“Promise?”

Sunday, December 11th, 2005
Advent 3B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Isaiah 65:17-25

17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. 18 But 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. 19 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. 20 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. 21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22 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. 23 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. 24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. 25 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.

“Promise?”

If you’ve ever had to look into the eyes of a six year-old that you’ve just told you’d do something with and they ask you that haunting, penetrating question, you get the idea of what it is to hope – to await with eager expectation, to dream and yearn with every fiber of your being for something to come true.

“Promise?”

Isaiah was written to a people undone, in captivity, in exile, far from home, wishing every moment of every day that they were somewhere else.

The picture we see in the passage this morning is not unfamiliar to us – it echoes similar passages throughout the Bible that show us a glimpse of what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.

What do we hear of first? Jerusalem as Joy and its people as a delight. Though I’m sure there are moments in which the inhabitants of today’s Jerusalem feel that way about their city, I strongly suspect those moments are all too fleeting. The line one phrase down rings truer to what our experience of Jerusalem has been -- no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. Keep in mind, this passage was written at the very least, nearly 2500 years ago, and yet, it could easily be applied to today’s inhabitants of Jerusalem.

The picture painted by Isaiah is one of a just, peaceful, joy-filled Kingdom that is altogether earth-centered – not a pie-in-the-sky soft-focused harps-playing in the background otherworldly image of something that is out of the grasp of even our most vivid imagination. This is a NEW EARTH. Where there will be no infant mortality, where centenarians will be considered children, where people will enjoy the fruits of their labors THEMSELVES – not be dispossessed of them by ruthless employers. Did you see? People will build houses and live in them themselves – people will plant vineyards and eat their fruit themselves – it is a none-too-subtle statement for all who have people working for them, isn’t it? And it is a promise to those same workers – the ones who DO toil in another’s field, who DO build someone else’s house, who DO plant and tend someone else’s vineyard.

The vision is mortal also in that in the new earth depicted – even though people live far longer lives than we do today, they still die. It is significant to note that detail … it does not seem to be speaking of the heavenly realm so much as a transformed earthly one.

This week, I sat beside a man who lost his sight at the age of 46. He commented on the fact that he believed in Jesus, believed the Bible, and since it says in the Bible that Jesus healed a blind man, HE wants that for himself. He cannot understand why he has had to suffer the traumatic loss of his sight.

I was reminded that though Jesus did heal the blind man, he also did not promise us an easy life here on earth – not YET anyway – that man knows that far better than I do.

In the coming of the Christ child, Brennan Manning says in Shipwrecked at the Stable Door - “God entered our world not with the crushing impact of unbearable glory, but in the way of weakness, vulnerability and need. On a wintry night in an obscure cave, the infant Jesus was a humble naked helpless God who allowed us to get close to him."

Jesus could have transformed the world while he was here. Being God incarnate certainly meant that he had the power, the ability to do it. But he chose not to. Did he choose to not redeem the world in one fell swoop in order to allow us to continue to suffer? The man I sat with said at another point in the conversation that he’s ready for his life to be over. He FEELS like it is over already. His loss is so overwhelming that he can’t yet find anything redemptive in the experience. I won’t stand here and say that he will. He very well may not in his remaining time. I hope that will come to him. I hope I nudged him in that direction, but I can’t say with any certainty that anything I said got through.

Ultimately, we know the true sense of Joy by understanding and perhaps experiencing despair and sorrow. If we did not have the valleys, we would not recognize the mountaintops. It sounds pithy, but it is true.

It is the same with understanding God’s promise of Joy. We cannot truly know that Joy without having been through this life here on earth – in its present condition.

We celebrate Christmas in the only way we can -- with a partial understanding of what that Joy really is, because we are still on THIS side of knowing it fully.

Christ’s promise to us is that we WILL be with him. Just like that 6 year olds’ eyes pleaded with me to spend time with him, we look toward the coming of the Savior both in our lives and in our world –

Let’s pray.

Prepare the Way

Sunday, December 4th, 2005
Advent 2B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Mark 1:1-8

1The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

who will prepare your
way;

3 the voice of one crying
out in the wilderness:“

Prepare the way of the
Lord,make his paths straight,”’
4 John the baptizer appeared in the
wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5
And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem
were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing
their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around
his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 He proclaimed, ‘The one who is
more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie
the thong of his sandals. 8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize
you with the Holy Spirit.’

I am a recovering news junkie. It dates back to when I was a night clerk my last year in college. CNN was relatively new then, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Weeknights I was usually the only one in the lobby of the dorm, so I would flip back and forth between MTV and VH1 and CNN Headline news. I had to do something to stay awake, and when reading my assignments stopped working, I would turn up the TV and see what had been happening in the world.

