Isaiah 65: 17-25 (links validated 3/13/24)

In 2011, protests erupted in Madison when Wisconsin governor Scott Walker proposed an end to collective bargaining for public employees. Sadly, within weeks, the caustic atmosphere in the state legislature had found its way into congregational life, particularly in small towns and rural parts of the state. The governor's proposal had divided families. Parishioners of different political persuasions were no longer on speaking terms. Friends were turning into enemies. Religious leaders responded by calling for A Season of Civility. The goal was to equip the community of faith to exhibit an alternative future--something different from the demonization we were embroiled in. Was it possible to bring Republicans and Democrats together in congregations to talk about their differences in a civil and respectful manner, and even learn from one another in the process?

One summer day, I hopped the bus to New York City with one of our daughters. She was a college student, studying art, and we wanted to visit a few galleries. It turned out to be a major disappointment. The Metropolitan Museum was closed, the Frick collection was shut down, and the Guggenheim was undergoing renovations. Every few steps, we heard another siren in the distance. By the Central Park boat pond, a little kid was screaming at his mother. A couple of panhandlers tried to shake us down. We were just about ready to call it a day when suddenly we stepped into a quiet grove of elm trees. Three paths intersected in the shape of a teardrop. Before us was a mosaic of black and white stones, covered with bouquets of flowers. To our surprise, we had come upon the memorial to the songwriter John Lennon. It’s right there by 72nd Street, right across from the apartment building where he had lived. In the center of the mosaic is the title of one of his most famous songs, “Imagine.” You probably know that song. Lennon sang of a world as Isaiah saw it: a globe without borders, a world without greed or aggression, a community of living beings dwelling together in peace. Right across the street is where an assassin took Lennon’s life one night when he returned from a recording session. We paused, drew our breath at the pain of the memory...

What will convince us that Christ’s calling is real, that God’s vision of peace is possible, not just for us but for all? “Without a vision, the people perish.” For professor Fred Craddock it happened just before a lecture he was about to give. The student who was offering the opening devotion carried her yellow legal pad to the podium and he noticed that it had a lot of writing on it. Fred thought, we’ll be here a long time. The student spoke softly, first in one foreign language, then another, and another - one sentence repeated over fifty times in different tongues. It was only when she got to German and Spanish and French that Fred began to understand what she was saying. She ended in English: “Mommy, I’m hungry.” And then she sat down. [John M. Buchanan, “Faith is something you do,” 9/7/03, citing Craddock’s “Cherry Log” sermons, in a sermon preached at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago.] In whatever language we can hear, Jesus is saying to us, right here, right now: “Do you love me? Feed my sheep.”...

("Jim Wallis tells the story from some years ago of volunteering in a church homeless shelter around Christmas time. The church basement was decorated with banners and Christmas decorations, One of the men who lived each day out on the streets looked around the room and asked, 'What is the good news anyway?' Jim said there was a long pause; no one knew what to say. Finally someone spoke up from the back of the line, 'The good news is that it doesn't have to be like this.'...")

There are all kinds of stories from World War II – stories of rampant evil, stories of self- sacrifice, of courage and stories of resilience. One of the good stories is about the liberation of a POW camp in the Philippines. The prisoners were survivors of the Bataan Death March, who had been held in the most brutal conditions for three long years. Many had died during the long forced march. Others had died of malnutrition and disease in the camp. Some had been executed. The survivors had about given up hope. Then one day in January 1945, 121 U.S. Rangers emerged from the jungle. After a brief skirmish, the camp guards fled and the gates were thrown open. Recounting this story in his book Ghost Soldiers, Hampton Sides writes: Slowly, the awareness that this was a jailbreak was beginning to sink in among the rest of the prisoners. They were reacting with a kind of catatonic ecstasy, numb and inarticulate. One prisoner wrapped his arms around the neck of the first Ranger he saw and kissed him on the forehead. All he could he say was "Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy!" Alvie Robbins found one prisoner muttering in a darkened corner of one of the barracks, tears coursing down his face. "I thought we’d been forgotten," the prisoner said. "No, you’re not forgotten," Robbins said. "We’ve come for you." With the help of many heroic Philippinos, the liberated prisoners, sick, weak, frail, made their way all the way back to the Allied lines. Finally they saw an American flag set in the turret of a tank. It wasn’t much of a flag, but for the men it was galvanizing. [POW]Ralph Hibbs remembers that his heart stopped. It was the first Stars and Stripes he’d seen since the surrender three years earlier. "We wept openly, and we wept without shame"...

("My wife's grandfather (Presbyterian preacher of the old school), when he became quite elderly and blind, used to bore the family mercilessly with his incessant talk of looking forward to heaven - during family prayers pleading with the Lord to take him home, in conversation at the dinner table, talking of how he couldn't wait to meet Jesus face-to-face. Now some of us would not want to put it quite that way...")

("According to the Chinese writer Ningkun Wu in his book A Single Tear, Communist Chairman Mao Tse-tung was not content trying to control every jot and tittle of human life--no, he wanted to extend his control into the realm of nature as well. So in 1958 Chairman Mao launched what he called A Campaign Against Four Evils...")

