Community Christian Church
Nov. 14 2010 Proper
Roger Ray, Pastor
17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.
20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—
and their descendants as well.
24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.
Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.
The early church quoted the Hebrew Bible when it served their purposes and it became quickly obvious that the book of the Old Testament which spoke the most directly to the hearts of the early Christians was the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah’s visionary statements about a new age, about building a new kingdom in which there would be justice and peace….A kingdom in which the poor would not be taken advantage of. Where everyone had enough to eat, and no one died prematurely. Isaiah speaks of a community of faith in which the broken are healed and no one even has a reason to cry anymore.
The early church found themselves living in a hostile world in which the government was determined to wipe them out, they were no longer welcome to practice their faith in synagogues, and they were often an embarrassment to their family members. They were, like the remnant of the faithful to whom Isaiah had spoken 500 years earlier, a tiny group of people facing very possible extinction but whose hearts were filled with hope for a kingdom which they had never yet seen but of which they dreamed.
You need to try to understand Isaiah in context. The part which most drew the imagination of the early church is this portion which includes the prophet’s preaching to the remnant of Jewish slaves in Babylon who were being set free. Of course, being set free sounds a lot better than it might be in actual fact.
Like the end of slavery in the United States, the African slaves were liberated and their former masters said, “Well, you are free now…. So get out of my house and get off of my land.”
Being a slave is a cruel form of existence. The Babylonians had allowed the Jews to live together in a ghetto. They could marry, have a family, even grow gardens for their own use but they were still slaves. They worked full time without compensation and they were the poor under class of that civilization. Almost every nation in every century as a cast system whether we wear colored dots on our foreheads or not.
For every Los Angeles there is a Tijuana. Drugs and prostitution are illegal in LA but Tijuana is a short drive away and if you need to abuse someone, or take advantage of someone and get away with it, that’s where you go.
And LA residents are always shocked when Latinos commit violent crimes, as if to say, “What do they have to be mad about?”
In our own city, land locked in the middle of a huge nation, our abused lower casts are often brought to us…. They are illegal immigrants without whom our economy and food supply system would not work but to whom we refuse to grant fully human status.
There are day spas and exercise facilities all over town where you can get a massage but everyone knows that if that spa has any oriental or Asian sounding name in its title that it is really just a brothel. The women who work in these locations are immigrants…. Some the abandoned brides of service men, some the imported peasants from Asia who hoped to have a better life here.
If a bunch of white women from Springfield and Nixa and Ozark set up a brothel on a main street of town and put a flashing neon sign out front they would be closed down immediately because we see prostitution among the natives differently than when it is practiced by the under class. I’ve lived in Springfield for 20 years and the same Oriental brothels have been in continuous operation as long as I have been here. The women who work there are moved regularly from state to state as a part of a nation wide network of sex slavery in America and it is tolerated only because they are not American.
The same thing happens in Western Europe except that the sex slaves are usually Eastern European. It happens in Japan and the sex slaves are usually racially mixed or from the main land.
What I’m trying to say here is that the people that Isaiah was preaching to were victims. Their people had been victims of economic exploitation, with all that that means, for two, three or four generations. Finally, they were being given a chance to be free….. sort of….. OK, you are not my slave anymore but if you don’t want to work here and be treated badly then get out of my country.
Understandably, the majority of the Hebrew slaves were willing to accept the second class status they had always known rather than to strike off through the wilderness to a virtually uninhabited and pretty much uninhabitable land they had never seen before to build a new life for themselves.
When the Civil War ended the slave trade in the United States, all of those slave ships and their crews, facing unemployment, shifted their business practice from Africa to Asia. The phrase, “to be Shanghaied” comes from that time period when ship’s captains would pull into a rural port of the China coast and offer jobs to the poor peasants. They told them that they would take them a little way down the coast where they could work, earn some money and then come home. Once on board they were taken to America where the only employment available to them was in building rail road lines, a job where they would never earn enough to buy a passage back to the poverty of their homeland.
Isaiah was, well, to be honest, trying to fill the Babylonian slaves with the dream of a better live on the other side of the wilderness. It wasn’t exactly like being Shanghaied but none of his sermons seemed to contain the objective truth that they were being invited to go back to a spoiled land with no established farms, economy, houses or protective walls. If they followed Isaiah they were going on what amounted to a life long survival camping trip….. which is not at like going back to a land where there is no illness, no premature death, no reason to ever weep.
No one would have left the bondage of slavery in Babylon for what was really waiting for them in Judah unless they could have a vision of what Judah could become. They had only known life in a nation of masters and slaves, but they could build a nation in which there was no longer a cast system. They had only lived in a world where they tended the fields and built the houses that people who were of another class would enjoy. Isaiah wanted them to believe, not only in liberation but also in justice, in mercy, in fairness and compassion.
And 500 years later, that vision found fertile soil in the hearts of the early church because they too were living as victims…. Outcasts, second class citizens. They were few in number and their existence was uncertain.
