Holy Mountain

This sermon is written in a bit of a different style than my sermons of the past.  There are a multitude of grammatical mistakes, broken up lines, etc.  Please bear with me and remember that it is primarily a spoken thing, which explains the weird breaks.  Thanks!



Isaiah 65:17-19, 25

¹⁷ For I am about to create new heavens

           and a new earth;

The former things shall not be

           remembered

           or come to mind.

¹⁸ But be glad and rejoice forever

           in what I am creating;

for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,

           and its people as a delight.

¹⁹ I will rejoice in Jerusalem,

           And delight in my people;

no more shall the sound of weeping be

           heard in it,

           or the cry of distress.

²⁵ the wolf and the lamb shall feed

           Together,

the lion shall eat straw like the ox;

but the serpent – its food shall be dust!

They shall not hurt or destroy

           on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

I had just finished loading my gear in my car at the end of a long weekend of backpacking.

As I typically do I called Claire

            to update her on the weekend,

                        tell her how backpacking had been.

                        get the update on her.

As she usually does at the end of a backpacking weekend she gave me a quick rundown

            telling me about her weekend:

                        where she’d been, what she’d done;

            and then we got to the point in the conversation when she updates me about the world,

            and she told me about the typhoon in the Philippines.

            I asked her for some basic, pointed details:

                        How many people are dead? Is the storm over?

            It was like a weird routine.

                        Claire knew exactly what to tell me and how to tell it.

And I realized in that moment, something that I knew deep down

                        from the moment in our wedding when I said, “I do.”

Claire has me figured out.

            In case there is any doubt, I say it now, for the record:

                        Claire has got me figured out.

We pull our verse today from a section of Isaiah called Third Isaiah.

It is the end of the prophetic book,

            and it is characterized by some sweeping prophecies.

This section was written as the Hebrew exiles were returning to Jerusalem

            after the exile in Babylon.

            They returned with many hopes

                        many plans to rebuild their once glorious city.

But they ran into obstacles as soon as they returned.

            There were people living in the ruins of the city,

                        who had taken over their homes.

            Rebuilding was slower and more difficult than they imagined.

            As so often before, the people didn't turn to God when the going got tough.

So Isaiah writes, the rebuilding of this city is not something that you people are able to do.

            At least not you by yourselves.

Right before our passage today, Isaiah says that the former troubles will be forgotten.

            The Israelites had lots of former troubles:

                        Jerusalem had been conquered

                        they had been exiled in Babylon

                        they had spent years in exile, in a foreign land

                        their temple had been destroyed.

            Theirs was a peace-less land.

Yet God says, into all of this trouble, that there is going to be

            a new heavens and a new earth

                        that God will create.

And this is going to be a place marked by something different: marked by peace.

Isaiah describes this wonderful place of peace in the verses in between our readings,

            where no one will die as a young person, all will grow to old age,

            where there will be shelter and food for all,

            where children will not be brought into a violent, chaotic world,

            where people will not hurt or kill on another.

This is going to be a remarkable place, and God instructs the Israelites

            to be glad, to rejoice forever, for they will weep no more.

I think about the world they faced.

            I think about the world we face and I wonder…

How can this be?

It didn’t take long for Claire to realize that the best way for me to find out about terrible things

            is by her voice.

            She knew from very early on that I was particularly sensitive to shootings.

I was a student at Virginia Tech in 2007 when 32 students and faculty members were shot and killed on campus by a mentally disturbed student.

            I knew people who were shot and injured,

I had a professor who was killed at his blackboard

                                    in the middle of a German lesson.

I lived through the chaos, through the fear,

 through a day of uncertainty and hospital waiting after discovering

                        that a friend of mine had been shot in the leg three times

                                    in her French class.

                                    Through months of watching her recover.

Claire learned very quickly that tragedies like the one at Virginia Tech

are particularly painful to me.

She woke me up from a nap in seminary once

            by coming to my room before class.

            She sat down next to me and told me

that a police officer had been killed at Virginia Tech

                        and they were still looking for a gunman

                        who might be loose the campus.

Claire knows that when there is a mass shooting or senseless violence,

            it’s best if it is her voice that tells me,

            or at least if her voice is the first one I hear.

It seems that this routine has become a near daily experience.

It’s hard to go a full day without seeing an eye-witness report

            or a breaking news story,

                        about some kind of disaster or shooting or instance of violence.