According to the Chinese writer Ningkun Wu in his book A Single Tear, Communist Chairman Mao Tse-tung was not content trying to control every jot and tittle of human life–no, he wanted to extend his control into the realm of nature as well. So in 1958 Chairman Mao launched what he called “A Campaign against Four Evils.” In this campaign Mao mustered the Chinese people to help him stamp out the evils of rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Especially the sparrows, Mao contended, were an enemy of the people in that the little birds freely helped themselves to millions of tons of food each year. Clearly these pesky birds had to go–how dare they take food away from The People?! So one day the entire Chinese populace was ordered to wage war on the sparrows. At the same hour all the people were instructed to pursue the sparrows relentlessly by banging loudly on pots and pans so as to chase the little birds into a frenzy. And it worked. Sparrows by the millions finally dropped dead of exhaustion, their winged abilities proving no match for the iron fist of proletarian dictatorship. The next day the official Chinese newspapers were triumphantly filled with stories of marketplaces all over China being glutted with more fried sparrow than the people could eat. Alas, however, what the government-run press never reported was that as a result of this victory over the sparrows, in the next two years China experienced massive crop loss and famine. It seems that without the sparrows around to eat them, wheat-eating insects flourished, consuming massive amounts of grain and other foliage in what these bugs must have regarded as a wonderful, all-you-can-eat buffet!...

("There is a story told of a farmer who decided to replace his aging barn which was leaking badly and did almost nothing to protect his cattle from the elements...")

I picture that scene in Sleeping Beauty where the fairy godmothers float around the kingdom gently putting the people to sleep, except the targets of the fairydust are the things that bring us so much pain. Gently, quietly, without a fight, the “suffering verbs” find themselves out of commission. Now, the Bible does not generally speak of God’s new world coming about gently—far from it—but it has always struck me: what if those things were just—*poof*—gone? Something about this week’s reading from Isaiah 65 strikes a similar chord:...

The Storyteller is a horrific and wonderful book by Jodi Picoult. In it, a 20 something Jewish girl named Sage knows that her grandmother, Minka, is a Holocaust survivor. Quite accidentally, Sage befriends Josef, a beloved old man who taught at her high school. As she gets to know Josef better, she discovers that he worked in a Nazi concentration camp. The book interweaves the stories of Minka and Josef. Both are haunted by their pasts, by the “former things” they experienced– Minka by what had been done to her, Josef by what he had done. Could their paths have crossed somewhere? You will have to read to find out. Suffice it to say that the themes of justice and forgiveness make the book a compelling, and troubling, read...

I love how the Lectionary brings the church year to a close. Next Sunday, of course, is the celebration of the reign of Christ the King. This Sunday we get a dramatic vision of the completion of the work of the King with this prophecy from Isaiah 65. It’s a welcome relief from our long sad journey through Jeremiah’s gloomy prophecies about the end of Jerusalem and Judah. In recent Sundays, we’ve heard more upbeat prophecies of the time after Exile and in the more distant future, when God will pour out the Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2) and “the desire of all nations” will come to redeem his people from the frustration and unfruitfulness of life (Haggai 1 and 2). Here we come full circle from the fall of creation in Genesis to its recreation, from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained, from Shalom shattered to Shalom restored. Putting Isaiah 65 in that redemptive historical framework will save us from the interpretive issues that arise if we take all of Isaiah 65 literally (for example, does verse 20 mean that there will still be death in the new heaven and earth?)...

Once, on a backpack in the Sierra Nevada, I poked my head into a rain-streaked, mud-stained, four-person dome tent and found the missing youth. For brief shimmering moments, I also found Isaiah’s divine dreams revealed in sweaty, smelly teen hikers. I had led a youth group deep into the wilderness. They were friends and strangers, popular and geeks, first-time hikers, extroverts and introverts, on the cusp of adulthood, each one a joy, and sometimes all of them a pain in the butt. My butt. We’d tramped through rain. We’d set up camp by a lake the color of steel under a dreary, dripping sky. Kids whined. Kids complained. And then, during a mid-day calm in the storm, I realized they’d vanished. Gone. All of ‘em. Then I heard laughter.

When it comes to commitment one of the names that frequently surfaces is Jane Hull. At the young age of seven she was visiting a shabby street in a small town near Chicago. Seeing ragged children there she announced that some day she wanted to build a house so poor children could have a place to play. When she became a young adult she visited Toynbee Hall in London where she observed educated people helping the poor by living among them. When she returned to Chicago she and a friend restored an old mansion and moved in. The two women cared for children of working mothers. They also opened the house to older children and held sewing classes and cooking classes. There were art rooms, music rooms and reading rooms too. Jane also became an advocate for the poor. Later she was awarded an honorary degree from Yale. President Theodore Roosevelt claimed she was "America's most useful citizen." She was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. In spite of her notoriety, Jane Hull remained a resident at the Hull house and finally died there in the place she called home...

("On the morning of May 26, 2006, Daniel Mazur, a mountain climber, was less than 1,000 feet from the summit of Mt. Everest. He abandoned his own climb to the top in order to save another climber, Australian, Lincoln Hall, who had been left for dead by his own team. Mazur's decision to aid the fallen climber meant that none of his group could press on..." and other illustrations)