Back to the Future
| John Wilkinson |
Third Presbyterian Church |
| November 18, 2007 |
Isaiah 65:17-25/Luke 21:5-19 |
One of the most recent powerful religious experiences I have
had came just a week ago, during our 10:45 worship service.
Our youth were leading that service, wonderfully, creatively.
It came time for prayer, and that handful of voices shared
what must have been dozens of prayer concerns written by you
and me – all of us. It was the combination of the voices
and the setting and the depth and breadth of the articulated
hopes and fears that really did a number on me. I felt washed
over by our prayer concerns in a powerful way, and remain grateful.
Many of you shared with me a similar feeling after last Sunday,
and I am grateful for that as well.
What was so striking was the range – from the macro to
the micro, as I like to say – from the very broad to the
very particular, from the very global to the very local. Concerns
ranging from the war in Iraq to peace in our world to specific,
personal requests for specific, personal needs.
If, as has been suggested, there are really only two kinds
of prayers – please and thank you – we heard those
in abundance. My own would have echoed yours, perhaps, in scope
and particularity. Thank you: thank you for these gifted youth
and those who work with them; thank you for the gift of laughter;
thank you for the gift of music. And please: please find a way,
and help us to find a way, to bring about an end to war; please
find a way to allow conflict to end in the church; please bring
your healing touch to a particular family member facing a specific
health concern.
The hope of prayer, the hope of all those “please’s”
and “thank you’s,” is the strong hope that
not only God hears our prayer, but acts upon it. The old teaching
is just that, that God hears and God acts, acts not always in
the ways that we want – always a challenging reminder
– but acts in the ways that God deems most faithful. That
makes the activity of God in the world all the more mysterious,
but it makes the hopes of our prayers no less fervent and no
less real.
Please…and thank you. That is what this week, this coming
Thursday, is all about. We know the history, or at least remember
its broad brushstrokes from grade school. In 1621 the Plymouth
colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared a harvest festival. This
actually echoed two kinds of such feasts – those held
by Native Americans already living in this land and those held
by surviving European colonists thankful simply to be alive.
Some of the most elemental “please’s” and
“thank you’s” one could utter.
Without conflating things too much, one can not help but detect
echoes of our own thanksgiving meal, what we call communion,
or its other traditional name, “Eucharist,” which
means “thanksgiving.”
We know the history. In 1789, George Washington declared this
a holiday, and in 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared it to be a
national holiday on the last Thursday. FDR tried to move it
to the third Thursday, ostensibly to ratchet up our consumer
spending, but it soon landed on the fourth Thursday, where it
remains.
It has become, for many, and at times for me, one of the best
national holidays and one of the purest as well. Culturally
speaking, it seems now also the most religious, though we still
contend with things like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
and www.butterball.com,
which offers a holiday guide, subtitled “everything you
need for a perfect day.” I could only think that if they
could deliver on that promise, that they were in the wrong business.
And still that basic set of utterances, please and thank you,
and the deep hope and belief that God is alive and active on
the stage of human history and in the particularities of our
lives, yours and mine.
Isaiah believed it. The Israelite people had returned to the
land from generations of exile and captivity, but life had not
improved. “Those who doubted the grand promises of yesteryear,”
James Newsome writes, “could hardly be blamed.”
(Texts for Preaching, Year C, page 597)
Listen to the fervent hope in Isaiah’s prayer of future
imagination: new heavens and a new earth; no more weeping…no
cry of distress; no infants dying prematurely, nor old persons
not living out a lifetime; the wolf and the lamb shall feed
together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; they shall not
hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.”
Newsome writes: “(Isaiah) understood the larger dimensions
of (God’s) plan for humankind…the very order of
existence is about to be turned on its ear.” War is recalled,
childhood struggles, the vulnerability of youth, unfair labor
practices, creation at odds with itself. But no more, the prophet
says. No more.
