks God’s word into that fear, not around it.

And that changes everything.

Listen again to how God addresses the suffering people:

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

Did you catch something important there? God says when, not if. There is no promise here that the waters won’t come, that the fire won’t burn near you. The exile was real. The suffering was real. The long road home was real. God doesn’t offer the people of Israel a detour around the hard thing. God offers them something far more precious: presence through the hard thing.

“I will be with you.”

That is the fulcrum on which this entire passage balances. Not “I will remove the obstacle.” Not “I will make the path easy.” But I will be with you.

This echoes the great story of the Exodus — the God who parted the Red Sea didn’t then leave the people to find their own way. That same God walked with them through forty years of wilderness wandering. Cloud by day. Fire by night. Manna on the ground every morning. Presence, sustained and faithful, for the entire journey.

That is the God Isaiah is pointing to. The God who doesn’t stand at the finish line waiting for us to arrive, but who walks with us — through the waters, through the fire, through every hard and uncertain mile.

I want to tell you something personal.

As you know, we’ve been building a cairn together this Lenten season. Each stone represents something we are laying down — releasing — as we walk through these forty days toward Easter. I placed my stone down on the first Sunday of Lent.

My stone represents fear.

I’ve been sitting with that intention — laying down fear for Lent — and I’ll be honest with you, it hasn’t’ been easy. Because fear doesn’t just evaporate when you declare you’re done with it. Naming it, placing it on the cairn, that’s an act of intention. But then you walk away, and the space that fear occupied? It’s still there. Something has to fill it.

I’ve been asking myself: what fills the void when fear begins to loosen its grip?

Not courage — at least not at first. Not optimism. Not sheer determination. What I’m finding — slowly, imperfectly — is trust. Trust in the God Isaiah describes. Trust in the One who says, “I have called you by name. You are mine. You are precious in my sight. I love you.”

And that’s when a verse from 1 John 4:18 clicked for me in a new way:

“Perfect love casts out fear.”

Fear doesn’t leave because we try harder. Fear doesn’t leave because we give ourselves a sufficiently stern talking-to. Fear leaves — is cast out — because something stronger moves in. Perfect love. The love of the One who created us, who knows us by name, who walks with us through water and fire and forty years of wilderness and however many years we have left on this earth.

The antidote to fear isn’t fearlessness. It’s being loved — completely, perfectly, unshakeably — by the One who is love itself.

Go back to the very first verse of our passage. Before God makes a single promise about the future, before there is any word about returning home or gathering the scattered people — God does something else first.

God restores their identity.

“I have called you by name. You are mine.”

This matters enormously. Because exile doesn’t just displace people geographically. Exile displaces people internally. It whispers: you are forgotten. You are abandoned. You are defined by your losses. The people of Israel had lost their city, their Temple, their way of life. They were strangers in a strange land, wondering if God had forgotten them entirely.

And God’s first word to them is not “here is my plan” but “here is who you are.”

You are called. You are known. You are mine.

And then — and this is the verse I keep returning to — verse four:

“You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”

Maybe there’s someone here today who needs to hear these words again, this time from God’s heart straight to yours: “You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”

This is not the language of a distant, transactional deity. This is the language of a parent speaking to a beloved child. This is intimate. This is personal. This is perfect love.

And perfect love casts out fear.

When you know — really know, in your bones — that you are this loved, fear begins to lose its claim on you. Not all at once. Not without struggle. But the identity God speaks over us is stronger than the fear that whispers we are forgotten. You don’t have to get home to be home in God. Belonging comes before arrival.

And here is where it gets even more beautiful.

This promise isn’t just for you, alone, in your private struggle with fear. Listen to how the passage ends:

Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; I will say to the north, “Give them up,” and to the south, “Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth— everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory.”

East, west, north, south. Everyone. No one left behind. No one too far gone, too far away, too lost to be gathered.

We are not walking home alone. We are walking each other home.

That cairn we’re building together — your stone and my stone and every stone placed by every person in this congregation — that is a physical, tangible sign of this truth. We are doing this together. We are laying down our fears together. We are trusting together. We are being loved together, and in being loved, we are learning to love one another through the hard parts of the journey.

Perfect love does that. Perfect love carries us, and then — in carrying us — makes us carriers of love for one another.

Remember Mr. Optimist, falling from the twentieth floor, calling out “so far, so good”?

Maybe — just maybe — his confidence isn’t naivety. Maybe he’s someone who has heard his name called. Maybe he’s someone who knows, somewhere deep in his bones, that he is precious, that he is loved, that the One who created him is not standing at the bottom of the fall waiting to say “I told you so,” but is somehow, mysteriously, present — even in the falling.

“Fear not” is not a command to feel differently. It is not a demand for toxic positivity or spiritual performance. It is an invitation — an invitation to trust the One whose love is so complete, so utterly without condition, that it has the power to cast out even our most ancient, most biological, most stubborn fears.

Whatever stone you need to lay down this Lenten season — lay it down. Place it on the cairn. And trust that what fills the space is not emptiness, but love. Perfect love. The love that calls you by name. The love that walks with you through water and fire. The love that is gathering all of us — from east and west, north and south — and walking us, together, all the way home.

Because we’re all just walking each other home.