Pentecost 23 Year C Proper 28    Isaiah 65: 17-25  Luke 21:5-19    

A sermon from Linda Mackie Griggs     

                                 

                                                                          

Often when I read a book I kind of temporarily obsess over it. I’ll see connections with it in news stories and in conversations, and this keeps up for awhile until I pick up the next book on my stack and find a new obsession. So it shouldn’t surprise those of you who I’ve been chatting with lately that David Brooks’ book, The Second Mountain has been part of my pre-sermon pondering.

In a nutshell Brooks suggests that many of us lead a two-phased life; the first phase is like a mountain, which we climb when we are younger and establishing our unique identities and accomplishments. We strive for the right career, the house, the family, the nest egg, the dog… Summiting that first mountain is a big accomplishment. Later, we may find ourselves questioning those ego-driven priorities of first mountain achievement, acquisition and individual self-fulfillment.

Whether brought on by life transition, financial or health crisis, loss of a loved one or relationship, the journey toward the second mountain involves existential questions like “Why am I here?” “Is this all there is?” “What now?” Confronting these questions, says Brooks, takes us downward into a valley of humility, vulnerability, and often pain that, if we let it, eventually leads us to the new heights of the second mountain, governed not by the ego, but by heart and soul—a new life of generosity, creativity, joy, and renewed relationships.

Spoiler alert: Brooks is telling us that our world is desperately in need of an army of Second Mountaineers. We can possibly intuit this. But lest we need persuading, the facts that he lays out are stunning and stark. 

I only heard the term “deaths of despair” recently, and didn’t know that it’s actually a medical phrase that includes three behavior-related medical conditions; drug overdose, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease, all of which are connected to social isolation. Loneliness. Brooks says that we’ve done too good a job of empowering our individuality—we’ve gotten so hyper-individualistic that we’ve come to think we don’t need anyone—and now, to borrow the title of Robert Putnam’s book, we literally and figuratively bowl alone—emblematic of a serious decline in community and civic engagement. And it’s taking a toll. Here are some numbers: Overall the suicide rate in this country has gone up 30 percent since 1999. Between 2006 and 2016 the suicide rates for those between ages 10 and 17 rose by 70 percent.

Please let that sink in. Ten-year-olds are included in suicide statistics.

Life expectancy in this country has declined for the third year in a row. The last time that happened was early in the last century, and it was influenced by a world war and a global flu pandemic.

I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime…

These words of hope are offered to a people intimately acquainted with despair. The beautiful yearning passage that we’ve heard today was written for the  people of Israel, who had been traumatized by the destruction of their home and a generation spent in exile. The Temple—the center of their faith and icon of everything they trusted, had been thrown down; not one stone left upon another. And now Isaiah writes for a people returned from Babylon, and he is excited.

“…be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.”

Isaiah expresses a vision of complete renewal of Israel; the erasure of traumatic memories and the creation of a world that is safe and just. God will be ever present and responsive: “Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.” A world at peace. Beautiful. Achingly beautiful for anyone who has felt that their world was falling apart.

I learned a couple of interesting things when I consulted our wise neighbor Rabbi Howard Voss-Altman about this reading. First, and most important, he confirmed the sense of immediacy in the passage. While it is common to read through a Christian lens and assume that Isaiah is referring to some kind of a heavenly vision of what the world will look like after it ends, this would be wrong. As Rabbi Howard says, “We’re not about heaven.” The Christian idea of heaven is not the “new heavens” that Isaiah is writing about.

What he’s writing about is a world that is to be co-created by God and God’s people together. This passage is a joyful reminder that God’s people, inspired by their Creator, are the builders of the wondrous, just, fair and peaceful world that Isaiah envisions. And then, when that world is created, God will bestow the gift of long life: “for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be…”

The prophetic call is for now. Now, when the world seems to be crumbling around us. Now, when social isolation is killing us. Now, as society retreats into the echo chambers of our tribal fears. Now, as Luke says, among wars and insurrections, famines, plagues, and persecutions. Now, when we are sunk in the valley, is when we are called to look in hope toward the Second Mountain.

