Sermons

A Bigger Picture

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
March 11, 2007                  1 Corinthians 10:1-13/ Isaiah 55:1-9

Perhaps the practice began earlier than a few years ago, but it took someone like Lance Armstrong to draw our attention. I’m talking about the ubiquitous, brightly colored, rubber bracelets that at some point or another over the course of the last few years (say “rubber bracelet” a bunch of times really quickly, and you’ll find out how difficult this is) many of us have worn around one wrist or another.

You will remember that Lance Armstrong’s -- cancer survivor, Tour de France cyclist’s -- foundation seeks to raise money for cancer research. And in what was a brilliant marketing move, it launched upon society the notion of yellow bracelets, worn by those with cancer, those who have survived cancer, those supporting them. And at one point millions upon millions of these yellow bracelets were out and around, seemingly everywhere.

The practice mushroomed. Many important causes and events, diseases, worldly conditions. For a brief while our children wore bracelets related to the prevention of drug and alcohol use. After a year or so I finally succumbed to the trend. I wear a white bracelet now that says on it, “Make Poverty History,” a reminder of the realities of poverty all around us, and our call to do something about it.

Perhaps more recently you have heard about a church in Kansas City that is distributing purple bracelets. I wonder why they chose purple. I like to think it’s for Lent, but I don’t think that’s the case. The bracelet simply says the words “No complaining.” People Magazine has been writing about it, the news shows have been featuring it. It’s turned into a mini-phenomenon --- a big one, if you’re a church. About a million of these things have been distributed across the country and around the world.

How the purple bracelet works is this: you put it on your wrist, and every time you find yourself complaining about something, you switch it to the other wrist. And if you cannot switch the bracelet from one wrist to another for 21 days, the church gives you a certificate.

I thought for a moment I might try it, but I would need two exemptions. One is, of course, complaining about the weather. And the second is about the Chicago Cubs. [Scattered laughter] Without those two exemptions, my hunch is I would be changing my wrist bracelet every ten minutes or so. And then earlier this morning, much earlier this morning, I thought about a third exemption, once a year, around daylight savings time. [More laughter]

As gimmicky as the whole thing might feels, it seems nonetheless to be a worthy goal. It seems, without being too critical, that we live in a kind of funny world these days, a society lacking in civility. We know more and more about more and more. We are driven by the Internet to learn more quickly and more comprehensively about what’s going on in the world. But it seems to me we want to know those things primarily not to learn or grow or be informed, but to criticize and be cynical.

I know I must be getting older, because I can’t believe I’m about to say what I’m about to say, but what it seems to me to be needed is a kind of cultural civics lesson. About the little things. About holding doors. About signaling when you’re going to change a lane. About saying “please” and saying “thank you.”

My mother taught me (perhaps yours did you as well) if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Now wouldn’t that be lovely right about now? Here’s an example. We face a presidential campaign. We don’t actually vote until November of 2008, but already we are being inundated and bombarded with images, essays, television reports. What would it look like if candidates and their supporters focused on the issues? Their own issues and those of their opponents and gave up personal attacks altogether? What a different kind of campaign we would experience.

So even though a purple bracelet that says “No complaining” on it seems a little bit gimmicky, I thought why not, if it can bring about just a fraction of civility or decency or friendliness. How lovely that would be. And if not, clearly, it would give us one more thing to complain about.

But in so thinking about that, there’s a deeper issue about which God’s people, in this place, at least, seem to be called to engage. It’s more than just haggling over terms. It’s the difference between petty and trivial criticism and a critical evaluation of the way things are. It’s the difference between whining about a parking spot or less than adequate service at a restaurant, or the color that your neighbors chose for their new shutters. An honest lamentation, heart filled, soul filled lamentation about how things are, and how God intends them to be.

Because to weep over the city as Jesus did is not to complain or to whine, but it’s to grieve deeply over a troubled and troubling situation. In our understanding of faith, that’s what God calls us to do, whether it’s your health or the health of one whom you love, a relationship that’s troubled or crumbling, a situation in the world, poverty or human brokenness, or a war now four years old with no end in sight.

Such lamentation, such grieving, is not to complain, but to express our anguish. It is not passive acceptance of the way things are, but a creative and courageous act of imagination about how things may be.

But it is to do something more than that. It is to express hope.

Several years ago, I think in the midst of the “Survivor” craze, I was at a very long church meeting (not that I’m complaining about long church meetings!), and in the course of a break a group of us had huddled off in a corner of the room. A friend posed the question: If you could have only one book of the Bible to take with you on deserted island, what would it be?

Now, only ministers would ask that question in that way. We thought for a moment or two. I said I’d take the book of Psalms with me. The words uplift and encourage, you can actually sing to them if you want to. Another friend said, “I’d take the gospel of John with me. It is soaring and gorgeous, and contains the heart of the gospel and its words.”

