This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on January 19th, 2025, drawing from Isaiah 62:1-5
It’s funny. The main New Testament reading in the lectionary for this week is a truly wonderful, dreadfully important piece of scripture which I imagine a great many churches will be preaching on today. It’s 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 if you’re wondering, and for those of you who aren’t the kind to go diving for your Bibles every time the pastor name-checks a verse, that is the bit about spiritual gifts; the whole “varieties of gifts but the same Spirit” part, to be specific.
It’s one of the greatest hits of Christian homiletics, a verse which you can almost set your calendar by, since you almost always hear it in January at the new year, and again in September when everyone comes back from the summer, because pastors LOVE to remind people to volunteer, to get involved, and to share their gifts with the community. And it’s not a bad message, to be honest; not only that, but it’s one that our community really does need to hear because - if you haven’t heard me ranting either in person or online lately - we do desperately need volunteers for basically everything!
But as I was reading, studying, and writing this week, my eyes just kept getting drawn towards the calendar, towards today’s date; the 19th of January. By itself of course this date means very little; other than being the second Sunday after the Epiphany, it really isn’t anything calendar-wise. It’s an empty, nothing, non-entity of a date. Just another Sunday.
But something about the calendar kept pulling my eyes back again and again, and each time it did I’d grumble slightly, and go back to the lectionary page and try to read again. And when I did, I’d inevitably start at the top of the page, as one does, and there I’d find not the traditional, common, New Testament reading for today, not the well-rehearsed and easily recited passage about spiritual gifts, but the first entry in the lectionary. The Old Testament reading. The reading from the prophet Isaiah.
Which…as you may have noticed…is not the same thing. Not at all.
It took me a few repeats of this before I realized just why its was that my eyes kept pulling me back to the calendar. It wasn’t, as it turns out, about today’s date at all, but about that great big 2-0 looming overhead, resting heavily on Monday morning like a piece of unexploded WWII ordinance lying in a French field somewhere.
Tomorrow, for those of you who may not know, is the American presidential inauguration. The day in which political power switches from the current administration to that which was voted in this past November. For many people, myself included, this is a day of high emotions. And while a lot of us look upon what is coming with a mixture of abject terror and somehow even more abject terror, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge that a great number of people don’t see it this way.
You see, for years now the folks who are coming into power have been spinning this tale about the America that was. This wonderful, beautiful, peaceful version of past America has been described with worshipful tones, treated the kind of pious veneration one might expect to see offered to an actual god. Time and time again, the folks coming into power have painted this image of long-passed perfection, telling the world that if we would but turn around and go back to the way things were, we could be that country again.
So today we find ourselves perched on the precipice of a return to this America of legend, an America which has been dreamed about and fetishized for decades now by those who are coming into power. And they are prepared to take action too; legislation is prepared which would utterly annihilate women's rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, really the rights of anyone other than the rich, white, cisgendered, heterosexual men who held all the power in these mythological bygone days.
These folks aren’t just reminiscing anymore; they’re ready to get to work.
After all, from their point of view, they’ve spent decades wandering in exile from their imaginary promised land, dreaming of a prosperous America with a stay-at-home wife, 2.5 children, a white-picket fence, and all that comes with it in the picture-plant fever dream of the alt-right. And now, everyone who dreamed this great and terrible dream will have the rapturous joy of returning in triumph to the long awaited promised land of an America which is truly, finally great again.
But when they throw open those doors, when they actually return to this place that they’ve built up in their minds as the promised land, as God’s divine country, is that what they’ll truly find there, what we’ll all truly find there?
No.
What they'll find is ruin.
This isn’t a new story, even though it really does feel like one. The Israelites had a very similar experience, when they finally returned to Jerusalem after being held for so long in exile in Babylon. For decades, the leaders of the Israelite diaspora told themselves, told all the people, of the great and golden city of Jerusalem; the promised land, flowing with milk and honey, given them to by the divine grant of God the Creator. After all those years living under the heel of a Chaldean boot, suffering the lash of their Babylonian conquerors, it must have seemed like divine providence when Cyrus the Great, after the Achaemenid Empire laid low the Babylonians, decided to send all the people of Judea home again.
Imagine the excitement, the pure joy of walking that long road home, knowing that at the end of it lay the perfect, beautiful, home that you have been told about for generations, each step bringing you that much closer to the land that was personally promised to you by God, given to your people in perpetuity by divine promise.
Only to turn the corner and find not the golden city of your collective dreams, not the homeland of milk and honey of legend, but a ruined shell run rampant over by two different empires, still smoldering from the last guy who got his kicks by kicking over the Jews.
All that promise, all that expectation, with only ash and ruin as your reward.
This is why the words of the prophet Isaiah matter so much here, not because of the glory they found but because of the glory of what they could become now that all that was old had passed away.
Now that they had returned and seen the truth of what Jerusalem now was, there could be no denying what it was that had brought them to that place. Not the Babylonians, not the Persians, not Nebuchadnezzar II who conquered them, nor Cyrus the Great who released them;
It was Israel which had set the stage for its own destruction.
