With Joy

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Advent 3C

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Warsaw, VA

Isaiah 12

¹“You will say in 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. ²Surely 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. ³With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

⁴And you will say in that day: Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known his deeds among the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted. ⁵Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth. ⁶Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

Where is the joy?

Isaiah is a compiled book. That means it is made up of the writings of Isaiah, certainly, but of others who wrote in the spirit of Isaiah, or with the same message and theme as Isaiah. The earliest sections of the book seem to have been written beginning around the year 740 BCE and over the next 40 years. The exile to Babylon began nearly a century later, in 605 BCE, and lasted for approximately 70 years – until the year 536 BCE. Scholars have divided what we now have as Isaiah into two – and actually three separate groups of writings. Chapters 1-39 were written before the Babylonian Exile, and chapters 40-55 were written during the Babylonian Exile. Chapters 56-66 were written after the return from exile, when the remnants of the people of Israel are back in their homeland, beginning to rebuild the Temple and rediscover their covenantal relationship with God.

Where is the joy?

As our passage this morning comes from the 12^th chapter, it is written to the Kingdom of Judah at a time when their existence seems to be especially tenuous. Though it was still at least a century off, their conquest loomed large in the awareness of the national psyche. They lived in the shadow of the power of the Assyrian Empire. The Northern Kingdom, of Israel, the ten tribes other than Benjamin and Judah, had been or was in the process of being overtaken and absorbed by the Assyrian Empire, and the prospects for the Kingdom of Judah didn’t seem to be much better.

Where is the joy?

That uncertainty is something that we have all shared – maybe not on a national level as they were then, but certainly on a personal level – when faced with the loss of a job, or health, or the death of a loved one. As Audrey West, Associate Professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago says, “it is no small thing to stare the menace in the face and say, ‘I will trust, and I will not be afraid.’”

Where is the joy?

These six short verses actually break down into two hymns – two songs – sung first by an individual and second by a group. In the Hebrew, the ‘you’ is in the singular form, along with all the pronouns in the first 3 verses. Then, beginning in verse 4, the ‘you’ is in the plural – in other words, this second section of the chapter is written as though for a choir or a congregation to sing.

And what they are singing isn’t just any old song of thanksgiving; it is deeply resonant with their history. The middle section of verse 2 is a quote from another hymn of thanksgiving sung at an earlier time of deliverance by God of the people of Israel – it is found in Exodus 15 verse 2. At that time, the thanksgiving was after being delivered from Pharaoh and his chariots after having crossed the Red Sea.

This is the first time in the book of Isaiah that the word ‘salvation’ is used. Because it is derived from a verbal root meaning “to be wide, spacious,” it connotes the idea of deliverance from all that would stand in the way of one’s peace and prosperity. There is an element of word play, a subtle reference to the writer, in the triple repetition of the word in verses 2 and 3, since the very name ‘Isaiah’ means, “the Lord is salvation.”

The second song begins with the same words as the first “And you will say in that day,” … ‘that day’ is a statement of hope in and of itself. It is a reference to the end of an era – when the Messiah will come. "That day" is a day of judgment and salvation, a day that calls God's people forward, beckoning us to live into its reality in the present moment, no matter the circumstances.

Here the people of Israel, the people of Judah, were facing what for them was TOTAL uncertainty about what their future held – as a nation, as individuals. It was normal for conquering armies to sack and to pillage and to kill. In fact, it’s not unusual to find even in the Old Testament to find where the Israelites themselves were ordered to go in and kill everyone. That would have been fresh on their minds.

If the power of the first song is that it is a lone voice singing out against fear in the face of overwhelming odds and certain loss or defeat, the power of the second song is that it is a whole congregation lifting their voices in praise and thanksgiving in the face of those same odds, calling others to do the same – and proclaim the greatness of God to the nations, which would seem to be counterintuitive, in light of the fact that Israel is crumbling, and Judah is facing obliteration, they are singing the praise of their God despite that fact.

It would seem to point to something else going on here. That even though the image brought out in the congregational song – that of a mighty warrior, able to deliver his people in battle, on the face of it, it seems to be a case of … you know how sometimes you are filling out a form and you come to a question that does not apply to you and you put in the space “N/A” (Not Applicable? … It seems like it might be that … but what they are singing of is patently opposite the worldly vision they are living through and are facing the prospect of CONTINUING to live through for the foreseeable future.

