This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of The First Reformed Church of New Brunswick, NJ, on Sunday, December 18 2023, drawing from Isaiah 64:1-4 and Luke 1:46b-55
So you may have guessed from the sermon title - if not from the call to worship, the prayers, and even the Old Testament reading - that transformation, renewal, and regeneration have really been on my mind this last week. I’m sure this comes as no surprise; recent episodes of Doctor Who notwithstanding, these things have honestly been on everyone’s minds for the last 5-10 years, especially in the church and especially since COVID. It has become increasingly clear to all of us that we just can’t keep doing things in church the exact same way we always have. We’ve been trying - God knows we’ve been trying - to keep shoring up the walls of the great, institutional church, determined to do everything in our power to keep this thing from crumbling away like sand, and this has given rise to just…so many different movements, theories, programs, initiatives, and other…things…at every level of every denomination of the great, universal church.
It makes sense, really, While it’s not true of everyone of course, many of us do have deep and wonderful memories of the church as this powerful, unshakable, massive presence in our lives. When we think back to the church as we knew it when we were kids, we see this institution in our minds-eye in much the same way many of us might remember our parents; as these unspeakably huge, 47-foot tall giants, archons of divinity and authority, unfailingly solid ground to which we could swim in any time of uncertainty or difficulty, well firm and secure in the unyielding assurance that this is a place where we could always find support, compassion, and answers to our deepest, most troubling questions.
For me, at least, church was a place where I found community when all other communities had failed me, the place where I could sing when all other songs were denied, a place where I could always count on my talents being uplifted, my thoughts and ideas being heard, and my whole self surrounded by that great crowd of witnesses, fellow travelers on God’s journey prepared to teach, empower, and share wisdom with me as I walked the difficult and confusing paths of my young life.
Just as “parent” is very often an unintentional synonym for “God” on the lips of unsuspecting young children, so too was it for many of us that “church” held the same meaning. It wasn’t just where we met God, it was the greatest example of God’s communal love and fellowship that most of us ever had encountered, and for some of us it’s the only example of that kind of community we’ve ever encountered.
Which is why it is so gut-wrenchingly hard, so emotionally brutal for us, in the post-COVID church, to look around ourselves and see not some institutional titan, standing boldly astride worlds of society, philosophy, and culture like a ham-bun eating Colossus, but a weakened, broken shell of what once had been, pews of weathered wood sat empty save for the echoes of kind hearts and kindred spirits long passed on. It’s hard to see something that was the center of so many of our lives for so long just…fade away into history like this.
So we pray for restoration. We pray to be raised up from the ashes of our devastations, we pray for our ruins to be rebuilt, all so that the church we know today might be once again like the wonderful thing that it was for us in days gone by.
Of course, this is exactly what Isaiah was getting at in today’s reading. Isaiah was sitting right in the middle of Israel’s apocalypse, speaking to a people who had to sit and watch as everything important to them was stripped away; their homes destroyed, families ripped apart, loved ones taken away into exile and captivity. The people to whom Isaiah was speaking knew loss and grief and pain; these people had had their fill of change, and they wanted no more.
All they wanted was restoration.
And so their cries are intermingled here with those of God, and we wind up with an outcry to God which would form the beginning of the way people would come to understand just who God is, and who the eventual Messiah would be. It begins, as it should, with the Word of God:
“he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor”
You may recognize as the same words Jesus chose to invoke near the beginning of his earthly ministry, at his hometown of Nazareth. And you might also recognize that, in that moment, he chose not to continue the verse from Isaiah, chose not to take things the one step further that Isaiah does into vengeance, and the restoration of all that was.
Isaiah goes on into these things because he, like all those around him, are sitting heavy with the grief of loss. So great was their pain that it would have been impossible for them to even consider the greater ministry of God on earth; when even restoration looks like a miracle, the idea of something even greater becomes an impossibility at best.
So they began to understand the reparative and just work of God in this moment in terms of rebuilding, clawing back up out of the pit to where once they were, and leaving the work of greater things for some later date. Their understanding of salvation is formed around the seed of restoration; being saved not to what could be, but simply to what once had been.
This understanding took root and grew of course, and in time it became the basis for who the people understood their long-awaited Messiah to be. They were looking for someone with an eye for rebuilding, a strong right arm to knock back the oppressors, a tactical thinker and an inspiring leader who could rally the people together so that the ruins of the city might be raised up into a fortress strong enough to withstand anything that Rome, or any other great empire, might choose to throw at them ever again.
But, as you might have noticed, when the actual Messiah is on the way, when it falls to Mary to lift up her voice in song and tell us all who it is that the incarnate son of the Almighty would be, what we get….isn’t anything like that at all.
Look at Mary’s song, for a moment; our second reading today. Take a careful look, and you will find no mention of institutional restoration. There are no ruins being surveyed for rebuilding, no plans being drawn up for walls or battlements. There is no crushing, historical victory of God’s people against man’s empire laid out.
Only the lowly being lifted up in place of the powerful, and the hungry being filled from the excesses of rich. With Christ on the way what is identified as being important isn’t the structures and institutions of old; those things have had their time, and their utility has fallen away.
In the time of Isaiah, everyone was poor and oppressed; they had just been ground into the dust by the largest Empire on the block! Rebuilding themselves as a single nation, an institution based around God’s justice for the poor and the oppressed had real, divine merit then. In that moment, the line of justice ran straight between Israel and Babylon.
But by the time Jesus is coming into the world, those days of oppression had long since passed, and there were plenty of wealthy and powerful among the people of God, just as there were within the empire.
