Greening Creation (Isaiah 65:17-25, Proper 28C, November 17, 2013)

Greening Creation

Isaiah 65:17-25
Proper 28C
November 17, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

The year is nearly over.  Next Sunday is the last Sunday of the church year.  The Sunday after that is the first Sunday of Advent and the church year begins again.  The year is nearly over.

These last few Sundays of the church year have as their theme imagining what the world would look like if the prayer that we pray at least once each week were finally, and against all our expectations, answered, if God’s kingdom did come and if God’s will were done on earth as in heaven.  To imagine that is to dream big.

Mostly we don’t dream that big. 

Carol and I do a fair amount of our Christmas shopping on line and, beginning about mid-October the retailers start their Christmas surge of catalogs.  We don’t dare let the mailbox go two days or the catalogs will be wedged in so tightly it takes a pair of pliers and a can of WD-40 to get them out of the mailbox.

Every day we flip through the pages looking for suitable gifts for our families and for each other.  My side of the family insists on wish lists from us.  On the one hand it’s nice not to have to guess about what each of us might want.  If it’s on the list, we know that our gift will be welcome and appreciated.  On the other hand, making our own wish list can become a burdensome chore.  What do I want?  What do I want?

It didn’t used to be so hard.  About this time of year my sisters and I started looking for the Sears catalog to come in the mail.  It was the size of our telephone book and our telephone book was this  (2 1/2 inches) thick.  Of course, it wasn’t the whole of the Sears catalog that we wanted.  Just the toy section, but that was big enough—about this (3/4 inches) thick—maybe a hundred pages of toys.  Each of us would take our turn reverently paging through the toy section, pausing to meditate on a few toys that attracted our attention.  The children in the catalog always looked so excited.  If only we had what they had we would be that excited, too.  Not everything in the catalog, just a few things, maybe just the robot arm on page 354, the one that was about a foot high and had controls so that you could bend the arm and pick up a ping pong ball with the “hand.” 

I wanted that robot arm more than I could say.  I dreamed about it, imagined that I had it and imagined how happy I would be.  I dreamed with nearly all my might.  But it wasn’t a very big dream.

If I had dreamed bigger maybe it would have been like a song by one of my favorite singer-songwriters, John McCutcheon, who sings songs about social justice and baseball and plays the hammered dulcimer.  He sings a children’s song entitled: “If I Ran the World.”

If I ran the world, everything would change.

The food and toy stores would be free

with door-to-door delivery.

Oh, what a party it would be,

if I ran the world.

And, if I ran the world, all homework would be banned.

Our school week would be just one day;

all the rest we’d have for play.

And I’d triple every teacher’s pay,

if I ran the world.

And, if I ran the world, I’d never change my socks,

my bedtime would be late at night,

there’d always be a hallway light.

Whatever’s wrong I’d make it right,

if I ran the world.

That’s a bigger dream than a robot arm!  But the dream could be bigger still, depending on who the dreamer is.  If you were, say, a prophet of the Isaiah school from the sixth century living in Judea after Babylon, your dream might look more like the Old Testament reading we heard just a bit ago.

If the babies of your community were dying as infants, you might dream a world where infant mortality would be unknown.  If it is a struggle to survive until you are fifty, in your dream a person who died at a hundred would be considered a youngster.  In a world in which invaders and imperial overlords confiscated houses and their stooges stole figs and olive oil and wine, you might dream a world in which people are secure in their homes and they enjoy the fruit of the labor of their hands.  In a world in which God seems slow to answer our prayers, you might dream a world in which God answers even before we pray.

You might dream a Jerusalem that is alive and the source of life, not a pile of ruins and rubble left by the latest looters of God’s city.  You might dream a new heavens and a new earth, a transformed and renewed world so thoroughly peaceable that a lamb would be safe among wolves.

There is no outside to this dream.  This is not a dream in which those inside the dream do well and those outside the dream not so much.  This is what makes it different from the schemes and plans of our world.  In our world people make plans with little regard for side effects, for the collateral damage.  In our world people “externalize the negatives,” a high-sounding phrase that means dumping your garbage in your neighbor’s yard.  A mega-retailer wants to reduce its labor costs, so it pays its workers poverty wages and lets them feed their children through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps.  If a supercenter costs the rest of us nearly $900,000 a year in social services, well that’s someone else’s problem.  The fossil fuel industry makes its profits extracting oil, gas and coal from the ground where they have been for millions of years, sequestered carbon that has kept our planet livable for us.  If the result is an increase in the violence of storms and a few hundred Filipinos die, well, profits come before people.  Those are the dreams that our world’s system encourages, but those dreams are a nightmare for the poor and for the planet.

The prophet’s dream is different.  The prophet knows that the peace of the human community must not lead to greater violence in the natural world.  The welfare of the city cannot come at the expense of countryside.  There cannot be an outside to the dream.  We struggle to solve problems locally.  But the prophet knows that what we need is a global answer.  What we need is a new earth and a new sky above it.  What we need is a transformed world.  What we need is for God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven.

That’s a big dream.  That’s a bigger dream than we’re used to.  That’s a bigger dream than we will find in the toy section of the Sears catalog or in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  It’s a dream that’s big enough to claim us mind, heart and soul.

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