BE GLAD AND REJOICE

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Do you remember where you were when you first encountered the tale Alice in Wonderland?  In the Chicago suburb I where I grew up, there was a movie theater—small by today’s standards—just one screen.  I used to go to the Saturday afternoon matinees.  There I watched movies starring Roy Rogers.  They were stories, of course, not the real world.  I saw the antics of the Three Stooges, also not the real world.  It was in that same theater that I first saw the story of Alice in Wonderland.  It disturbed me.  I have faint memories of moving into the fetal position and crying when I saw that movie.  I couldn’t get myself into the world that the movie was inviting me into.  The characters were uncanny.  I guess I have problems with certain kinds of fiction.  I like most of the fiction I view or read to be more like the real world.  Alice in Wonderland—that’s not the real world.

            Well, look at our Old Testament lesson.  What world is this?  It’s a new one.  A perfected one.  Jerusalem, which knew the taste of defeat, will enjoy good times again, in this new world.  Her inhabitants’ time of mourning is to be a thing of the past.  Infant deaths will be no more, in this new world.  People will live to old age.  What’s more, people will have greater control over their lives, in this new world.  They will plant vineyards and they themselves will enjoy the fruit.  They will build houses and get to live in them themselves.  In this new world, things will be so peaceful that the wolf and the lamb will feed together; the one will no longer be the other’s dinner.  What world is this?

            Not the real world, of course.  The real world is not this peaceful place.  You talk about Jerusalem!  I don’t know about you, but I’ve taken Jerusalem off my list of desired destinations.  How I have longed to go to the Holy Land over the years!  I have dreamed about going.  But not now.  Too risky!  Things could be calm there as you plan your trip, but when you get there you could face violence or having your plane hijacked.  No thanks!  Jerusalem is no joy for this traveler.  Nor is it a secure place for families to live.  This “new earth” envisioned in our Old Testament lesson is not a visible reality.  No, no.  In today’s world, we think it is a good week when only a few people in Iraq are killed by suicide bombers.  This is the real world, a world in which people easily kill.  Last Wednesday, a twenty-four-old man was arrested and charged with beating his seventy-five-year-old mother to death.  News reports say that the young man beat her with a rock.  Apparently he beat up his father inside their home, and then chased his mother down the street, carrying a rock.  In this world, people kill all too easily.  Even their own parents!  Oh!  And in the real world, wolves still enjoy lamb for dinner.  This is the real world.

            Yes, but is this the way God wants things to be?  No.  The ongoing biblical story tells of God’s involvement with humanity to renew and to bring about wholeness where there is brokenness.  The beginning of the biblical story declares the theology that God is the Creator of all things.  The universe, including human beings, is intended.  In the poetry of this theological declaration, each time God finishes a portion of creation, the narrator says, “And God saw that it was good.”  At the end of the entire process, the narrator states, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”  Later in the story, when things on earth get out of hand and the wickedness of humanity goes to the extreme, God obliterates most of humanity and starts over.  Remaking what God had made is a recurring theme in the Bible.  Listen to Isaiah 11:  “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse. . . .  The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him. . . .  “  Things will be so peaceful then that it will affect even the animal kingdom:  “The wolf shall live with the lamb. . . .  They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”  There it is.  God recreating this world into a peaceful place.  It’s here again in today’s Old Testament lesson.  The writer is a prophet who comes after Isaiah, but his message is the same about God making all things new.  What the Bible celebrates as God’s ongoing recreating activity has not yet accomplished its ultimate effect.  But the prophet in today’s Old Testament lesson wants us to be on the lookout for it.  It may not yet be the world as it will be.  But it is the world as it will be, because our Creator God is in the process of making it so.

            Now we begin to see things differently.  If God is going to make all things new, we can live expectantly.  We can work toward God’s goals, even if we don’t see the new world clearly.  The prophesy in our Old Testament lesson is not the world as it is, but the world as it will be.  The prophet gives us a better vision for the world and our life.  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream that became for America a better vision for the future.  On August 28, 1963, Dr. King delivered a carefully-crafted address.  Films of that day show him reading it.  The image for that part of his speech was that of a check.  The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were, he said that day, “a promissory note.”  But for African Americans, he said, it was a bad check.  “But we refuse to believe,” Dr. King announced, “that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”  This was the image he began with.  A better vision.  Dr. King urged his hearers to go back to their towns and cities “knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”  And suddenly, Dr. King stopped looking at his manuscript.  Something happened.  A voice from nearby—gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, it is reported—a voice called through the applause:  “Tell them about your dream, Martin!  Tell them about the dream!”  And so, without looking at notes, Dr. King continued, using words spoken previously elsewhere.  Now the whole world was hearing them for the first time.  “I have a dream,” Dr. King announced.  “I have a dream that one day. . . .”  And you know it so well.  That dream wasn’t the world as it was, but a better vision.  It was a vision of God’s ongoing recreating, making all things new.  It was a vision of wolves and lambs living together in peace.  Dr. King’s vision wasn’t the world as it was on August 28, 1963.  But, because of God’s recreating activity in Christ, that better vision is becoming reality, little by little.

            Of course, if we trust in ourselves to make all things new, we will be aiming too low.  Don’t get me wrong.  The reason we need a better vision is so that we can realign our wills to God’s will.  It is so we can cooperate with God’s recreating activity.  But if we count solely upon ourselves, we will be disappointed and directionless.  We are, alas, the problem.  Creation needs “recreating” because of the brokenness introduced into God’s good world by human rebellion.  So pervasive is the effect of human sin that it was seen to cause brokenness even in nature.  In the Genesis story, you will remember, the serpent becomes the enemy of humans, which is certainly the opposite of the peaceable kingdom.  We cannot trust in ourselves to make the world new.  Because we are the problem.

            So, who can fix it all?  God who made heaven and earth.  The only way human brokenness is going to get fixed is by the creative activity of God.  Only the one who made everything can fix it all.  Some of my sermons in preparation don’t work.  Their construction is faulty.  As a result, they have little hope of communicating effectively.  But I constructed them, so I can remake them.  I can start over.  I can revise.  I can remake what I created.  God, the Creator of heaven and earth, can remake creation.  God can make all things new.  The only way heaven and earth get fixed is with an “extreme makeover.”  That’s why God sent his Son, Jesus, to reconcile a rebellious humanity to himself.  Jesus came to make a broken humanity whole.  The apostle Paul points to that very reality when he declares, “. . . if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:  everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”  This is God recreating humanity and the world through Jesus Christ.  This is happening in the present.  We may not see the end result of God’s recreating activity, but we can see glimpses of it, if we look for it.  Look then at David Argo, a Methodist pastor.  Back when he was a teen, he had a turbulent relationship with his mother.  Yes, that created a rift between them.  Even when David was a young adult, he battled with his mom over which one of them had the correct view of the world.  Still, as time passed, they seemed to settle into a kind of truce, even if there was no real sense of peace in their relationship.  When David’s mother was ninety-two, she suffered a massive stroke.  Because the doctor didn’t give her much time to live, David traveled across several states to be with her.  He talked to her, without knowing if she was aware of his presence or not.  He sang hymns to her, read the Bible to her, prayed, and cried.  David realized that he had not been in the same room with his mom for entire days since the time he was an infant.  As he continued spending this time with his dying mother, David came to the understanding that “the wolf and the lamb were feeding together.”  David Argo was given a glimpse of God’s new creation as he sat by his mother’s bed.  God, who made us all, has the power to make all things new, even internally.  God is in the process of recreating the heavens and the earth.  That same God can even make us new.