Jesus addresses the same issue, it seems, that of past and
present and future. The people following him, ever anxious about
the present and ever restless about the future, press Jesus
for answers. He offers a twist on Isaiah’s perspective,
less a vision of peaceful harmony and more so of a culture and
people turned inside out by the promises of this present moment.
Do not be fooled, he is saying. “Beware that you are
not led astray…When you hear of wars and insurrections,
do not be terrified; for these things must take place first,
but the end will not follow immediately.”
He then tells his followers that they will be tried and tested.
Do not worry, he says, “for I will give you words and
a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand
or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers,
by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death.
You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair
of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your
souls.”
Two vastly different interpretations of reality, one gentle,
seemingly, one harsh, again, seemingly. And yet, and yet.
Jesus is saying that we should not be seduced or tempted by
what is, and that the road from what is to what is to be will
be difficult and challenging, at the very least. Isaiah is imagining
that world once we arrive. Neither vision is content with the
status quo. Both visions insist that God’s role in the
present and ever-unfolding future is central, and that we are
at our best when we remember, folding in an extra measure of
hope and trust with our anxiety and restlessness.
These visions are often critiqued for their inability to take
seriously the present moment, waiting for some “sweet
by and by” future. I would argue just the opposite, that
the prophetic tradition, embraced and manifested by Jesus, takes
the present moment very seriously, and is never content with
it. We are called to change it, to make a difference, but we
are also called to do so with an understanding that it is ultimately
God’s future, God’s vision, God’s imagination.
Our pilgrim forbears came here because they imagined something
different. We are called to do the same. They gave thanks, but
it was an active, restless, hopeful thanks, predicated by an
active, restless, hopeful faith.
Our context is different. Our faith’s role in the culture
resides in a new place, more marginalized, perhaps, but certainly
less acculturated. Thanksgiving to Washington and Lincoln and
FDR meant a form of Christian Thanksgiving, primarily because
that was all they knew.
The world has changed. The nation has changed. The culture
has changed, and religion’s role in it. But that doesn’t
mean for a moment that we who follow Christ and seek to live
into his promise are called in any less of a way to work for
the vision that he placed before us.
Our “please” and “thank you” prayers
may be spoken with different accents, or emphases. But they
are spoken with no less urgency. Prayers for a world at war
and conflict. Prayers for those in need. Prayers for the very
earth itself.
We do not know what time it will come, but we know we are called
to work on it and work at it. And we do not know what it will
look like, but we believe with our hearts and our spirits that
it will be more beautiful than anything we could ever imagine,
and at least as beautiful as a glorious meal, at which all are
welcome, all, safely gathered in, with more than enough for
everyone.
Thanksgiving has a uniquely American feel to it, but giving
thanks is a universal experience.
In the early 1600’s, Martin Rinkart was the pastor of
the Lutheran church in his hometown of Eilenberg, Germany. He
arrived there just as the terrible bloodshed of the Thirty Years
War was beginning. The city of Eilenberg was a walled city and
it became the refuge for political and military fugitives. This
caused serious overcrowding, and deadly pestilence and famine
swept through the city. Armies overran it three times, leaving
death and destruction in their wake. The population of Germany
went from 16 million to 6 million during this time.
In the year 1637 the plague was particularly severe. At its
peak, Rinkart was the only pastor remaining in Eilenberg, conducting
as many as 50 funerals in a day. He performed more than 4000
funerals in that year alone, including that of his beloved wife.(See
www.songsandhymns.org)
In the midst of this, Rinkart wrote these words:
Now thank we all our God/With heart and hands and voices/Who
wondrous things hath done, /In whom (t)his world rejoices; /Who
from our mothers’ arms, /Hath blessed us on our way /With
countless gifts of love, /And still is ours today.
O may this bounteous God /Through all our life be near us,
/With ever joyful hearts /
And blessed peace to cheer us; /And keep us in (God’s)
grace, /And guide us when perplexed, /And free us from all ills
/In this world and the next.
In this world and the next. Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks be to
God. Amen.
