November 14, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Isaiah Vision

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor

Psalm 99:1–5
Isaiah 65:17–25
Luke 11:1–4

“They shall not labor in vain.”

Isaiah 65:23 (NRSV)

Let every word be the fruit of action and reflection. Reflection alone without action or tending towards it is mere theory, adding its weight when we are overloaded with it already. Action alone without reflection is being busy pointlessly. Honor the Word eternal and speak to make a new world possible.

Helder Camara

The first time I ever left my home country of Scotland was when I was two years old. I was taken by my mother on a plane, on a trip to Germany. The reason we were going to Germany was so that my mother could visit her sister, my Aunt Maud, who had met a young German teaching student who was doing a year abroad in Glasgow, in Scotland. They met and fell in love and got married and then Auntie Maud moved to Germany to live. I don’t really remember much about this trip. I remember seeing pictures and perhaps built up recollections of being on the plane, but I wonder if somewhere inside in doing that it created some kind of wanderlust in me. That is perhaps why I’m the only person in my family who has ever left Scotland and actually lives abroad.

I always was amazed by and admired my Aunt Maud for her strength. She and my Uncle Fritz (of course!) fell in love and got married some twenty years after the end of the calamity of the Second World War, a time when people in Britain were still very suspicious of Germany and Germans. My cousins who live in Germany reflect that when they would come over to Scotland and visit, all of the cousins would get together and go outside and play our favorite game, which was World War II. Of course they had to be the Germans, and they lost every time!

Subsequent trips to Germany instilled in me something of a love of that country, and when it came time to choose a language to learn in school, I chose to learn German and can still speak a little. German is a fascinating language which uses long, long compound words, and some incredible words have actually entered into the common currency of English. English is a Germanic language, and when you learn German, there are many similarities in words. There are some words which we use today that are essentially untranslatable into one English word. I think of that delicious concept called schadenfreude, which means, the delight that one takes in someone else’s misfortune. Not a very Christian concept, I know.

Another one that you’ll hear used and bandied about in the media is the word zeitgeist. Again, untranslatable in one word, it means the spirit of the times, the feeling of the age; it encompasses sociopolitical and cultural concepts and themes. Zeitgeist is a very useful word. What, I wonder, do you think is the zeitgeist of the culture of the United States today? We might reflect that we are continuing to live into a complex economic situation. Recovery seems to be slow; unemployment continues to be at shockingly high rates. Some people reflect on a kind of a malaise or anxiety that seems to be present in the collective psyche; there seems to be growing despair about the political discourse in the country as polarization between the parties seems to be ever more the way things work, and little seems to be getting done.

Hendrick Hertzberg in the New Yorker gave his summary of the zeitgeist, if you like, in an article summarizing the experience of the recent elections. He says the outcome of the elections was an “expression of angry anxiety about the ongoing economic firestorm.” I wonder how many of you might agree with that as a sense of the zeitgeist in these days.

It interesting to reflect and compare this to what the zeitgeist was two years ago at this time when the country had just elected its first African American president. The key words were “hope” and “change” and “yes, we can.” Perhaps it’s indicative of the zeitgeist that the president, in his interview on The Daily Show, reflected that the motto has become “yes, we can, but . . .” Perhaps President Obama was simply being honest about the reality of political discourse, the realities of the political system. He’s no longer about heady idealism as a candidate, but a pragmatic realist who would perhaps subscribe to Bismarck’s famous dictum that “politics is the art of the possible.” I actually prefer J. K. Galbraith’s reflection on that. He wrote, “Politics is not the art of the possible; it consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” There you go, any of you who are thinking about entering the upcoming mayoral race. (Thanks be to God for J. K. Galbraith)

Zeitgeist. I wonder what that means for us as people of faith, as Christians seeking to follow in the way of Christ? Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this developing sense of anxiety or despair. Remember the psalmist reminds us, “Do not put your trust in princes or mortals.” A very influential theologian of the twentieth century was John Howard Yoder. A fascinating man, he was a Mennonite, a radical pacifist who taught theology at Notre Dame University. He reflected on what it meant to be a Christian, to seek to be a follower of Jesus. It is not that somehow we are better or so set apart, but that we bring different perspectives to life and history and culture. Yoder argues that there is a “majority perspective” in the world, and that is the perspective of wealth and power and influence and political worldliness. The church, Yoder argues, lives with the “minority perspective.” Its role is to embody and be witness to the way of Jesus without embracing worldly power or wealth or influence.

The Christian zeitgeist is always one of hope, rooted and grounded in love. But hope in the context of the church, in the context of Christianity and scriptures, is not simplistic optimism that somehow, oh well, everything is going to turn out right. It is in the most profound way an experience that itself grows out of distress or fear or brokenness. Back on my German theme, two of the great theologians of hope were Germans, Paul Tillich and Jürgen Moltmann, and their development of approach to and understanding of hope in Christianity grew out of devastating and calamitous experiences. Tillich as a young man was a chaplain in the German army for four years in the First World War, the span of the whole of World War I, and he saw the horror of that war of attrition in the trenches. And it was out of that experience that he developed his existential theology, his understanding that our hope lay in the courage to be and to live with God as the ground of our being. And then a generation and a half later, Jürgen Moltman as an eighteen year old was drafted into the Wehrmacht, the general regular German army, in 1944 and six months later was captured and became a prisoner of war. Moltmann was not brought up in the church, but in the prisoner of war camp in Britain he was given a New Testament and Psalms by the military chaplain. It was out of this encounter with the story of Jesus that Moltmann developed his undergirding of hope as being the gift that we are given and the way that we must live that has important and radical implications for our life together.

This concept of hope permeates the scriptures. That beautiful psalm, Psalm 99, that we read this morning, gives God the title “lover of justice.” What a beautiful concept of God—lover of justice. Jesus, of course, in the Lord’s Prayer speaks of this hope with the petition “your kingdom come.” Your kingdom, your reign, O God, be a reality here on earth. There is hope too in our reading from Isaiah 65.

Some people look at these verses in Isaiah and see in it some kind of pie in the sky, utopian dream that Isaiah is offering. But it is not a utopia that Isaiah speaks of. The Isaiah vision is grounded in the experience of desolation and exile of the people of Israel that Isaiah is prophesying to. The vision that he offers is a poetic vision, but one that has at its heart a sense of God’s will for economic justice. The Isaiah vision is about hope out of darkness. About working for a reality of place where children do not die because of lack of clean water or medication. Of a society in which old people would live in dignity, that those who labor, those who build the houses, get the benefit of that: they live in them. Those who plant the vineyards, who do the hard work, reap the fruit of the harvest: they get to eat the fruit that they have planted. I have a little book that I was given very early in my time in ministry. It’s a book by an Asian theologian, Raymond Fung, who was with the World Council of Churches, a book about this vision of Isaiah. Fung impresses this point that this is not a utopian dream that is being offered but God’s will for humanity. He writes, “The God we believe in protects children, empowers the elderly, and walks with working men and women.” The Christian zeitgeist is one of hope, of a real hope, a belief that in the most difficult times, in the darkest places, God is present, and in that reality springs hope. Hope, the Christian zeitgeist allows us to proclaim, in Desmond Tutu’s words: Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death; victory is ours through the one who loves us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.