Proper 28/Pentecost 26/Ordinary Time 33
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VII, Cycle C
Object:
Theme For The Day
God promises to make all things new.
Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 65:17-25
New Heavens And A New Earth
"I am about to create new heavens and a new earth," says the Lord (65:17). Building on the radically new vision of Second Isaiah, the prophet known as Third Isaiah continues to operate from an expansive vision of God's activity. No longer is God concerned primarily with the affairs of Israel; the scope of divine engagement has now moved beyond even the other peoples of the earth, to encompass the very heavens. A hurricane of divine activity is scouring creation clean; at its very eye is Jerusalem, the place to which the exiles are being repatriated. "No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it" (v. 19). Infant mortality -- and, indeed, premature death from any cause -- will be no more (v. 20). Never again shall God's people see their homes and vineyards snatched from them by foreign marauders (v. 22). The Lord will be so attentive to the people's needs that they will hardly even need to raise a prayer before it is answered (v. 24). The final vision of this poem -- of the wolf and the lamb sharing a feeding trough, and the lion dining on straw (v. 25) -- stretches the imagination. It is poetic (prophetic?) license taken to the extreme. In such soaring poetic vision, Isaiah speaks consolation to a dispirited people.
New Testament Lesson
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Avoid Idleness
Unlike many communities in the Roman world, the church of Jesus Christ is distinguishing itself by the way its members care for one another -- particularly widows, orphans, and others who are weak or needy. Along with this commitment to social service, however, there has arisen a certain problem: Some able-bodied Christians are finding it easier to live off the community's largesse than to work for a living. Paul condemns this lifestyle under the label "idleness" -- and holds up, as a counter example, his own practice of engaging in part-time work for pay, even while spending most of his time proclaiming the gospel. He did not have to do this, he says, but he chose to do so, as an example to others (v. 9). He reminds the Thessalonians of a rule he has rolled out in the past: "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat" (v. 10). This section concludes with the oft-quoted saying, "Do not be weary in doing what is right" (v. 13).
The Gospel
Luke 21:5-19
Hope Amidst The Temple's Ruins
Many scholars believe the synoptic gospels were completed at or around the time of the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 B.C.E. This event was an unparalleled catastrophe for Judaism, and created a sort of spiritual vacuum into which Christianity quickly moved -- for this new faith, being focused on a resurrected Lord, had no need for a central place of sacrifice. In recalling Jesus' prophecy about the leveling of the temple, the synoptic authors are making it clear that this traumatic event happened according to God's plan. For those who profess faith in Jesus Christ, the destruction of the temple is not so catastrophic; indeed, it is a sign of God's activity in the world. The false prophets, wars, insurrections, and persecutions catalogued in verses 7-19 are all things the Lukan church is experiencing. There is a certain comfort that comes of knowing that Jesus himself has predicted these things. The final assurance is that, in the last analysis, those who rely on Jesus Christ will be safe eternally (vv. 18-19).
Preaching Possibilities
The scene: a midtown Manhattan street. Crowds throng the sidewalk, spilling into the street itself. It is one of those rare moments of public jubilation, when rules of conduct are suspended by popular agreement, and perfect strangers feel free to celebrate with one another -- yes, even in New York. A sailor grabs a young woman next to him and kisses her. Nearby, the shutter of a Life magazine camera clicks, preserving the moment for the history books.
It is one of the most famous news photographs of the last century: the sailor kissing the woman in the middle of a Manhattan street. To this day, no one has been able to discover the identity of the sailor or the woman -- although at least a half dozen people have come forward over the years, volunteering that they were one of the couple.
What brought on that giddy celebration? The year was 1945, and the event was V-E Day, the day when victory in Europe was announced. Everyone knew that victory over Japan was not far off, and that the long years of economic hardship, of food and gas rationing, of obituaries of young men from every American city and town, would soon be over. On V-E Day, the whole nation paused for a brief, giddy party, celebrating the certainty that, one day, life would return to normal.
Today's Old Testament passage makes reference to just such a joyous celebration. The time of celebration is not here yet, but the prophet Isaiah is certain it's coming soon. For long years, the leaders of the people, Israel, have been in exile in Babylon. The time of their return has drawn near at last.
