O Lord, in distress they sought you, they poured out a prayer when your chastening was on them.
17 Like a woman with child, who writhes and cries out in her pangs when she is near her time, so were we because of you, O Lord;
18 we were with child, we writhed, but we gave birth only to wind. We have won no victories on earth, and no one is born to inhabit the world.
19 Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead! (New Revised Standard Version)
“Escape Routes: How the
Christmas Story Points Us Forward,” Week Three
The
rolling countryside estate isn’t what you think it is—or was, for that matter.
For years, it belonged to one of the most notorious villains of the late 20th
century, the Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, who was shot by police in 1993
after amassing a fortune that, today, would be worth well over $50 billion.
Those ill-gotten gains came from his cartel’s monopoly on the cocaine trade in
the United States and all of the attendant violence that came with such an
illicit monopoly.
But
his former country estate a few hours outside of Medellin? It is being
transformed into, of all things, a safari. And not the sort of one where filthy
rich tycoons who have more money than they can spend splurge to trophy hunt exotic
animals, but a family-friendly one that parents and children can enjoy and,
hopefully, learn something new about the natural world and who we share it
with.
That
is about as fundamental a transformation as any piece of property can likely
undergo—to be used to serve the whims of a drug lord and murderer to go to acting
as a sanctuary for animals and a place of wonder and education for children.
And when transformation is often over-talked about and under-executed—meaning that
it makes for a nice buzzword, especially in a church that always loves a good
born-again story, but few of us really and truly undertake it.
We
don’t much care for such an effort—think of the ease with which we abandon
exercise routines or healthy eating. Think of how, in movies, the effort a
protagonist takes into learning a new skill or transforming themselves is compacted
into a short montage of clips set to The Eye of the Tiger.
Yet
we must embrace such transformation. The season of Advent demands nothing less
of us.
This
is a new sermon series for a new church year—while the calendar year doesn’t
turn over for another couple of weeks, the church year begins with the season
of Advent, a preparatory time set aside for us to live out the exhortation of
John the Baptist, who, quoting Isaiah, encourages us to prepare the way of the
Lord and to make straight His path.
We
look at our own path to Jesus and typically want it to be as straight and as
easy as possible as well—a simple beaming up to the mother ship when the time
comes would do for us, never mind the fact that the journey is what defines the
destination.
So
how can we prepare a way when we are trying to escape the world upon which that
path rests? Can we instead escape the hell we create in this world and this
life, confident that our doing so veers us away from hell in the next?
That
is the premise of a book by Johann Christoph Arnold, a pastor in the Christian
communitarian church, the Bruderhof, who sadly passed away this past spring.
Just before he passed, I had settled upon his book, Escape Routes, as the template for this year’s Advent sermon
series, and I hope to do that justice. We began this series two weeks ago with
a passage from his chapter entitled, “Success,” and moved on last week to
another passage from his chapter entitled, “Suffering.” Today, we arrive at a
passage from his chapter called, “Rebirth:”
Real transformation is
the opposite of self-improvement. It is one thing…to spruce up an old wall by
covering it with a new coat of paint; quite another to check for dry rot or
termites and replace every damaged board. The cosmetic solution costs less, at
least upfront, whereas the structural one, which requires far greater changes,
also requires far more labor and time. But if that is what is needed, that is
what must be done. Even if the new paint is shiny, the surface will soon prove
itself insufficient to save the wall, and in the end, more will be lost than
was temporarily saved.
As with the house, so
with each of us. We can…spend the greater part of our lives repainting
ourselves. Upgrading our computer, replacing the old car, shedding those extra
pounds, going to the hairstylist to try the newest look. Deep down, however, we
all know that none of these changes can bring lasting happiness. Deep down, all
of us sense that to some extent, the hells of our lives are related to the
brokenness of our own hearts and minds, and that this brokenness is the most
vital thing we must examine and fix.
The
notion that transformation is necessary isn’t new, or even revolutionary,
really. But it is supremely difficult because we are extraordinarily talented
at coming up with all sorts of reasons and all sorts of excuses to avoid it,
even when—especially when—transformation is in our best interests.
Isaiah,
I think, realized this. He was a much earlier prophet than either Jeremiah or
Ezekiel, who we spent weeks one and two of this series with. However, the
political, religious, and existential scenario he faced was a bit similar:
Israel fell to Assyria in 722 BCE, and subsequently, the southern kingdom of
Judah where Isaiah prophesied was in this state of ongoing tension of whether
they too might be conquered by the Assyrians. Jeremiah and Ezekiel faced down
the same threat with the Babylonians; the difference being, of course, that the
Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II was entirely successful where the Assyrian
king Sennacherib was limited: Judah was completely subdued by the Babylonians,
whereas Judah retained at least a modicum of independence from the Assyrians as
a vassal state.
What
does all of this background have to do with these three verses in Isaiah 26?
The whole chapter is a song extolling the strength of Judah and a beseeching
for permanent peace, even though the people have followed masters other than
God. These three verses, though, highlight the need for birth—for rebirth—in the
kingdom, and in such a way that the pains of that birthing and rebirthing are
central to the prophecy.
Imagine
laboring and suffering in pain to create something, or someone, and all you
gave birth to instead, as Isaiah writes, was the wind. That is no victory, the
prophet says, yet the victory is revealed in the very next verse: the dead shall
live, their bodies shall rise, and those who dwell in the dust will awake and rejoice,
and the earth will give birth—there’s that phrase again—to those long dead.
It’s
a resurrection. A mass resurrection at that. A fundamental transformation from
death back into life. At a time when the prospect of death to Assyria was an
increasingly frequent possibility.
We
can choose to cope with that prospect of being conquered by sin in all its
forms—prejudice, hatred, oppression—as best we can, or we can choose to embrace
the resurrection Isaiah describes, and the resurrection of the Christ child who
will be born unto us just eight short days from now.
That
choice to make is ours, and ours alone. We make it every single day in how we
choose to treat each other, how we choose to treat ourselves, and how we choose
to treat the world. Will we live for the future, or go for broke burning bridges
and sending the future for our progeny up in smoke?
God’s
answer was clear. Faced with the option of writing humanity off once more as
God did with the flood, God instead chose, and continues to choose,
relationship and reconciliation in the form of this baby boy whose birth we are
soon to celebrate.
May we choose likewise ourselves, the ways of
relationship and reconciliation as we too seek the transformation and resurrection
of which the prophet Isaiah speaks, of which an estate outside of Medellin
experienced, and of which God’s presence in our lives represents.
We’re
seven days away from the Eve, and eight away from Christmas Day itself. We’re
almost there. Keep on the path, my friends.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
December
17, 2017
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