Sermon Seeds: Infinite Possibilities/A World Filled with Love

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C
Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28)

Lectionary citations
Isaiah 65:17-25 with Isaiah 12 or
Malachi 4:1-2a with Psalm 98
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19

Sermon Seeds

Focus Scripture:
Isaiah 65:17-25

Weekly Theme:
Infinite Possibilities/A World Filled with Love

Reflection:
by Kathryn Matthews

This reflection was written in a specific setting that’s enjoying a lot of national attention these days, at least as much as possible in the midst of an awful election season: Cleveland, Ohio, the home of the national offices of the United Church of Christ, a few steps from the basketball arena that is home to world champions, and the baseball field where the World Series was just played (we won’t discuss the outcome). Of course, even on game nights, when the city lights shine, this “Rust Belt” city continues to show the signs and stresses of poverty on any block where one is approached by a person in desperate need.

The news on most nights reports another shooting, usually of a young person, and most often a person of color. On the one hand, our children are gunned down by random bullets on their way to the store, without much reaction, and on the other, our city–and the nation as well–still struggle with the horror of the police-shooting death of a twelve-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, at play with a toy gun. Police procedures are called into question by the Department of Justice and a population that both needs and, at times, fears law enforcement officers.

We also received national and international attention after three young girls were kidnapped, held captive for many years, and then miraculously freed again. They spent those years in a house in a struggling neighborhood in the city, with the people in surrounding homes unaware of their ordeal. Drugs and high-interest payday loans are readily available here, our schools struggle, and there are empty storefronts on downtown streets and in all of the city’s neighborhoods.

Signs of rebirth and renewal

Nevertheless, there are signs of rebirth and renewal, signs of promise, as this city works hard to recover its former glory. We’re still the home of wonderful arts, medical and educational institutions, and city planners are bringing to life a new vision for the city. In just the past few years, new hotels but also schools have been built, an amazing public square opened as a beautiful community gathering place and a magnificent new bridge crosses the Cuyhahoga River; apartments fill restored buildings, and the world’s most beautiful grocery store has opened in a former (long-empty) bank building. At the Church House of the UCC, a new-church start in the Amistad Chapel reaches out to this new mission field. For everyone who lives or works in the city, or cares about its welfare, our impatience with the mess of rebuilding is tempered by a slender hope that the time has come for our city to shine once again.

Of course, we’re just one city, and not all that unusual. In addition to the latest shootings, the news tells us that the gap between the rich and poor in this nation resembles the Gilded Age, when robber barons amassed fortunes at the top and the poor struggled far below, without the strong middle class that arose in the last century. No wonder there is so much unfocused anger in our population. As a nation, we’re spending hundreds of billions–no, trillions--of dollars on our military, on wars and the possibility of wars and the cost of the destruction they bring, and then arguing over whether we can afford health insurance for our children and the most vulnerable among us, while health insurance CEOs are paid tens of millions of dollars every year–and if they fail, they get exit “packages” that would eradicate hunger in the cities where they made that money.

And the suffering isn’t limited to our cities: for many weeks, protesters in North Dakota have been supporting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s fight to stop the 4-state, $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline that threatens water supplies and sacred lands. Meanwhile, forest fires threaten communities in the West, polar bears struggle with dwindling ice cover because of global warming, and the oceans yield fewer and fewer fish: it feels as if creation itself is in revolt over the damage we have done.

Dreams and discouragement

Perhaps we might begin to imagine, then, how things must have felt for the people of Jerusalem around 475 B.C.E., two generations after they returned from exile and tried to rebuild their devastated city. They knew of the former glory of Jerusalem and its Temple, and the rebuilt version didn’t quite measure up to the glory of Solomon’s Temple. Imagine the prophet Isaiah, walking through the rubble of the city. (The evening news from Aleppo in Syria–and this week, even Italy, with its earthquakes that have destroyed historic old towns–provides vivid images to help our imaginations.) Much of the city was still in ruin, including homes and markets, and many people continued to suffer the effects of oppression and dislocation. Hunger, thirst, illness and early death, sorrow and grief, economic injustice and political turmoil were the realities of the day.

The first generation had returned excited and full of joy about coming home to their own land, their own great city: Jerusalem. And yet, when the prophet we call Third Isaiah wrote the beautiful words in this week’s passage, the people were still hungering for a word of hope. In this setting, Isaiah speaks of a vision from God, who, in the midst of human suffering and despite the long wait, is about to do a new and great thing: “to create new heavens and a new earth….be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating: for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight” (65:17-18).

No “pipe dream”

The scholars are in remarkable agreement on this poetic, hopeful text about God’s transformation of the present, gloomy circumstances into a new creation. They hear echoes of the Genesis creation story, this time, though, with the “curses” in Genesis 3:14-16 undone. Stephen Breck Reid focuses on our hearts that respond to God’s promises, what Reid calls God’s “yeses” that counteract the “noes” we live among: “yeses” that connect us to God and end the “noes” of weeping and wailing from those who suffer, the premature deaths of our children, the injustice of workers not being able to afford to live in the homes they labor over and in.

