A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter AldrichA Beautiful Ending
Isaiah 65:17-25
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
22 December 2024
We humans long for a beautiful ending. Not just the fairy tale happily ever after, but in the biggest and grandest sense of the idea. We dream and long for history to arrive at a beautiful ending, whether that’s the communist utopia or the kingdom of God or a scientific techno culture that has expanded human habitation into the stars. The historian John Jeffries Martin has revealed the ways in which this vision of a beautiful ending not only animates our religious ideas but is also embedded in our modern political ideas, which imagine a better, more just world of freedom and equality.
This Advent we’ve been exploring the beautiful endings imagined by the Hebrew prophets. And, in particular, how those visions of God’s redemption are rooted in the here and now, with rather ordinary, mundane visions of the good life—old people at rest, children playing, young people making merry, everyone with plenty of food to eat, where work is fulfilling and we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, where the disabled are included, people feel safe and secure, where griefs are comforted, and together we joyfully celebrate with dancing and music.
And today’s reading from the Book of Isaiah adds to the wonderful imagery. The poet dreams of a new heaven and a new earth. God is about the work of new creation, and that new creation will be filled with joy and delight. The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes about this passage, “[God] is moving beyond what is troubling and unresolved to what is wondrously new and life giving.”
And what will this newness look like? Again it is very practical, very here and now. God is creating a new city, a new social arrangement. Walter Brueggemann identifies three qualities of this divinely new society.
First, there will be “stability and order that guarantees long life.” In a world of violence, where lives are so often cut short by the bombs of war or a random shooter, what a blessed dream that we could be safe enough to enjoy long life free of those horrors.
The second quality of Isaiah’s vision is economic stability. There will enough to go around. Our work will not be in vain. We will not live in fear that someone else will take what we have worked for. Here’s how Brueggemann describes it:
[God] will be the guarantor of a viable, community-sustaining economy. . . . Nobody is threatened. Nobody is at risk. Nobody is in jeopardy because the new city has policies, practices, and protective structures that guarantee . . . an egalitarian possibility.
And the final quality of the beautiful ending Isaiah imagines—“an agenda of well-being for our children.”
This October, Wendell Berry, the great American poet, essayist, and social critic, who is a deep person of faith and a Kentucky farmer, wrote a scathing cover article for The Christian Century entitled “Against Killing Children” in which he condemns our society for not “prevent[ing] our own children from being killed in their classrooms—and who do not much mind the killing of other people’s children by weapons of war.” According to Berry, we have become the exact opposite of what Isaiah envisions. Ours is not a society that prioritizes the well-being of children.
Yet, in the face of our troubled, disappointing reality, we return again and again to visions like Isaiah’s. We want to imagine something new, something better. We long for this. We want to prepare for it. We keep waiting and hoping for the beautiful ending.
Advent, of course, is the season of hope. A season of waiting and preparation. The beautiful ending isn’t here yet, it’s still coming. We are still longing for it. We can imagine it, maybe even begin to taste it, but it isn’t here yet. We’re doing what we can to prepare for it—hoping, loving each other, enjoying life, and practicing peace. But, we are still waiting.
And, truth be told, we keep on waiting. For all the fun and excitement of Christmas morning, we know that when we return to normal routines next week, the world won’t have radically shifted, the beautiful ending will not have finally arrived in all its wonder.
Which is one of the many reasons I appreciate the liturgical calendar of the church. In the cycle of the year, our worship focuses on so many human emotions and experiences. All of us have Good Fridays, for instance—days of deep and despairing darkness when all seems lost. We also have Easter moments—filled with new life, the bright sunshine of a new dawn, a chance to begin again. We face Ash Wednesdays, when we are confronted by our own limitations, our mortality, our vulnerability, our weaknesses, our sins. But there are also Pentecost moments in our lives where we are filled with spirit, on fire with passion, capable of amazing things.
It’s not that every year we are in the same emotional place on the same day as the church calendar. But all these aspects of the human condition are explored each year and over and over again, reminding us that our spirituality and our faith flow from and are present in all the varied aspects of our lives.
Advent is that season of waiting and longing. And sometimes what we are waiting and longing for, never quite arrives.
On the Alban Institute blog this week I read a fine essay on the meaning of Advent. When I shared it to the church Facebook group, a few of you responded, including one congregant who wrote, “Thanks for sharing....I'm right there.”
The essay was by Jean Neely, who teaches writing at Azusa Pacific University, and she wrote about the profound depths of this season of longing:
Advent says that there’s room in the church for all of us whose desperate faith is more doubt and longing than steadiness of belief.
Advent is for the eternally bothered, those of us who too keenly feel our own pain and the world’s. The season meets us in our inability to perform “good cheer” or “great faith” when it is not well with our souls.
In Advent, we attend to the heartache over all that has gone awry. We join our yearnings for more love in our homes, our churches and our country; we cry for peace in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Sudan and around the globe.
