Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · September 13, 2009

  Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Litany of Praise and Invocation

From Psalm 19

The heavens are telling the glory of God

      and the skies sing of the holy handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech,

      and night to night declares knowledge.

But there is no speech, no words that can be heard,

     no sound received by human ears.

Yet their voice goes out through all the earth,

      and their words to the end of the world.

Let us pray:

      Let the words of our mouths and meditations of our hearts

      Be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Old Testament Lesson

Isaiah 35:1-10

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

   the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,

   and rejoice with joy and singing.

The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,

   the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.

They shall see the glory of the Lord,

   the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands,

   and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are of a fearful heart,

   “Be strong, do not fear!

Here is your God.

   He will come with vengeance,

with terrible recompense.

   He will come and save you.”

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

   and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer,

   and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

   and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,

   and the thirsty ground springs of water;

the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,

   the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

A highway shall be there,

   and it shall be called the Holy Way;

the unclean shall not travel on it,

   but it shall be for God’s people;

   no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.

No lion shall be there,

   nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;

they shall not be found there,

   but the redeemed shall walk there.

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,

   and come to Zion with singing;

everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

   they shall obtain joy and gladness,

   and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Message

The Relentless Invasion

Tim Carson

When I was a little boy, my family struck out from Kansas City for a family vacation.  With apologies to Chevy Chase, we had the typical load up the car, keep cold drinks and sandwich materials in the cooler, and see how many miles we could rack up over two weeks in a great loop out west.  And we did cover territory.  Included on the itinerary were Estes Park, the beach in California, and the Grand Canyon.

On the return leg of the trek, we traveled through Phoenix, Arizona to visit family friends.  And there In the middle of summer, we pulled into Phoenix, and I remember looking at the front yards in all these neighborhoods, adorned as they were with cactus and rocks, wondering what manner of people would choose to live in such a baron place.  But the real shocker was yet to be revealed, because it was in the back yard.

The only way that people could water their yards was by flooding them.  And a kind of canal ran through the adjoining back yards, and a couple of times each week, water came pouring through a slough.  For a short time each week, these desert yards were six-inches deep in water, enough so the kids could thrash around in them.  And then, as quickly as it came, the water disappeared, sucked up by the thirsty ground.  And I was left wondering what a strange world this was.

This is the kind of radical weirdness we find in the book of Isaiah this morning.  The only difference is that it hasn’t happened yet.  Isaiah writes about what is going to happen: The prophet casts a vision of the future that includes streams in the desert, blooming crocus, and the people of God high stepping it out of captivity back to Zion.  There is not a predator in the room.

But here is the unusual and essential thing: Isaiah talks about what is going to happen as though it already has – the future is the present.  What that means is that everyone who is listening has to suspend their critical judgment because nothing that he describes is to be seen anywhere.

It’s a strange thing to hear, this description of the future-become-present, because the prophetic imagination keeps painting pictures of things you can’t see yet.  Jesus does the same thing when he tells parables about the already present but yet-to-come kingdom of God.  It’s here but it’s on the way, too.  You can’t see it, but you know it’s coming.  And describing the way it will be is the first step in welcoming it on in.

“Sure, streams in the desert,” says the dust bowl farmer scratching out a living in his dry fields.  “Right, no lions and tigers and bears to fear,” says the peasant caught in the crossfire in Afghanistan.  “Beautiful flowers blooming everywhere?” asks the untouchable in one of Calcutta’s ghettos.

Like most of them, we shake our heads in disbelief.  “Really, I mean it,” insists Isaiah.  “You’ve been living in the desert, but that’s all about to change.  Dry places will be singing swamps in a minute.  The weak will be strong, the blind see, and the speechless speak.  Those who have been captive and oppressed will be sprung free from their traps.”

I don’t know about you, but I have a problem with Isaiah’s brand of logic.  Can you find the peaceable kingdom he is describing?  Is it just a state of mind?  Or does it actually exist somewhere?  What does he mean?

In this strange new world of Isaiah, the lion is just going to lie down with the lamb.  When’s the last time you saw that?  On a National Geographic special, right?  Doesn’t the lion usually sit down with the lamb around lunch time?

Do you know what I think?  I think that Isaiah is an artist, a poet, a prophet of the future and its possibilities.  And what Isaiah knows is that unless you are able to first see and then name a new world, there is no chance that the old one will let go of its hold on you.

It is very true that most of us don’t live in the moment enough.  We miss so much richness, beauty and truth, because we don’t see it before us.  We don’t attend to what is here, because we are rooting around in the past where we have no power to change it, or worried about things that mostly will never happen.  It’s true, most of us miss the present, and that’s where life is lived.

But Isaiah turns that coin over in a different way.  You’re not missing the present, says Isaiah, but rather captive to it, owned by it, constrained and limited by it.  The present moment has become your prison, because you can’t imagine anything other than what meets your eyes.

Isn’t that one of the great challenges of adolescence and young adulthood – the tyranny of the present: “Now is always?”  One of the things researchers discovered in the states of mind of young persons who contemplated suicide – which is simply a way to get out of what is perceived to be the impossible or unbearable condition – is that they could not imagine anything other than today.

I remember being 16 and being dumped by one of my first girlfriends.  At the time, I truly believed that my romantic life had come to an end.  That wasn’t true at all.  It was just toughening me up for my second girlfriend!

Now is always; that’s the mantra.  It is the captivity to the present, the prison of the moment.  And Isaiah is offering a pass out of the dungeon, but it is a very special pass.

Have you ever seen the movie Jacob the Liar?  Robin Williams plays a World-War-II-era man living among his people in a hopeless ghetto.  As the story develops, Jacob pretends to discover a mysterious crystal radio set.  Only he listens to it.  And people come to him, waiting for, hoping for any good news.  Jacob gives them just enough good news to keep them going, and the hope of a transformed future gives them strength to not only endure the moment but anticipate a new world.

So, is it Isaiah the Liar?  Is Isaiah just tuning into his holy radio to engender hope, because it is at such a premium?

No, I think it is much more than that.  As Walter Brueggemann reminds us, the prophetic imagination, the future as seen by the holy poet, both announces and brings into being the future.  Announcing it makes it real enough to catch hold.

The winter after Katrina hit the gulf coast, Kathy and I travelled to a conference to join an ecumenical group of a thousand college students who had gathered from across the country.  The conference was scheduled for, of all places, New Orleans.  Of course, there was discussion about cancelling or moving the conference.  After all, how could we travel to the city, stay there, get out and about with such destruction left by the mighty waters? The leadership made what I consider to be a courageous and righteous decision, and that was to go to New Orleans as a witness of hope.

This required revising the whole event, which they did.  Significant time would be given to understanding the impact of the storm, building bridges of solidarity with the residents, and spending time in the wards mucking out houses.  But the most important thing, in my mind, was the least expected.

One of the grand New Orleans traditions is the “Front Line” parade in which a Dixieland band leads out in front with a large crowd parading, dancing along behind.  And that’s exactly what the planners decided to do in collaboration with the city.  They would have a Front Line parade with a thousand college students winding their way through the city, down Bourbon Street and the French Quarter.  Remember: at that time only a third of restaurants, stores and businesses had reopened.

As we marched behind the drums and horns and drum major, all thousand of us, a policeman on his cycle asked me, “So what are you all doing here?”  

I said that we had come to be with them.  And then an ancient black woman, standing on the curb, grabbed me by my arm and said, “I never thought I would see a Front Line again in our city.  Now I know that we can go on.”

You see, you have to announce it before it has arrived.  You have to have a parade before there is much to celebrate.  And that sets us free from the present and sets loose the transforming power of the invading future.  That’s what the holy imagination does.

It’s counterintuitive, but the spiritual practice we have to cultivate is that of thinking from the end.  The imagined end shapes the present and how we live toward it.  Living from the end shakes us free from the tyranny of the present.  Every good, beautiful, and redemptive thing that exists began with the sacred imagination, an imagined future. “The Word of the Lord has done this” cried the ancients.  Yes, indeed.  The Word created and is creating now.

I once had a seminary intern from Puerto Rico in our church in St. Louis, and her name was Zaida Perez.  Zaida is a faithful and brilliant leader in the church, and she came from a family of devoted Christians.  Her father was a pastor who specialized in new church planting.  And Zaida would often go with her father to set up for Sunday morning services, often taking place in rented store-front space.  And one Sunday as they were setting up the metal folding chairs, her father stood up and said, “Can you see them, Zaida?"  

Zaida couldn’t see a soul. “Who, Papa?" 

“All the beautiful people, Zaida, look!”

“What people, Papa?” She looked out at the empty room.

“All the people who will be here in the future praising the Lord!” 

Isn’t it true that of all our maladies, the one that undermines us most is a drought of sacred imagination?  What we need most right now – in our world, our nation, our city, our church – is to let loose our sacred imagination so that we can see the story from the end.  And isn’t it the greatest encouragement and comfort to know that the most exciting, rewarding, healing, inspiring things are just around the corner?  We can’t see them, but we need to start announcing them now.

I know there are plenty of folks in this room who have been living in the desert.  Your spirit has been parched as you wait for the waters of God.  Your health seems to be failing.  Your kids are in trouble.  Your job is driving you crazy or is in jeopardy.  You feel like you’ve lost something in a special relationship.  There’s a certain dullness to your living that defies description.  Where is beauty?  Where is hope?  Where is life worth living?  How can anything matter?

If you are one of those persons today, know that you are surrounded by a whole host of witnesses who have been in that desert before and may be in it now.  You are not alone.  But what’s more is that ever so often, in the mercies of God, the desert is invaded by mighty waters, the irrigation system of the Spirit.  The weak hands and hearts are strengthened, the crocus blossom, and the rocks break into song.  Now is not forever, because tomorrow is already invading.  And that’s good news, because every invasion of the future is a holy one, because the future belongs to God, and we announce it before it arrives so that it can begin to take root – now, today, here.

 

Benediction

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.