Nowadays I get most of my news from the radio, or online, depending on where I happen to be driving. National Public Radio is my drug of choice, but I usually try to tune in to the EIB network to hear what the take is from that end.

This week I had the opportunity to watch some news on television, something my schedule doesn’t always lend itself to anymore. The footage and the stories are truly disheartening.

So it is with a heavy heart that I come to the second Sunday of Advent, when we’ve focused on peace, we’ve heard a reading on peace, we’ve lit the candle, and we’ve prayed for it. And though we may to some degree be experiencing peace in our respective lives, it is perhaps the most elusive of gifts, for we do not see it in the greater world around us. Not by a long shot. Even the local news is anything but peaceful. We hear of arsons, and shootings, and wrecks, and attempted escapes, even in this relatively quiet corner of the world.

The image in today’s passage – at the very beginning of the Gospel according to Mark, is of John proclaiming the coming of the Messiah, the promised one, and in that proclamation, there is a foreshadowing of the turmoil to come. We’ve read the passages, John didn’t have just a few followers, he had CROWDS following him – coming to him for baptism – for the forgiveness of sins.

Do you remember what it was like to be confronted with your own fallen-ness, your own brokenness? Coming to grips with one’s sinfulness is not a soothing experience. For me, it usually involves pain and sorrow beyond words – and even anger – at the realization that, as much as I try to let Christ govern my life, his is not always the voice that commands, that prevails.

So Jesus DID come to proclaim the ‘favorable year of the LORD,’ but he did not promise us peace on this earth, in this life.

We may catch glimpses of it, dim reflections … as Paul says, “through a glass, dimly.” Can you think of any? I had the opportunity to witness one of those moments yesterday morning, when baby Alejandro first came back from the nursery to be with his mother and father. There is something eternal and transcendent in the sight of a new family forming, something that speaks so strongly of hope, and a hope in the future, that even when conditions are anything but in their favor, the first response is to smile and thank God for the miracle of life.

But then life HAPPENS. And we have all seen and know that life is anything BUT peaceful. Even in the pursuit of peace, there is danger.
Last weekend, and in the days since, there have been several abductions in Iraq. In one, a British citizen, two Canadians, and a U.S. citizen were abducted. Night before last the reports started coming out that the group responsible for the abduction stated that the men would all be killed unless Iraqi detainees are not released by this coming Thursday.

We’ve grown … what? Somewhat immune (is that the word?) to the reports, haven’t we, that this many soldiers and that many civilians were killed in a car-bombing in Baghdad, that so many Iraqi police trainees were slaughtered … how is it that such devastating, heart-rending news is summarized in a two or three sentence note trimmed to fit the timeslot, and we go on with our lives.

The four men are members of Christian Peacemaker Teams, a program born out of the Brethren, Quaker and Mennonite Churches in the United States and Canada. Denominations that have from their beginnings taken to heart Jesus’ beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount – ‘blessed are the Peacemakers, for they will be called children of God’ – and their pursuit of peace may end up costing these men their lives. It has yet to be seen.

I fully realize that there are radically differing views on the war in Iraq and on the reasons for the war – a fact that is drilled into me by my choice of radio listening, if nothing else. I am at a loss when it comes to trying to find some resolution to the situation. I’m not that smart.

But I do know one thing.

Christ calls us to follow him, to be like him. And though his call does initially cause distress, it ultimately results in peace. And so I pray for peace – spiritual as well as emotional and physical – military and political. His promise IS for peace, ultimately.

It is one of his given names – the Prince of Peace. But this Prince of Peace has told us in his own words –

34 ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
35 For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
36 and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
(Matthew 10)

Jesus knows to whom he is speaking. He knows the human heart. He knows the passions of the human spirit, and he understood that what he was bringing into the world would first strain and even tear the fabric of our existence, for we live in a world that is NOT as it should be, it is NOT as it was originally intended, neither the physical world nor the spiritual and emotional one.

Simply stated, we live in a world in which peace is absent.

So we pray for peace, we work for peace, we seek peace in much the same way that we seek and pray for and work for the Kingdom of Heaven: in the expectation of its fulfillment, not in the reality of its full presence.

So our concentration on peace this day is with a yearning and a hope that it will one day BE – not only in our hearts, but in the greater work of creation around us.

And how are we to prepare the way for the Prince of Peace?

By nurturing, encouraging, strengthening the peace in our own lives that he has already planted there, by sharing that peace, by living OUT that peace, by living IN that peace in relationship with each other. We are, after all, the representation of God’s glory on earth.

How true to that glory are we being?

Let’s pray.