Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder: 2010

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Christmas Proclamation

Christmas Eve: December 24, 2010

Comedian George Carlin said he once entered a bookstore and approached the clerk to ask where the self-help books were located. The clerk responded, “Well, if we told you, it would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?”1 The implication being, of course, that in the end, we can only really count on ourselves for help, we are all alone in this business of living.

After all is said and done, Christmas is a sort of divine declaration that self-help won’t/can’t do the whole job, will never get us where we need to be. There is no question that anyone can work on personal issues; personal improvement is always a worthy goal, but the gift of a Savior – which is what this night represents after all – is a powerful declaration about the very nature of God, that God recognizes our innate inability to rescue ourselves from everything that life has done to us, and that we have done to one another. We need help. We need a Savior.

One of the most ancient Advent carols, with words dating clear back to the 4th century, offers these words to people seeking the child who will be the salvation of us all. The first line of this song was sung by the choir from the rear of the church at my home church almost every Sunday of the year during my childhood and youth, as the choral call to worship. I can hear it in my memory to this day, reverberating through that gothic-style stone sanctuary:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

And with fear and trembling stand;

Ponder nothing earthly minded,

For with blessing in His hand,

Christ our God to earth descendeth,

Our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,

As of old on earth He stood,

Lord of lords, in human vesture,

In the body and the blood;

He will give to all the faithful

His own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven

Spreads its vanguard on the way,

As the Light of light descendeth

From the realms of endless day,

That the powers of hell may vanish

As the darkness clears away.2

Let’s think for a moment about this ancient affirmation, how it describes what the Christ child comes to do for us, and the unique way in which he does it. The first stanza declares that Christ comes to us – the carol says he descends, as from the sky perhaps, but you are free to imagine him coming to you across a windswept meadow or from the other side of a crowded parking lot, the effect is the same. He fixes his gaze on us, and he comes to us. Without our having known it fully, we stood in need of a Savior, and one was provided, entirely apart from our ability or inclination to conjure one up. This is the caring love of God, expressed the same way people feed their own children, without regard to questions of their deserving or not deserving food, we come to them and we feed them. It is the way we hasten to warn someone who is about to step off a curb into the path of an oncoming bus. They didn’t know they needed saving, but that made their plight no less desperate, and we call out to them nonetheless.

Which brings to my mind the second stanza of the carol. “King of kings, yet born of Mary...” The sheer incongruity of the image of the highest king our minds can conceive, brought to birth by the merest peasant girl; this combined with “He will give to all the faithful his own self for heavenly food.” He comes in the most inconspicuous way, and in coming, delivers himself entirely into our deepest place of need, making available his very body, the very blood of his veins, everything he has and is. Every time we eat the bread and drink the cup at the Lord’s Supper we remember this one who comes to us, unbidden, rescuing us, devoting on our behalf the very essence of his life to our well-being. It’s an astounding thought if we stop to think about it.

The third stanza takes Christ back to heaven, but not without his having changed what happens on earth for all time. “Light of light,” he causes the brooding powers of all that is evil to recede in his light, and clears out the darkness the way a housekeeper removes the dusty bed sheets covering the beautiful furniture in a long-neglected home before it is restored to its old glory.

Why does the Christ child come to us? “That the powers of hell may vanish.” Anyone who lives in this world knows there is plenty more vanishing that needs to be done before that task of the Christ child is accomplished. Still, the Christmas celebration of his first arrival reminds us that the work of Christ is underway at this very moment in every nation on every continent.

“That the powers of hell may vanish…”

Reflecting on that, I want to share with you a recent reflection on Christmas from a young college student. He wrote the following note after the annual, beautiful Christmas season program on the Willamette University campus in Salem two weeks ago. My wife Christine directs the women’s choir, there is also a men’s chorus and a mixed chorus. In all about 120 singers and 20 or so orchestra players. With that background, I found this to be a remarkable reflection on this young fellow’s experience of college life.

