Grace From the Wastelands.

Isaiah 61:1-11.John 1:6-8, 19-28.Advent 3.

I.

            God’s future emerges from the waste-places of empire.  This comes to us as a major theme of Scripture.  Contrary to the way we have always been taught history, which is that the future is built on the achievements of the great, the powerful, the famous, and the wealthy, what we have in the Bible is just the opposite.  In the Bible the rich and powerful are almost always the villains.  While God’s saving, redeeming, liberating Presence always shows up among the slaves, the poor, the women, the defeated, the sick, the excluded, and the broken.

            This is the insight of the exiles, God’s crushed people, who had been living as virtual prisoners in Babylon for 70 years.  Last week we read about their miraculous deliverance when they were released and allowed to go back home, something no one expected.  God comes to people when they have hit bottom, when they have reached the end of their rope, when they have run into the proverbial wall, when all hope appears to be lost.  When all other rational and reasonable alternatives have been exhausted, that’s when God begins to appear.

            The exiles go home in joy, and excitement, and new hope.  But they do not go home in triumph because when they get back to Palestine they find that they have a lot of work to do.  What they discover when they get home is a Jerusalem that is a pile of rubble, and a land inhabited by other people, many of were foreigners who had been settled there by the Babylonians. 

            And what the prophet wants to ensure is that the people do not fall back into the habits of injustice and inequality and violence that resulted in their removal to Babylon in the first place.  For if God is with the people at the bottom, that’s where we have to stay.

            Power is toxic to human beings.  Privilege is poison.  Inequality is a corrosive acid that dissolves the soul and communities into an acrid smoke. 

            So the prophet starts with words made famous 500 or so years later by Jesus the Anointed One, who used them to define his whole ministry.  He is about bringing good news to the poor, binding up the brokenhearted, proclaiming release for captives and liberation for prisoners.  In other words, Jesus finds his place with the losers of the world.  He identifies with the people at the bottom, beginning with his ridiculously humble birth, and ending with his execution by the Romans as a troublemaker.

            These are not new ideas.  The prophets have been hammering them for centuries.  Neither is it a new idea to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, which is a term referring back to the Jubilee in Leviticus 25.  The Jubilee is when all debts are cancelled and property restored to its original owners.  It is a day of God’s vindication, when we see that God’s way is better than our way of injustice and inequality.

            This is not good news for people who made a killing in the market.  This is not good news for any wealthy speculators who might have moved in and bought up abandoned or wrecked houses cheap, so they could build McMansions to be turned over for a nice profit.  This is not good news for anyone who got richer at the expense of their neighbors.

II.

            The living God also looks at places that have known grief and devastation, but sees an opportunity for blessing.  God sees a place where newness and light may emerge.  God seeks out the places where human power and projects, human wisdom and reason, human adventures and achievement have failed.  God cherishes such places, because there, at the limits of our abilities, when we have done our best and still fallen short, is where we are most open to something new happening.  That’s where we are most open to wonder and surprise.

            And God comes into them just as God enters and inhabits a mortal human body, through a young woman in the backwater village of Nazareth, and is born with the animals of Bethlehem and laid in a feed-trough, and is worshiped first by minimum-wage shepherds on the night-shift.

            When the prophet says we are to provide for those who mourn, here he means those whose hearts remain broken over the destruction of Jerusalem, and the orgy of murder, demolition, and exile the people endured.  We are to empathize with those whose compassion is endless, but for whom the consequences of going against God’s blessings and peace remain burned into their consciousness.

            These are the people who get it.  They are not in denial about the way things have turned out.  In the writings of many of the most deeply spiritual people throughout history I find that they often view the shedding of tears as almost a requirement for any kind of spiritual growth.  If we aren’t moved to tears by the human situation, and our own situation, we probably don’t really understand it.  It’s still theory and abstraction to us, it’s still about someone else.  If we’re not crying we’re just not conscious; we’re not awake.  Because if we did have a clue our hearts would be broken too.

            Only in a spirit of mourning and grieving do we become strong Oaks of Righteousness planted by God and displaying God’s glory; only then are we able to see new life and order come into the ruined, devastated places.

            When the prophet talks about rebuilding ancient ruins and renewing ruined cities, I hear him directing us to the wastelands and marginal spaces of empire, the places the unwanted people and the refuse of industry get unceremoniously dumped.  Here, not on Wall Street or among the mansions of Far Hills, is where God’s future is brewing.  Places like Doremus Ave. in Newark, the post-industrial, toxic zones where no one wants to live but some people have to.  That is where we should be looking for the blast of redemption from the God who comes in Jesus Christ.

