God's End, Sermon on Isaiah 62

Sermon for St. John the Evangelist, 17 January 2016.

From Isaiah 62:1-5

How are your New Year’s resolutions going? We are halfway into the first month of January 2016 and, according to The Guardian, 43% of our New Year’s resolutions have fallen away already. By the end of January, roughly 2 Sundays from now, 66% of people who made a resolution will have broken it. Our plans to choose better and remake one or more areas of our lives will fail.

Not that we don’t sincerely want to stick to those resolutions- life just gets in the way.

The weather keeps us from going on that evening run. Work occupies our time and we don’t make time for that cup of coffee with a friend. Take away is faster than cooking a meal, with both our budget and our plans to eat healthier feeling the pain. The Dry January campaign more or less assumes that 31 days is the max amount of time they can encourage people to give up alcohol.

We want change for the better, but consistently fail at succeeding.

Do you think that Israel made New Year’s resolutions? Did Zedekiah wake up after Rosh Hashanah and decide- “this next year is going to be the year of Zedekiah! This year I’ll stop enacting policies that hurt the poor. I’ll try to talk to those Temple Priests about maybe teaching the spirit of the Law better. Maybe I’ll reinforce the troops so we don’t accidentally fall to Babylon.”

It’s obviously an anachronistic question, but the story of the Jewish people and their nation seems like a series of doomed resolutions.

We see this early in the Old Testament. Adam and Eve failed at the one job they had to do of not eating from the Tree. Cain fails at the simple task of not murdering his brother. Abraham tries to pass off Sarah as his sister multiple times, even after it causes confusion and misery the first time. Esau trades his birthright for soup. All of this is before we’ve even left the first book or even finished the first book.

It goes downhill from there. Whether wandering through the wilderness and not making graven idols or collecting manna on the Sabbath, occupying the Promised Land according to God’s commands, or trusting in God as the leader over a human as a king, Israel seems to start with good intentions and forget them by the end of the first month (figuratively speaking).

So we arrive in Isaiah, to a familiar picture. Despite prior reform efforts, God departed from Jerusalem and let the city fall into exile. The Babylonian Exile, lasting for roughly fifty years, marks a shift in Israel’s theology. The belief was that God lived in the Temple and had departed when the Temple fell. They now grappled with the reconstruction of the city where God had dwelt, without the Temple and presumably without God.

Chapters 60-62 form the middle of the saga. Prior to this God judged the nation and “left” the Temple. After verse 62, the nation asks- how do we rebuild? How to we make sure that this won’t happen again? But history tells us that it has a way of repeating itself, and for Israel this means that in just a relative bit of time they will once again be occupied. The remainder of the Old Testament tells us that Israel continually fails at keeping their resolutions. They will, more or less, not not be occupied again until after World War II.

People, things, institutions, situations don’t change. We are who we are from when we are first born and will be that way until we die. We can’t change who we are so we might as well give up trying.

The end.

But that’s a really fatalistic place to end a sermon, and our failure at sustaining change isn’t what we should take away from the Old Testament, as true as that may be and as often as it does teach us that. So maybe it’s worth pausing and looking at change differently.

I recently found a notecard that says “everything will be okay in the end, if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” On the one hand, that’s a pretty cliché expression. Things aren’t always “okay” even at the end. I still really like it and bought it for my office. But then, as is often the case, I started to think about it more, and I thought about which end it meant. If it means my ends, then yes, things won’t always be “okay.” It’s impossible for us to see the infinite outworkings of events in our finite mind. To borrow another overly used phrase, we tend to see the trees and not the forest. We don’t change all that much in the finite- or at least in the finite period we perceive. It can take years, decades, and entire lifetime for us to change even a small bit. We may not even recognize that we’ve become “okay” in that time, although others see it.

We may not realize we weren’t “okay” to begin with.

Which gives me the hope that my notecard is correct when I put it’s promise in the context of God’s time. God names our ends. We are promised in the Book of Revelation that at the end of all things, we will stand before God and our true name, the name that only God knows, will be revealed to us. In the most cosmically possible “it’s okay” moment, God chooses to tell us who we are, just as our parents started forming our identities when they gave us a name at birth.

You can’t read the Old Testament and not realize how important names are. When God calls Abraham and Sarah to parent the nation he changes their names. After he wrestles with God, Jacob is renamed Israel. In Isaiah, God declares that

You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.

These aren’t just new names, but new identities, new promises to be carried out in ways that those immediately receiving Isaiah’s pronouncements will not see to the end. These names are the continuation of the promise made to Abraham, that God will be faithful until the end, but that God’s end won’t always be recognized in our time.

It’s the great transformation of making the old into the new. As creatures we can try to change and modify ourselves, but it’s often just switching one behavior out for another for a short period. Only God sees us and nudges us to be the new person that we will one day be. Jesus’ first miracle, as recorded in John’s Gospel, has him changing water into wine. It doesn’t seem accidental that his first miracle mirrors the sacraments. Through the waters of baptism, we are made new. Through the drinking of the sacramental wine we are made part of the new covenant.

The change we undergo when we trust that at God’s end everything will be okay, can’t be measured by the same objective goals we set before ourselves on December 31^st. We don’t measure God’s work in our life by monetary success or health or or fame. These changes are subtler. As we are formed more fully by Christ, the love and light and peace that we offer the world increases. A life formed by Christ is inherently marked by mercy and grace, neither of which can be measured out precisely.

And this is the freedom that we live in presently. We are free to strive to change ourselves for the better, but are assured that our success or failures aren’t the marks that God ultimately measures us by. Hear again the promises made to the fallen Israel-

62:1 For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch.
 62:2 The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory; and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give.
 62:3 You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
 62:4 You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.
 62:5 For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

God resolves that in the end everything will be okay, and if it’s not okay, then it’s not God’s end for us or with us just yet.