Dear Choir Directors:

Thank you for another glorious Christmas in Hudson (Hall). I think that for many of us it’s the high point of the semester, and I know that these two days and the preceding months of preparation will figure prominently in my fondest and most vivid memories of Willamette. I want to share with you a short story, an experience I had that gave this Christmas in Hudson a very special meaning for me. So begging your indulgence, I’ll give you a little background.

Every weeknight a small group of friends and I gather to pray for our university – sometimes we sing in prayer, walk around campus in prayer or just sit in a room in silent prayer. Well, on Thursday night after the concert, we got to do something a little more unusual. A lady from a local church called us. She opens her doors to several homeless folks, sheltering them and feeding them. One of these had relapsed that day. After 14 months of sobriety under her care and influence, he gave in again, stumbling back to her, soaked, inebriated and ashamed. She was discouraged, obviously, and wanted our presence and our prayers. So she called that night.

Less than an hour after performing in Hudson, drinking in the warmth, the light, the radiant joy, the dignity, beauty, pageantry – after living in the wonderful celebration of worship for the infant king, I found myself surrounded by the darkness, the harsh city sounds, trying to stay warm, trying to stay dry, on the porch of an unfamiliar house with a drunken man at my feet, entreating God that He would make Himself known here, that He would intervene, heal and restore.

The dichotomy of the two worlds distracted me for a while, but as my friends and I prayed together, I began to understand something new, to get glimpses of a certain sameness between them. “The Lord God omnipotent reigneth." I had sung those words in a place of comfort and peace, amid excellence and splendor. But my removal from a building didn’t diminish the truth of the text. Omnipotent, He reigns. Everywhere. Here in the darkness His glory is undimmed – indeed, it’s the only thing shining. “The angels sungen the shepherds to.” To whom? Poor workers on the outskirts of a no-name town. To these, to the lowly ones, and to the discouraged woman and the ashamed reprobate, the angels declare a message of salvation.

More than this, I was struck with the realization that our celebration, as glorious and grand as it was, can’t approach the magnificence, the reckless and exuberant abandon that goes on in the throne room of heaven when this lady acts as Christ to the needy, or when the needy respond and welcome Him into their hearts.

So we prayed. After a time, we helped the man to a bed and took our leave.

In the comfort of my dorm room, I knew that I had encountered God in two profound ways – each one glorious, each one rich, but I don’t know that I would have recognized the beauty in the dark cold and wet had it not been for the wonder of the first. There are so many reasons to put on Christmas in Hudson: it serves the community, gives us a chance to sing great literature, it’s a mainstay of the university. But I need to thank you because it was something else for me this year. Thank you for your dedication to excellence, your sincerity, enthusiasm, vision, and most importantly your willingness to lead us in the adoration of the Christ child. You helped to make my experience transformative and revelatory; I learned something deeper about “our Lord and His Christ.” And every time God is glorified like He was on Thursday and Friday, there is the opportunity for transformative experience. So with all of my heart, thank you for Christmas and Hudson. I really can’t tell you how much it means.

- Dan Daly

The King of glory comes to us this night, in whatever place of need we may find ourselves. The Lord comes, whether in the shape of glorious angels, or a handful of ministering college students. The Lord came, and is coming still. Let all mortal flesh – which is everyone here and anywhere the word is proclaimed – let us all offer our full homage to the King of kings.

__________________________________________

1. Publishers Weekly. October 18, 2004, alt.'

2. From Liturgy of St. James, 4th century.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Making Welcome

Second Sunday in Advent: December 5, 2010

Romans 15:1-13

Welcome one another, therefore,

just as Christ has welcomed you,

for the glory of God.

“The abominable greeting.”

I have heard it called that.

Here at First Church, Vancouver, we have been calling it the “passing of the peace.” I have also heard it called the “fellowship moment,” and the “ritual of friendship,” among other things. I hear occasional complaints about it, praise for it, questions concerning it, but mostly, it provides barely even a dent in our worship life, it is but a blip on the liturgical radar screen, a whispered hello, and handshake or two, and then it’s gone.