As it turns out, Solomon the Wise was a great many things, but a wise and good ruler really wasn’t one of them. He took the empire that had been given to him by his father, the United Kingdom of Israel, and absolutely drove it into the ground in an explosion of wealth and extravagance. Under his reign the wealthy and powerful had theretofore unprecedented position and control, and they used it to take absolutely everything they could. Taxes on the poor rose, the wealth gap grew and, before too long, things got really, really out of hand. Unrest began to grow, and the country became unstable. When Solomon finally died, he left in his son a successor who refused to change, to stem the excesses of wealth and power that defined his father’s rule and, as a result we were left not with a prosperous and unified kingdom, but a kingdom divided; split in two.
And, as the Babylonians can attest, a divided kingdom is - before too long - a conquered kingdom.
Do you see it? The greatness of Israel that was so longed for by those in exile, the decadence, excess, and wealth that defined their long-dead kingdom wasn’t something that was granted to them by God; it was the very thing that caused their exile in the first place.
This is why Isaiah matters so very much, why what he’s preaching her is so very important, because he’s not at all promising them the security of wealth and privilege, not promising a vindication based on the reclamation of that which once was.
He’s preaching transformation. He’s not talking about Israel, he’s talking about Hephzibah; not a King to rule with the desolation of iron and gold, but a Queen whose mercies and kindnesses God absolutely delights in.
What Isaiah is telling people, what he absolutely will not be silent about, is the fact that Israel cannot be the same country they were before. There is no “good version” of the Israel that was - King Rehoboam was indignant and unwilling to heed the call to change, King Solomon was destructively indulgent, King David was adulterous, murderous, and waged war against his own son, and King Saul turned against God and committed genocide for his own personal gain.
There is no way to make Israel great again, says God through Isaiah, because it never was great in the first place. Not, at least, in the ways that matter to God.
I wish I could tell you that Israel heeded Isaiah’s words, that they realized the truth of the identity God had instilled in them from the very beginning, and transitioned into a beautiful queen Hephzibah, leaving behind all that toxic, wealth-driven, power-obsessed masculinity behind.
But it’d be an awfully short Bible if that were the case.
What happened next is, as is all too often the case, the emergence of new bigotries as different groups grapple for power in this new and broken land. Those who returned for exile immediately began to take the position that their time in exile had made them “pure,” since they had stayed a closed and isolated community while those who remained intermarried with the various settlers and conquerors who ran roughshod over the region during the years of the exile. Instead of unifying with each other, coming together in a blessed union through their shared love of the Creator, they turned on each other.
Hatred bloomed between the two groups, and conflict blossomed until it reached a point that Jesus could shock and astound his Jewish audience by pointing to a descendant of those who remained - known as Samaritans - and holding him up simply as being “good.”
Whether we grapple for power, or push back against oppression, we all have the same reaction when society goes off the rails. Rather than embrace the challenge of transforming into something new, we tend to grasp blindly backwards for a better world that never truly was. We convince ourselves that these systems that led us to destruction would work just fine if only we were the beneficiaries, if only the wheels of society ran over bodies other than ours, if only the power was placed into our hands.
But the truth is, if who we were worked, if we really were great once, we would be great still. The present doesn’t come to us fully formed out of nowhere, it is shaped by who we were and what we did in the past - that's how time works.
The America that so many folks want to return to? Whether that’s an America under Democratic leadership rather than Republican, or the mythical America of fever-dreams and legends, the truth is that it never actually existed. The lash of the slave owner, the heel of the policeman’s boot, the cold denial of medical care, the whistle of the incoming drone strike - these things are not soften’d by whether our leaders wear a red tie or blue.
Who we are is who we were, who we ever have been.
But who we will become be doesn’t have to be.
All we have to do is surrender our identity as who we were, embrace transformation, and allow God to call us by a new and different name.
When times of threatening change come upon us it can be terrifying, and it can be hard to know what to do, especially because in our minds “what to do” is really just “what to do to get back to where we were.”
We are as a people who are plummeting down the cliff face, trying to convince ourselves that if we reach out just a little father, grasp backwards just a little bit more, we can grab hold of the edge and pull ourselves back up.
We’re praying for longer arms, when what we need is wings.
Because the truth is that God’s transformative calling means that there is no going back. And whatever it is that our future is destined to be, if it is to be just, if it is to be merciful, if it is to be righteous, then it won't look anything like what we were, won't look anything like what we know.
It's gonna be uncomfortable. It's gonna be different.
It'll require growth. Change. Regeneration.
Revolution.
For all of us, for a better world, we cannot continue being who we we were. We cannot continue fighting for what was, for the ideals of a world that's already burning because of all of our skewed priorities. We need to stop chasing the ideals of wealth and power and privilege, give up the principles of capitalism and zero-sum thought. We need to stop trying to be the great men of the west, and embrace who God has calls us to be; Hephzibah, the queen in whom God's whole self delights.
TRANSformation is the key.
So brace for impact my friends, because change is coming, whether we want it to or not. We are coming ‘round the bend to a burned and broken Jerusalem, and as we stand there in the ruins of all our hopes and dreams, let us heed the words of Isaiah
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually
and satisfy your needs in parched places
and make your bones strong,
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water
whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.
For Zion's sake, for America's sake - for ALL our sakes - do not keep silent, do not rest, until our vindication shines out like the dawn and our salvation like a burning torch. Let us speak and act for transformation, for change, for growth, and yes for revolution that someday, when all this too has passed, we may claim the new name that God has given us, and our true identity as children of God who do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
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