And then another friend said, “I would take with me the book of the prophet Isaiah.” And she convinced me of that that day. If you think about it, the book of Isaiah, which I would commend you to in this Lenten season, carries in it the heart of the story of Israel. It foreshadows the coming of Jesus, not just his birth but his earthly ministry, and it is at the heart of our story as God’s people of faith.

Walter Brueggeman writes about the Old Testament prophets. Brueggeman says that they are less concerned about interpreting Israel’s past than they are about God’s promise for the future. And about Isaiah in particular, Brueggeman writes, “The community of faith that gave shape to the prophet Isaiah’s work does not surrender to the vagaries of historical circumstance” --- that is to say we just don’t look around and shrug our shoulders ---- “but rather they and therefore we cling to a vision of God’s governance, our past and present and future, and offer up a counter world, counter to denial and despair, rooted in God’s steadfast purpose for a new Jerusalem, a new law, a new covenant, a new temple, all things new.”

When I was in seminary (more years ago than I would like to remember these days), the focus on our biblical studies was much more technical than it is now, though I think no less scholarly. We were still living in the shadow of German historical biblical scholarship, then almost a hundred years old. There was source criticism: who wrote what parts and how were they put together. There was redaction criticism: what was the theology and the politics of the editors as they gathered various biblical books. There was something called form criticism.

Around the book of Isaiah we were taught and learned that there were in fact three parts to the book, called --- strangely enough --- first, second, and third Isaiah, although those terms didn’t quite satisfy. So we used the more academic terms “Proto,’ first Isaiah, “Deutero,” second Isaiah, “Trito,” third Isaiah.

If I were to go to seminary now, we would still learn Hebrew and Greek, but we would approach the Bible much differently. I think it’s been helpful and an important shift over time. The term is “canonical” criticism. Of course we have to have a term for this, but what it really means is you take the Bible for what it says, for what it is. The literary world calls this “reader response.” The text is what we’ve been given, so let’s take it at face value and see what it might say to us.

So do that with Isaiah. Read it as literature and poetry as well as history and theology. Let the words that we have shared this morning cascade over you, like the spring of water that they are. If you’re thirsty, God says, come to the waters. If you’re hungry, come and eat, even if you have no money, even if you’re unsure about your life, if you are unsure about love, yours or God’s.

If you are searching for meaning, gather in this place and listen to what God has to say. I will make a covenant and it will transform you. Your life will be in an altogether new place, a new constellation, as will the life of the world. God says, “I’m near. Seek me out. Call on me if you have lived a wicked way, if you have thought a thought less than it should have been, do not worry. Come and receive mercy and grace and pardon from me.”

That’s the promise, and the hope, which seem to me to be perfect Lenten words -- as we are now deep in the season of Lent -- that acknowledge human brokenness but do not linger on it, that call us to examine our lives, our individual and collective lives, but insist that we not be immobilized by what we discover, that insist on an abundance, whether it be an abundance of food or justice or mercy, when we insist on scarcity.

Not only does the prophet Isaiah reject the little things, all the whining and complaining that certainly the people of Israel were engaging in, but they redeem our deeper lamentations and offer transformation, a continuing promise of God’s new thing, God’s new way in our lives and in the life of the world. A bigger picture. Our thoughts are what they are, but they are not God’s thank God. Our thoughts are what they are, but they are not God’s, thank God. Our ways are what they are, but they are not God’s, thank God.

We believe that we are saved by our own work and cleverness. A problem as old as the eighth century before Jesus and as current as the 21st century after him. The response then, the prophetic response then, is the same as it is now: trust and hope and rely on something bigger and greater and beyond your comprehension. That is not a passive acceptance about how things are, whether an unsatisfactory job, or a challenging health situation, or a relationship that is hurting you in some way, or the world in which we live. But it is a reminder that we humans, when left to our own devices, we will become victims of the devices we are left to.

Whether it’s in the lives that we lived or the world that we build, Isaiah insists otherwise. That the resources are available for difference making. In the ways that we approach the living of our days and the ways that we approach the solving of the world’s problems, the resources are available. We are not to despair. We are to remember whose people we are, and we are to act like it, with risk and hope and radical obedience.

It’s kind of nice to look out the window and think about the melting snow, which is not to complain about the snow, by the way. But in the middle of Lent, Kate McIlhagga from the Iona Community offers a lovely vision:

“Into a dark world/a snowdrop comes/a blessing/of hope and peace/carrying within it

a green heart/symbol of God's renewing love/

Come to inhabit our darkness/Lord Christ, for dark and light/are alike to you/

May nature's white candles of hope/remind us of your birth/and lighten our journey

through Lent and beyond.”

That is the vision and the promise. A God whose love for us is deep and broad and high, deeper and broader and higher than ever we could imagine. A Christ who brings light to our darkness, and a spirit who calls us, through death, to new life, new, abundant, eternal, hope filled life, day by day making all things new.

Amen.