David Brooks writes of Second Mountain people as the ones who–neighbor by neighbor, conversation by conversation, potluck by potluck, community action meeting by community action meeting– the ones who are re-weaving the fabric of American society by establishing and re-establishing relationships.

Brooks writes of the importance of “thick” institutions, communities and societies, which are defined by people who are keenly aware of their interdependence and the importance of meaningful relationships. Thick organizations and institutions are centered around a physical location where people meet regularly. They have collective rituals, shared tasks, a creed of some kind, and watch over and care for one another. Brooks continues,

They often tell and retell a sacred origin story about themselves. Many experienced a moment when they nearly failed, and they celebrate the heroes who pulled them from the brink…They point to an ideal that is far in the distance and can’t be achieved in a single lifetime.

Sound familiar? He’s talking about Church! Of course he’s not just talking about church, but if he’s going to posit the need of thick institutions to help reweave the fabric of society, who can possibly be better positioned to do that than the Body of Christ?

If he’s going to talk about the importance of relationship and interdependence as an antidote to fear-based tribalism, who better than those whose life of faith centers on a Trinitarian God who defines the very concept of relationality and interdependence? Who better? We’re already here; we don’t need to be invented. We only need, with the grace of God and the guidance of the Spirit, to be renewed and transformed to meet the challenges that confront us.

We just need to believe it of ourselves. The task is bigger than a single lifetime, but that simply means there’s no time to waste.

Luke’s vision of a world in its last days is not the only thing that confronts us in today’s Gospel. The world is ending for someone, somewhere, every day; the numbers don’t lie. One more number: sixteen. The perpetrator of the latest school shooting in California on Thursday—it was his sixteenth birthday.

We can’t keep losing our children.

We are called—today, now—to testify to the hope that is in us—the hope that is our foundation as the Body of Christ. We are called to testify in word and action to the love of God who sustains us; to hold on to hope; to proclaim it, and most important, to become it.

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox…they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

Tonight

Tonight, we gather to honor Martin, our patron. Martin was a man whose life expressed his deep concern for others. Martin believed that violence was against Christ’s call but also understood faithfulness to duty. After a period of military conscription, he devoted the rest of his life to the pursuit of holiness, at first in pursuit of his own spiritual quest but eventually in a wider service of the community. Let us pray for his spirit to infuse us- so that like Martin we may not be found wanting in witnessing to Christ in our own day through lives of holiness in action.

Tonight, we have an opportunity to celebrate the completion of a major restoration of our beautiful church. As we move into the first years of a new century in our parish life, the lot has fallen to us to meet some serious restoration challenges in order to secure the integrity of our church building for the next 100 years. Some might say it’s a piece of bad luck that the need to meet this challenge fell to us on our watch. But God raises up the right people for the task at the right time through the quality of leadership from John Bracken and David Brookhart as Church Wardens, and the professional expertise of Peter Lofgren as supervising architect.

There is a growing realization in the community that without the impetus of a big challenge, would we be able to move beyond our comfortable expectations to forge the foundations of a renewed vision for our future?

What’s in a word?

I have been thinking about church as a word. Is it not odd that we use the same word to speak about the building as well as the community? It’s important to remember that the church (ecclesia) first described the community and only later came to refer to the building in which the church met.

Over the last year we have come to speak of the restoration of the church when referring to the renovation of the physical structure. The greater challenge, however, is to remember that when we speak about the restoration of the church we are also speaking about the renewal of the community. For we have a church, yes. Yet more importantly, we are the church.

Is restoration an expression of our love for God or is it a significant distraction from our primary purpose?

The expenditure of considerable financial resources on the building begs important questions about our priorities. Is it an expression of our love for God or is it a significant distraction from our primary purpose? There is room for disagreement here. However, none of us believe that God’s primary concern is for our building. Nevertheless, we do intuit that our building articulates an ages-old human aspiration to be associated with something greater than ourselves and the utilitarian priorities of our age.

