November 10, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.
View pdf of bulletin
November 17, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.
View pdf of bulletin

Keep On Keeping On

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 98
Isaiah 65:17–25
2 Thessalonians 3:6–13

Have we ever tried to love God where no wave of emotional enthusiasm bears us up and we can no longer confuse ourselves and our life-urge with God, where we seem to be dying of a love that looks like death and absolute negation and we appear to be calling out into nothingness and the utterly unrequited?

Karl Rahner

I begin with two stories.

When our daughters were roughly fourteen and ten, we attended a family wedding on the East Coast and afterwards spent a few days in New York City. One of the sites our younger daughter, Carrie, wanted to see more than anything else during that trip was Strawberry Fields. Many of you remember that Strawberry Fields is an area in Central Park dedicated to the memory of John Lennon. Its name comes from the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The Dakota Apartments, where John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono lived, is adjacent to this part of Central Park. It was in front of The Dakota that John Lennon was murdered in December 1980.

Carrie has always been enamored with celebrities, and I suppose, at the age of ten, she had read or heard enough about the Beatles that she wanted to see this place. And so on a very hot and humid Manhattan day, we trekked through Central Park on a mission. There were a few wrong turns and some moments spent being completely lost, but we finally arrived. And that’s when Carrie’s face fell. Complete and utter disappointment was written all over it. You could almost see her mind working in slow motion. What I think she thought she would see when we arrived at Strawberry Fields was a place full of people playing guitars and tambourines and Beatles songs, long-haired hippies sitting yoga style, exuding wishes for peace to everyone who arrived. What she expected was completely different than what was there. What was there were two or three people, quietly reading, a peace pole erected in the middle, and a nice garden area. But not much else was going on. The gap between what she expected to find and what she actually found was huge. If I were to title this vignette from our family history, the title would be Dashed Expectations or Disappointment.

Second story. Just the week before last, at the end of a papal audience in St. Peter’s Square attended by 50,000 people, Pope Francis was approached by a man asking for a blessing. The man was horribly disfigured because of a genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis. It is a disease that causes tumors to form all over a person’s face and neck and head. Disfiguring tumors. The man approached the pope and asked for a blessing. The pope took the man’s head in his hands and cradled it against his shoulder. He kissed the man’s disfigured face and offered the blessing. If I were to title this story, I would use the words from the Thessalonians passage we just heard: An Example to Imitate.

These two stories capture a sense of—or just a tiny glimpse into—what today’s two lessons are getting at: disappointment that comes when a vision isn’t realized and a call to keep on being the church, even when hope wanes.

The people addressed by Isaiah have been horribly disappointed. Their disappointment is far more serious than a ten-year-old’s disappointment in Central Park, but what is similar is the huge gap between what they expected when they returned from the exile and what they found. They had been promised a restoration of the temple to the same glory that existed before the exile, and what they found was a poor substitute. A new day had been promised. God had brought them home. They had expected something different than what they found in the temple, and they had expected a new world order to have been established, too. They didn’t find it. And they lamented.

Over the last few weeks, a series called The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, has been running on PBS. The dashed hopes of the freed slaves after the end of the war reminds me of the dashed hopes of these returned exiles. In 1865, at the war’s end, the freed slaves had enormous hope in what a new reconstructed South might be. Some of them were promised land on Edisto Island in South Carolina, and for a year they had that land. But when Andrew Johnson succeeded Abraham Lincoln, he started dismantling reconstruction. All of the land the slaves had been promised on Edisto Island was reclaimed and taken away from them. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the writer and narrator of the series, posed the question, How did these slaves maintain hope amidst such disappointment?

How do any of us maintain hope when expectations are dashed? When a leader disappoints us? When a promised system doesn’t work out? When hope in a less violent city is dashed? When our healthy bodies fail us? When hope in a relationship is dashed?

How do we maintain hope?

Perhaps we do it by remembering the words of God we hear through Isaiah, that God is acting, is acting in the present, whether we know it or not. That God is creating, whether we can see it or not. Our version of scripture has God saying this: “For I am about to create a new heaven and a new earth, the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” The word choice for “create” is a participle in the original Hebrew. God is creating already—is in the midst of creating. The verse reads more like “Indeed, look at me, creating a new heaven and a new land” (J. D. W. Watts, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 25, referenced in Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, After Pentecost 2, Soards, Dozeman, McCabe, p. 134).

