Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Text: Isaiah 35:1-10, James 5:7-10
I confess to you that I have never liked the term: “Everything will be all right.” It is thrown about with reckless abandon! When people don't know what else to say they say, “Everything will be all right.” Yet so often it sounds facile, it sounds banal, repeated without any real thought or meaning. For people who are sitting in hospitals or who are dying or who are ill, “Everything will be all right” seems to ring with a very hollow tone. To those who lose their jobs or their companies, for those who have disputes in their families, for those who live in places of war or degradation, to simply say to them “Everything will be all right” might make the person saying it feel better, but it does nothing for the one who hears it. Even though I confess that from time to time those words have come from my own mouth when I haven't known what else to say, I am often aware of just how banal they really are.
It really dawned on me many years ago at Christmas in 1968. My parents, one of my uncles and I were driving to the north of England from the south, where we lived, to spend Christmas with my grandparents. We were driving on a motorway which, for those of you who know England well, was the A1, and we were heading north past the town of Grantham. My mother was driving, we were enjoying ourselves, looking forward to seeing my grandparents, and having some Christmas pudding, when we came over a hill, we realized that a truck had dumped its load of gravel on the road. My mother hit this at considerable speed, we spun 360 degrees, my mother controlled the car magnificently, and we bounced and landed on the median amongst the rocks, and just missed oncoming traffic.
We got out of the car shaken, devastated by what had happened. We immediately looked around to see if there was much damage to the car, and it seemed to be all right. We were fine. My uncle put his arm on my shoulder, and he said, “Andy, everything will be all right.” A few seconds later, over that very same hill came another car, and that car also hit the gravel at speed. It turned 360 degrees, and it bounced and it hit the median and, as we scattered to hide behind the barricades on the other side of the road, the car ploughed into the back of ours, destroying the entire rear end of it.
Three men got out of the car, one clearly injured, the other two okay. They came over to us and we found out that they were three soldiers who had just returned from Northern Ireland. They had been there for two years, and this was their first day back in England. They said to us something like this: “Can you imagine, we have been shot at for two whole years, we come back to our own country and we nearly get killed on our way home. Who would have thought?” One soldier was badly injured. We later found out that his leg was amputated. I looked at my uncle, and I have never forgotten his words to me: “Everything will be all right.” Really!
There are some philosophers who have made fun of the idea that everything will be all right. There are those who have questioned the validity of making such a comment and believing in the power of fate, none more so than Voltaire in Candide. He made fun of a philosopher called Liebniz, who really believed optimistically that everything would be all right. In the play Candide, there is a character called Dr. Pangloss, and he is always talking about the best of all possible worlds, just like Liebniz, and that everything will be all right. Voltaire calls into question such thinking, for he had gone to Lisbon in Portugal and had seen the devastation of an earthquake, where people had died, and even though Voltaire was still in many ways an optimist, he could not believe that everything would be all right. He concluded that all we can do in a world where everything will not be all right is simply to work hard, take care of our gardens, make some money, and do the best that we can. Cynical a bit, sceptical definitely, a touch of optimism, but he understood that not always is everything going to be all right.
When we come to a text like today's from the Book of Isaiah, we read of a man who was sort of in the wilderness, holding up a great, big placard saying “Everything will be all right.” Isaiah believed that everything would be all right. He was writing to the people of Israel when they were under the oppression of the Assyrians. He was saying that there will be a day when the people will be able to return to their home in Israel, when they will be able to have the dream and the vision that they currently only find as a distant reality.
He says that crocuses will be grown in the midst of the desert, that the hot sand will turn into pools of living water, that the lame will be able to walk, that the blind will be able to see, that the mute will sing praise to the glory of God, and that there will be a highway in the desert, a highway of holiness for the people to return to the Holy Land, no longer under the capture of the Assyrians. God will deal with them. He will come and save his people. They will rejoice and be glad and everything will be all right. In this magnificent passage, we find the optimism of a person of God.
It is not just optimism. It is not the banal fatalism that just says “Everything will be all right.” For Isaiah, everything will be all right because of God. It is God and God's presence and God's grace and God's love that ensures that in the end everything will be all right, that the people of Israel will return home, the highway of the Lord will be there, and the people who are now imprisoned will be able to sing with joy and with freedom.
