Sermon at St. Thomas by Lynn E. Cunningham October 29, 2006 Is 59:1-4, 9-19 Hebrews 5:12-6:1, 9-12 Mark 10:46-52

There are a host of issues confronting our country, our state and town, and our church. The 2006 elections are coming up. This is the church stewardship season, which highlights issues of how well St. Thomas is performing, financially and otherwise. These lessons invite reflection on behind these issues. Isaiah in particular invites the question, who can restore order and righteousness in the world?
The passage from Hebrews similarly invites the reader to ask whether he is ready for the real meat of a Gospel of righteousness, or whether he must be content with the more digestible milk of a milder version of what kind of life the Gospel demands of the followers of Jesus.
The Gospel story of the healing of the blind beggar Bartimaeus considers what forms of blindness may need to be healed in order to discern the direction toward righteousness.
Americans are blessed to be able to vote in elections for political leaders of the country. The press is filled with stories of other countries caught up in internal warfare, strife, and civil war, where personal security is lacking. The countries where this is occurring are called “failed states”, because there is no government strong enough to keep the peace, to deter violence, to restore righteousness and justice. Iraq certainly is a failed state, since not even the collective might of our best military forces seem to be able to keep the peace there among the warring factions. Other failed states include Somalia in the Darfur region, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Haiti.

Reading through the passage from Isaiah shows what it means to live within a failed state. It makes me all the more grateful to be living in the U.S. Listen again to just a sample of what Isaiah says:

“Justice is far from us and righteousness does not reach us....We grope along like the blind along a wall... We all growl like bears; like doves we moan mournfully....We wait for justice.... for truth stumbles in the public square and uprightness cannot enter.”
Then Isaiah says that Yahweh was displeased with this lack of justice. Yahweh was appalled that there was no one to intervene. And so Yahweh will intervene to restore order and respect for justice among the peoples.

It is easy to understand how, when a state has failed, when there is no access to justice or to personal security and safety, the minds of people who live there would turn to asking God to intervene, asking God to set up a divinely inspired government that is based on God’s law and guidance, as Isaiah seems to do. When there is no justice or functioning government, it is easy to understand why people would reject the American notion of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”, in favor of a government where God would be in charge at the center. Islamist fundamentalism, and the frequent

call in our own country for a government based on Christian biblical principles is quite understandable when society seems to be in collapse. Isaiah makes the same call 2500 years ago when his own society was falling apart.

Our society faces issues that are complex and threatening. Global warming, persistent poverty, the role of foreign immigrants in our society, the degradation of the natural world, the stability of our national and local economy. The US cannot be described as a failed state and yet we face daunting issues, that many in American society would like to see resolved directly by God’s personal intervention.

Our parish church also faces complex problems that do not offer ready solutions. For example,

Should St. Thomas have one church service or two on Sunday, and at what time should the services be conducted? No matter how that question is answered, there will members of the parish who will not be able to come in to worship.
Does the parish have plenty of money, or are we short of funds? Our financial statements show we have lots of money in the bank. On the other hand, our current income from pledges and plate collections do not support our current operations.
How can the parish do a better job bringing more of the youth of Dubois into our church community? Everyone wants to do this, but few have the ideas or energy for making it happen.
And there are other issues.

Should our church ask God to intervene directly to solve these problems? I doubt it. These lessons, I suggest, can be teachers here. These lessons, I suggest, invite us to approach these issues prayerfully, and with an awareness that God is in charge of life. Yet, even with God in charge, you and I are the ones who must seek to act with justice and righteous on each of these issues, as well as on all the other personal issues that each person is facing.
But did I not just say that Isaiah was calling for a government based on God’s direct intervention and God’s divine law? At first reading he does so, but look again.
If the reader goes back and looks more closely at the Isaiah passage, he or she may discover that it is not simply a clarion call for God to govern our nation or any other nation. The passage says that Yahweh will come to restore order. That he will visit punishment upon the wicked.
But it does not say how exactly God will accomplish this. The clear implication of the passage is that every human being who is a responsible member of the community is charged with carrying out truth, and justice and righteousness. Remember it says that “uprightness cannot enter the public square.” The passage is saying that it is the people who are at work in the public square who are called upon to act with uprightness. Each person in the public square is charged with being upright. Uprightness is not something that only God can accomplish. Each human being is charged with striving for righteousness, not just God. God acts in a mysterious way through each person to restore righteousness. But the restoration is so that every person may live more righteously. And, as the letter to the Hebrews says, each person may have to be fed on the milk of babies to

move towards righteousness, before they are ready for the real meat of the Gospel. Converting to acting with righteousness takes time.

I read these passages to say that God acts mysteriously in and through the lives of each of God’s human creatures. God does not act in some form of artificial intervention in the world, like a space ship dropping in from another planet.
After making what seem highly political statements, Isaiah ends with a statement that to me has a very different quality, a statement that opens a deeper perspective on God accomplishing the restoration of righteousness in the community. Isaiah says, at the end of the passage, that because of the evil works of the community the wrath of God will come upon that community “like a pent up stream that the wind of the Lord drives on.”
Isaiah’s image is that of a sudden flash flood of God’s wrath washing down a riverbed, overpowering everything in its path, driven all the faster by a huge blast of sacred wind pushing against the flood waters running before it. A storm surge of wrath, if you will, like the storm surge that overtopped the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Now, play for a moment with that image of the flood driven on by the blast of wind.
Think of a River of Wind, a River of water. A River of water driven by wind. A Wind River. Is not Dubois located on Wind River? “The Lord will come like a pent up stream that the wind of the breath of the Lord drives on.” There is something divine and mysterious going on in this image, and especially for us in Dubois, where a continual reminder of this image flows past in our very own Wind River, a few hundred yards from the church’s front door.
What is the divine mystery of this wrath of God that blows the waters ahead of it? What is the wrath of God?
To me, the wrath of God is not an anxious anger, not an angry parent slipping out of control. Not a cruel anger. What the Wrath of God seems to do in the Isaiah passage is to restore peace and harmony in creation, in human community. It is not a wrath that just rips up and destroys, but that creates and re-creates truth and justice and righteousness in the human community. And Isaiah is telling the reader that this breath of God is blowing mysteriously directly through our lives, like a wind blowing a flood of water ahead of it, like the Wind River flowing right through our town.
And can you hear in this image echoes of all those other times when the Bible expresses God’s presence in a mix of wind and water? God hovering over the waters of chaos at the beginning of creation. God’s wind parting the Red Sea so that the children of Israel could escape Egyptian slavery. Think of Jesus telling Nicodemus in the third chapter of John’s Gospel that the holy spirit blows wherever it wills. Water and wind, a wind river often expresses the loving restorative wrath of God. And here it is again in the middle of this Isaiah passage. And here it is again in us and with us as we come into the election and stewardship season.
When you consider voting and the issues facing our society, when facing the issues before the parish, let the sacred wind and river of God’s loving power flow through you. Let it restore your own power to act with love, righteousness and justice.
In Jesus name, Amen.