This seems to be the unending violence that our world embraces.

This is the chaos that we seem to breed.

            And I find myself asking: “How long oh Lord. How long?”

                        How long must we endure this unending cycle of chaos?

And I open to find the words of Isaiah.

            Be glad, and rejoice forever,

            for I am about to create a new heavens, and a new earth.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian.

He is Iraqi by birth, and he has covered conflicts

in the Middle East from Afghanistan to the Sudan.

He tells a story about the reporting he did in Libya

following the uprisings which have come to be known as the Arab Spring.

In the Spring of 2011, he was in Libya reporting on the rebels

who were fighting against Muammar Gaddafi.

In the course of his reporting he was captured by

            Gadhaffi’s forces and, despite the fact that he was there legally

            he was dumped in a damp prison cell.

Ghaith was kept company by one light bulb and a dirty mattress on a prison floor.

After a few days in the cell, Ghaith started to realize

            there was only one way he was going to leave.

                        And this would be if the rebels managed to take over Tripoli.

The guards in the prison were severe,

            Ghaith could hear them beating prisoners in cells down the hall.

One guard, a man named Hatam, was particularly fierce with Ghaith.

            The guards became very agitated,

                        blaming journalists for the uprising.

Throughout battles raging around the capitol,

            Ghaith was stuck in the prison

                        With no end in sight.

So he decided to try to get to know his captors,

            particularly Hatam, who hated journalists.

            Ghaith slowly formed a relationship with this man,

                        talking back and forth with him

                        not as guard and prisoner, but just two normal people.

            He knew only that the man had a family, and that he loved the regime.

                        Ghaith talked to him through the small grate in the cell door

                                    for two weeks.

Finally, the Guardian negotiated for Ghaith to be released,

            and he was put on one of the last flights out of Libya.

Four months later, the rebels took the capitol.

The day Libya fell, Ghaith called his editor. There was one person he wanted to find.

            The guard, Hatam.

Ghaith made his way back to the capitol,

            tracked down his house, in a Tripoli suburb and knocked on the door.

            For Ghaith, it felt like meeting an old friend.

                        There was a moment of camaraderie.

            They were laughing, and talking, “How are you, how did you find me.”

For Ghaith, it was a moment of vindication.

Out of chaos, a moment of peace is found.

            When time is taken for one person to understand another

                        for one person to understand the enemy,

                        for a moment of love to pass between two people

            There is a peace that is reached,

                        And both men cannot help but laugh.

How did Ghaith move from a place of conflict to a place of peace?

            With a small, tangible action that increased understanding.

            He took some time to talk to Hatam as one human to another.

                        Some time to get to know this other human being;

                                    to know his struggles and passions

                                    a little bit about his life.

The changes that Isaiah talks about not sweeping, unachievable changes.

            They are tangible, maybe even mundane things.

                        people will live longer lives,

                        they will have fruit to eat

                        they will be able to live in houses.

            But these are the things that would embody a new creation.

            These are the things that would make a difference in that world.

They are the same things that might make a difference in our world.

And we are able to do those tangible things.

            We are able to give that one drink of cold water.

            To bring comfort to the poor, one act of mercy at a time.

                        One book given

                        One friendship claimed.

                        One can of beans

                        One moment of caring.

                        One moment in which a person is humanized rather than objectified,

                        One challenge to the set order,

                        One revelation of the evil that hides in plain sight,

                        One declaration that every single person is a child of God.

These are the little things that bring about God’s kingdom,

            these are the little things in the face of the chaos of the world

that give us a glimpse of God’s holy mountain. 

                                                             (borrowed from Feasting on the Word)

But the task, as Isaiah said, is not ours and ours alone.
In a world where we are totally focused on our capacities,
            Isaiah lifts our eyes so that we are forced

            to contemplate God’s capacities.

We are aided in all of these things by a God who is creating something new.

  

We are reminded of faithful people throughout the ages

            who proclaim a future hope for peace

and work for that hope in the midst of the chaos.

People like Martin Luther King Jr.

            who knew of the painful sea of inequality around him

                        but stood up in spite of that sea and proclaimed, “I have a dream.”

                        And described a future in which that dream would be realized.