When any of us tries to think about what is the essence, the main event or outcome of worship – if we think about it at all – probably we would offer a variety of perspectives. I doubt, however, that many of us would offer the opening greeting or the passing of the peace as the highlight of our worship experience. More’s the pity, because if the New Testament writers recommended anything to those earliest Christian churches, it was the blessing of hospitality, of welcome, and, most especially, the welcoming of strangers.

Probably all would agree that a church ought to be welcoming. But what do we mean by that? Exactly whom do we think we are welcoming? People just like us? People slightly different than we are? People drastically different than we are? More importantly, how do we express the thing we call welcome in such a way that those outside the church family would see it, experience it as true about who we are? And how do we go about making this an important aspect of worship?

It might alarm, or even frighten us to know in our flu-bug-sensitive, vaccine-seeking age, that there were churches in those earliest days of gatherings of Christian believers that passed the kiss of peace. Some still follow that practice. Yet for stout Northern European types, among others, the practice, if it survived at all, eventually devolved into the much less intimate business-handshake of peace, or, as I recall from my long-ago sojourn in the South, the “Texas howdy of peace.”

Recently I read that in some church assemblies, word has come from denominational authorities offering permission for folks to skip the kiss and even the handshake of peace in favor of the more sanitary “wave of peace.” The whole point of the kiss of peace, of course, is that a kiss is intimate, germs and all. And by this action, members of the community of faith are meant to remember that Christ would have us be reconciled to one another, even “leaving our offering at the altar,”1 as scripture says, to reconcile with one another before going about our religious rituals. It was meant to be a gesture of intimacy among those who had formed a small, faithful community for Christ in the midst of a world that barely knew who Jesus was, if they knew of him at all. Genuine affection would be hard to miss if we were asked to kiss each other as worship got under way. Even the simpler greetings we do make would cause some to wince in discomfort in churches that do no such thing.

OK, I suspect some of our personal space intrusion-meters might be starting to click like Geiger counters, so let me put fears to rest, or at least at ease. There are no plans afoot to initiate the practice of the free-for-all exchanging of the kiss of peace in the sanctuary. After all, we don’t live in the first century, which is one of the many things about which we don’t need to feel guilty. We aren’t a community of believers on the far margins of a culture at best ignorant of, at worst hostile to our faith and the community in which we celebrate it, as those first Christians were.

Still, I find myself cycling back to the many, many admonitions to the earliest church communities to be communities of welcome, and I do think if we need to recognize our shortcomings about anything, we need to recognize them when we fail the test of Christian welcome, in any form that welcome might take. There is little chance we will be found overly welcoming, our particular shortcomings are more likely to run the other way.

In the New Testament, words for welcome occur 46 times; for greetings 61 times; for hospitality 7 times. The word kiss appears 15 times, though, as we know, not always in a happy context, since Judas was known to have betrayed Jesus with a kiss in the gospels. Still, there is plenty of kissing apart from that unhappy scene, as when the Ephesian church elders said their farewells to the apostle Paul with weeping and kissing.2 This was a description of hospitable kissing, the Ephesian version of the Texas howdy of peace.

In other words, making welcome is, in the New Testament, a high-level Christian duty, right up there alongside jacking the log up out of our own eyes before pointing out specks in others’, and practicing kindness to the poor, the powerless, the weak and the suffering. But this sounds so great to hear, it is often not so easy to do. After all, since, biblically speaking, welcome is not intended only for those already in the community of faith, there is a high likelihood that welcome to those currently outside the community will include a welcome to some outsiders whose presence we might even find discomforting. Yet scripture seems clear, welcome is meant to be expansive, not restrictive. Paul’s words certainly provide a case on that point.

In Paul’s day, Jewish Christian believers worshiped right alongside non-Jewish Christians, often referred to as Gentiles, which, really, meant anyone not born a Jew. Because most faithful Jews grew up with a laundry list of religious practices we associate with the Old Testament – like refraining from eating pork or other meat the Old Testament law declares to be unclean, circumcision as a religious requirement for males belonging to Israel – there was a tendency in the earliest churches for conflicts to develop between those who believed that to be faithful followers such requirements as circumcision were still required, and those who didn’t. It doesn’t make much sense to revisit those ancient quarrels which are no longer our quarrels, except to find in them the opportunity to ask what barriers we may place between ourselves and others in our own time when, as Paul said,

“Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. Christ became a servant of the circumcised [that is, the Jewish believers] on behalf of the truth of God, in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.”