It is remarkable that the New Testament picks up those very themes. The writers of the New Testament and the characters of the New Testament believed that the birth and the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth was actually the fulfilment of everything that the prophet Isaiah had believed. But, there is a gap in time between Isaiah's writing and the birth of Jesus, there is 600 years, yet they believed that what the prophet Isaiah envisaged for his people, the salvation of humanity, had occurred in Jesus.
When Mary sang that magnificent Magnificat upon the news that she was carrying the Messiah, she believed that God had come to redeem the people. The mighty and the powerful and the oppressors would be brought low. The way home for the People of God was actually right there in her womb. Her child would be the cause of the rising and the falling of many nations.
Similarly, in the Book of Matthew there is an incredible moment where John the Baptist is imprisoned and he sends some of his followers to meet Jesus. His followers ask Jesus this question: “Are you the Messiah? Are you the one who we have hoped for? Are you the one who is going to bring our people home?” Jesus' answer to him echoes what we find in the Book of Isaiah. He said, “Do you not see already that the lame walk and that the blind see, that the lepers are healed, that the mutes can sing praises, that the poor receive good news, and that the oppressed are set free. Go back to John and tell him that you have seen these things.”
In other words, Jesus knew, and John eventually knew, and all those who witnessed the ministry of Jesus knew, that the Child of Bethlehem actually was the fulfilment of all that the people of God had hoped for. When Christ was crucified and raised from the dead, those early Christians saw in this one act the indication of God's salvation for people. In this one moment, in this one person, in this one time, the hopes and the dreams of all the years are found in Jesus of Nazareth.
Now what? Those early Christians believed that everything would be all right because Jesus had fulfilled what Isaiah had hoped for. But, here we are, 2,000 years later and people are still at war with one another, even though the Prince of Peace says otherwise. People still live in poverty, people still lose their jobs and are ill. We lose our loved ones and the people who are close to us, and we say, a bit like Voltaire, “Come on, don't tell me that everything is going to be all right!” We see otherwise.
The Christian message is that between the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and his triumph over sin and death, between then and his eventual return, we the Children of God, the Church of God, the people of God wait expectantly. Between the victory of Christ on the cross and the eventual moment when it will be consummated, we bear witness to the wonder and the grace of God.
What sort of church should we be as we wait? The first thing that we need to be as the church, between the Resurrection and the return of Christ, is patient. I thought it was fitting that the same uncle who had told me that everything was going to be all right also gave me a Christmas gift. The Christmas gift that he would give to all his nieces and nephews every year was something horticultural. He sort of thought that he had a green thumb, did my uncle; he didn't really, but he thought he did.
He gave me a bulb in a sack, and he said, “Here Andy, enjoy this! Merry Christmas!”
I looked at this stinky thing and I thought, “I know he went to Cambridge, but I think my uncle has lost his mind.” Nevertheless, he gave me instructions, in writing, where he said that you add copious amounts of water on a regular basis, make sure that it is always facing the sunlight and you will have a wonderful gift for Christmas.
So, I did as he suggested. I dug a hole, I put it in the ground, I put copious amounts of water on it, and I got up on Boxing Day to see what would happen. Nothing! A mound of soil! I went back the next day thinking I had done something wrong, and I poured more water on it. And, for another 10 days, religiously I poured copious amounts of water on said stinky bulb. Nothing happened! I gave up! I thought “What a terrible, terrible man my uncle is! What an awful gift he has given me! Something must be wrong!” Then, I forgot about it. I went back to all the other gifts that my other uncles had given me, and they were really wonderful things.
But then one day in the spring I went out into the back garden and right next to my soccer ball there was this incredible flower. It had come from almost nowhere, seemingly from the barren earth. Overnight, this magnificent plant had grown with wonderful leaves and vibrant yellow colours. It was a magnificent thing! I thought about my uncle and I thought about his gift and I thought about his comment to me - everything will be all right!
The Book of James says something very similar. It says that as Christians, we must be like farmers who sow seeds, but then wait patiently for them to bear fruit. We must wait expectantly for something to grow. All together, my friends, the cynicism of our age and the hurry of our age call into question the sovereignty and the grace and the work of God, because we are in such a hurry for results. We expect immediate responses, we expect things to happen in the blink of an eye, and we have lost one of the greatest gifts that anyone can have: the gift of patience.
