Sermon — October 15, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Last weekend, as I flipped through newspaper images of devastation coming out of Israel, one understated caption stuck with me. The photo showed a multi-story building in the city of Sderot that looked like it had come down in an earthquake, with two walls gone and about three-quarters of the floorspace completely collapsed, leaving only half of a shell of the original building. The caption said something like, “Israeli soldiers stand outside the police station in Sderot, damaged during fighting on Sunday.” “Damaged,” to say the least, but not yet totally destroyed.
Soon enough, images of devastation were coming from outside Israel, too, as Israeli airstrikes and shells began flattening buildings across the Gaza Strip, and the familiar cycle of violence and retaliation began again. This week, Isaiah’s words have once again become terrible reality on both sides of the border fence: “for you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin.” (Isaiah 25:2)
And then on Monday, I heard the awful news, and on Tuesday, shared you with the awful news, of Evie Scoville’s death, which was sudden and unexpected, and deeply, deeply sad. And it felt, to me at least, like one of the central buildings in our community had collapsed, because someone who had been a source of comfort and strength and shelter to so many people for so long was suddenly gone.
One way or another, many of us have taken some damage this week. And if by some chance you don’t have family or friends in Israel or Palestine; or if you didn’t know Evie, or didn’t know her well, and your week has been perfectly fine; then for the purposes of this sermon I’d invite you to think about some time when it wasn’t, when you were going through some grief, or pain, when the world felt like it was collapsing around you.
Because the question I want to ask today isn’t a question about the intricacies of Israeli history or Palestinian rights, about how to process an unexpected death or any given crisis in any of our lives. What I want to ask is this: We sing every week in praise of a “God of power and might.” So what is God’s mighty, powerful response in the face of all of this?
In our first reading today, the prophet Isaiah speaks from a place of conflict and grief that’s very familiar in the world today. Isaiah is the great prophet of exile and return, a prophet who not only foresees the judgment and destruction of his people and their holy city of Jerusalem, but comforts them, after they go into exile, with the hope of a future restoration. At this point in the story that surrounds the prophecies of Isaiah, the city of Jerusalem hasn’t fallen yet, but disaster is looming. And Isaiah already looks forward, in chapters 24 and 25, to what he calls “the day of the Lord,” to some future day on which God will finally act to save the people, some day when God will finally come in and clean up this whole mess.
Isaiah’s description of that day has become a key part of the Christian understanding of our future hope. This vision is at the heart of our answer to the question, “What’s God going to do in response to all of this?” Isaiah returns to the theme of the “day of the Lord,” that long-hoped-for future day. God will gather us on the holy mountain, Isaiah says, God will gather all the peoples of the world, and we will feast on “rich food,” and “well-aged wines.” (Isaiah 25:6) But this heavenly feast is not itself the main event. The feast is a celebration of God’s greatest act: for “on this mountain,” Isaiah says, God “will destroy… the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces.” (Isaiah 25:7-8)
This is God’s mighty response to the violence and injustice of this world: not the destruction of the enemies of the chosen people of God, but the destruction of the greatest enemy of all people: the destruction of death itself. This is God’s answer to the grief and pain of this life: not to make it make sense, not to try explain it away, but to wipe the tears from our eyes. This is what Christian hope is: not the naïve optimism that says that things will be just fine, that good things happen to good people in this life; but the conviction that even though things aren’t okay, that even though life isn’t fair right now, a day is surely coming when God will set things right.
Like so many things in Christian life, this is both “now” and “not yet.” It has already begun, but it is not yet complete. God has already defeated death; but the final victory is still to come. Because on that mountain where Jesus was crucified, God destroyed death. On that day when Jesus shrugged off his burial clothes, God cast off the shroud cast over all peoples. When Jesus walked out of the tomb where death sought to swallow him up, God swallowed death instead. And when we finally, one day, see God face to face, our faces will be full of a lifetime of tears, and God will wipe away the tears from our eyes. And the Resurrection that began with Jesus will be made complete in us.
But until that day comes, here we are, damaged but not destroyed, trying to live in the light of the Resurrection; trying to live as though the things that I just said were true. The promise of “the coming day of the Lord,” after all, isn’t just a pleasant dream about the future. It changes something about how we act in the present.
If “all peoples” are going to feast together one day, that means “all peoples.” It means that there are no enemies in heaven; only dinner companions. It means that no one is too far away or too different from you for you to care about in this world; you might be seated next to them in the next. It means, frustratingly enough, that the people you can’t stand being around in this life are going to spend eternity with you in the next; and you might want to start practicing how to deal with it.
And if God is going to wipe away the tears from our eyes, if God is going to destroy death, that changes something about our grief. It doesn’t take away the pain and the sadness we feel when someone dies, because they’re still gone from our lives now, even if we will one day meet them again. But the people we have loved and lost become to us like the apostle Paul, when he’s writing to the Philippians, writing to them on the assumption that he’ll see them again, and he’ll know what they’ve been doing. Their memories still speak to us, as Paul wrote to the church he’d left behind: “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.” (Phil. 4:9) Their memories become a blessing to us, because they inspire us to be the people they would have wanted us to be, and we know that they will one day see us as we have become.
I’ve been thinking so much about Evie this week, and all the memories I have of her from the few years I’ve known her, from my first interview with the Search Committee she co-chaired to the last time I bumped into her walking Santana on Main Street. Evie was, I think, defined by love. She lived the life that Paul describes here. She rejoiced always, fighting hard for joy in times that were sometimes far from joyful. She let her gentleness be known to everyone, with a love that could be fierce when she was protecting the people she loved but was never cruel. She was and she is an inspiration to me, as a parent, as a human being, and as a priest. Her soul rests now in the hands of a loving God, and we feel her absence, and the absence of all those whom we have loved and lost, and it hurts. But we will one day see her again, and see them all again, and God will wipe away the tears from our eyes, and we will say on that day, “this is our God, for whom we have waited, so that God might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation.” (Isaiah 25:9) Amen.