People like Eleanor Roosevelt

            about whom it is said

            she would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

People who understand that God’s holy mountain is not just something to be dreamed about

            in some far off place or time,

                        but something to be worked for

                        and prayed for, now.

These people knew that the world was in shambles,
            but into that chaos, they shined a beam of hope.
That’s what Claire’s voice is for me.

            Into the chaos of a hurricane or an earthquake,

            Into the terror of a school shooting or a violent attack

            Her voice reminds me that God is at work,

                        It reminds me that into the horrors of the world,

                        There is a still, small voice of God.
                        Speaking hope when I feel none.

  

I have had the sneaking suspicion for years that my mother used to be a hippie.

She tells us children of a letter that her father sent her when she was in college,

            asking her to please study more

and to stop going to protests quite so much.

When I was growing up

and news would come on about violence in the Middle East

                        my mother used to say

with a certain amount of desperation

and despair in her voice:

                               “I’ve been praying for peace in the Middle East my entire life…”

Isaiah would tell my mother,

            “keep on praying, keep on dreaming, keep on working

                        because the wolf and the lamb will feed together,

                        the lion will eat straw like the ox,

                        the Israeli and the Palestinian will sit down for dinner together,

the parents will send their children to school

                                    without fear of a shower of bullets,

                        the nations will not rise up against one another

                        they will beat their swords in plowshares

                        and God says no one shall hurt or destroy

                                    on all my holy mountain.

AMEN.

The Other Ones

Luke 18:9-14

Jesus also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 

“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 

The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 

I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 

I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Amen.

The approach to the Western Wall in Jerusalem seemed to me somewhat anti-climactic. Claire and I took a trip to the Middle East in 2010, and we spent a few days in Jerusalem. I had gone with our group to the wall earlier in our trip. But Claire had been sick that day. She desperately wanted to see the Western Wall. So, once she was feeling better, she and I decided to go back for a visit.

So here are Claire and I set off through one of the most holy cities in the world for three of the world’s largest religions. We approached the wall from the old City of David, through these incredibly narrow streets. Vendors are set up on either side of the walkway, selling everything from pashmina scarves to hookahs to ancient relics. 

As we came upon the remnants of the Western Wall, we were amazed. The streets opened up into this amazing courtyard where thousands of people were gathered. And it’s kind of a strange moment, because usually when this many people are gathered to pray you expect there to be this huge focal point, like Saint Peter’s Basilica, or the Kabaa in Mecca. But the focal point in this holy place is a crumbling wall.

The Western Wall, or the Wailing Wall, stands on the western side of the temple mount in Jerusalem. The western wall of the complex has become a sacred place for Jews, not because it was built as such, but rather because it is the last reminder of the temple of Solomon that still stands. People gather outside of the temple mount praying at the outside of this wall.

I was fascinated with the extreme age of the wall, the history behind it, the wonder and the terror that surrounded that place. But the thing which caught my attention the most was the people who were there praying. Hundreds of people were gathered staring at the wall, or with their heads and hands pressed against the wall, or rocking back and forth in a heightened state of prayer. I will never forget the iconic image I saw in that place of an Israeli soldier standing with his face and hands pressed against the wall and a semi-automatic weapon hung across his back.

All of these people, religious leaders, tourists, soldiers, gather at this place to pray. They make pilgrimages from across the world to pray in this spot, to write out their hopes and dreams and push them into the dusty cracks of the ancient structure, to seek the guidance of the Lord.

This image of prayer will be forever embedded in my mind, because of the desperation that could be felt in such a place, the desperation for some sign of the presence of God for a distraught and lost community.

The two men in our story make their way to the temple in a very similar way. They come to pray to the Lord, and both men separate themselves from the mass of people.

But this is where the stories of the two characters diverge a little bit.

The Pharisees of the time were not intrinsically bad people. In fact, as this particular Pharisee points out, they were in tune with the law of God and they lived lives that reflected this. They fasted, they gave to the poor, they even tried to make religious life accessible to all people.

The character that would typically be the “bad guy,” is, of course, the tax collector. This would be the character that Jesus’ audience would have easily despised. The one that received the least respect. We can see that this would be the location of the role reversal that we expect to happen in Luke’s gospel.

