Westminster Presbyterian Church
1200 Marquette Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(612) 332-3421
www.westminstermpls.org
What Did the Prophets Preach?
Tim Hart-Andersen
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Isaiah 11:1-9; Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 3:1-6
Last Thursday at the Interfaith Thanksgiving service at Plymouth
Congregational Church the Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs and I offered a dialogue
sermon. Jim Bear is a member of the Mohican tribe that originally lived in
the east along the Hudson River valley, but was pushed westward and
now lives in Wisconsin. We invited Jim Bear to offer a Native American
perspective on the national holiday.
After noting the irony of a church called Plymouth inviting an indigenous
speaker on Thanksgiving, Jim Bear said that for Native people the holiday
is a painful one. It marks the beginning of a displacement that continues
unabated four centuries later. They reject the one-sided American
Thanksgiving Myth.
He also said that the very idea of reserving one day a year for gratitude is a
strange concept to Native Americans. “Thanksgiving is our way of life,” he
said. “We don’t restrict it only to one day.”
He went on to urge us to think of the bricks and stones of our buildings,
and give thanks for the earth from which they came. “Remember the paper
on which your sacred texts are written,” he said, “And give thanks for the
trees.”
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His view was a long one, reaching back and within to a deep awareness of
humankind being woven into Creation from the beginning.
That’s a helpful point of view, especially as we head into the season of
Advent, which culminates on December 25. We tend to think of Christmas
as occurring one day in December, at the end of four weeks of preparation.
It happens, and it’s over. One day, not a way of life.
This year in Advent, as we ready ourselves for the birth of Jesus, we will
try to open a longer view of incarnation, one that commences not at the
manger, not with Mary’s pregnancy, and not even with the word of the
ancient prophets. We will take our cue from the gospel of John that opens
with the declaration that the Word was there in the beginning, and that the
Word became flesh at a particular moment in a particular place. But the
Word is not bound by that time and place, or any particular moment or
place. Advent and Christmas play only a brief, supporting role in the long
life of the Word of God.
John the Baptizer is the one character in the gospels who appears to grasp
the significance of the long-term biblical trajectory. He understands that
incarnation means that the Word there at the beginning of all time is now
being cloaked in human vesture and dwelling among us. He tries his best
to enlighten his followers to the cosmic dimensions of the birth of Jesus.
He quotes the prophet Isaiah:
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be
filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked
shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh
shall see the salvation of God.” (Luke 3:4-6)
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For the Thanksgiving service the clergy agreed we would speak of the
holiday not as a kind of early 17th-century kum-bah-yah in the woods
between grateful Europeans and their new Native friends, but rather, as a
season of struggle that continues today. After all, the national holiday was
not formally established until 1863, during the greatest time of struggle in
the history of this land, the Civil War. Recognizing the deep and violent
division in the country, President Lincoln declared a day of national
thanksgiving in an effort to heal the nation’s wounds through the
intentional practice of gratitude.
It was a good start, but one day was clearly not enough. The wounds are
still evident among us. We need a whole lifetime of it.
Christmas, as well, was born of struggle. We hear the prophets preaching
and the words are so familiar they fail to penetrate. But listen to them
again… To make every mountain and hill low is impossible. To make the rough
places smooth is not easy. To lift every valley and make straight what once was
crooked is unrealistic, and may not ever happen.
And that’s the point: the prophetic vision of incarnation calls for what looks like
the impossible. Justice among all people. Peace on earth. Creation restored. It
may take a long time, but one day, one day – Isaiah is convinced of this – all
flesh shall see the salvation of our God.
The ancient seers were not pragmatists. They had no strategy for careful
reform of a system and culture that had strayed from the will of God. Nor
were they narrow-minded and keenly focused. Their vision stretched wide
and extended to all people, making it all the more outlandish. God’s
salvation was not reserved for one tribe only. All flesh shall see it, Isaiah
declared.
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The prophetic approach is to cast bold and far-reaching imagination into
the wind, knowing it may be blown far from where and when it was
supposed to land. The prophets are dreamers of the implausible:
“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead
them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down
together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” (Isaiah 11:6-7)
It’s absurd, but what better way to say that when God’s intentions are
fulfilled enemies will sit at table and feast together? What better way to
point out that for too long we have lived in fear of one another? What
better way to imagine a just world where the powerful at the center and the
vulnerable on the margins come together in common cause – and all
creation rejoices?