The first Christians read the visionary statements of Isaiah and saw in them the kind of values which they had found at the heart of the teachings of Jesus and so they found it irresistible, whenever they talked about Jesus to lace the conversation with quotes from the book of Isaiah.
And even though there are two ways to read these passages….. one way is to see it as a hope for a kingdom which is not of this world…. A heavenly existence in which there is no more need for either homeless shelters or hospitals…. No more sorrow, no more tears. But, of course, Isaiah never mentions heaven and I doubt seriously that Jesus said much of anything about it either.
The real vision of our faith is not to sit in slavery hoping for pie in the sky by and by. The real power of the vision is in its ability to create that kingdom now, in this world, in our life times.
And here is where this gets very real for me. When I read this passage from Isaiah these days, I see myself in it more than ever before. We too are a remnant…. Refugees…. Liberated to be sure but many of us liberated with the equivalent of having been told, “You are free now so get out of my house and stay off of my land.”
There is, for us, an over hanging memory of having been victims. Some of us liberated ourselves from an oppressive religious system in which women were made to be second class just because they were women. Or gay people had to keep their lives and their loves secret or face abuse on the level of torture.
Some of us found ourselves at odds with our former faith community for nothing more than having suffered a personal tragedy such as divorce or illness…. Or for daring to question the doctrines or leadership …. Or for drinking a beer or going to a dance.
There is a reason why we are not all in one of the other 400 congregations in this city…. Many of which offer fabulous amenities and perks of which we can only imagine. We are not there either because we are not wanted there or we can no longer make our minds narrow enough to fit through the doorway of their conservative beliefs.
But coming here is not like deciding to go to Taco Bell rather than McDonalds. We left our former denominations and churches without a steeple, a pew or a hymnal. Empty handed we went out into the wilderness to see if we could build a community of faith which can succeed in leaving behind classism, prejudice, oppression, magical thinking, superstition and any reason to ever make one another weep.
But when you look beyond the visions of Isaiah to the historical record we see that it was not like just leaving Babylon and moving to Utopia. In the first place, most of the Hebrew slaves decided to stay in the slave ghettos of Babylon. Just as we all left people we really love behind in churches which we believe to be filled with injustice and malice.
And, along the way, many among the remnant decided to turn back.
I was talking recently with a friend of mine who now goes to a new and very popular Assemblies of God church on the north side of town.
I had always hoped that she would end up here because we had worked together in several gay rights events through the years and I had known her to be a passionate woman who had escaped the judgment of her Catholic family who refused to accept her lesbian life.
And so I asked her, “Is Northpoint open and affirming?” And she blushed at the question….. “Well, no, but I am more than my sexuality and I love the music and a lot of my friends go there.” Five years ago she had nothing but contempt for her sisters who were afraid to come out of the closet….. now she has gone back into the closet because it is more comfortable there…. And they have a great band.
Freedom isn’t free and sometimes the price is more than some folks are willing to pay.
The other thing we see from the historical record of both the early church and the remnant of Hebrew slaves is that they did not always get along very well. There is a very insightful proverb which I learned from A.A.: “Hurt people hurt people.” I always compare this to a childhood memory of when my neighbor’s dog got hit by a car. We ran over to help his beloved pet who was lying in the ditch with a broken back but when we would reach down to try to pick him up he snarled, bared his teeth and snapped at us. He was hurt… he was dying… but he wouldn’t let us help him.
Hurt people will very often find some way to take out their pain on someone else. Virtually every child molester was molested as a child. Virtually every wife beater grew up either being beaten or watching his own mother be beaten. You would logically think that someone who had endured that kind of pain and humiliation would do everything humanly possible to make certain that it never happened to another person but it doesn’t usually work that way.
One of the most painful memories of my home life happened when my oldest brother was getting a divorce. I was only about 12. John had dropped out of college so that he could get a job and marry his high school sweet heart against the wishes of our parents. Two years later, when the marriage was coming to a humiliating end, my father told John, “I told you so,” and turned his back on him intending to never speak to him again.
My mother and father sat my other brother and I down and told us that John was dead to us. That we were not to speak to him or about him that he was no longer a member of our family. Now, I want you to hear me say very clearly that my parents were not monsters. They fed us, clothed us, housed us, took us to school and music lessons and they took us to church…. A church which they believed taught that divorce was a sin for which there was no forgiveness, only eternal condemnation.
Thankfully, they were eventually capable of thinking their way through that prejudice and many other prejudices, but, for me, the lesson was clear. Family is not a guaranteed relationship. It is a relationship predicated on not embarrassing or disappointing your parents. It not only was possible to be ejected from the family, I had seen it done.
There is a saying in real estate that a house is worth whatever someone will pay for it. It is non-sense to say that a house is worth $1,000,000 if you can only sell it for $200,000.
