During this Advent season, we the people of First Church are being asked to use our imaginations. Collectively and individually, we are meant to reach within ourselves to imagine a better world—a world in which we partner with the divine project of promoting God’s intended life for all. Joyous people living in a world imbued with justice and peace, with everyone enjoying lives of health and safety. That’s quite a project, that’s quite a hope!
During this Advent season, our beloved community is called upon to persist in our struggle for peace, justice, and yes, joy. Somehow, with all too many lives suffocating under the weight of unspeakable harm, we need to draw from deep wells of resilience, as we push ahead in our active work for change. In these times we look liturgically to the arrival among us, none too soon, of Emanuel, that is, the arrival of God-with-Us.
God-with-Us—God Help Us might be more realistic way to imagine the task! Looking around this city and this country and this world, it would seem to take a massive infusion of cockeyed optimism to find much peace or justice or joy. But that painful absence of much that is good may somehow be precisely the point, the reason for this season of daring to hope and work for what we know is better.
This week’s theme is “Imagine Peace”. The scope of the notion of “peace” seems to have shifted over my lifetime, and certainly during the events of this past year. Back when I was in high school and college, to me, being a peacenik meant opposition to the Viet Nam War, along with support for the never-ending struggle for civil rights. Then, in the 1980s, seeking peace meant joining anti-nuke campaigns and providing aid for families seeking refuge from the US backed terrorist gangs of Central America.
Today the longing for peace seems to be ever more urgent and all-encompassing. There are so many global, national, local, and deeply personal aspects of our yearning for peace. Where do we best do this work—addressing problems whether they be right here, or far away? Everywhere we look we find the too often fatal effects of hunger, the displacement, disfigurement, and death wrought by war, and so many challenges to people’s physical and mental health. Perhaps most alarming are the looming disastrous effects of climate change.
Making all these challenges even more painful, of course, is our awareness that every one of those problems is worsened and intensified day by day by the actions and whims of a heedless and selfish president, abetted by a gleefully criminal administrative gang in Washington. And some of us—most of us —feel the pressure ever more strongly each and every day.
Today’s Scripture readings have had me meditating on the city of Jerusalem, and how the Biblical authors stress its prophetic role as a locus of peace for all the nations. Many books of the Bible, each in its own way, ask us to imagine an ultimately peaceful Jerusalem, despite most of these books being written in circumstances of conflict and imperial oppression. Paul in Galatians and John in Revelation go so far as to picture for us a glorious heavenly Jerusalem far away from our earthly troubles. I imagine most listeners to those ancient words might have reacted with as much doubt and skepticism as would we if we were told that the divided and contested city of Jerusalem today, of all places, was to be a beacon and haven for the long-awaited arrival of God’s sacred peace, justice, and joy.
The poetry and prophecy of Isaiah’s book was composed under the immense strain of siege and conquest of the city, destruction of its temple, and the exile of its people, first threatened by armies of the Assyrian Empire and then finished off by the Babylonian Empire. Pastor Jane spoke eloquently last week about how the prophet Jeremiah unmasked those residents of Jerusalem whom he held responsible for these disasters—people who held wealth and position too closely and tightly to themselves, without concern for the needs of the poor, the widowed, the sick, and the dispossessed. Parallels with the people currently in office in our country today are as chilling as they are clear.
Isaiah’s warnings of devastation for Judea and Jerusalem, home of Israel’s God, are interspersed with defiant promises of restoration. Return and renewal do come, but as it turns out only under the auspices and rule of yet another imperial power, led by Cyrus, King of Persia. Somehow, even in the face of these devastating defeats, disasters, and desecrations, the prophet Isaiah can imagine a glorious end-time world, we see here in chapter 2—all the nations will one day stream up Mount Zion to acknowledge the sovereignty of the God of Israel.
The Bible nerd in me can’t help but note that the word Jerusalem can be read as a linguistic hybrid of the Greek word for things holy or sacred, hiero-, together with the Hebrew word salem, close sibling of the more familiar word shalom: thus Hiero-Salem. It is that much worse that the city whose very name declares itself as God’s Sacred Peace today could serve as a byword for conflict, for unending violence and disturbance. I am reminded of Jesus’s lament over the city in the Gospel of Matthew: Jerusalem, Jerusalem! The city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate. (Matthew 23:37–38)
Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye speaks directly to the troubles of modern residents of Jerusalem and the occupied portions of Judea. Her poem, written more than thirty years ago in response to the first Intifada, is reflective of the Palestinian struggle to survive relentless displacement caused by the increasingly expansive Israeli settlement program in the West Bank and within Jerusalem itself. New houses are built and built and built to replace bulldozed family dwellings, ancient olive groves are seized by newly arrived owners. Might we hope that God, the mothering hen, would somehow protect all her children under her sheltering wings?