All of this suffering will end, Reid says, because of the caring presence of an attentive, responsive God who will bring transformation not in some apocalyptic sense but in a concrete, this-world experience of all things made right. Creation will be so full of peace that even “natural” predators–ravenous wolves and ferocious lions–will live gently, side by side with the gentle lamb, and presumably with us as well. This world may sound like a beautiful dream, the dream of God, we might even say, but Reid has an even better word for it, calling it God’s own “project” (The Lectionary Commentary: The Old Testament and Acts).

Will we join in?

Perhaps the word “project” calls us to join in even more practically and powerfully than the word “dream,” for all of the latter’s poetic power. In any case, God is the One who wills all of this, and is bringing it to reality, with us joining in, if we respond to the call. What better work is there for us to do, or to give our lives to? However, if the rebuilding of a city and its hope leaves out “the widow, the orphan, and the alien,” its most vulnerable ones, is its foundation a solid one? Are glittering hotels, bustling nightlife and massive sports arenas what’s needed most for God’s dream, God’s project, to come to fruition? What does the lamb need to feel truly protected, loved, and at peace?

How might we see “the city”–your city, and mine, anywhere the people gather in community–as a joy? The dream is for everyone, including people on the land, because the dream (the project) envisions the earth yielding an abundant harvest shared by all, and everyone’s children enjoying long lives. The imagery of this ancient text still inspires us today, in economic times of great complexity and problems that nevertheless call us to find creative ways to justice and greater sharing.

God speaks and moves in the midst of it all

The great biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has written elegant and abundant words on this Isaiah passage that he says describes God’s intention for Israel (Theology of the Old Testament). Brueggemann illuminates the text in its setting while shining its light on our own situation today. Post-exilic Israel was looking at rubble; so are we. Israel may have felt overwhelmed and threatened by empires and forces they couldn’t influence, let alone control; we feel overwhelmed, too. Israel worried about its children and lamented their deaths as well as the wasted lives of those who toil in vain; we worry and lament, too.

However, it’s right in the midst of such despair-inducing circumstances that God speaks and moves, Brueggemann writes: “Ours is not an empty world of machinery where we get what we have coming to us. No! Caring, healing communication is still possible. Life is not a driven or anxious monologue. The Lord is findable….And that is the song of the promises and the image of the poets, the voices of Moses and of Jesus, that a new world is about to be given, and we can trust ourselves to it and live as though in it” (Peace). Yes!

Called to a larger view of God

Even now, in such challenging times for a person or people of faith, we can trust that God is at work, then, bringing God’s dream to reality. This is true no matter how many televangelists prefer to speak of destruction and punishment for humankind being visited upon us by God. When the evening news continues to be mostly bad, what would it look like to live as though we are already dwelling in the new world God has promised? What responsibilities do we bear in all of this dreaming?

For example, natural disasters and environmental degradation sound an ominous note over our lives, and we wonder how long creation can or will bear the consequences of our actions. Brueggemann urges preachers to turn to the texts at hand that offer a larger vision than “our privatistic, personalistic faith,” and inspire us to “confidence about the renewal and mending of the world” (Texts Under Negotiation).

That’s what Isaiah, like any good and faithful prophet, is talking about in this passage. Recognizing the connections between damage to the environment and injustice (such as environmental racism), how might a sermon on this text “think large” about the state of the world and the condition of the earth? Life is hard, and sometimes we need our faith to sustain us in our private, personal struggles. How do we preach a message that encompasses the personal and the public? Is there really a split between the two?

Good news that challenges us

Some of this good news may not sound so good, at least for some of us. Our present political struggles (actually, they seem to be the same political struggles in every time) illustrate the complexity and sometimes intransigence of our economic systems when it comes to generously sharing the good things God has provided in abundance. Somehow, the abundance gets redistributed so that some (even a few) have an excess, and many (too many) live in scarcity and want, clearly not the will of God.

Joining in God’s project may require, however uncomfortably, adjusting the way we live and the way the world lives–our “lifestyle” as “consumers.” (Whoever decided years ago that that would be our new identity?) The way we hear this text will be influenced by our position in life and our level of comfort and security, just as preaching on it is shaped by the setting in which we proclaim the Good News while still weighing the “cost” of discipleship, to borrow Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s powerful words.

Courage for visionaries

One of the characteristics of our United Church of Christ heritage is an “evangelical courage.” As we wrestle together on any number of issues–the allocation of health care resources and our responsibility for our own health, or rebuilding the infrastructure that serves the common good, or the role of our military in a much smaller world, not to mention how to distribute the costs of these “goods”–can the church be a place where we struggle together, learning not only the facts but learning also to be people of an ethical vision grounded in scriptures like this text from Isaiah, with all of its beautiful promises?