Pretty clearly, Paul says that the welcome of Christ came first, his decision to become a “servant” for the sake of all, Jews and Gentiles, equally. If his welcome can be so global, how can ours be any less? He who died that all might be one is crucified again when we seek to divide, when we fail to welcome one another “just as Christ has welcomed you.” If Christ offers welcome, we must let go of any barriers dividing us and also welcome one another. It is a religious act, not just a way of being neighborly, and it is meant not only to transform us but to transform the world. And the world will be transformed when all who confess Jesus as Lord, believing God raised him from the dead, are found together in the same worshiping community, celebrating his gift of himself at the same table.

A friend of mine was preparing to retire from ministry after 37 years in the same church when he shared his delight in his memories of speaking with the children in that church in the annual season of Advent. Something he reflected on with great joy is an experience many of us have come to cherish in our own church life, and that is the telling of the story of Jesus’ birth to the children. If you’ve ever attempted to “tell” a group of children this particular story – or any other story really – in a way that takes the children seriously, you will know that “telling” is not really the right word. Even many very young children, given a chance to speak, already know so much of the story, it is astonishing. They are generally eager to supply details about names and places as hands shoot up with eagerness to be part of the telling. And then their own stories begin to weave into the big story, the “travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem,” calls up memories of recent family trips, and mention of names like Joseph and Mary elicit the naming of their own fathers and mothers.

Why do children feel this way? Because they instinctively know they have been welcomed in the church, this story is as much theirs as it is ours – maybe more so in a way. They are at home at church, and they feel it, they know it. Children understand this effortlessly and at this season of the year it is they who welcome us to join in the telling, so that the story of Jesus “becomes our story and our story to tell.”3

As we move through Advent with it’s built-in longing for Christmas and the arrival of the Christ who receives us all, it is especially good for us to think again and again on ways in which we receive each other in his name. If reaching toward another person in welcome and fellowship seems a bit of a strain, we need to think of it like the strain required for muscles to become stronger. Though the process may require some discomfort, in the end, it’s a good thing, the healthy thing to do.

In the name of the One who is coming to us, may we always welcome one another, as well as those whom, year by year, Christ is bringing to our faith and fellowship; because in doing so, we welcome Christ himself.

__________________________________________________

1 George Chorba, in The Pipe Organ, New Vernon, NJ, December, 2004.

2 Matthew 5:23

3 Acts 20:37

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Have You Got the Time?

Communion Meditation, November 28, 2010

Romans 13:11-14

First Sunday in Advent:

Anyone who knows me knows that in my work life I am pretty conscious of time. I may occasionally be one or two minutes late, I’m rarely early, but I am always conscious of time, especially when we are running short of it. If we were thirty-five minutes into the worship service and hadn’t begun the second hymn yet, I would be the very picture of anxiety. I have always thought that we have a sort of informal contract between us that we who lead worship will work together to do everything we can to keep our services within a one hour time-frame, and all who participate in worship will not start shifting in their seats or looking distracted or anxious or pelting us with crumpled bulletins as long as we come close to accomplishing this. I have been to churches where this is not the understood contract. I remember one Baptist church I attended in Texas where the sermon began after we had been there singing and praying for over two hours. They were just getting warmed up. But that was their informal contract. There’s no use complaining that we don’t make very good Baptists!

I had an uncle in New Jersey, now passed away, who was a retired Certified Public Accountant. He knew I was interested in what goes on in churches, and liked to tell me about what was going on in his; after all, I went to seminary about an hour from his home. He was a numbers guy, as you might imagine, a true CPA guy. Every now and then, he used to send me the bulletin from the Presbyterian church he attended in Madison, New Jersey. On it he would write such remarks as, “Baptism: 8 minutes, Minute for mission: 10 minutes!” and, usually underlined for emphasis, “Even so, sermon: 27 1/2 minutes!” and then, finally, “Total service: one hour and fifteen minutes!” To my uncle, and to many, there are few shortcomings in church life that loom larger than abusing the unwritten contract about the mutually understood time scheduled for worship.

