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 work reduced to cosmic dust in an instant. Maybe you jumped up and chased after the little menace, 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.
You might have yelled, “Why didn’t you at least TELL me that the baby was up from his nap, so that I could be ready for him?”
We
all 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 the magnificent Temple, at the solid stones of the place where they know that God can always be found. They must 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.
Luke’s first readers know, too, as they struggle to survive in a land occupied by the very Empire that had indeed reduced both Jerusalem and the Temple to rubble in 70 CE. Even 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.
Now, as parents and grandparents, we can’t promise our children that unpredictable toddlers won’t destroy their Lego creations. But think about it: 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 rebuild. 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. Like a parent, God yearns to give us that love, to lift the yoke and lighten our deadening load.
I invite you today to curl up in God’s lap. Close your eyes, and with Isaiah, imagine God wiping the sweat of suffering from your brow, removing all 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. In 2015, 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 find joy, I did, just like in our reading from Isaiah.
On the evening before the historic Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage, Convention deputies had been engaged in discussions on the topic. There was a lot of dark fear lurking in the corners of that meeting room. 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 the crisis. 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. There was 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.
It was a beautiful moment, a glimpse of what could be. But of course, our carefully constructed towers have continued to tremble and fall since that day. We still experience anger and despair. 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 healing. 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.
In our turbulent world right now, people are looking for what we experience in this Jesus. They are looking for love, looking for forgiveness, looking for meaning and abundant life. And as they search, do you know what they are going to find? 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, with the blocks of both word and deed. 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.
Are you willing? I'd like us to try something this morning. There was once a little boy who kept reaching up to give a high five to his parents in church after every prayer. They thought that it was a cute gesture, 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!" So he gave them a high five, like you would respond to your little league teammate or something. [4] Can we follow the little boy's example this morning? If you are willing to join in building a tower of love, no matter what, 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.”
[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.
[4] From a lecture by Martin Smith, summer 2018, the School of Theology at the University of the South.
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