Nye writes in effect that any change is up to us. Her poem opens:
I’m not interested in who suffered the most.
I’m interested in people getting over it.
A bit further on we read:
A man builds a house and says / “I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place / of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says / “I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.
Why are we so monumentally slow? …
There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.
It’s late, but everything comes next.
The parables and prophecy of Matthew were composed in the wake of ruin by Roman armies of the temple that had been recently refurbished in first-century Jerusalem, and the gospel’s perspective is reflective of the diminished status of the defeated Jewish people. Our reading from Matthew 24 today activates a desire for divine retribution for those renewed calamities. Matthew’s mention of the ancient story of Noah and the Flood serves to remind us that God once enabled, indeed unleashed a monumental climate disaster to wipe away nearly all the life on earth.
The Gospel of Matthew wants its readers to prepare for a new divine intervention, called the Day of the Son of Man—a heavenly figure expected to appear from heaven to do God’s will on earth and identified by early Christians with the Risen Jesus. Suddenly, we are told, there will be a sorting out—one person will be seized and taken away for punishment, the next will be left behind to persist with their work here toward a better world. Yes, in the grammar of this fantasy we should hope to be among those left behind.
Let me explain that the common evangelical reading of this warning is confused. Those who choose to ignore the dangers of climate change because they expect to be taken away safely by the angels to heaven at the Second Coming have things exactly upside down. The word rapture in English derives from a Biblical verb that connotes a violent seizure, not a rescue. And so Matthew imagines this rapture as the seizing and carrying off of the wicked, not the end-time rescue of the righteous from divine punishment, the long-feared Apocalypse.
What specters of destruction and devastation haunt our dreams today—now, the ever-building crisis of humankind’s despoiling of the earth. It is not too much of a stretch, you might agree, to view the looming calamity of climate change in similarly apocalyptic terms. This month’s issue of The Christian Century includes a thoughtful review by Annalise Jolley of a new book by the author Martha Park, entitled World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After.
In her review, Jolley writes that “World Without End twines Park’s love for this world with her uncertainty about a world to come. … Park grapples with religious ambivalence and ecological care as she wonders how faith both compels and hinders our love for a planet in peril. Her essays explore apocalypses personal and global, present and anticipated. Her writing moves nimbly between climate and religious apocalypses (such as biodiversity collapse and the rapture) before turning inward to investigate her own apocalypses: the loss of her faith, the birth of her son. She contrasts a love for this earth, home to wetlands and infants and songbirds, with the apocalyptic impulse that sends people into bunkers to prepare for its end.”
Jolley goes on to say, “World Without End positions doubt not as faith’s opposite but as its own form of engagement with the divine. Seen in this light, doubt is a kind of good wrestling with God. The certainty that troubles Park is the opposite of permeability: a rigid, binary way of relating to God, to others, and the natural world. This certainty ‘might be a barometer, not for the strength of one’s faith, but for its fragility.’”
I would like us to linger for a moment considering this perspective. Certainty might be a barometer, not for the strength of one’s faith, but for its fragility. Doubt as engagement with the divine is perhaps where we could stand most authentically in the face of all the wickedness around us. Here the example of Jesus in his own confrontation with mortality and apparent failure may be of help. The gospels portray Jesus awaiting arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, wracked with attacks of self-doubt and struggling with indecision. After asking for a way out, Jesus finally puts his trust in God but then when scourged and put up on the cross, he cries out in words of desolation that his God has abandoned him to a shameful and painful public death. Jesus nevertheless clings to a sliver of hope for divine deliverance, slow to come, and when it does, it yet remains shrouded in mystery and in silence.
We as a country and a culture are caught in our own time of doubt and may feel ourselves teetering on the edge of despair—I know that at times I do, at any rate. Could anything short of divine intervention save us and our world from humanity’s own self-made disasters? I’m not at all sure. But rather than relying on some miraculous outcome with a blind but fragile faith, perhaps we can transform our dismay and our fears about the future into fuel for this project of hope, to work through all the challenges we struggle with every day. Perhaps Jesus’s experience offers us some grounds for that hope.
In worship services we typically pass the peace, we offer each other the precious gift of the Peace of Christ. Where exactly is that peace to be found? Perhaps it is alive in the very midst of uncertainty and fear, resting somewhere between hope and promise. Our feelings of doom about the future might reflect a faith too inflexible, a despair that is all too human. We may need to find and embrace a sense of openness to what may still be to come, to permit ourselves truly to imagine a better world, one imbued with these needed and deeply desired gifts of peace, justice, and joyful lives.
Some may call the birth of Jesus the reason for the season. His offer of peace in times of sadness and uncertainty feels especially powerful to me today. So—we need to stay committed to the task and refuse to give in to feelings of helplessness. Advent truly is the season of hope and joy—so let’s embrace it and keep on pushing forward!
Amen! May it be so.