Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday November 13, 2022
Scripture Reading: Isaiah 65:17-25
Earlier this year, I told a family member that I had made a donation on their behalf to Hestia House; and because my family isn’t from here, I had to explain that Hestia House is a shelter for women and children who are escaping domestic violence and abuse. My family member said thank you for the donation, and that women’s shelters were something that they thought should always be supported; and I made a passing comment along the lines that I agreed, and that they are organizations that I will support until a time comes when they aren’t needed any more. And to that, my family member laughed – “Ha! Like that time will ever come.”
And that took me aback and made me think. And I realized that I have to believe that the time will come. I have to believe that a different world is not only possible, but it getting closer and closer all the time. I think that if I wasn’t able to believe this, I would fall into despair, and the despair would paralyze me so that I wouldn’t be able to do anything. I have to believe that the future holds something better than the brokenness of the present; however unlikely that future might seem from the perspective of the present.
Isaiah, like several other prophets in the bible, was a prophet of the exile. (Side note – the book of Isaiah was likely written by three different people at three different points of time – before the exile to Babylon, in the middle of the exile, and just before returning to the land they had been taking from.) The passage we heard today is from almost the very end of Isaiah – the people had seen their city and their temple destroyed 70 years ago, and had been carried away into a foreign land. They had deeply grieved everything that they had lost, but then had built houses for themselves, they had learned to grow crops in this new place, they had married and children had been born. Two generations had passed. Almost everyone who was originally brought to Babylon is now dead, and it is their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who are living in Babylon. 70 years and two generations – talk about circumstances where you can’t imagine anything ever being any different.
And yet God promises them that something different and something better is coming. In the middle parts of Isaiah, God talks about raising the valleys and lowering the mountains and smoothing out the road so that the people would be able to return from exile. And now at the end of Isaiah, God looks even further into the future and using beautiful poetic language describes a time that is coming – a new heaven and a new earth. A time when there will be no more weeping and no more distress. A time when a person a hundred years old will be considered young. A time when there will be food enough for everyone. A time when all of creation will be governed by peace so that a lamb is safe to lie down next to a wolf, and not a single person will hurt another single person.
And I have to trust that God, who has been trustworthy in the past – a God who did make a way for the people to return home from exile; a God who did lead Moses and the people to safety through the waters of the sea; a God who created the whole universe and called it good – I have to trust that since God has been trustworthy in the past, God will be trustworthy in the future.
And more than just God’s previous track record – I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it – but we are an Easter people. We know that the end is never the end. We know that Good Friday with all of its suffering and death and despair and abandonment isn’t the end of the story, because Easter and new life and new beginnings is just around the corner. Because, as author Frederick Buechner wrote, “resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing.
I don’t know everything that is going on in your life right now. I don’t know if you are going through a time of exile like the ancient Israelite people – the exile of grief, the exile of illness, the exile of a struggling immune system that means that you have to be very careful these days about contact with other people. I don’t know if you are going through a Good Friday time in your life right now – a Good Friday of despair, a Good Friday of exhaustion, a Good Friday of abandonment, a Good Friday of pain and suffering.
But while I don’t know everything that you are going through right now, what I do know is that exile isn’t the end of your story. Good Friday isn’t the end of your story. God gives us a glimpse, through these words of Isaiah, of what is coming. Jesus gives us a glimpse, through his resurrection, of what is coming.
And once we catch a glimpse of what is coming, that doesn’t mean that we sit back and passively wait for it to get here. No – instead once we can see what is coming, then the Holy Spirit working in us makes us increasingly uncomfortable with the brokenness that we see in the world around us. We look around and we see poverty and hunger and violence and war and abuse and inequal sharing of the world’s resources… and none of this lines up with God’s dream for the world.
And that is when the vision for the future has the ability to transform the present – it has the ability to transform our lives so that we can be people who work for a better world.
As I said to my family member earlier this year – I will continue to donate to Hestia House and other shelters for people fleeing domestic abuse until the time comes when they aren’t needed any more. And I have to believe that this time will come – even if it isn’t in my lifetime – because that is what motivates me to work for change in the right now.
For this isn’t the end of the story. The wars and the violence and the suffering that we see around us or that we experience ourselves isn’t the end of the story. God’s dream for the world is more beautiful, more loving, more peace-filled than anything that we could ever imagine. We have to trust that the exile will end someday, that Easter will eventually dawn, that the wolf will lie down with the lamb, and all of creation will be at peace. And may this time come soon. And may it come soon. And may it come soon. Amen.
Right after the sermon, we sang “When Hands Reach Out Beyond Divides” – the words matched this reflection perfectly.
Photo Credit: “hope” by fen-tastic on Flickr
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