I stand before you today wearing a stole I was hoping I wouldn’t have to wear today. This orange stole was created to support Bishops Against Gun Violence, and I wear it today in mourning for the victims of yet another school shooting in Santa Clarita, California. I wear it in response to the murder of a mother and three of her four children in San Diego at the hands of her estranged husband -and a gun.
I wear it in memory of all the “children born for calamity” that our passage from Isaiah brought to mind. As I was studying our scriptures in preparation for this sermon, that phrase hung heavy on my heart.
It’s a problem all over the world—it’s true. On one of her latest albums, singer-songwriter Dar Williams wrote a song called “I Am the One Who Will Remember Everything,” which tells the story of a very young refugee boy who faces the constant possibility of being pressed into service as a child soldier, an illustration of a “child born for calamity” as Isaiah speaks about. Imagining herself in a refugee camp, she imagines seeing a little boy by himself:
“Oh what have we here, he must be three or four,
Shaken out of a boot on its way back to war
And he’s not looking for a father or a mother,
Just a seven-year-old brother,
On this smudged line border camp of refugees,
I am the one who will remember everything.
I am the one who will remember everything.
So where are we now, he must be five or six,
Just running around, hungry kids, sharpened sticks.
And he will grow with pain and fear and jealousy,
Taken in by schools of zealotry,
Who train orphans to make orphans evermore.
I am the one who will remember everything.”
I was remembering this song, and hearing Dar sing it, and I was haunted by the knowledge of yet another school shooting-- the 30th school shooting this school year alone in America. Thirty. Then came the news of the massacre of that family in San Diego. It is this kind of thing that we long to see swept away in the new Jerusalem that Isaiah predicts where “never more will children be borne for calamity,” according to Isaiah’s sweeping vision of resurrection and renewal of all creation.
In a world oriented to justice and peace, such as that described here at the end of Isaiah, these kinds of tragedies are unimaginable. In the new creation awaiting birth in our reading, such cruelty and abandonment of the innocent to the grist-mill of slaughter and abandonment would be unimaginable. We struggle under the weight of so many griefs, so many tragedies. And even worse than the tragedies themselves is the knowledge of so many of us refusing to attempt change, of too much shrugging of the shoulders and too many declarations of “That’s just the way the world is.”
Isaiah 65 calls us to remembrance of our responsibility for the brokenness of the world—either through our selfish choices or through our easy acceptance of pain and suffering. Isaiah calls us to repentance—and then also to hope and resilience.
The promise in Isaiah that God is setting creation aright should sound familiar—we hear it repeatedly throughout the latter part of the Book of Isaiah. The promise of creation, of the kingdom of God, is finally going to be fulfilled. This will be a time of peace, justice, and plenty. Jerusalem will be God’s city; in other words, the new Eden. The memories of war, violence, pain, and death will be wiped completely away. The laborers will enjoy the fruits of their labor, and blessings and mercy will be freely given to the people who inhabit on God’s holy mountain.
As we begin to close out the liturgical year, and approach the Feast of Christ the King next weekend, therefore, what could be better than to hear again these words from Easter Sunday, helping us to reframe our expectations of resurrection away from what happens to us after we die to what could happen to us right now if only we worked to bring the kingdom of God near?
I am convinced, beloveds, that it’s important to hear Isaiah’s words about what the kingdom of God looks like—and to be willing to open our hearts and our hopes to the idea that maybe we could try to bring the kingdom of God into being. Maybe? Let’s face it—trying it our way for the last 100,000 years has not worked so well. Perhaps we could actually try God’s way.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Our gospel talks about wars, and cruelties, and destruction. And although those words were written for a very specific context that Luke’s readers were themselves experiencing at that very moment, we only have to open our eyes to see much of the same going on in our world today. A world that humans have shaped, and for which humans must take responsibility. A world where too many proclaim almost gleefully that the church, that body called to bring the kingdom of God into being, is dying. A world where many seem even to be entertaining the idea that God, or God’s absence, is somehow responsible for that suffering and that dying, which is completely backwards.