In trying to think of a modern equivalent of the tax collector, I was thinking about my wife Claire’s favorite movie: Gone With the Wind. For those of you who may not be familiar with the story, it follows the life of Scarlett O’Hara, a southern Belle, through the course of the Civil War and after. The movie is like a solid 15 or 20 hours long, or at least it feels that way. I really do like the movie. The role of the tax collector in Palestine reminded me of carpetbaggers.

Carpetbaggers were Northerners and some Southerners who came to the south after the Civil War and took advantage of the state of desperation they found. They were called carpetbaggers because they carried carpet bags. They charged land owners heavy taxes, and then took their plantations. They exploited the people in the name of what felt like a foreign government while benefitting heavily in the profits they collected. They were despised in the south for their lack of compassion.

The tax collectors of Jesus’ time were of a similar breed. They were often local people who collected taxes for the Roman empire. They were allowed to keep whatever extra money that the empire did not require. It was easy for them to exploit their position, demanding lots of extra taxes which they would then pocket.

So these two somewhat familiar characters gather at the same place and offer up their very different prayers to the Lord. They both start their prayer with, “God…” but the Pharisee launches into the first person. He describes all his wonderful deeds and how righteous he is. Picture this Pharisee with his head turned toward God, his arms and hands raised up, thanking God for his righteousness. He stands alone because he is cleaner than the tainted folk that gather around him. To be frank, it is all about him.

Now picture the tax collector, kneeling on the ground, alone because he does not believe he is worthy to occupy this space with the others. He beats his chest with his hand in sorrow and repentance. The reason his prayer is so short yet powerful is because we know he is telling the truth. He really has sinned. He really is corrupt.

The two men leave the temple and we know which one has left with God’s favor. As they walk away we watch them go saying to ourselves, “I am so glad I know better than that Pharisee! I’m so glad my prayers don’t sound like his…”

And then Jesus says, “Gotca!” See we knew when the parable started that the Pharisee was going to get in trouble. We just didn’t realize how easy it was going to be for us to be the Pharisee!

See this parable is like that thing that we have all done at one time or another. You walk into a bathroom or a room with two mirrors that face each other. And you see your reflection in one mirror, and then you move a little bit one way or the other and you can see your reflection in the first mirror through the reflection of the second mirror. And then you can see your reflection in the first mirror as the second mirror is reflecting the reflection of the first mirror! And then you see…just kidding.

As soon as we hear the description of the Pharisee we want to distance ourselves from such behavior, so we think about how we’re like the tax collector, and then we smoothly slip into the role of the Pharisee again. As soon as we arrive at an appropriate level of humility, we immediately take pride in our accomplishment, and then we’re back to the beginning.

It seems the only relief is when we act like the tax collector – for he is the one who walks away justified. The only time we seem justified in our prayer is when we confess every week. When we come to God begging for forgiveness. 

We approach God like the tax collector, broken and disconsolate, humiliated. God, in mercy, lifts us up, exalts us, and sets us a place of honor at the banquet table.

But we also approach God like the Pharisee because we just can’t help it. We pray to God thanks for making me who I am and not making me someone who does not obey you. We are puffed up and proud and judgmental. And God, in mercy, will bring us down, so that we can join the party with our fellow sinners.

See the Pharisee is not some venomous villain and the tax collector is not generous Joe the neighborhood handyman. These are not one-dimensional characters, just as we are not one dimensional people. If that were true, both of these people would be getting what they deserved, and that is not the point.

John Calvin said that the only way we can be justified (like the tax collector), the only way we can receive grace, is through the gift of God. This means that, in all ways, we are totally dependent upon God. It is not by any action of our own that we deserve grace.

In the parable, in Calvin’s theology, and in our experience of the world, what is received is not “because of,” our actions but rather, “in spite of,” them. The point is not that the two men get what they deserve, the point is that the get exactly what they don’t deserve. In spite of all that we do to mess up, even when we’re trying our best, God is still there for us. No matter what we do, no matter what our history, God is still giving us this gracious gift of forgiveness, of mercy, of salvation. This ONLY happens because of God.

So, are you the Pharisee or are you the tax collector? Most of us are probably both at one time or another. But the promise that we hear is the promise of baptism. The promise is that God knows us and deeply loves us. The promise is that God will give us what we don’t deserve. The promise is that we all walk out of this place and join all of those other children of God out there to make up God’s totally flawed, holy community. May we always be reminded that God’s grace abounds for the most unlikely and undeserving of people: us. Amen.