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Frank and I stand with his best man behind the door leading into the
sanctuary for his wedding. We are co-conspirators, in a sense,
having gone together through this very same ritual, with a different
bride, a few years ago. I tell him that I am responsible only for
the wedding, not the marriage, but I hope this will turn out better.
To break the tension, he smiles and says that he doesn’t understand
why I didn’t favor his choice of a song this second time around, a
country ditty with the descriptive title: “I put a golden band on
the right left hand this time.” His ploy works, and our tension
lessens as the music starts and we three walk through the door and
into a new chapter of his life. Last I heard, Frank has two
daughters, now grown, and the golden band is still on what he
referred to that day as “the right left hand.”
It’s a turn-around story, not so different from so many stories that
form so many of our lives. Life is about picking up broken pieces,
beginning again, discovering hope in spite of brokenness, and new
life in the midst of lives marred by sin. I remember Frank’s story
not to affirm divorce, which is both a tragedy and a sin, but
because it offers a real hope that from the fire of a collapsed
marriage, a new and even better life may arise. God is still in the
business of raising the dead, even today.
But God’s been in this business of turning lives around for a long,
long time. Isaiah, eight centuries before Christ, gives his people a
vision a God’s world turned around, restored, renewed. David’s great
kingdom is destroyed, but Isaiah knows that God redeems the most
hopeless situation, including a fractured nation. Speaking about
David’s family tree, and the royal dynasty it symbolizes, Isaiah
proclaims:
“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge
and the fear of the Lord.”
Then Isaiah gives hope for a world totally transformed:
“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.”
Isaiah gives a vision of a world turned around. It’s a world turned
right, for a change. This new world is old, too: it is Eden
restored. It’s a place where life thrives without struggle, without
pain or death. It’s a life described by the Hebrew word “shalom:”
peace, complete, a society of harmonious interaction, cooperation,
mutual trust and affection. Shalom carries all those positive
meanings, and more besides. It’s a powerful word, Shalom.
“Turn-around” is what I’ve called this development of shalom. And
“turn-around” is what I called the renewal that my friend Frank
experienced in his second marriage. And I’ve used that term, “turn
around” to describe the new vision of a new life offered by Isaiah
the eighth-Century BCE Hebrew prophet. And yes, “turn around” is the
phrase we use in common parlance. But if I used theological language
instead, I might say not “turn around,” but “repent.” Actually,
these are two ways of speaking of the same experience. Because quite
literally to “repent” is to “change direction” to “turn around.”
Every Advent we listen to John the Baptist, that wild, hairy, loud
creature, shout out this message to his generation: “Repent, for the
kingdom of heaven has come near.” We dismiss him, and his message,
as quaint. “Repent” is not a word for us, we tend to imagine, but
for the dirty street preacher in the sandwich sign, mocked in New
Yorker cartoons.
But wait, the word “repent,” the call to turn our lives in another
direction, is a word for us. God, we pray, is sending a messiah into
OUR world, the very fulfillment of Isaiah’s hope. He is the branch
from the dead stump of Jesse, who brings to life Isaiah’s vision:
wolf and lamb and leopard and kid and calf and lion and children in
peace. It’s a quaint vision, perhaps.
Suppose we give that hope a makeover. Suppose we see it, in our
time, in a new way. It might become, for us, a vision of democrats
and republicans sharing leadership with civility, and yes, in even
harmony. Or might Isaiah’s vision be, for us, a vision of Korea
united north and south? And yes, it is a vision of Israel and
Palestine in peace, sharing the sacred sites of Jerusalem and
Bethlehem and olive orchards no longer divided by walls or words,
and where neither coffee shops nor buses nor airplanes in fear of
suicide bombers. And suddenly the peaceful vision is ours, as a
dream of a world where travel is free of scanners and pat-downs and
a world where diplomats live without fear of both wiki-leaks and
White House leaks.
This Advent, as every Advent, we long for such a world. It’s not a
world that we can build, really. It’s a world we’re given. And it’s
a world in which we participate by undertaking the “turn around” of
that one corner of the world that we do control: ourselves. We can
each build toward this world, Isaiah’s vision for his nation, and,
by extension, for ours.
So repentance is up to us, ourselves. This hoped-for turn around is
our responsibility. To make the turn is to come toward the light in
the midst of darkness, toward the table of God’s presence in the
midst of a lonely world. To turn toward God is that which we can,
and must accomplish, beginning with the way we see our world and our
responsibility for all of it.
Last week I listened as a county legislator, a good and thoughtful
person, spoke of coming cuts in the county budget. But we were
assured, “It will be hard for some poor people, who will lose
services” came the word. “But it won’t impact us in our area very
much.” I thought about the implications of that thought. Our taxes
won’t rise. It’s about money. It’s about us. We’ll be okay. But then
I reflected on the truth spoken by modern-day preacher, evangelical
social-activist, and Isaiah-like Prophet Jim Wallis: “Budgets are
moral documents.” Yes. Budgets are about money, yes, of course; but
budgets are about people, too. And it’s time for us who proclaim as
our mission loving our neighbors as ourselves to see that the
question is not merely, ‘What’s good for me?”, but “What’s good for
us all, together?” What hurts some hurts all; what helps the least
among us instructs the strongest among us, too. It’s time to repent
of thinking first of “me” and turn around to affirm the “we” of our
world, too.
Turning toward God gives us finally this hope: we’ll see and know
that God is already turning toward us. The kingdom of heaven, as
Matthew speaks of it, is here, in this broken world, with each of
us, broken people, together. The kingdom of heaven is our living
together toward Isaiah’s vision of a new community, toward shalom,
toward generosity. God’s true community begins as we share this
simple, holy meal. And that community continues as we share our
lives with each other, and with the God who comes to us in the
simplest of pleasures, with the grand hope that one day, by grace,
we will feast together, all of us together, a whole divided world
finally united, not by us alone, but by the God’s abundant and
generous grace.
Amen.
Mamaroneck United Methodist, December 5, 2010.
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