These reasons Neely articulates are why it is so important for us to observe Advent and not just rush into Christmas. Not everyone is feeling as festive. Each year there are people grappling with new losses and griefs who may want to be in the mood, but just can’t muster it. Each year there are some people stressed out and made anxious by all the holiday preparations. Each year there are some people dreading seeing family. Each year there are some people for whom this season is always difficult, because of their memories of what has happened in the past. Each year there are some people for whom this darkest and coldest part of the year brings on depression. There are always folks who are more “In the Bleak Midwinter” than “Joy to the World!” And Advent is for them.
Jean Neely continues:
This time of year, we get to remember that we’re still in the waiting season, that though the Light has come, we’re still caught in the place of unfulfillment. It’s for all of us who never feel ready for Christmas or who feel like Christmas never quite comes in the ways we’d hoped.
Advent says that it’s OK to still be waiting through Christmas for God to show up. We’re allowed to “always always long for something.” Advent invites us to come with our fragile hope, our dimly flickering faith and our . . . longing to the Christ who welcomes all of who we are.
The great truth of Christmas is that Christ was not born once long ago, but Christ is born anew in each of us every year, all the time. The love, the power, the glory we encounter in Jesus of Nazareth is made available to us in our vulnerability by the Spirit of God that dwells within us.
God is present with us, and empowering us, even in our moments of unsatisfied and unfulfilled longing. And because of that, we dare—despite the present circumstances and whatever might be troubling us—to gather together and lift our praises. To sing with the angels and proclaim with the shepherds, while also pondering like Mary.
Because something good and wonderful and beautiful and true is happening. In us, in others, in the world. And we continue to hope for more of it to break out and spread and bring the change we so desire. And we continue to practice peace, even if this world is violent. And we continue to love, because that’s the greatest gift of all. And we rejoice, because joy is our birthright as children of God.
So, we do all of this together—we wait, we dream, we imagine, we lament and mourn and grieve, we wonder and prepare, we light the candles and ponder the darkness, we sit quietly and we make merry together. We do all of it. Because we continue to long for the beautiful ending, and our eyes are open to see all the little bits of it already present among us.
A Happy Fourth Sunday of Advent.
A Blessed Solstice.
And, a Merry Christmas.
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Jeremiah 31:1-14
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
15 December 2024
Earlier this week, the Rev. Becky McNeil, who used to attend our church here but now lives happily in retirement in Trinidad, Colorado, posted to Facebook a column John Pavlovitz had written for his blog on the negative mental health impacts of staying up with the news these days. Pavlovitz begins:
Growing up, I was taught that knowledge was power.
I used to agree.
Now, I'm beginning to believe differently.
Now, I think it's a pain in the ass.
Right now, knowing is actually the problem.
He continues detailing his daily stress from reading the news, before concluding, “I think responsible people of empathy are suffering from information-poisoning right now.” And in that environment, he’s finding it more difficult to be hopeful.
I was on a panel this week of queer clergy persons speaking to a diversity training at the Omaha Chamber of Commerce and the organizer’s last question to us was “What is something that makes you hopeful right now?” It took us a moment to arrive at good answers. So, I understand Pavlovitz’s feeling. A feeling that’s likely pretty widespread.
But while he admits that being aware is affecting his mental health, he also knows that trying to exist in blissful ignorance is not the solution. That choice, while protecting ones mental health in the short-term, only contributes to the long-term problems facing society.
Instead, he decides:
If there's a way forward, it isn't in knowing less, and so I'll keep reading and learning, while trying to be wise in how and when I absorb the news so I can minimize how much turmoil it creates within me. We all need to selectively expose ourselves to media, having the discipline and restraint to know the difference between awareness and self-harm. There are ways to be blissful without being ignorant, and we all need to seek that balance.
Which isn’t some grand insight, genius solution, but probably the best answer one can give.
So, why bring this up today of all days—Gaudete Sunday, our annual excuse to be gaudy on the Sunday of the liturgical calendar devoted to joy?
Well, the short answer is that if we are to find any comfort in joy, if our sorrows are to be turned into joy, as the prophet Jeremiah imagines, then we have to first start by acknowledging our current circumstances and the things that are troubling us.
This is the great insight of the Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, who writes in his classic little book The Prophetic Imagination that before the prophet can lead us into imagining a new and better world, the prophet first has to speak the truth about what’s going on and invite us to lament for our sorrows.
And in this way the prophet works counter to what Brueggemann calls the “royal-consciousness.” According to Brueggemann the ruling authorities generally don’t want people to lament their current circumstances, and so they often keep them distracted with other things. Roman emperors used gladiatorial contests for this. Lots of rulers throughout history have distracted people from their own failures at governance by starting a war somewhere. These days in the West sometimes the distractions are far easier, coming in the form of easily consumed, saccharine popular culture.