Those who will return to Jerusalem are not the same as those who left so forlornly, at the time the Babylonians first invaded. All of that generation has died. The people who are now readying themselves for the journey home have never seen the holy city, the city of their ancestor David. They have heard their parents and grandparents tell of it, and they have sung of it in the psalms -- under another name, "Zion" -- but they have never seen it. It is, for them, a city of distant and improbable hope.
The prophet Isaiah who writes these words is the man biblical scholars know as Third Isaiah. He is following in the tradition of Second Isaiah, a man with a truly revolutionary vision. Second Isaiah had been so bold as to believe that God could be doing a new thing: that the Lord could work through a foreign ruler -- King Cyrus of Persia -- to bring the chosen people home again. Now, the promise is close to being realized, and Third Isaiah is issuing some promises of his own.
They are amazing, extravagant promises. The very act of creation is to be recapitulated: there are to be "new heavens and a new earth" (v. 17). Jerusalem -- which, after a couple of generations of Babylonian colonial rule, has become a sad ruin -- will be "a joy" and "a delight" (v. 18). This will be a city of gladness, in which weeping is unknown (v. 19). Infant mortality -- the scourge of human civilization, even until the most recent years of our own era -- will no longer bring mourning and sadness to God's people; neither will there be premature death of any kind (v. 19).
This people who have had so much taken from them will have everything given back, and more. They will build their own houses, farm their own fields, and take pride in what their hands produce (vv. 21-22). Truly, this is a vision that represents the best the human race could rationally hope for. Peace, prosperity, meaningful work -- and, in the midst of it all, a God who is so close that even before the people cry out, God will answer (v. 24). What more could the people want than that?
Well, as it happens, the prophet does have a few more things in mind: "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox" (v. 25). So completely banished shall strife and conflict be, that even the animal kingdom lives out this new order. The Lord's shalom shall be a solemn and beautiful chord resonating through all creation. Only the serpent -- that cunning conniver from the first chapter of Genesis, the one who brought sin into the world -- shall experience anything that could remotely be described as suffering.
Some years before, Second Isaiah had introduced a vision of God's sovereignty, love and justice so stunningly different that it could rightly be described as the turning point of the Old Testament. Now, Third Isaiah trumps even his illustrious predecessor, singing of a joy that is truly cosmic in scope.
It is a powerful, energizing vision, one that gives the people hope. Like all visions, of course, it cannot be sustained for long. The exiles do return home, to face formidable challenges in rebuilding the temple and reinstituting the ancient law of Moses. After some struggle, they do succeed in those tasks, after a fashion -- although it never would be true that the sound of weeping would not be heard in that city's streets. As the years go by, Isaiah's vision of a powerful, universal God fades. The Jewish people fall back into legalism. The Persian empire is replaced by another, and another, until Israel is under the thumb of foreign rulers once again.
Yet still, there is the vision. Still, there is hope. The lion has not yet lain down with the lamb -- but, in the eternity that is God's frame of reference, God's people may yet see this vision realized one day.
Prayer For The Day
If our lives are dry and parched,
Lord, send the living waters of your Spirit
to revive us, to enliven us, to bring forth new life.
If our lives are empty and barren,
Lord, grant us a rich harvest,
send us home with sheaves of blessing,
fill us with your abundance,
and teach us to share the harvest with others.
If our bodies are weary and heavy laden,
Lord, fill us with laughter;
give us shouts of joy;
envelop us with your gladness.
If our lives are small and trivial,
Lord, make us see great things;
enlarge our vision;
widen our borders.
God, grant us hope,
in the name of Christ. Amen.
To Illustrate
This brings me to the other sense of glory -- glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun; we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more -- something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words -- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves -- that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it cannot. They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into a human face; but it won't. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rushing with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
-- C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)
***
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
-- Thomas Carlyle
***
One of the most stunning vistas in the western United States is Bryce Canyon, in southern Utah. This natural wonder is named for Ebenezer Bryce, a cattleman who used to pasture his herds on land that has since become Bryce Canyon National Park.
Someone once asked Bryce what it was like for him to have spent his entire working life on the edge of a canyon that has drawn people the world over to marvel at its natural beauty. The cattleman's reply: "It's one heck of a place to lose a cow."
There are those who catch the vision, and those who don't.
