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Sermon - The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 10th August 2008
St Alban’s Epping 7:00am and 8.00 am
Readings: Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 Psalm 105:1-6, 16-22, Romans 10: 4-15, Matthew 14:22-36
Verse 15 of Romans 10 quotes part of Isaiah 52:7;
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the one who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”
The scene is the forlorn, hopeless, abandoned city of Jerusalem.
The Babylonians have their ruthless way about everything. The Babylonian armies are powerful; the Babylonian rules are harsh; the Babylonian gods prevail. All things Jewish are diminished. The city of Jerusalem is gone and its glory departed. The covenant appears terminated. It all turned out to be a bad gamble with God. The gloominess of the scene is one we might feel if we try to think about peace in our world.
Yet if peace is to come, it will come on the tongues of people who, out of uncommon faith and nervy speech, dare to say something new; because we have been given the responsibility to proclaim the good news of God’s new realities. God does reign!
Isaiah speaks, tied up in exile, surrounded by defeated Jews who had lost heart. In such a situation, he constructs this imaginative scene. Then the watch keepers on the wall start to sing and shout and dance, because as they look over the hills to the north toward Babylon, they see a runner coming, a messenger. They can tell by the way the messenger runs that there is good news. They had hoped while there was no real hope. Faith in Jesus brings hope to all who believe and with the ability to do apparently impossible feats, those who bring good tidings can beat the odds and bring peace.
Your God, the God of Israel, the Lord of the Exodus, the one who fells cities and gives offspring to barren women, the one who seemed to be defeated by the Babylonian, this God has now gone back into the dispute and won. That is the heart of the gospel that this God, who seemed to be defeated, in fact, is the God who governs. He who was dead and buried is alive and bringing peace to all who accept him.
Peace, good, salvation and liberation together assert that this God has reclaimed power and what this God is about to do is restore community, wellbeing and life-giving order. That peace is specifically characterized as the rule of God that entails wellbeing and liberation. Peace is derived from affirming that God governs and will have God’s way.
Babylonian authority, technology, intelligence and hardware seemed beyond challenge. People were docile and obedient and passive and hopeless, because it seemed that Babylonian modes of reality were absolute and eternal. The early Christians were defeated, docile, scared and hopeless.
The rule of God’s peace turns out to be more powerful and more decisive than anything Babylon, or the world, can do. As early as the Exodus, the power of Egypt seemed stronger, but Moses and Miriam assert the rule of the God of freedom and justice.
It is no different in the New Testament, where the power of Roman oppression or the power of harsh law or the power of guilt and death seem always to dictate our life. Then there is the gospel that announces that all of these powers that rob us of our humanness have lost their legitimacy and their clout and their credibility and we are free to go home. That is why those who keep watch danced and sang and the messenger hurried, because God’s power permitted Israel to go home.
What is so stunning about this is that this gospel ends the fixity of the world. Is it not assumed among us that there will always be terror in such places the Middle East and Zimbabwe? Of course it seems it will always be so.
However, we know those who keep watch on the wall do not cease to expect. We know about the power of this God. Wherever “Your God rules” is blurted out breathlessly, there the fixities of the terrorism and fear and hatred are dismantled. The world is made available again for peace and new life is possible.
None the less, new life and peace are not possible unless there are those who watch, unless there are runners who run, unless there is news of victory, unless there are moments when the fixities are shattered. Peace is an act of God’s rule that shatters all the tired ways in which we have organized the world.
This assertion of peace is a liturgical, poetic act of imagination. The scripture of Isaiah 52 is poetry. Peace is, first of all, a poetic, imaginative, liturgical enterprise. It depends on having the freedom and imagination to speak of the world differently.
Because of our baptism, we trust a different worldview and we believe a man who does the unexpected. Characteristically, Christians speak differently, which thus shapes the world differently. When we say, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you,” or “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” this poetic speech asserts that the world is indeed under the rule of this other God.
We must start speaking seriously to each other about the rule of God over the troublesome, peace-less parts of our life, in order to find out if we believe our own worldview. To be able to say to each other “Your God reigns” could be the beginning of a new way in the world. Because if we start with very poetic speech, such as “Your God reigns” or “Peace be with you” then we find ourselves publishing peace and good and liberation. The foremost peace action of the church is to recover our own language of God’s rule to find out if we mean it. To assert the rule of God is not to be stupid in a dangerous world. But it is to begin to turn loose of the fear that immobilizes.
It is a dream and a hope. It is a subversive peacemaking activity, because it announces that the empire is finished. At a liturgical level, we shall have to decide if we believe enough to make such a remarkable claim in the face of enduring imperial power.
Peacemaking requires that serious people go back home to the places from which we have been exiled. Going back home means to return to our places of obedience with new liberty and imagination.
We are so alienated from our true life, so habituated in this other world, that we no longer notice how alien it is. We are children of the language of competition and the ideology of individualism, of the practice of fear and hate and greed, so that it feels to us normal.
The Isaiah and Paul come to people like us to say that this is not our home. We have forgotten our home. We don’t belong to the military system that tries to find security through armed strength. We don’t belong to the consumer ideology that believes more is better. We don’t belong to the propaganda that believes the world is divided up into camps.
So, where do we who have been baptised belong? To go home is to become who we are baptised to be. Home is to be engaged, wherever we have access, in the chores and tasks of peacemaking, to become peaceable people who know that the world is ordered and willed by God toward peace.
Imagine the nerve and freedom and power of the Jews who believed Isaiah’s words. They stood tall in the face of the empire. They mocked the fears and hopes of the empire.
Peacemaking depends on believing we have the power to stand tall in the face of the empire. The baptised disciples of Jesus disengage and stand tall and refuse to have our hearts and imagination administered by others, because we know our place is in the midst of the peace making of our society.
Against the dominant value system that does not blush and that keeps on lying, it is the task of the peacemaking church to grieve, to speak the truth, to dismantle, to turn loose, to face the exile, all for the sake of peace. The only way from here to there, from despair to hope, from death to new life, is by way of weeping, of grief, of exile.
The primary peacemaking work of the church is to consider the story of crucifixion and resurrection again, to see in what ways it really is our story, to see what must be given up to death in order to be surprised by God’s new life.
It is the central vocation of the church to reshape our public imagination around different images. The real issue is that we must learn to discern all of life, personal and public, around the truth telling and the surprise of Jesus, around the strange cost of letting go of the city and the equally strange gift of receiving a future from God.
The church tradition knows something unshakably true about peacemaking. It goes like this: “Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses her life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35). That is as true with public policy as with prayer. It is the strange central insight of the gospel.
We know of no alternative to this truth. Peace begins in communities of bleeding that will give their life. That bleeding may indeed lead to repentance, then to healing, and finally to homecoming, and with it, peace.
This sermon prepared using the sources of www.sojo.net and “A World Available For Peace Images of Hope from Jeremiah and Isaiah” by Walter Brueggemann