Proper 28, Year C
Isaiah 65:17-25;
Isaiah 12
Luke 21:5-19
Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
This
will be easier for the children than for the adults, but I’d like for you
remember a time when you had just finished building a fantastic Lego spaceship
or a super-high tower of blocks. Picture for me how fine it looked. Remember
how proud you felt putting on the final piece… How you wanted to keep your
amazing construction there in the middle of the living room floor for everyone
to admire for at least, say, ten years? And then a younger sibling or a
neighbor’s baby came toddling in from the kitchen, a determined gleam in his
eye. He zoomed straight over to your construction and before you could stop
him, just as you were hollering “no …..!!!!” at the top of your lungs, his little
hands lunged at the blocks, and the whole beautiful thing broke into tiny
pieces. Remember for a minute how angry you felt at the little menace who had
just destroyed your finest work. Remember the despair that you felt as you saw
your dream spaceship reduced to cosmic dust in an instant. Maybe you jumped up and chased
after your little sister, hoping to give her a good whack for what she did. Or maybe you just
collapsed on the floor in a pile of sobs. Or maybe you ran with the speed of
righteous indignation over to your mom or dad so that they would make
everything right again.
“Why didn’t you at least TELL me that he
was up from his nap, so that I could be ready for him?” you might have yelled.
Even as adults, we know what it feels
like to have our hard work, or our security, or our dreams, smashed before our
eyes, seemingly without warning. Jesus’ disciples know, as they look with pride
and love at their beautiful Temple, at the trustworthy place where they know
that God can always be found, and try to comprehend Jesus’ words about its doom.
Luke’s readers know, as they struggle to survive in a land occupied by the very
Empire that has indeed already reduced both Jerusalem and the Temple to rubble.
Isaiah’s readers know, as they return home and try to rebuild a life together
in a country that had been totally wiped out by foreign powers. They know the
sinking feeling of devastation, the numbness of displacement. They cringe to hear
their Lord tell them that their comfortable lives and comfortable certainties can be
ripped apart just as suddenly as if a two-year-old smashed them to smithereens,
without warning.
As parents, we can’t promise our children
that unpredictable toddlers won’t destroy their Lego creations. We can’t stop
the ocean tides from rising inexorably to wash away their beloved sandcastles. But
what do we do when our precious children come running to us, wailing and in
despair? We take them in our arms. We wipe their tears. We kiss them gently on
their damp foreheads. We encourage them to get back out there and build again.
Maybe we even help them build. We comfort and console them.
To comfort, in Hebrew, carries the image of removing a
burden so that a person can breathe freely again.[1] That’s what we need, isn’t
it, in order to keep on going, to endure? We need the loving kindness that will
lift the crushing burden, so that we can breathe again.
God yearns to give us that love, to
lift the yoke and lighten our deadening load. So curl up today in God’s lap. Close
your eyes, and with Isaiah, imagine God wiping the sweat of suffering from your
brow, removing the sound of weeping from your ears. Imagine that there’s no need to feel
the world on your shoulders anymore. Everyone has enough food to eat and a good
place to live. No one is taken advantage of by another. All races and peoples can create,
and thrive, and build without fear of loss. No one can hurt and no one can
destroy. As our Presiding Bishop likes to say-- such a world is God’s dream for
us.
This comforting image, this wonderful new creation that God
offers us isn’t just some “pie in the sky by and by” thing, either. No, we can
see glimpses of the joy that streams from God’s dream every day, if only we are
looking in the right places. Two years ago, I was a deputy at our Episcopal
Church General Convention in Salt Lake City. For me, church business meetings are not
the place where I expect to find abundant joy! But see it, I did, just like in our
reading from Isaiah. On the evening before the Supreme Court decision on
marriage, we were engaged, once again, in small-group discussions of same-sex
marriage, and there was a lot of dark fear still lurking in the corners. The fear was
expressed in hand-wringing “what-ifs”: what if we made the wrong choice; what
if we were jumping the gun; what if the church didn’t survive. We sounded a lot
like the disciples trying to pry out of Jesus knowledge of when the Temple was
coming down. Faces were drawn, and voices were tense, and it was indeed hard to
breathe.
The
next day, however, after news of the Supreme Court decision filtered through
the crowd, the fear seemed to have vanished into thin air. As people heard the news, there were extra smiles
in the hallways, more clever repartee in the House of Deputies, and more voices
singing during worship than I noticed earlier that week. Those who had stood in
drooping solemnity during the past days’ Eucharist started clapping along to an
impromptu, “We are Marching in the Light of God.” Young adults, grey-haired
bishops, and collared clergy started dancing down the aisles, all waving their
arms like a bunch of Pentecostals on fire. The funny thing was, the show of
emotion didn’t seem forced or staged. There was none of that,
“Oh-look-at-us-we-are-Episcopalians-but-we-know-how-to-be-cool-too” air that
often accompanies mandatory innovation in worship. It was all authentic. In the
hallways, I didn’t notice any of the self-congratulatory back-slapping that can
accompany a political victory, either. It was just pure joy, an exhaling of
breath held in too long. A burden removed. All of a sudden, we caught a glimpse
of the freedom that God dreams for us, the freedom to soar, the freedom to
love.
Jesus can’t promise us that our beloved institutions,
our churches, our government, our securities won’t ever face change or plunge
us into adversity. He can’t promise us that there won’t be upheaval. But he
shows us—in his own life and suffering—how to flourish in the midst of that
upheaval, how to find life in the midst of death. He shows us--as he forgives the
leaders who have sent him to die on the cross. He shows us--as he reaches out
to the criminal outcast hanging beside him and offers him immediate grace and
salvation. He shows us--as he hands his spirit over to God even as he takes his
last breath.[2]
He shows us—as he rises from the dead, guaranteeing that God’s way of self-giving
love will always defeat worldly power and violent oppression.
At our Diocesan Convention this weekend, Bishop
Terry reminded us that people are going to be coming to our churches looking
for this Jesus, looking for his grace, looking for his forgiveness, looking for
his abundant life. And do you know what they are going to find, he asked us?
They are going to find us.[3] You and me. That’s how
Jesus set it up. We are his witnesses here on earth. Empowered by God, it’s up
to us to build lives that testify to his love, both with the blocks of word and
deed, both inside and outside of the walls of our churches.
Martin Smith told us this summer at
Sewanee about a little boy who kept trying to give a high five to his parents
in church after every prayer. They thought that it was cute, if a bit strange.
It was only later that his parents found out that he thought that they were all
ending their prayers with the words, “I’m in,” instead of with “Amen!” Today,
Jesus is asking us if we are willing to risk building a tower of love out of
the very blocks of our lives, even though it will get knocked down. And then to
rebuild it, over and over, for as long as it takes. To work to inch closer and
closer to Isaiah’s vision of a just world for all of God's people. To remove the burdens from our neighbors' shoulders so that all might truly breathe again. If you are willing, turn to the person in the pew next to you on both sides, give them your best
high five, and say, “Amen/ I’m in.”
Image from piecesbypolly.com.
[1]
Ruthanna Hooke, found in Feasting on the
Word, Year C, Volume 4, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds.
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010,) 298.
[2]
John Shea, The Spiritual Wisdom of the
Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers: Year C (Collegeville:
Liturgical Press, 2006), 215.
[3]
From the November 11, 2016 diocesan convention homily by the Rt. Rev. Terry
White, Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville, Kentucky, who borrowed the
image from a sermon by the Rt. Rev. Jake Owensby.