Having a church is only important when it is one of the ways we identify ourselves as being the church.

As history shows, a church as a building can easily overshadow our awareness of the church as a community. While the two go hand-in-hand, they also sit in an uneasy and often confusing tension. The only insight I have to offer here is that we must hold this tension between having a church and being the church. Because, having a church is only important when it is one of the ways we identify ourselves as being the church.

A lesson from history

In 587, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, taking those who lived within the Jerusalem Beltway of Jewish society into captivity in Babylon. In 539, the Persians invaded Babylon and Cyrus I decreed that the Jews could return home and rebuild their city and temple. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell the story of this return and the struggles and successes encountered in the great national restoration project.

In the OT lesson for tonight we heard about the laying of the foundation stone for the new temple. We heard that the older Priests and Levites wept when they saw this while the rest of the people shouted for joy. The fact that priestly weeping seems juxtaposed with popular joy suggests that the priest wept not for joy but because they remembered the glory of Solomon’s temple and perhaps were dismayed by the reduced scale of the envisaged new project.

We are coming to the end of a discernment process that is attempting to map the community priorities emerging from our restoration project as it moves to the next phase in capital campaign preparation. An initial perusal of the notes taken by dedicated scribes at the cottage gatherings reveals a range of both complementary and clashing priorities.

Tonight’s lesson from the book of Ezra is a salutary reminder that restoration projects trigger an inevitable clash between nostalgia for the past and the framing of a vision fit to meet the changing circumstance demanded by the future. The easy part is to restore the building. Much harder is the task of renewing the community with a vision to carry us forward into a future that will bear very little resemblance to our past.

Through a monumental material and human expenditure by the returning exiles a new temple arose from the ruins of the old. Nehemiah the governor had a dual focus. On the one hand he was responsible for ensuring enough supplies of both materials and labor while protecting the building works from the constant attacks from the neighboring peoples. But what interest me more is his request that Ezra, the Scribe of the Lord, read from the Book of the Law before all the people gathered before the Water Gate.

Nehemiah 8 records the moving depiction of Ezra standing on a wooden podium built for the purpose – a kind of pulpit I suppose, reading from the Book of the Law before all the people. As Ezra read the unfamiliar words of the Law, for it had mostly been forgotten by the people at this point, 12 Levites engaged in a kind of simultaneous interpretation of his words so that the people would understand what was being read to them. In this moving scene we hear all too clearly the echo of our own tension between having a church and being the church; the movement from the restoration of stones to the renewal of spirits, hearts, and minds?

It seems it’s never one or the other – church as building or church as community. Both exist in an oscillating tension – a balancing movement, back and forth between the two.

In the tonight’s NT lesson from his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul weaves a wordplay between the material and the spiritual by using an analogy to a physical building to speak about the life of the Spirit within and between us.

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? …. for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.

1 Cor 3:10

I would propose the litmus test for us is when church as building ceases to be an inspiration for and expression of church as community – only then will it be the time to abandon our buildings to decay.

Church as a building – is for Paul really the metaphor for Church as the community. Remember the word first applied to the community and only later to the building where the community met. I would propose the litmus test for us is when church as building ceases to be an inspiration for and expression of church as community – only then will it be the time to abandon our buildings to decay.

There are three key resources that sustain our community life. The commitment and vision of our members, the dedication and skill of our staff, and the quality and serviceability of our buildings. These three key resources are infused by the Holy Spirit – who is always present among us. The Holy Spirit makes her presence known to us when we gather for worship, when in small ministry groups we embed the Bible to continually reshape our vision, and when we reach out to others in acts of solidarity.

Tonight, we gather to honor Martin, our patron. Martin was a man whose natural bent was to care for others. Only reluctantly did he take on the burdens of community leadership. But he fulfilled the responsibilities of pastor and bishop as dual aspects of his response to God’s call. Let us pray for his spirit to infuse us- so that like Martin we may not be found wanting in witnessing to Christ in our own day through lives of holiness in action.