It’s also exactly the same line of thinking that the people in Isaiah’s time entertained. The start of Isaiah 65 begins begins with a frank account of how far astray the people have wandered from remembering where their priorities and loyalties should lie. Like a betrayed loved one, God speaks in 65:1-3:
“I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask,
to be found by those who did not seek me.
I said, ‘Here I am, Here I am,’
to a nation that did not call on my name.
I held out my hands all day long
to a rebellious people,
who walk in a way that is not good,
following their own devices;
a people who provoke me
to my face continually…”
The mixture of frustration, heartbreak, and righteous anger in the face of rejection come through easily in these words. We get it exactly backward if we ignore the scriptural testimony that insists that every time we feel God’s absence, that we feel God’s abandonment, it is not through God’s actual leaving of us, but based on our wandering from God.
That’s starkly stated at the beginning of Isaiah that sets the stage for our reading. The people were afraid that their religion was dying. And that’s similar to today’s situation too, I am convinced. That’s why I think I also get frustrated when I hear repeated, defeated proclamations—sometimes by leaders of the church!-- about “the dying of the church.”
Hearken to this: We live a faith that proclaims death is NEVER the end! Rather than defeat, we are called to see the hope of resurrection!
In Isaiah, God isn’t speaking about the end of religion so much as denouncing the end of faithlessness, and there’s an important difference in that. Yet after God lists the specific crimes of God’s people, nonetheless, God knows that there are some, few perhaps, who remain faithful, and for that faithful remnant God will continue faithful. It is then that this beautiful poem bursts forth about a new creation that is ongoing even as God’s listing of human faithlessness hangs over the scene.
This capacity to forgive, forgive, forgive, to see beyond the worst things humans have ever done to the ongoing possibility of our redemption and repentance is one of the things that reminds us who are honest that were God is God, and we are not. Where humans carry grudges and vendettas and nurture injuries of long ago to our bosom as if they were some kind of boon companion, God always seeks us, always leaves open the door to repentance, reformation, and redemption.
God makes it clear that what has brought this calamity of conquest and exile upon the people is their own faithlessness—their lack of care and concern for each other, certainly, but especially their lack of care for the oppressed and marginalized among the people. Worse, beyond the fact that they have abandoned principles of social justice, they have made a mockery of their religious practices—claiming to be faithful and holier than thou, but engaging in unclean practices and idolatry.
The word of warning from the prophet to the people regarding idolatry hits frighteningly close to home for us, too, in this time and time place, as we hear of yet another school shooting, another group of children killed, injured or traumatized upon the altar of gun worship, we cannot fail to understand that these words against idolatry speak to us right now, in a dozen different ways.
Yet, all is not lost. To those who remain faithful, who see the scars and wounds being inflicted in society, God offers a word of comfort, consolation, and hope- even more of regeneration and resurrection- that word that is at the center of our faith as Christians.
It is at this point that we see the beautiful vision of Isaiah 65:17-25. The Edenic vision laid before us in this joyful promise of ongoing creation and recreation, new life and resurrection is striking: long life, health, absence of strife, and utter contentment with abundant food and peace for all, and once again the kind of intimacy with God that is the subject of longing since the fall of humanity. Indeed, in this new Eden, the serpent is prevented from being able to do his dastardly work from the get-go, as it is already marginalized rather than given the freedom to live without the mark of its duplicitous ways already stamped upon it—in verse 25, it alone has dust as its food.
This time, we won’t have the serpent to point the finger at, in other words. This time, God makes it clear that the first cause of bringing our common life together is our own commitment to justice, mercy, and real peace, which is always founded on equity and action, not merely the “lack of war.” Underlying all of this beautiful vision is the idea that we have a responsibility in bringing about this world. We hear the promise that infants will live to ripe old age—and are reminded that we are called by God as faithful people to love all children as much as we love our own as part of making that dream a reality.