The people of Israel and Judah, and by extension – we – are still singing because of the radical redefinition of what a mighty warrior is supposed to DO. It means that we do not let our hope, our peace, our joy, depend on anything – ANYTHING but the promise that we have in God’s salvation and God’s faithfulness, love and God’s grace.

Earlier this morning we sang a hymn in our opening assembly – a traditional German Christmas Carol – How Great Our Joy – the words refer to the usual imagery of Christmas –

While by the sheep we watched at night / Glad tidings brought an angel bright.

There shall be born, so He did say /
in Bethlehem a Child today.

There shall the Child lie in a stall / this Child who shall redeem us all.

This gift of God we’ll cherish well
/ that ever joy our hearts shall fill.

The refrain – the chorus – is what I love about this hymn, and it’s designed, I think, to be sung antiphonally, men and women, or one section and then another:

How great our joy! (Great our joy!)


Joy, joy, joy! (Joy, joy, joy!)


Praise we the Lord in heaven on high! 


(Praise we the Lord in heaven on high!)

To find it in us, to sing with Joy, to live in Joy, when we are living through times that would seem to drain all that joy from us, is of God. It is the Spirit calling out, calling out to us and from us and saying “just wait, there’s hope, there’s peace to come, there is rest to come! God’s salvation is at hand, God’s love does not fail!

Let’s pray.

“Loving God, your word speaks of peace that passes understanding, and we thank you for that and we pray for that, and have, at times, experienced that.

But we are surprised by joy that passes understanding. Even in the midst of our darkest times, you fill us, you touch us with the certainty that you are with us, and in that presence we find joy.

Go with us now, even as we know you have been with us, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Into The Way of Peace

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Advent 2C

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Warsaw, VA

Luke 1:68-79

⁶⁸“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. ⁶⁹He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, ⁷⁰as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, ⁷¹that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. ⁷²Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, ⁷³the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us ⁷⁴that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, ⁷⁵in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. ⁷⁶And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, ⁷⁷to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. ⁷⁸By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, ⁷⁹to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Matthew Hensley, a member of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Virginia’s Coordinating Council traveled to South Africa recently on a mission trip with a group from Haymarket Baptist Church, and he came back with this reflection:

Reverend Colin Jooste was arrested from the pulpit of the Zion Congregational Church in King William Town, South Africa in 1985. The charge: treason. The cause: organizing groups of Christians and concerned citizens in a feeding scheme that would provide people in the local black township with necessary food.

Colin did not organize this initiative from the comforts of privileged South Africa. He and his congregation also lived behind fences, in a township categorized as “coloured.” Their coming and going was monitored and their ability to work was limited to what the government considered acceptable for their “race.”

The old apartheid system of South Africa is too convoluted and detailed to easily describe. Suffice it to say it was an arbitrary and elaborate system that rested power in the hands of a privileged few while pitting the majority against one another by placing them in different categories of race and ability. Those categorized as “coloured” were given a few more “privileges” than the black South Africans creating a divide between the two contrived groups. So instead of the oppressed majority rising up together against the oppressor, the system of apartheid pitted coloured against black.

So Colin stood in his congregation’s pulpit each week and exposed the evils of apartheid while preaching the hope found in the life of Jesus Christ and in his gospel message. In Jesus’ worldview, the weak, the marginalized, and the poor were the privileged. And in God’s coming kingdom, the playing field would become level and all people would stand as equals with one another as they do before almighty God. Under apartheid, what was playing out before his congregation was far from such a kingdom.

Colin believed that God calls people to reflect God’s coming kingdom – to provide a tangible example of what such a kingdom will be when God returns to reign over creation. To sit back and watch their brothers and sisters suffer from starvation and disease when they could help was not taking such a call to be light in a dark world seriously.

So Colin, with the help of pastors in the black townships, began to collect food and money to send to the people on the other side of town, kept in their own area. This initiative, which began in King William Town, started to take hold in other areas of South Africa. Many black townships began to receive aid from coloured townships – the oppressed caring for the even more oppressed.

But if one aspect of apartheid was to separate and pit the races against one another, then surely what Colin had started was meant to undermine the government. And so he was arrested from his pulpit one Sunday and taken to a nearby prison where he was kept with other political prisoners where they were beaten and mistreated. The memory of a young girl’s cry held in a cell down the hall from his still haunts him.

Colin, luckily, was released after six months due to his work with the World Council of Churches and given 24 hours to leave the country. He and his family were sponsored to come to the United States where they lived for seven years. While in the US, he never stopped working, even though churches wanted to provide for his families needs while in exile. He worked as a carpenter and painter, spoke to many churches, and later served as a professor, after studying at Yale University.