III.

            Our God is a God of reversals.  God turns our world upside down, mainly because we have by our blindness and ignorance, leading to fear, leading to injustice and violence, have turned God’s creation upside down.  God comes to turn everything right-side-up again.

            This is a theme that permeates the New Testament; Jesus Christ proclaims and enacts these reversals throughout his life, beginning even before he is born, with his mother’s hymn, where the poor are filled and the rich are sent away empty.  And it continues as he quotes these very verses from Isaiah when he begins his ministry. 

            This new community of blessing and equality, this place of liberation and peace that will be witnessed by the ones who rebuild the ancient ruins, this blessed work of the people of God – here the returning exiles, the Oaks of Righteousness, the ones who mourn in Zion, the Priests of the Lord – the work they are to do will be considered so valuable and exemplary that foreigners and strangers will hear about it, the Gentiles will get wind of it, and they will come to Judea, and they will choose to support this work.

            It is like when we hear of a particularly powerful teacher of the Word, and we make an effort to go to workshops and seminars and hear that person, and willingly pay good money for the privilege, because we get so much benefit from the experience.  Only here this is magnified.  The prophet is saying that because the people of God underwent such shame, dishonor, and hardship before and during their exile in Babylon, the honor and joy they receive back will be double.  They shall enjoy the wealth of people from nations who are grateful for such profound spiritual instruction, and such a miraculous example.

            But the prophet also intentionally blurs the pronouns in verse 7, so it is not completely clear whether the ones who receive the double portion of joy are the Jews or the Gentiles who come to learn from them.  As with any good relationship between teachers and learners, the benefits will be mutual.

            And the prophet moves on to stress how God loves justice, and hates robbery and dishonesty.  The people will be well-compensated according to the awful sacrifices they have made.  God keeps to God’s promises; God is not unfair or cheap.  If anything, God is overly generous in bestowing blessings and forgiveness upon the people, now apparently including the Gentiles.

                

IV.

            This passage is about people who have known great tragedy and heartbreak and pain, who have been miraculously delivered by God, who now receive from God a holy vocation: to dwell in the power of God’s Spirit and build together a new kind of society, a society that will be so amazing and wonderful that people will come from all over and contribute of their wealth just to learn about it.

            As such this chapter is a model for the gathering of followers of Jesus the Messiah.  It is a model for the church.  The church was never supposed to be this domesticated institution where people learn to be good citizens of the State and dependable cogs in the economy.  It was never supposed to be about educating people in social conformity and conventional morality.  It certainly was not supposed to be a place where our inequalities and classes, violence and injustice, were rationalized and even taught.

            Rather, it was supposed to be a living alternative to all that.  The church is where the lowly are lifted up and the arrogant brought down.  It is a place where grief and mourning are turned into joy, where diseases are healed, and the shattered, broken, crumbling places are made new and strong.  It is a place without robbery and dishonesty.   It is a seedbed, a garden where righteousness and praise sprout and grow and blossom in the sight of everyone!

            The church of the Messiah Jesus is supposed to be a place so astonishingly different and wonderful that strangers and foreigners will pay to be a part of it, to learn what the followers of Jesus know, and to have the kind of life together that the followers of Jesus have.

            It is safe to say that we haven’t lived up to that model.  But God is always calling us to it.  And that call never gets old.  It is always right here, within us, closer to us than we are to ourselves.  And all we have to do is turn to it, and covenant together to live this way.

V.

            In our gospel reading we hear again about John, who goes out to the wilderness, the desert, to testify and witness to the Light who was coming into the world.  He deliberately follows in the footsteps of the great and prototypical prophet Elijah, who also challenged the injustice and corruption of his day from the same wilderness.

            John says to his interrogators that while he baptizes with water someone greater than he stands with and among the people, unrecognized.  That Light of God’s Word is here among us, within us even.  And we are so slow to recognize, let alone welcome him.  But we may.

            For we too are baptized.  And in our baptism we too are anointed by the Holy Spirit.  God has sent us as well to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release for captives, and liberation for prisoners, to proclaim Jubilee, the year of God’s favor, and to comfort all who mourn.  God has called us into the ruined, wrecked, and poisoned places, to be agents of renewal, forgiveness, grace, and blessing.  God has called us to witness to God’s victory, and to cultivate God’s righteousness and joy before all the nations.

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