On the other side of the time management issue, Does anyone else remember the old song recorded by the band, Chicago, which began:

“As I was walking down the street one day,

a man came up to me and asked me

what the time was that was on my watch;

and I said:

‘Does anybody really know what time it is?

Does anybody really care?'"1

In the background, the chorus sings, “I don’t care about time.” It was a modest little protest against the control which clocks place on our lives, and perhaps my uncle’s pastor had heard this song once too often and begun living by its message. But the answer to the question that chorus is asking, of course is, yes, lots of people care about time.

In the middle of the letter he wrote to the believers in Rome, as if anticipating the question from that song in all its gravity Paul said, “you know what time it is.” What on earth was he talking about? They didn’t have clocks back then. And I know he wasn’t suggesting that they knew the day of the week or of the month. He was referring to a certain kind of time, and it didn’t have anything to do with the measurement of the hours. The New English Bible translates it well: “You know how critical the moment is.”

If we think about it we realize there are 2 kinds of time, a fact that the band Chicago was toying with in their song. One is Chronological Time. This kind of time keeps track of how many minutes the sermon will last, how many seconds it takes the Olympic sprinter to cross the finish line, how many days until Christmas, how many hours the operation lasted. There is no question that this is the kind of time in which we live most of our lives. A few centuries ago, clocks were mechanical marvels, which few people owned, but now they are one of the most taken-for-granted appliances in any home or on any wrist. Chronological time is very useful about some things. Imagine if we had to cook turkeys that didn’t have a little doo-dad that popped out when they were done, and we had no clock either. What if we really liked a three-minute egg, and had no way to measure when three minutes had passed? Credits for diplomas and college degrees are measured in classroom hours spent in various subjects. Throw away the clock and calendar and we might have to use some other silly measure like competence to see if a person had achieved an education. Chronological time and the effective use of it is one of the preoccupations of our age.

Still, there is another kind of time, though we think about it less frequently. It is this second sort of time that Paul had in mind in Romans. It is Decisive Time. The Bible uses the Greek word chairos for this, while using chronos for the other. How many times have we heard someone say about college and professional basketball games that the only time anyone really needs to watch is the final few minutes? If the game has been at all close, it is the endless final three or four minutes of fouling, calling of time outs, and scoring strategy that will decide the outcome. (And lately, of course, the starting of fights in the stands) While the whole game is still the same game, run on the same clock, the final minutes are the decisive time, a different kind of time. Or think of my uncle’s timekeeper’s worship bulletin. If some Sunday during worship it suddenly came to everyone’s attention that tragedy had unexpectedly stricken some family in the congregation, and amid gasps and tears everyone was asked to pray together for the family, for the blow this had struck to their faith, and everyone was asked to support them with their continued prayers, do you think any person with a semblance of a heart would mention afterward that the service that he had gone four minutes over time?

Chronologically, one person’s growth from youth to adulthood takes up just as many minutes, hours, days and years as anyone else’s. But not every minute stands out in our minds equally. I remember vividly a youth trip in the summer before my senior year in high school on which my pastor sat with me and spoke to me no more than a handful of sentences, but my life was changed. I could describe that scene as if it were yesterday, yet I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast last Wednesday. I couldn’t say what I was doing the ten minutes before he spoke to me, or the ten minutes after, but that ten minutes I remember vividly. It was decisive time. All our thinking about time is not the same. Decisive time somehow bursts the bonds of chronological time, stretches it, manipulates it.

Chronologically, the season of Advent comes in the time of the year when darkness appears to be overtaking our days. Yet our faith is not too taken with chronological time. Advent scripture passages are filled with opportunities for decision, with decisive time. Throughout the Sundays of Advent we hear promises that the light will overcome the darkness, that soon a Messiah will walk into our world. And on this first Sunday in Advent we gather around this table to celebrate the meal, which declares to the world that our Savior lives beyond clock-bound time, and that because of that fact, each moment in our lives is decisive time.