In other words, this new creation is dependent upon the transformation of our relationships, both with each other and with God. This resurrection is dependent upon our decision to put the love we are called to embody into action, in decisive and insistent ways. We are called to be a people of hope, a people who dream dreams, as we were reminded a couple of weeks ago—but also a people who act to make those dreams reality. Resurrection of creation does not happen unless we take what we profess on Saturday or Sunday and take it on the offensive—an offensive of love, mind you, but an offensive nonetheless-- throughout the week.
There are three particular emphases in the description of a transformed heaven and earth in this reading: 1) rejoicing, both by the people and by God; 2) life itself is transformed so that all can flourish without one life being sacrificed for another; and 3)relationships themselves being transformed by virtue of the new life and community that will be formed as a result of God’s creating, energizing act. Indeed here, our relationship with God will be so transformed that “Before they call I will answer; while they are yet speaking I will hear.”
The middle of our reading mentions that no more will one person enjoy the fruits of another person’s heritage. Leviticus 25 talks about the “Jubilee Year,” a year of rest and restoration that would occur every 49 years, kind of sabbath year of sabbath years. In that year, all bondservants would be freed, the land would be allowed to lie fallow and rest itself in its own sabbath, and any land that had been sold away from its owners would be restored so that no one would be deprived of their patrimony.
Three major shifts will take place: God will take joy in this new work; justice, contentment, and peace will take the place of weeping, vulnerability, and injustice; and relationships and the order of nature will be transformed so that none must suffer or be deprived so that another may prosper. If we all understood that we are members of one community—the kingdom of God—we might not just be satisfied with a human calculus that divides our fellow human beings and children of God into circles of ”them” and “us”—which is unfortunately another way to say “losers” and “winners.”
God is eternal. Love is eternal. How will we act in light of this knowledge?
Perhaps such a vision is exactly what we need, as more and more people talk about the “dying of the church,” as if that somehow lets all of us off the hook for living faithfully in this context. The joyful images of renewal Isaiah describes do not come without cost, without first a recession of faith and a loss of faithfulness. Isaiah 65 starts with a Dickensian admission that it really was the worst of times, and the best of times seems to be inconceivable. The first verses of that chapter detail a people who have lost their way in the darkness of their own willfulness.
Yet after describing the waywardness of the people, Isaiah bursts forth with a vision of restoration so glorious that much of it is later recapitulated in the beautiful poem found in the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation. It is no coincidence that Isaiah 65 is a reading that we also hear on Easter Sunday in the lectionary. The language is immediate and filled with NOW: God proclaims “I AM creating… I am about to create!” Those who believe that God is dead—open your eyes and see what CAN be!
It becomes as simple as this: are we a resurrection-shaped people, or not? Is it possible for us to drop our thin veneer of cynicism to take seriously the idea that resurrection is at the very center of our faith? Isaiah 65 calls us to reclaim our faith with not just boldness but with joy. Real joy. Real hope. Real energy.
Beloveds, the world is feverishly a-thirst for the message we bear as Christians who proclaim the God who we encounter: a God who calls us to love, who calls us to proclaim a jubilee of redemption against the machinery of hopelessness that only serves the cause of the oppressor, who calls us to walk in integrity and unity in the face of division and fear. A God who calls us into partnership in this new heaven and new earth, who strengthens us to see that what can be has been here all along. We only need the faith and the will to never, ever give up. It's time to start working toward that resurrected creation.
Amen.
Preached at the 505 on November 16 and at 8:00 and 10:30 am on November 17, 2019 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.
Readings:
Isaiah 65:17-25Canticle 9 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13Luke 21:5-19
Notes:
"I Am the One Who Will Remember Everything," from In the Time of Gods, by Dar Williams, 2012.
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