The words aren’t meant to be a platitude intended to erase all of the emotions of our suffering over what hasn’t yet been accomplished or our desire and hope for a new world. They aren’t meant to act as blinders for us so that we don’t see what’s wrong. But they are meant to yank us back into remembering that there is a big vision out there and God is in the midst of bringing that vision about—even when we can’t see it. It’s already in motion. Hope.

I visited someone in the hospital recently who is struggling with a very serious illness. When I arrived in this person’s room, there was another visitor. And in the middle of my visit, a doctor walked in. In other words, our visit didn’t include much privacy. But at the end of the visit, I offered to pray, and I invited the visitor to stay and be included in our prayer. I had no idea as to whether the visitor attended a church or believed in God or relied on prayer, but we prayed. A couple of days later I received an email from the person I visited, an email that expressed the desire she’d had during the visit to have been able to talk with me more privately, her regret that someone had been with us. But she also said that her visitor had been touched by the prayer. She concluded, “I think your visit had something to do with my visitor, too. I think God had something in mind for her, too.” She was able to see beyond the present reality—that God was already in the process of creating a new heaven and a new earth, something new, perhaps in someone’s life, even in the midst of her own unmet expectations.

The people in the church of Thessalonica were disappointed too. They were even a little alarmed, because they had received a letter from someone that stated that the the Day of the Lord had already arrived. They thought the letter had been sent by Paul and his people. Paul writes his second letter to the Thessalonians, assuring them that the letter wasn’t from him.

It had been an upsetting message for them because if the Day of the Lord had already arrived, why were they still suffering such persecution? Why weren’t things in the church better? Why didn’t they see what they had expected if the Day of the Lord had already arrived, if the parousia had already come? Paul assures them, but he also has a “come to Jesus” talk with them. Their discouragement had caused some of their members to act as if there was no point to living out their faith, no point to following Jesus, no point in being part of the church. If things are so bad, what’s the point?

I’ll bet you’ve had that thought. I know I have.

Paul’s words to them are words that tell them to stop slacking. Watch out for those believers—those in the church—who are living in idleness. The word in the text is “idleness,” but the better meaning is “disorderliness.” He was addressing the people in the church who had become sloppy in how they lived out their faith in the community. Sloppy in their attention to practices, the practices of faith. The disciplines of faith. He accused those who were living in the community and being idle of being moochers—people who were taking advantage of the work of the community that everyone else was doing.

And so Paul calls them to imitate. To imitate Paul and the ones who came with Paul, because, he reminds them, “We pitched in, and worked alongside everyone else, when we came to you, even though it was not required of us.” In the Greco-Roman world, work was for the lower classes or people with no position. Being served was for the people of position. Paul reminds the people of Thessalonica that Jesus turned that system upside down—a new heaven and a new earth in the making. This is why the story of the pope this last week came to mind. The man with the highest office in the Catholic church has set an example to imitate in whatever way we can. The church is supposed to reflect to the world a new heaven and a new earth in the making. The church was to live into the new creation God had proclaimed. If some are just along for the ride, the community is compromised and so is the vision.

John Wesley wrote in the General Rules of the Methodist Church that the task of the believer is not simply to go to church and do no harm, but also to do all the good he or she can possibly do. Pope Francis sets the bar high. There are others around us, too—a lot of them in this church community—worthy of imitating as we live out our faith and live into a new world. In a message the pope tweeted in September, he said “True charity requires courage. Let us overcome the fear of getting our hands dirty so as to help those in need.”

Dashed expectations. All of us have experienced them. Yet God is already creating a new heaven and a new earth. Can we strain to see what God is already doing?

We doubt. We meet disappointments. But in theologian Paul Tillich’s words, “Faith is our yes despite all that says no.” And sometimes the only way out of our deep disappointments is to keep on keeping on being the church, imitating, if necessary, the people who serve, who love, who pass on blessing, who encourage, who show humility, who forgive, who give. They are all around us. Alleluia. Amen.