Today can be such a decision day. This very day is Decisive Time for some of us. If we claim Jesus as Savior and Lord, today we can recommit ourselves to him and to the work of his kingdom. And if we have never really given our hearts and lives to Christ, today we can answer his prayers for us and trust ourselves to his care. Today we can decide to do justice and love kindness. Today, this very hour, our lives can turn a whole new direction, and our church can become a fellowship of the redeemed in a way it never has before. Does anybody really know what time it is?

__________________________________

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Welcome to the Hotel California

November 14, 2010

Isaiah 65:17-25

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;

the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

The title for this sermon comes from a song by the band called the Eagles from a few decades back,1) about 3½ decades now, to be more precise. Some of you may remember it. The song’s title line was set to a rather persistent melody and tended to stay in your head, which is probably why it has stayed in mine for all these years. If you are not familiar with the song, just take my word for it, no need to rush out and buy it. The refrain declares, over and over again:

“Welcome to the Hotel California.”

And then in the final line from the song, a line that tends to stay with you:

“...you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

This song came to my mind when I began thinking about the context of the first recipients of the hope-filled message of Isaiah in the reading we shared today. In the beginning of the chapter from which we read, God declared,

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.

Apparently, the folks in Israel had become accustomed to God’s absence. At least they had become accustomed to thinking of God as absent. I recall playing hide and seek when I was a child, the sort of memory that many of you will likely share. There was always the danger of hiding yourself away too well, of being ready to be sought out by those who do not seek, of finally needing to cry out, “Here I am!” to those who had either accidentally or purposefully overlooked you. Perhaps that is the way God felt about his chosen people.

The end of Isaiah’s prophecy addresses a people in the thrall of futility and depression. They had been to Babylon in its heyday. They knew what a major empire looked like. Now they were home again from their exile, and their capital city looked more like an abandoned rock quarry than a seat of empire.

Yet like a losing coach on the sideline, who alone among the downcast figures on the field knows that there will be a better day in the future, Isaiah’s prophecy declared that it is precisely in the midst of spiritual depression and futility that people of faith must remain faithful. Judah had been characterized as a people who followed “their own devices,” serving as a law unto themselves. This sounds familiar to anyone in our own time who tries to establish community norms for behavior while the popular ethic of the day declares that individualism is the highest philosophical good and that no one can tell us what to do.

In 587 B.C., the people had been taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians and removed from Judah into Babylon, what is now Iraq. There they remained for 49 years, an entire generation, the best and brightest of the chosen people walking the narrow byways of a Jewish ghetto in Babylon until, in 538 B.C., the Persians became the dominant empire in the Fertile Crescent and by edict of the Emperor Cyrus,2) exiled peoples were all returned to their original homelands. For those 49 years in captivity, it must have seemed as if they had checked into the “Hotel California,” where you could “check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

And though they had been eager to get back to the homeland their parents and grandparents had told them so much about, things didn’t change all that much from their Spartan living conditions in Babylon. They arrived back in the homeland their forebears had left 40 years before – having heard all those stories around the hearth of a beautiful land, a fertile land, a glorious Temple – only to find the land a shambles, the Temple reduced to little more than a pile of stones, fertile fields sown with salt, ruin everywhere they looked. A new Temple was slapped together, but it was apparently a shabby structure when compared with the Temple of Solomon. Where were the cedar timbers? Where were the gold fittings? Gone. All gone. Then, after almost 50 years of struggle to make a new life in the old ruined homeland, it must have seemed as if they had come again to a place where you could “check out any time you liked, but you could never leave.”

So, you have people trapped in an existence which is grueling at best, a future that looked like nothing but more of the same, a past which, as long as anyone alive could remember, was pretty much like the present they now knew. All that remained of the glory of God’s chosen people now were stories from their great grandparents, stories of other times when Israel was great. Their remembered stories of the beauties of Mount Zion, now seen with their own eyes, seemed little more than a fairy tale.

