Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 14, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Isn’t that passage we just heard from Isaiah beautiful? It is a vision of nothing less than a glorious new creation. The passage says that God is “about to create new heavens and a new earth.” It bids us be glad in what God is creating even now. Jerusalem, that city symbolic of God’s presence with the people, a city that when this passage was written was a miserable ruin, a faint shadow of its former glory, shall be a joy. There will be no weeping or distress there. Everyone will live a long and happy life. Everyone will have a home and food. God will be near to them and hear when they call. Even nature will be transformed. Best of all “they shall not hurt or destroy” on all God’s “holy mountain,” a symbol I think for the whole earth. What a joy it will be to live in that new world, a world of peace and prosperity for all people. The prophet here gives us a beautiful vision indeed.

I’m pretty sure that Isaiah intended this vision to be a source of hope for his people at a time when life seemed pretty hopeless. When this part of Isaiah was written the people had returned from captivity in Babylon, but life in the Jerusalem of the restoration was far from the grand and glorious life they had expected. Their Persian overlords had let them come home, but they were draining them dry with the tribute they demanded. They were home, but their home was a place of poverty and exploitation. So the prophet scholars call Third Isaiah gave them this vision of a glorious new creation that God was creating in their midst, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He intended, I’m sure, to give the people hope in a time of despair.

Yet as I read this passage and pondered it this past week, it produced in me not hope but despair. After all, Isaiah wrote his beautiful vision of a glorious new creation something like two thousand five hundred years ago. In terms of human history that’s a long time, a really long time; and Isaiah’s beautiful vision has never become a reality. It is true of course that for many people in the world today life is a whole lot better than it was in Jerusalem twenty-five hundred years ago. I don’t deny that, but the fact remains that for a great deal of the world, including in some ways the world most of us live in, Isaiah’s vision remains a hopeful vision at best and a cruel delusion at worst. For an awful lot of people, and in some ways for all people, earthly reality today is nothing like Isaiah’s vision. Isaiah said that God was about to create that beautiful new world and indeed that God was already doing so. All I could say about that as I read and pondered this passage this past week was “Not so as you’d notice.”

That “Not so as you’d notice” of mine was a cry of despair. I compared Isaiah’s beautiful vision of a new creation to the reality of the current creation and felt nothing but hopelessness. It’s been so long, and the dream is still so far from realization. The vision is so beautiful, but how do we hold onto it as millennium follows millennium and the vision remains so far beyond our grasp? One possible answer to that question is, of course, “We don’t.” One option is to write the beautiful vision off as an idle daydream, an unrealistic fantasy that never will be.

I was quite prepared to do that this past week, to leave this passage from Isaiah alone and preach on something else—anything else; but then I realized what Isaiah’s vision actually is. It is a pre-Christian, Jewish version of the vision Jesus called the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ ministry on earth was centered on the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. He called his followers then, and he calls us now, to work tirelessly for the coming of the Kingdom of God, that world free from suffering, that world of justice and peace for all people, that is nothing less than God’s vision for our world. If it is Jesus’ vision, and if it is God’s vision, how can it not be our vision too? Giving up on that vision is, I realized, un-Christian. Giving up on that vision is nothing less than giving up on Jesus Christ, giving up on God. So we don’t cast the vision aside. We don’t give up; but for me the question remains: How do we hold onto the vision that is so long delayed? How do we not give up on the vision when realizing it seems so beyond our means, beyond our powers?

As we were discussing that question at a clergy lectionary study group that I attend, one of the UCC seminarians from Seattle U who attends the group reminded us a famous statement by Archbishop Oscar Romero. Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, in the late 1970s. Although he didn’t begin his ministry as one he became a world-famous champion of human rights and an opponent of the El Salvadoran government’s oppression and violation of the human rights of its citizens. He was assassinated on March 24, 1980, by a so-called death squad working for the El Salvadoran government as he celebrated mass at a hospital chapel. The assassination occurred one day after he had called on El Salvadoran soldiers, as Christians, to stop obeying the government’s orders that violated people’s basic human rights. He is honored as a 20th century martyr at Westminster Cathedral in London, and a process within the Roman Catholic Church to declare him a saint is under way. The people of El Salvador already call him Saint Oscar.

About our working for the vision of the Kingdom of God without giving up Romero said:

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

This is what we are about: we plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing they hold future promise. We lay foundations that others will develop. We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

That, it seems to me, is the only way we can hold onto the beautiful vision of a new creation. Romero’s statement points to the reason why I and so many others—and I imagine Archbishop Romero himself—feel such despair at the delay in the coming of the Kingdom. The cause of that despair isn’t really that the vision is not yet reality. The problem isn’t actually the delay in the realization of the vision. The problem is that we, that I, place too much responsibility for realizing the vision on ourselves, on myself.

Romero said we plant but we do not reap. We tend what others have sown. And he says that it is enough. That’s the trick, for me at least. To realize that what we can do will not suddenly usher in the Kingdom of God, but it is enough. To realize that we are ministers not Messiahs, and it is enough. It is God’s vision. God expects us to work for it, as Oscar Romero did; but God doesn’t expect us to do it all, as even a saint like Oscar Romero realized he could not.

What all of that comes down to for me is that we are called to live in hope. Hope in this context is continuing to work for that which we will never see realized. To continue the work that others have started and never saw realized. To start new work that others will continue after us. Hope here is working for peace and justice in the world without needing to see our work have miraculous results. Hope is working—and leaving the results up to God.

So let us not despair. Let us not lose hope. The vision is indeed a beautiful one. It is worth giving our lives to it, as Romero gave his for it. It is worth working for even when the end of the work is nowhere in sight. We are ministers not messiahs, workers not saviors, and is enough. Amen.,