But his home country and extended family were enough reason to not stay permanently in the United States. His whole family returned to South Africa in 1992 when the apartheid government fell.

Colin now works for the new South African government. He remained a pastor in a local congregation until recently. His family now lives in a part of King William Town that less than twenty years ago was meant for whites only. Many days, on his way to work, he drives past the prison where he was held. The experience is still painful.

I find Colin’s story compelling on a number of levels – on a personal level, his courage in speaking the truth of the Gospel of Christ into the presence of human suffering – especially suffering caused by other humans – calls me to a more courageous stand of my own. His efforts to provide for the basic needs of his neighbors despite an officially sanctioned systematized injustice that made it at best difficult and at worst nearly impossible to carry out calls me to do more, be more, SPEAK more about what Jesus had to say about those injustices that existed in first-century Palestine and that still haunt us today.

As for our passage this morning, we are walking through the approach – the advent – of the coming of the Christ child.

Just to recap – Zechariah, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth’s husband, who was a member of the priestly order of Abijah, was most likely well into his seventies when the angel Gabriel appeared to him as he was performing his priestly duties, and announced that he and Elizabeth, who had up until that time not been able to have children, were going to be parents of a little boy. Gabriel didn’t stop there, but went on to tell Zechariah something of what his son would do after he grew up – that he would be great in the sight of the Lord, that he would turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God, parents to their children, the disobedient to the wisdom of righteousness, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord … all in all quite an earful for a man who had led a long and faithful life serving God and his fellow Israelites in the temple.

The twist to the story is that Gabriel also told Zechariah that for the next nine months more or less he would be without a voice. He would not be able to speak a word through the whole of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Can you imagine the degree of frustration that would cause? I know what a hurdle it was to be able to communicate with Irene Hinson as well as Helen Coates when neither one of them were able to speak clearly during their illnesses.

Ask yourself: what must it have been like for Zechariah to be unable to speak for those nearly forty weeks? What insight do you think he may have drawn during that time? When you are required to be silent, you are better able to enter into ‘observer’ mode in relation to the world around you.

This past week I had the opportunity to sit in Domestic Relations Court with one of our Hispanic friends, and while we waited for her hearing to begin, we sat through another case, which involved two women who had gotten into an altercation – one behind the wheel of a car and the other standing outside the car and being struck by it – all apparently over the fact that the woman in the car, who was coming to the house to see the father of the baby she is expecting, believed the woman outside the car was in a romantic relationship with that same man. The questioning and the back and forth in the courtroom was both sad and intriguing. Sad, because it was obvious that the lack of conscience of someone had brought these two women to that courtroom dealing with a situation and potential penalties and fines and even jail time for what one had done to the other. Intriguing in that the person without the conscience seemed to be completely absent from the proceedings: the man over which the one woman struck the other.

Greg Boyd, Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, summarizes what Christ’s call to his followers is when it comes to being in conflict: simply put, if they have flesh, they are not our true enemy. God’s radical, revolutionary, transformative love is one that calls us to pray for our enemies, lay down our lives for them, to serve our neighbors, our relatives, a stranger on the street; it doesn’t matter what they’ve done, or what they look like or smell like or are wearing, we are to love them unconditionally and live peace into our shared existence. Jesus told his disciples over and over again that our fight is with the princes and rulers of the air – the spirit realm… it is those same spirits that would cause us to turn against each other, that insinuate themselves into our egos and our consciences and inflate our pride and convince us that our reputations are more important than maintaining a relationship with someone who is supposed to be our brother or our sister – who also calls Jesus Lord.

Our passage this morning is, in the liturgical tradition, referred to as the ‘Benedictus’ – it refers to the first word of this song “Blessed” – that Zechariah sings when he regains his voice after the birth of his son John.

John took his task seriously. He carried it out until the day he was executed.

So did Colin Jooste.

So have countless others through the centuries.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

This evening we will remember the life of one who gave HER life in that same task – Lottie Moon served her Lord by serving the people of China for over 30 years… just like reverend Jooste in South Africa, she organized food drives and solicited funds to help in that effort to feed the people in her region during a famine, and even more than that, she gave of her own stores, her own food, to the point that she was so weakened that she ended up succumbing to disease – actually starving to death for the sake of making the Gospel real to the people God had called her to serve.

May we be found so faithful.

Let’s pray.