After all, did not Israel wait over 600 years and then declare that Isaiah's prophesy was fulfilled? Oh, our perspective is so narrow! We must be a people of patience. But, you know, patience can be nothing more than simple pacifism, fatalism. “Oh, everything will be all right,” we say, “all we have to do is wait.” No! There needs to be commitment while we wait, a commitment to the things of God, a commitment to the things of Christ, a commitment to the way of peace, a commitment to the way of justice.
Not long ago, I was reading a book by someone who I love and admire, Robert Fulghum, who wrote the book, All I Ever Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Any of you read that book? Well, he has a new one out. It is called, What On Earth Have I Done? It is the story about various people that he has met.
He meets two university students and picks them up in his car. They sit in the back seat, and he enters into a discussion with them. He asks them what they are working on right now. They reply that they are philosophy students, and that they are learning to do different things, but they had just been given an assignment by their professor. He gave it to them a few months ago to do something new, to do something bold, and then to reflect on the effect of what it was that they were doing.
Fulghum said to them, “Well, what is it that you have done?”
They said, “We have eaten a chair.”
He looked at them, completely bemused, and said, “You have done what?”
They said, “We have eaten a chair.”
He says, “Pray, tell me, how have you eaten a chair?”
They said, “Well, a few months ago, we got a wood rasp, and we took a chair and it had no stains and no toxins in it, and we began to shave it into little pieces. We then took the sawdust everyday and we sprinkled it on our granola. We added to it some cranberry and lemon, which makes wooden chairs very nice, by the way. Every single day, under the guidance of our doctor, in small amounts, we ate the chair.”
Fulghum said, “What have you learned from this philosophically?”
They said, “The power of patience and of waiting for what you want.”
Fulghum said, “You know, this is a lesson all people need to learn: to wait patiently, but to act diligently.”
In matters of peace and justice and of truth and of righteousness, it is a time of commitment to doing things over a period of time. The world throws up its hands and says everything will be all right, or else it says, everything will not be all right, and then it sits in pacifism. For those who sit and wait, they work for the things that they dream for and are committed to. This Christmas believers need to be committed to something greater than themselves. They will be astounded to see how things work out.
All of that is meaningless without one last great thing, and that is faith. It is fine to have things in our hands and to do good. It is fine to wait and to be patient. But, it is faith that moves the whole process. It was the faith of the early Christians in Jesus when they saw in him the fulfilment of all the people had hoped for and that gave them a sense of peace and victory. It was faith during the time of Isaiah that allowed the people to finally wait for the highway home to Zion and to the Promised Land. You and I need to wait for the final moment of Christ's victory and for our faith to be vindicated.
Over the Advent period, as many of you will know, I have used the image of the great banquet feast of heaven. I have suggested in classical Old
Testament and New Testament terms that the people of God will someday (metaphorically) be at a great banquet feast in heaven. The prophets will be there, the priests will be there, and the monarchs will be there, and Jesus, the Messiah, will be the host and there will be this huge banquet hall.
I want to leave you this Christmas with one last image. It is that also in this banquet hall there will be the Church. There will be a big sign on a big table reserved for those who have faith in Christ. At this banquet table will be Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and Peter talking. Mary is saying, “You know, I gave birth to this Child, and I know him best.”
Peter will say, “But, I saw him last, and I am the rock on which this place is built.”
The saints will all be there nattering away with one another, saying, “If only more people would listen to what we have to say...”
And, Augustine, the great saint, would be saying, “You see, it was about grace. I was right! I was right!”
The priests and the ministers and the clergy will be there, and we will be talking about what a motley crew we have had to look after over the years and how hard ministry has been and what we have given up, like Sunday mornings almost every Sunday of the year! John Calvin will be there with Mother Teresa, and they will be eating their meal side-by-side and they will be saying, “It was all about Jesus, after all, wasn't it?” They will smile and nod at one another, and the Protestants and the Catholics will be sitting side-by-side.
And then there will be, at the end, one other little place, and it will say “Timothy Eaton Memorial Church” and all those who have been part of our church for a hundred years,(as we approach our centenary), will be gathered at the end of the great table together, reunited at last. What will we be doing? Probably just eating - that's all - for at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church we eat a lot! We will be gathered there with those who have gone before us, and we will be there with those who God prays will follow us. Jesus will enter in as the host. He will come in to the table called “Church” and he will say, “I am here. This is my Father's house and everything will be all right.” Amen.