Then came Isaiah, with his lofty and extravagant vision of a whole creation made new, an end to tears, a new beginning. Did they think he was crazy? Apparently they did not, at least not ultimately, as they preserved and handed down his words so that we can share them today. It is seers like Isaiah who provide humanity with a view of what can be when humanity’s vision has become limited and earth-bound. When we are overwhelmed with the feeling that things are not the way they are supposed to be, Isaiah tells us of the way things will be in the kingdom of a God who never forgets his love for his people.

How would that look in our present world? One writer said that if we tried on as fantastic a vision for our times as Isaiah presented to his we would find that nations and races in this brave new world would treasure differences in other nations and races as attractive, important, complementary. Government officials would still take office, but, to nobody’s surprise, they would tell the truth and freely praise the virtues of other public officials. Public spaces like parks and playgrounds would be left intact. Highway overpasses would be graffiti-free. Motorists would be serene and polite to one another on city streets, secure in the knowledge that, with former gang members all now enrolled in law school, they need not fear to venture out. Business associates would rejoice in each others’ promotions. Newspapers and internet sites would be filled with well-written accounts of acts of great moral beauty.3)

If any of this makes us smile knowingly, recognizing as we do that this is the stuff of dreams, not reality, then we are likely in company with those who first received this prophecy from Isaiah.

But how is it that we know when things are wrong in our world? How do we know for sure that it is not right to abuse one another, to live for self only, to pocket the public’s money? We only know these things to be wrong not because there is a perfect nation or state somewhere to which we compare our own faulty one, but because, together, we know an ideal, a vision of the way things are supposed to be. No matter how the world actually is, all of us carry inside our heads a dream or a picture of the way things should be. We may like to play the cynic sometimes, but we only know ourselves to be cynical in those moments because we have a feel for the truth of the world that God intended to bring into being. Meanwhile, however, we’re stuck with this one.

As I look at Isaiah’s vision for the world I recognize that I am struck by the total newness of it. It opens with God’s declaration, “I am about to create a new heavens and a new earth...” and concludes with a line about “the serpent – its food shall be dust.”4) To speak of a new heaven and earth is to speak of a new creation and the suffering that followed upon the very first act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden. It is to peel back the history of humanity’s suffering through its sins, beyond the wrong-doing of the present generation, or even Isaiah’s generation, back to “the original point of rupture between God and God’s people.”5) For the former things to be put away for good, God must begin again. As another song of the late 70’s put it, “And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.” Problem is, we can’t get back there ourselves. To do that, we need an act of God.

We dedicate our pledges of support to the church today, and in doing so we offer a communal vision of the world as it should be. By our very act of pledging from our livelihoods to the work of this congregation we make a statement of belief about the way God intended things to be in this world, and commit ourselves to stand with God and one another to bring such a world to pass. Don’t let go of that vision because it is God’s business to bring it about instead of ours. Cherish it. It is not false or wrong simply because everything good thing has not yet come fully to fruition, any more than the inventions yet to come in this 21st century are false or wrong because we have not invented them yet. They are out there. They will be discovered.

Remember the verse from the beginning of Isaiah with which we began this morning?

I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask,

to be found by those who did not seek me.

In light of that, one promise in Isaiah’s vision stands out more than all the rest:

Before they call I will answer,

while they are yet speaking I will hear.

This is the gift that a community of faith has to offer the world. The gift of hope, hope grounded in a God who is bigger than our most profound perceptions of him yet who is so ready to respond to us that his answer already awaits our asking. The community of faith – as it celebrates its baptism into the kingdom of God – gives to the world a vision of God’s coming purpose for creation in which wolves and lambs will feed together, where harm and destruction will no longer characterize our existence. That such a day is coming is our confession, and the vision of it rules our actions and our lives in the time in between that day and this.

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1) 1976, in an album by the same name.

2) Whom the Lord names as “my anointed” in Isaiah 45:1.

3) Thanks to Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., “Not the Way It’s S’pposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin,” Theology Today, July, 1993, p. 183 for central ideas in this paragraph.

4) Genesis 3:14.

5) New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume VI, Abingdon, 2001, p. 544.

Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder