A joy and a delight

(sermon delivered by Cat Healy on 25 Pentecost, Year C, Nov 14 2010)

25 Pentecost 2010
Isaiah 65:17-25 – Psalm 98 – 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 – Luke 21:5-19
It strikes me that this week’s readings summarize every campaign ad we’ve seen on TV in the last several months. It’s the same in each election year: Half the candidates promise us new heavens and a new earth, and the other half tell us that anyone unwilling to work should not eat. A few brave ones do both. Beneath all the flag backdrops and political rhetoric, there are kernels of truth in there somewhere. That’s why campaign ads work; we’re all looking for something to believe in.
But Isaiah’s vision of the new earth is much more than a campaign ad. Here, we see God’s promise that the people of Israel, who have suffered so long, will not be destroyed. And more than that, they will be blessed beyond their imagining: “I will rejoice in Israel,” says the Lord; “I will delight in my people.” In every part of the new Jerusalem, God promises transformation. Infant mortality will disappear; no one will be homeless or hungry; even animals will have no need to harm each other.
However, there is another piece of this transformed creation. The ancient Israelites may have used different language for what we now call “social justice,” but they surely understood the concept. Isaiah’s new Jerusalem is about more than long lives and vegetarian lions. When the world is re-created, the workers who build will be able to inhabit their houses, and those who plant will enjoy the fruits of their labors. “They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.” This is not a faraway utopian vision, like the wolf lying down with the lamb. For this reason, it is much more challenging to us. Think about the world we live in now. The people who haul the lumber and lay the bricks of mansions will never inhabit them; workers spend hour after hour in the hot sun, picking produce they could never afford to buy. We know from the Hebrew prophets that this is not the world God wants. But these kinds of changes are not magic tricks that will be worked by God alone, with no effort from us, the people of the new earth. If we want to live in such a world, we have to do the work ourselves.
If you fast-forward to Thessalonians, you can watch a community of people trying to live out this mandate. The Christians of Thessalonica were mostly Gentiles; the Scriptures were brand-new to them, so they approached the Hebrew prophets as starry-eyed converts, seeing this vision of the world for the very first time. Though it’s hard to know for sure, you can imagine how carefully they made their chore charts, ensuring that everyone had an equal share of the labor and enjoyed an equal share of the fruits. They wanted to be just like their heroes, Paul and Timothy; just like Jesus and the Apostles; they wanted to make the new Jerusalem. In today’s reading, you can see how that went for them.
They are tired. They are cranky. They are in a bad mood.
Equal sharing of labor is hard. Equal sharing of the rewards is even harder. You don’t need to be an early Christian to know this; you only need to share a kitchen with someone. The Christians Paul is addressing here have a lot working against them. They’re getting picked on left and right by all the other people in Thessalonica, who view them as a cult; they converted as adults, they have no roots in Jewish tradition, and a lot of them are new even to monotheism; and in the midst of all this, they’re trying to revolutionize the labor economy as we know it. No wonder they’re burned out. And so they complain to Paul that their fellow Christians are “living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work.”
And so Paul writes back: Shut up and do your work! Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.
Not because he wants the Thessalonians to starve each other. Not because he is heartless.
But because everyone has to buy into the new Jerusalem, or it doesn’t stand a chance.
Had Paul gone into more detail here, he might have said: If even one of you sits back and hoards your wealth while another goes hungry, the vision falls apart. If even one of you takes a break from your labor in the fields and lets your brother or sister do their share of the work and yours too, allows them to suffer and struggle while you rest in the shade, the new heaven and the new earth are shot.
And this is where campaign ads always fail. They ignore the obvious: We can’t do it alone. If we treat our own good intentions as our only fuel, our only source of energy, we develop compassion fatigue and begin to come apart at the seams. If we try to build the new Jerusalem without God as its rock, we crumble.
In the same way, if we lose our sense of community – if we find ourselves unable to look past “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat” – we fall apart.
Isaiah resonates with us, though, because he tells us that we don’t have to do this hard work alone. As we work on building the Kingdom, as we make our chore charts, as we try to ensure that no one goes hungry and everyone gets a chance to reap what they sow – we are lifted up by one whose strength and patience are infinitely greater than ours. Whose powers of forgiveness are infinite, who, no matter how many times we turn away, is able to remake us as a joy and a delight.