It is equally non-sense to talk about unconditional love when, in fact, there are lots of spoken and unspoken conditions. We would like to believe that families are always mutually supportive, loving, forgiving and healing environments but they are not, in fact, they usually are not. It is what we hope for but the ideal family is usually something we dream of but rarely see.
The painful fact is that you can judge the value of a family, or a marriage or a friendship by what it takes to break it up. If someone leaves our church because they don’t like the hymns or because we don’t have a gymnasium then they didn’t understand what we were trying to do in the first place. If someone can cut off their friendship with me because of something I believe or have said or published then they are telling me what value they placed on our friendship but they are not telling me what my value as a human being is…. They don’t get to do that.
One of the most real and most painful challenges for us is that while we have been set free and we have been drawn together by a vision of a just and compassionate way of being a community of faith, we are still a small and endangered gathering of people, many of whom, cannot quite break free of the need to bite someone.
If given a choice between being punched in the face or having someone ask me, “What happened to so-and-so who left our church,” I would always choose the punch in the face because it would hurt so much less. It is tough being rejected by someone you have loved…. Someone you thought was your friend, your brother or sister, someone you have helped and sacrificed for.
But you can move heaven and earth to get someone out of prison but they can still stab you in the back. You can rescue a woman from a violent marriage and a nearly successful suicide attempt and still have them turn their back on you. You can show acceptance and love to someone who has been rejected by their family, their church, their employer and their neighbors and still find a dagger with their finger prints on it shoved straight in your heart. Hurt people hurt people. Some people find bondage just to be a lot easier than freedom. Some people have an emotional itch that they need scratched so badly that they will do anything to anyone to feel a little better for a little while.
And if we give our emotional energy and time to focusing on the people who don’t want to be a part of our community then there is no energy or time left for the people who do want to be in our community. No one will leave our church saying, “I’m making a grand exit because I feel like acting like a spoiled child.” They will not say, “The church voted to buy this building even though I didn’t want to.” They will not say, “I got caught stealing and was made to give the money back.”
And some people just aren’t ready to take a progressive approach to faith. One friend left our church because he was furious about a newspaper column I had written condemning the torture of prisoners of war. I asked him, “So you want to go to a church which favors torture?” Of course, there was no response to that question but we all know what the ipso facto answer is….. you can go to almost any church in town and the subject of torture will never be brought up…. Nor will the subject of war…. Or racial prejudice, nor discrimination against gays and lesbians, nor the injustice of capital punishment or the violence of poverty and the pain of unemployment. Most churches will talk about going to heaven when you die and joining the church softball team until that time comes and if that kind of bondage feels less threatening to you then you are also free to return to Babylon.
Some will say that they don’t like the music, or there are not enough programs, or another church has a better location, or that our pastor is the spawn of Satan or something like that. Hurt people hurt people. So, punch me in the face or ask me to explain for the hundredth time why someone chose not to continue trying to build this community of justice and compassion but it still comes down to the same thing. Do you believe in the vision or not? Is it worth it to you to work to establish something that you have never yet seen? Do churches always have to be mired in gossip and divided by cliques or can we do church in a different way? Can we work for justice and liberation and have a good time doing it, becoming friends and learning to love one another as we share this work together?
Anyone, at any time, can pick up their toys and leave, but what they cannot do is take my joy along with them. Look at the text of Isaiah in your bulletin and see how often the words “joy” and “rejoicing” are repeated in the vision of the new kingdom. This is hard work but it should be filled with joy. I like feeding the homeless. I like challenging the abusive power of banks, corporations and governments. I enjoy being the one who thumbs his nose at public prejudice and oppression. Say whatever you want to but I get to choose how I feel about being who I have chosen to be and believing what I have come to believe.
Whenever someone decides that they no longer want to be a part of this experiment in progressive Christianity it is painful to me to see them go but I can tell you this….. I am not sorry that I helped someone in danger of suicide to get the help that she needed. I am not sorry for what I did to win early release of an unjustly incarcerated prisoner. I am not sorry for what I have done to fight for fair and equal treatment of the gay community even when many of those people have since turned their backs on me or on us.
The author of 2 Thessalonians writes to the beleaguered little church, “Don’t grow weary in doing what is right,”…. Don’t get tired of being the one who decides to do the good thing, the right thing…. Even when you are sometimes rewarded with a stab in the back or a kick in the teeth…. Don’t give up on the vision…. Don’t get tired and just quit…. Don’t thrown in the towel on justice or compassion and never let yourself regret the sacrifices you have made to show someone love and compassion even though they may never feel any gratitude or show you love and compassion in return.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “it is always the right time to do the right thing.”
I would like to close by reciting again a poem with which many of us have become very familiar in recent years. She didn’t write it but Mother Theresa is said to have kept a copy of it on display where she and others served the poor of Calcutta because she too was beset by the coming and going of critics and the faint of heart. It says:
People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered;
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.
And so, like Martin Luther, I have chosen. Here I stand. I can do naught else. May God help me.