***
God is not always silent, and man is not always blind. There are moments in which, to us a Talmudic phrase, heaven and earth kiss each other; in which there is a lifting of the veil at the horizons of the known, opening a vision of what is eternal in time.
We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of his living light. The essence of Jewish religious thinking does not lie in entertaining a concept of God but in the ability to articulate a memory of moments of illumination by his presence.
Our quest for God is a return to God; our thinking of him is a recall, an attempt to draw out the depth of our suppressed attachment. The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, means return. Yet it also means answer. Return to God is an answer to him. For God is not silent. The stirring in man to return to God is actually a "reminder by God to man." It is a call that man's physical sense does not capture, yet the "spiritual soul" in him perceives the call. God's grace resounds in our lives like a staccato. Only by retaining the seemingly disconnected notes do we acquire the ability to grasp the theme.
It is within man's power to seek him; it is not within his power to find him. God concludes what we commence.
-- Abraham Joseph Heschel, Between God and Man (New York: Free Press, 1997)
***
The spiritual master assigned many disciplines and practices to his disciple, and the student asked, "How do these practices help me attain enlightenment?"
"You cannot attain enlightenment," replied the master, "any more than you can cause the sun to rise."
"Then what is the purpose of all these things you tell me to do?"
"To make sure that you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise."
-- Anonymous
***
It is essential to distinguish between hoping and wishing. They are not the same thing.
Wishing is something all of us do. It projects what we want or think we need into the future. Just because we wish for something good or holy we think it qualifies as hope. It does not. Wishing extends our egos into the future; hope grows out of our faith. Hope is oriented toward what God is doing; wishing is oriented toward what we are doing. Wishing has to do with what I want in things or people or God; hope has to do with what God wants in me and the world of things and people beyond me.
Wishing is our will projected into the future, and hope is God's will coming out of the future. Picture it in your mind: wishing is a line that comes out of me, with an arrow pointing into the future. Hoping is a line that comes out of God from the future, with an arrow pointing toward me.
Hope means being surprised, because we don't know what is best for us or how our lives are going to be completed. To cultivate hope is to suppress wishing -- to refuse to fantasize about what we want, but live in anticipation of what God is going to do next.
-- Eugene Peterson
God promises to make all things new.
Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 65:17-25
New Heavens And A New Earth
"I am about to create new heavens and a new earth," says the Lord (65:17). Building on the radically new vision of Second Isaiah, the prophet known as Third Isaiah continues to operate from an expansive vision of God's activity. No longer is God concerned primarily with the affairs of Israel; the scope of divine engagement has now moved beyond even the other peoples of the earth, to encompass the very heavens. A hurricane of divine activity is scouring creation clean; at its very eye is Jerusalem, the place to which the exiles are being repatriated. "No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it" (v. 19). Infant mortality -- and, indeed, premature death from any cause -- will be no more (v. 20). Never again shall God's people see their homes and vineyards snatched from them by foreign marauders (v. 22). The Lord will be so attentive to the people's needs that they will hardly even need to raise a prayer before it is answered (v. 24). The final vision of this poem -- of the wolf and the lamb sharing a feeding trough, and the lion dining on straw (v. 25) -- stretches the imagination. It is poetic (prophetic?) license taken to the extreme. In such soaring poetic vision, Isaiah speaks consolation to a dispirited people.
New Testament Lesson
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Avoid Idleness
Unlike many communities in the Roman world, the church of Jesus Christ is distinguishing itself by the way its members care for one another -- particularly widows, orphans, and others who are weak or needy. Along with this commitment to social service, however, there has arisen a certain problem: Some able-bodied Christians are finding it easier to live off the community's largesse than to work for a living. Paul condemns this lifestyle under the label "idleness" -- and holds up, as a counter example, his own practice of engaging in part-time work for pay, even while spending most of his time proclaiming the gospel. He did not have to do this, he says, but he chose to do so, as an example to others (v. 9). He reminds the Thessalonians of a rule he has rolled out in the past: "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat" (v. 10). This section concludes with the oft-quoted saying, "Do not be weary in doing what is right" (v. 13).