The point of these distractions is to numb people. Brueggemann writes that the prophet must break through the numbness and get people to genuinely feel. The prophet must bring to public attention what is troubling people, the real fears and sorrows of the time.
And no prophet is better about that than Jeremiah. Today’s beautiful vision of the redeemed future is actually not a typical passage from the Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah is most often sad, angry, even bitter. Brueggemann describes it as a “ministry of articulated grief.” When you read this book, you feel the deep emotions of the prophet. Which is exactly what the prophet wants to evoke in you.
Only when the prophet can break through the numbness and get us to genuinely feel, can we then begin to imagine something new.
I think this partially explains the cultural experience this country has gone through the last two weeks after the assassination of the United Health Care CEO. The moment shattered the status quo and broke through the numbness. People have used this opportunity to express their real anger and hurt from the way health care is managed in this country. They employed sarcasm and dark humor to great effect. And the more elites scolded people for not having the “right” reaction to the murder, the more upset people got. This should become a moment then to address the real issues that have been revealed—the epidemic of gun violence, the injustices of the health care system, the feeling of masses of people in this country that they are not heard or seen and that the system is rigged against them.
For Walter Brueggemann, the lesson of the prophets is that newness only comes through weeping. He writes, “The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.”
This vision of the prophet of Jeremiah that we read today is part of a section of Jeremiah called by scholars “the Book of Consolation.” After all the grief, sadness, anger, and bitterness of earlier parts of Jeremiah, now the prophet turns to consoling. And what a beautiful vision it is.
Terence Fretheim, another great Bible scholar who was one of Jim Harmon’s seminary professors, describes this passage:
The return to everyday life of the village, with its familiar tasks and joys, are given special attention. God is imaged as a loving, nurturing parent (both as father and mother), comforting those who sorrow and caring for the needs of a bruised community. It is as if God is finally able to get back to doing what God has always wanted to do for this people.
Our Advent series this year is focusing on an aspect of the vision of God’s deliverance that we find in the Hebrew prophets—it’s everdayness in the here and now. When the Hebrew prophets imagine what God’s redemption of the people will look like, it is not a militaristic triumph. It is not a powerful hero leading the people into a new golden age. It is not some impossible to believe utopia. It’s radicality is in how mundane the visions are. Such as last week in the passage we read from Zechariah where he imagines old folks sitting in the public square and children being free and safe to play.
What does Jeremiah imagine that God’s steadfast love and deliverance will bring the people? That they’ll go dancing with their tambourines. That they’ll plant vineyards and get to enjoy the fruit of their labor. That the children and the disabled will be gathered together. That people will join together in singing over the harvest. That young people will make merry with one another. That priests will be able to eat enough to get fat. But most importantly, sorrows will be consoled. After the tears will come the joy.
What is being imagined is a new creation, built on God’s love for the people. And one that invites the people themselves to participate in what is being created and built. Terence Fretheim proclaims: “Their lives will become like a watered garden, flourishing and fruitful, and they will never (!) languish again.”
Now, to return to Walter Brueggemann’s analysis of the prophetic imagination. After the prophet has broken through the numbness and gotten people to feel, then they can finally move toward something new. Brueggemann calls this “prophetic energizing and the emergence of amazement.”
He writes, “It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God.”
The ruling regime wants to inhibit the imagination from dreaming of new, different, better things. The prophet wants to expand our horizons and get us dreaming, imagining, envisioning all sorts of ways that everything can be better.
What if guns weren’t so easy to get? What if young men were formed in different ways that helped them avoid turning their anger into violence? What if we didn’t have a for-profit health care system? What if people could receive the care they need without all the forms, phone calls, and bureaucratic headaches that pile on the stress and despair? Are any of these really that difficult to imagine?
Here’s Brueggemann again, “The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there.”
What breaks through the despair and provides us hope, according to Brueggemann, is “the language of amazement.”
And here, I think, is the purpose that these joyful visions of ordinary life serve. We can imagine these worlds—where the old folks have a chance to rest, where public spaces are safe, peaceful, and beautiful, where children have the freedom to play, where abundance is shared more equitably, where people receive the care they need when they are hurting, in pain and despair, where youth can make merry with one another, where people sing and dance because they are happy, where we can do the work we find meaningful and enjoy the fruits of that labor, where we all come together to celebrate the achievements of our community.
These are not impossible to imagine. That such a world feels impossible is a result of how we’ve been distracted and numbed and trained to limit our vision for what is possible.
But what’s best about these visions of ordinary life is that they are joyful. They’re just . . . fun. God invites us to have fun. To enjoy ourselves. To enjoy each other. To enjoy our blessings. This isn’t rocket science. We ought to be living lives of delight.
Do not let fear, anger, the bad news rob us of what we deserve as God’s children—JOY!
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