We read this text from the great prophet Isaiah many centuries after it was written, many centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem, the return from exile, and the life and ministry and death of Jesus, and the fall of the empires that oppressed his people. Still, we persist in the belief, the trust, that is at the core of Israel’s story, of the gospel story, as well as our own: that God is at work for the good of all of God’s children, no matter how things may appear at the moment. Joining in the “project” of God: that’s one way of seeing ministry. Ours isn’t some pie-in-the-sky hope: something as “earthy” as “bread for all” is quite a project, quite a labor of love, and will require some major adjustments in our lives and the life of the world. We dream, then, not just of bread, or justice, for all, but peace for all, and healing and peace for all of creation at last.

The Rev. Kathryn M. Matthews retired in July after serving as dean of Amistad Chapel at the national offices of the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, Ohio.

You’re invited to share your reflections on this text in the comments below the post on our Facebook page.

A Bible study version of this reflection is at Weekly Seeds.

For further reflection:

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 20th century
“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th century
“Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up.”

Marian Wright Edelman, 21st century
“Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?”

Barbara Kingsolver, 21st century
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

M. Scott Peck, 20th century
“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

Madeleine L’Engle, 20th century, A Wrinkle in Time
“‘Oh, why must you make me look at unpleasant things when there are so many delightful ones to see?’ Mrs. Which’s voice reverberated through the cave. ‘There will no longer be so many pleasant things to look at if responsible people do not do something about the unpleasant ones.'”

Verna H, Dozier, 20th century
“The important question to ask is not, ‘What do you believe?’ but ‘What difference does it make that you believe?’ Does the world come nearer to the dream of God because of what you believe?”

Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story, 21st century
“If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.”

Lectionary texts

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.
But be glad and rejoice for ever
   in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
   and its people as a delight.
I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
   and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
   or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
   an infant that lives but a few days,
   or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
   and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
   they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
   they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
   and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labor in vain,
   or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord-
   and their descendants as well.
Before they call I will answer,
   while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
   the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
   but the serpent-its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
   on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

with

Isaiah 12

You will say on that day:
I will give thanks to you, O Lord,
for though you were angry with me,
your anger turned away,
and you comforted me.

Surely God is my salvation;
I will trust, and will not be afraid,
for the Lord God is my strength and my might;
he has become my salvation.

With joy you will draw water
   from the wells of salvation.
And you will say on that day:
Give thanks to the Lord,
   call on his name;
make known his deeds among the nations;
   proclaim that his name is exalted.

Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously;
let this be known in all the earth.
Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion,
for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

Malachi 4:1-2a

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.

with

Psalm 98

O sing to God a new song,
for God has done marvelous things.

God’s strong hand and holy arm
have given God the victory.

God has made known God’s victory;
and has revealed God’s vindication
in the sight of the nations.

God has remembered having steadfast love
and faithfulness to the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth
have seen the victory of our God.

Make a joyful noise to God,
all the earth;
break forth into joyous song
and sing praises.

Sing praises to God with the lyre,
with the lyre and the sound of melody.

With trumpets and the sound of the horn
make a joyful noise before the Ruler, the Sovereign.

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who live in it.

Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of God,
for God is coming to judge the earth.

God will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

Now we command you, beloved, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you. This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.

Luke 21:5-19

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.

“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

“But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

Notes on the Lectionary and Liturgical Colors
by the Rev. Susan Blain, Curator for Worship and Liturgical Arts (mailto:blains@ucc.org)
Faith Formation Ministry, Local Church Ministries, United Church of Christ

The use of colors to differentiate liturgical seasons is a custom in use among some Western churches for hundreds of years. Although the custom of using colors is an ancient one, there has not always been agreement on what the colors should be. The Council of Trent in 1570, a Roman Catholic response to the Reformation, codified the colors for the Roman Catholic Church. When we talk about “traditional” colors today, we usually are referring to that codification. There were four basic colors in that codification: purple (penitence), red (Spirit or Martyrs memorials), green (long season after Pentecost) and white (festivals). Other colors, or no color at all, were acceptable variants in some regions.

The Reformation of course was a watershed for Christian ritual practice. Anglican and Lutheran churches often used some form of liturgical colors; however, the Reformed tradition of churches, where the UCC falls, for the most part did away with the custom of using colors, opting for much more simplicity. During the ecumenical liturgical movement of the mid-20th Century, Protestant churches began to look back at some of the ritual and colorful practices of the past with an eye toward reclaiming them to help give expression to feeling, tone, and imagery underlying the lectionary stories.

Before the Reformation’s iconoclasm, and Trent’s code, practices varied from place to place, often depending on what was available. Indeed, in some places the custom was to organize vestments into practical categories of “best,” “second best,” and “everyday” — not depending on the color at all. For Christmas and Easter the “best” vestments were used, no matter the color! Other, less prominent feasts or Sundays got “second best” or “everyday.”