The Gospel
Luke 21:5-19
Hope Amidst The Temple's Ruins
Many scholars believe the synoptic gospels were completed at or around the time of the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 B.C.E. This event was an unparalleled catastrophe for Judaism, and created a sort of spiritual vacuum into which Christianity quickly moved -- for this new faith, being focused on a resurrected Lord, had no need for a central place of sacrifice. In recalling Jesus' prophecy about the leveling of the temple, the synoptic authors are making it clear that this traumatic event happened according to God's plan. For those who profess faith in Jesus Christ, the destruction of the temple is not so catastrophic; indeed, it is a sign of God's activity in the world. The false prophets, wars, insurrections, and persecutions catalogued in verses 7-19 are all things the Lukan church is experiencing. There is a certain comfort that comes of knowing that Jesus himself has predicted these things. The final assurance is that, in the last analysis, those who rely on Jesus Christ will be safe eternally (vv. 18-19).
Preaching Possibilities
The scene: a midtown Manhattan street. Crowds throng the sidewalk, spilling into the street itself. It is one of those rare moments of public jubilation, when rules of conduct are suspended by popular agreement, and perfect strangers feel free to celebrate with one another -- yes, even in New York. A sailor grabs a young woman next to him and kisses her. Nearby, the shutter of a Life magazine camera clicks, preserving the moment for the history books.
It is one of the most famous news photographs of the last century: the sailor kissing the woman in the middle of a Manhattan street. To this day, no one has been able to discover the identity of the sailor or the woman -- although at least a half dozen people have come forward over the years, volunteering that they were one of the couple.
What brought on that giddy celebration? The year was 1945, and the event was V-E Day, the day when victory in Europe was announced. Everyone knew that victory over Japan was not far off, and that the long years of economic hardship, of food and gas rationing, of obituaries of young men from every American city and town, would soon be over. On V-E Day, the whole nation paused for a brief, giddy party, celebrating the certainty that, one day, life would return to normal.
Today's Old Testament passage makes reference to just such a joyous celebration. The time of celebration is not here yet, but the prophet Isaiah is certain it's coming soon. For long years, the leaders of the people, Israel, have been in exile in Babylon. The time of their return has drawn near at last.
Those who will return to Jerusalem are not the same as those who left so forlornly, at the time the Babylonians first invaded. All of that generation has died. The people who are now readying themselves for the journey home have never seen the holy city, the city of their ancestor David. They have heard their parents and grandparents tell of it, and they have sung of it in the psalms -- under another name, "Zion" -- but they have never seen it. It is, for them, a city of distant and improbable hope.
The prophet Isaiah who writes these words is the man biblical scholars know as Third Isaiah. He is following in the tradition of Second Isaiah, a man with a truly revolutionary vision. Second Isaiah had been so bold as to believe that God could be doing a new thing: that the Lord could work through a foreign ruler -- King Cyrus of Persia -- to bring the chosen people home again. Now, the promise is close to being realized, and Third Isaiah is issuing some promises of his own.
They are amazing, extravagant promises. The very act of creation is to be recapitulated: there are to be "new heavens and a new earth" (v. 17). Jerusalem -- which, after a couple of generations of Babylonian colonial rule, has become a sad ruin -- will be "a joy" and "a delight" (v. 18). This will be a city of gladness, in which weeping is unknown (v. 19). Infant mortality -- the scourge of human civilization, even until the most recent years of our own era -- will no longer bring mourning and sadness to God's people; neither will there be premature death of any kind (v. 19).
This people who have had so much taken from them will have everything given back, and more. They will build their own houses, farm their own fields, and take pride in what their hands produce (vv. 21-22). Truly, this is a vision that represents the best the human race could rationally hope for. Peace, prosperity, meaningful work -- and, in the midst of it all, a God who is so close that even before the people cry out, God will answer (v. 24). What more could the people want than that?
Well, as it happens, the prophet does have a few more things in mind: "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox" (v. 25). So completely banished shall strife and conflict be, that even the animal kingdom lives out this new order. The Lord's shalom shall be a solemn and beautiful chord resonating through all creation. Only the serpent -- that cunning conniver from the first chapter of Genesis, the one who brought sin into the world -- shall experience anything that could remotely be described as suffering.
Some years before, Second Isaiah had introduced a vision of God's sovereignty, love and justice so stunningly different that it could rightly be described as the turning point of the Old Testament. Now, Third Isaiah trumps even his illustrious predecessor, singing of a joy that is truly cosmic in scope.