The world had become an entirely different place, and what had been built by God’s people to serve justice then, was not serving God’s justice now.
God’s justice hadn’t changed; it never changes. God was still calling out for the oppressed to receive good news, for the brokenhearted to be bound up, for liberty to be proclaimed to the captives, for the prisoners to be released, for the lowly to be lifted up, for the hungry to be fed, and for the year of the Lord’s favor to be declared. But the times had changed, and when that justice came into the world in the form of Christ Jesus it looked nothing like the warrior king, born into power and privilege, trained and prepared to turn away the Empire at the tip of the sword and bring about the next, great age of the gathered congregation of God’s people.
No. It looked like a small, helpless, baby, born in the cold to an unwed, teenage mother and her supportive but overwhelmed fiancee, hiding out in a barn because no one else would take them in.
Not restoration. Not reformation. Regeneration.
We Reformed folks love talking about reformation, don’t we? And we always think about it in such fiercely binary terms too. To us, reformation is the exact opposite of stagnation, a word that speaks of gradual but determined change, incremental progress, and the slow forward-march of growth. Ask any Reformed theologian what it means to reformed, and you’ll undoubtedly get that ol’ chestnut from Martin Luther himself ecclesia reformata semper reformanda; the church reformed, and always being reformed.
You see, we tend to understand reformation - the God-inspired process of change - as an incremental process by which we slowly change the things that are, so that we can make progress without losing who and what we already are.
It’s change of a kind, but the sort of change which prioritizes the restoration of what was over the progress towards what God might be calling us to be. It’s shoring up the walls of our sand castle with bucket after bucket of sand while the tide rolls inexorably in. When our reformation stops at the walls of what we once were, we wind up fixated on outdated understandings of justice, mercy, and compassion, trying to show God to 2023 using the best tools that the 1980s have to offer.
And as any parent from the 80s who has ever tried to talk to their pre-teen children can tell you, that’s an entirely different world!
This is why I like to think of what we’re being called to do not as reformation, but rather as regeneration. Regeneration - and yes, the Doctor Who reference remains intentional - is much the same as reformation in that it is a way for us to embrace change, and keep our eyes on the moving target of God’s unchanging justice in an ever-changing world. But while reformation is an incremental progress rooted in what was, regeneration is an immersion in change, a complete surrender of our attachment to what was, and a complete embracing of the newness of what God is bringing forth in and around us.
Regeneration doesn’t mean we become a totally different person, of course. We still hold on to the memory, cherishing who we were then and appreciating all the things that God did with and through us in that time and place. But rather than trying to keep doing that thing, to keep being that thing, we surrender our need to be bound by it; we let it go, and allow everything that we have been push us forward into being something new.
That makes it sound so easy, doesn’t it? But that’s the thing about change; even though it is an eruption of new life, it still very much feels like dying.
And you know what? It’s supposed to! The path that begins with God’s calling and ends in glory? I’m sorry to say, it passes through Golgotha along the way. Christmas Day is beautiful, but it’s a long, hard, path between the manger and salvation. But when the massacre of the infants has passed, when Egypt is behind us, when Nazareth and Galilee have fallen behind, when the cross has passed away and the stone rolls away what emerges may yet go by the same name, but it will be different than what came before. Unrecognizable, even.
Behold, I am doing a new thing.
My friends, the temptation of restoration is perhaps the biggest temptation I’ve ever come across. It’s a temptation powered by grief and fear, a temptation that tells us that the most we can hope for is to return to the way things used to be. But the truth is that, even if we were able to do that, even if we could somehow become the exact same, suit-and-tie, every-pew-filled, biggest-game-in-town church that exists in our memories, that isn’t what the world needs today!
The instrument of God’s justice, God’s very presence on earth, didn’t look the same when Jesus came about as it did when Isaiah first set the tone for the people of Israel during the Babylonian exile. It didn’t look the same when our grandparents turned up to church every week in their Sunday best and their children were left to wonder in silent awe at a great crowd of believers who all inexplicably looked the same, and it didn’t look the same in the decades to come as society moved towards greater heights of openness, inclusivity, and love while many of us stood back in silent judgement - or not too silent, in some cases - of the love other people had the audacity to share.
Today we find ourselves living in a world wracked by division, where judgement and hatred run more rampant than ever, where nearly 1% of the entire population of the United States - two million people! - are prisoners, where 69% of the total wealth of the country is held by less than 10% of the population, and where seventeen million households can’t afford to eat consistently.
We’re living in a world where LGBTQIA+ youth attempt suicide at a rate four times higher than their peers, at a rate of about one every 45 seconds simply because they’ve been told that the beautiful, wonderful creations of God that they are are unwelcome and unloved in this world.
Can we really fix this with ham buns and hymn-sings?
Is that really good news to the oppressed?
Or do the brokenhearted need more than that to be bound up?
Does liberating the captive and the prisoner take more than that?
Does lifting up the lowly require more of us than that, to say nothing of bringing down the powerful from their thrones?
Does it require more than that to fill up the hungry with good things, to say nothing of sending the rich away empty?
Or perhaps, like Mary, we’ve been given the responsibility of carrying something wondrously improbable; something long-awaited which will change everything, though not in the way we expected. Perhaps we too have a chance to be part of the ever changing, ever-regenerating story of Christ Jesus in the world; not a story of old ruins restored, but of a justice, mercy, and peace which is fresh and new every morning.
Behold, Christ is doing a new thing. And as Christmas comes once again, we have the chance to join in this new thing ourselves as a church that is regenerated in Christ, and always regenerating.
Amen.
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