November 17, 2019
/Proper 29
Isaiah 65:17-25
Canticle 9
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
May only your word be preached, and may only your word be heard. Amen.
In our reading from Isaiah today the prophet reports the words of God to the people of Israel, newly returned from Babylonian exile. Israelites have come back to their homeland, but things are not like they were. Jerusalem and its temple have been destroyed. The people are back – but they have come back to a society in tatters, land devastated, cities and temples torn down.
God promised to bring Israel back to the land God had given them, but he is not finished. God has brought them back, but he has not brought them back to give them the glory of what was, he has brought them back to give them the hope of what will be. “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” says God, “the former things” the exile, the destruction of the temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, the suffering of the people “shall not be remembered or come to mind.” God promises a future where “no more shall the sound of weeping be heard” in Jerusalem, “or the cry of distress.” This future will be filled infants and the elderly who will live out full lives, “one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,” and “one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.” The people “shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity.” God promises a future where all of creation – man and woman, adult and child, lion and wolf and lamb and ox will live fully and freely to be all that God has created them to be. The threat of life cut short – by death or exile or illness or suffering is done away with. In the midst of a shattered present, God speaks words of a future brimming with life.
I was thankful to have these words this week. As I sat down to write this sermon on Thursday, the first reports of the shooting in Santa Clarita, California were rolling in. It’s the fifth news-worthy mass shooting in the US since I came to St. Andrew’s just shy of four months ago. Hearing the story of another shooting brought home the reality that we, like the Israelites, live in a shattered world. We are living in a world that is sick, a world that is broken, a world that isn’t ok. A world where kids can get shot at school, a world where someone, a child, can be filled with so much hurt, so much anger, so much grief that he sees violence against others as his only option is not a world that’s alright.
God’s words come to us just as they come to the people of Israel. God promises us what he promised Israel: a world where the former things – the shootings, the bombings, the terrorist attacks, the natural disasters. Where the bullying, and the broken homes, and the abuse, and the suffering of life shall not be remembered or come to mind, a world where life will not be cut short, and where even the most natural of enemies – wolves and lambs – will come together. God promises us a world where “they shall not hurt or destroy.”
This world, a world where wolves and lambs lie down together, where weeping and distress are done away with, is the world that Jesus has brought into being. What was promised in Isaiah has come about in Jesus Christ. The crucifixion of Jesus is the testament to the nature of our world. When confronted by Jesus, by the love of God in human form, humanity decided to kill him. In the cross we see most fully and most completely how broken our world is. But the cross is not the end of the story: Christ is resurrected. In Christ’s resurrection the promise of a future beyond weeping and distress, beyond suffering is made concrete. Christ is our sure and certain evidence that God will not leave the world as it is. The Resurrected Lord is a testament that the shards of our world will be gathered up and knit together.
There is an obvious issue, though. There is still distress. There is still weeping. If I put a wolf in a pin with a lamb, good chances someone’s getting lamb chops for dinner. Christians live with a tension: on the one hand, we proclaim that in Christ the new world has dawned, that God’s future is made present. On the other hand, we also proclaim that this new world, that God’s future is not fully realized. Already and not yet. We might think of our predicament in theatrical terms. The first coming of Christ, his death and his resurrection is like the release of the first trailer for a long-awaited movie. It’s proof that the movie has been made and it builds anticipation of what will come, while not being the fullness of what is promised. The second coming of Christ, the full realization of God’s promised future in our world is the premiere. It’s the moment we’re all waiting for.
About that day and hour, as Scripture says, nobody knows. We don’t know when Christ will return and when the future heaven and earth will be fully revealed. The premiere date is to be determined. So, we wait. But our waiting isn’t passive. We gather together each week, citizens of a world where death seems to reign, where weeping and distress are more common than we would like to admit or acknowledge, and we remember that this is not all there is. We remember that there is hope. That there is a promise. We remember what has happened in Jesus Christ. We remember that he has made us participants in his resurrection through baptism, we remember that Jesus shares his life with us every week through Holy Communion. We remember, and we tell the story, over and over again, of a God who loves our broken world and has set out to mend it, the story of a God who has become human, who has suffered as a human, who has died as a human, and who was raised to new life, a promise to all of us that God’s future will triumph even in the face of death.
Remembering and telling may not seem like a lot – but I think in a world filled with story after story of death and suffering, remembering and telling a story of life beyond death, life that overcomes death, life that cannot be contained by death is a radical, powerful act. Remembering and telling prevent us from succumbing to the narrative that this is just how it is and how it has to be. Remembering and telling kindles in us the ability to hope when hope is gone, when hoping seems stupid. Remembering and telling fires our spirits to imagine a world different, radically different, from the world as we know it now.
As we come to the table today, in the shadow of another tragedy, as we live with more proof that our world is not as it should be, come with hope: hope that God’s promises are sure, that God will not forsake us, that the God who has come once before will come once again, hope for the day when a new heaven and a new earth are made real, hope for a time when all we will know is the unsurpassable joy of the Kingdom of God. Come with hope, and then leave as messengers of hope for a shattered world, messengers that God has a future.
In the name of the One God who is Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.