It is a powerful, energizing vision, one that gives the people hope. Like all visions, of course, it cannot be sustained for long. The exiles do return home, to face formidable challenges in rebuilding the temple and reinstituting the ancient law of Moses. After some struggle, they do succeed in those tasks, after a fashion -- although it never would be true that the sound of weeping would not be heard in that city's streets. As the years go by, Isaiah's vision of a powerful, universal God fades. The Jewish people fall back into legalism. The Persian empire is replaced by another, and another, until Israel is under the thumb of foreign rulers once again.
Yet still, there is the vision. Still, there is hope. The lion has not yet lain down with the lamb -- but, in the eternity that is God's frame of reference, God's people may yet see this vision realized one day.
Prayer For The Day
If our lives are dry and parched,
Lord, send the living waters of your Spirit
to revive us, to enliven us, to bring forth new life.
If our lives are empty and barren,
Lord, grant us a rich harvest,
send us home with sheaves of blessing,
fill us with your abundance,
and teach us to share the harvest with others.
If our bodies are weary and heavy laden,
Lord, fill us with laughter;
give us shouts of joy;
envelop us with your gladness.
If our lives are small and trivial,
Lord, make us see great things;
enlarge our vision;
widen our borders.
God, grant us hope,
in the name of Christ. Amen.
To Illustrate
This brings me to the other sense of glory -- glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun; we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more -- something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words -- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves -- that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it cannot. They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into a human face; but it won't. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rushing with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
-- C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)
***
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
-- Thomas Carlyle
***
One of the most stunning vistas in the western United States is Bryce Canyon, in southern Utah. This natural wonder is named for Ebenezer Bryce, a cattleman who used to pasture his herds on land that has since become Bryce Canyon National Park.
Someone once asked Bryce what it was like for him to have spent his entire working life on the edge of a canyon that has drawn people the world over to marvel at its natural beauty. The cattleman's reply: "It's one heck of a place to lose a cow."
There are those who catch the vision, and those who don't.
***
God is not always silent, and man is not always blind. There are moments in which, to us a Talmudic phrase, heaven and earth kiss each other; in which there is a lifting of the veil at the horizons of the known, opening a vision of what is eternal in time.
We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of his living light. The essence of Jewish religious thinking does not lie in entertaining a concept of God but in the ability to articulate a memory of moments of illumination by his presence.
Our quest for God is a return to God; our thinking of him is a recall, an attempt to draw out the depth of our suppressed attachment. The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, means return. Yet it also means answer. Return to God is an answer to him. For God is not silent. The stirring in man to return to God is actually a "reminder by God to man." It is a call that man's physical sense does not capture, yet the "spiritual soul" in him perceives the call. God's grace resounds in our lives like a staccato. Only by retaining the seemingly disconnected notes do we acquire the ability to grasp the theme.
It is within man's power to seek him; it is not within his power to find him. God concludes what we commence.
-- Abraham Joseph Heschel, Between God and Man (New York: Free Press, 1997)
***
The spiritual master assigned many disciplines and practices to his disciple, and the student asked, "How do these practices help me attain enlightenment?"
"You cannot attain enlightenment," replied the master, "any more than you can cause the sun to rise."
"Then what is the purpose of all these things you tell me to do?"
"To make sure that you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise."
-- Anonymous
***
It is essential to distinguish between hoping and wishing. They are not the same thing.
Wishing is something all of us do. It projects what we want or think we need into the future. Just because we wish for something good or holy we think it qualifies as hope. It does not. Wishing extends our egos into the future; hope grows out of our faith. Hope is oriented toward what God is doing; wishing is oriented toward what we are doing. Wishing has to do with what I want in things or people or God; hope has to do with what God wants in me and the world of things and people beyond me.
Wishing is our will projected into the future, and hope is God's will coming out of the future. Picture it in your mind: wishing is a line that comes out of me, with an arrow pointing into the future. Hoping is a line that comes out of God from the future, with an arrow pointing toward me.
Hope means being surprised, because we don't know what is best for us or how our lives are going to be completed. To cultivate hope is to suppress wishing -- to refuse to fantasize about what we want, but live in anticipation of what God is going to do next.
-- Eugene Peterson