As I worked with Jim Bear to prepare for Thanksgiving he spoke of the
significance of the Standing Rock encampment to Native peoples
everywhere. “What’s happening in North Dakota is not simply about a
pipeline,” he said.
“It’s the largest gathering ever in this land of indigenous tribes – well over
100. It a collective cry against historic and continuing injustice toward
Native people, as well as a lament for the earth itself.”
As I listened he began to sound like an Advent prophet. The prospects of
Native people defeating vast energy interests backed by the government in
an effort to protect land and water are not good. The chance of their
recovering any of what they have lost over the last 400 years is far-fetched.
The possibility of all those abrogated treaties somehow being reinstated
and now enforced is laughable. But still they dream.
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The prophets of ancient Israel faced similar odds. They, too, were a tiny
minority with little influence. The powers of their time were arrayed
against them. All they had was a voice, but they concluded it should be
used.
Never mind that wolves do not lie down with lambs and mountains resist
being brought low, and energy companies do not easily give ground and
history cannot be undone and renewing creation will take time; so what if
lifting a valley make take ages and restoring rights is a quixotic effort led
by a little child: the vision of justice God intends for the earth and its
people needs to be proclaimed and pursued anyway.
And one day all flesh shall see it.
Here’s Jeremiah:
“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the
promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.”
That long-ago promise was the Word given at the very dawn of all time.
“In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up
for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”
(Jeremiah 33:14-15)
Prophets preach their unlikely vision from a position of hope. It’s where
God’s work among us started, after all: In the beginning was the Word. And
the Word was hope.
Advent links us to the age-old ache of a Creator for the members of the
human family willing to live in harmony with one another and all creation.
It’s a long-shot, but it’s the stuff dreams of incarnation are made of.
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Poet Lisel Mueller says this of Hope:
It hovers in dark corners
Before the lights are turned on,
It shakes sleep from its eyes
And drops from mushroom gills,
It explodes in the starry heads
Of dandelions turned sages,
It sticks to the wings of green angels
That sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye
Of the many-eyed potato,
It lives in each earthworm segment
Surviving cruelty,
It is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
It is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born
It is the singular gift
We cannot destroy in ourselves,
The argument that refutes death,
The genius that invents the future,
All we know of God.
Hope is in this season, wanting to put on flesh and be born among us,
longing to lead us toward a just world and a sustainable creation.
When that day comes let’s make it last, you and I. Let’s make it our way of
life.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
*****
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Pastoral Prayer ~8:30 am Worship
Doug Mitchell
Good and Gracious God, we are a people who have sat in darkness, not
knowing our way, but today we celebrate Your decision to send one who
has always been one with you, now in bodily form among us to bring to us
a great light. Jesus, Your Word among us has brought life into being in a
new way which is our light and the light of all people.
Almighty God, in Jesus Christ you dealt with spirits that darken minds or
set people against themselves or against each other. Give peace to those
who are torn by conflict or depression. Help us to know that your divine
way is the way of peace, a peace in which the wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling
together, and a little child shall lead them.
We thank you for giving us a vision of what a just peace will look like. The
strong will dwell with the weak – which means the powerful will use their
power to protect and care for those who have been without power. It will
be a time when the privileged yield their status and share it. As the
prophets often say when calling forth the image of the holy realm of God,
“They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”
In the advent season, when the past has fled, unmasked away and there is
nothing left to do but wait in your holy time O God, shelter us. Be our
surrounding comfort; be fertile soil out of which hope springs in due time.
On this Thanksgiving weekend, we praise you Eternal Creator and
Redeemer of all that is, giving thanks for the gifts of community and of
your church. Though we were born children of earth, you have taken us
up in your arms and made us children of heaven. Let your spark of divine
love glow within us once more, that through our lives, others will come to
know your grace, power, love and justice.
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Holy comforter, healing Spirit, grant your peace to those who are sick, and
to those who grieve this morning. We pray that your healing touch be felt
by those who are in the hospital and those recovering from illness or
surgery…
God of comfort, stand with those who sorrow for the death of loved ones.
Let them be sure in the knowledge that neither death nor life, nor things
present nor things to come, shall separate us from your love…
And as we remember your great love, we pray together the prayer that
Jesus taught us, Our Father…
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