Author Archives: Jeff Rudy

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children. – Revelation 21:1-7

John Donne was an English clergyman in the 16th and 17th centuries who wrote some of the most beautiful poems in our language. One of them rings especially true to what I want to say today. He wrote this, maybe you’ve heard portions of it in other venues:

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were:

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a book and the band Metallica wrote a song with the title being what the ending of that poem says – “for whom the bell tolls.” Surprisingly, that didn’t make it into our hymnal!

Ok, seriously, when Donne wrote about the tolling of the bells he was referring to funeral bells. In saying that “it tolls for thee,” Donne was expressing one of two things, or perhaps both: that when funeral bells were heard it was a reminder that we are all nearer to our own death each day; or he may have been saying what some of us believe to be true as humans – that all people are socially and spiritually interconnected. That is, when someone dies, a part of all of us dies. It might be seemingly apparent that the bell tolls for the one who is deceased, but make no mistake that it tolls for thee.

If you will pardon a bit of morbidity as I have already begun: I’ve spent some time among cemeteries in the last couple of weeks. It wasn’t due to some fetish or fixation about zombies or that I was hoping for some reason to have nightmares. The reason I went to the cemeteries is because I was looking for some spiritual inspiration and guidance on how best to conclude this four-week series we have spent at Jackson First UMC on “Four Parts Grace.” As I’m growing up, I’m coming to appreciate more and more that line in the Apostles’ Creed that says “I believe…in the communion of saints.” We are surrounded by what the author of Hebrews calls a “great cloud of witnesses” who are encouraging us onward along the journey of faith, pointing us toward the author of our life, and our faith, and our hope, Jesus Christ. I went to the tombs, in short, to look for a message of hope.

Dan Camp (Jackson FUMC’s Senior Pastor) and I spent a lot of time in conversation about each of these messages and one that we had the most difficulty assigning an adjective to was this one. We spoke in this series about the various ways that God’s unmerited favor, or what we call grace, comes to us and is revealed in us: in going before us and wooing us toward God’s self, or what we called prevenient grace; in pardoning us and welcoming us with open arms as we accept Christ’s saving offer, or what we called justifying grace; in changing us for the better, to make us more holy and pure like Christ, in going on to perfection, or what we called sanctifying grace. But if grace is eternal, what do we call that grace that welcomes us from the end of this life and carries us on into the next? John Wesley called this glorification, or glorifying grace. For that reason, we could simply leave it at that and just seek to unpack what that means. But we also talked about some synonyms and asked if there are other ways to describe this mode of grace – we’ve spoken of it at times as “final grace” or “dying grace.” While I always felt like those two words were somewhat close, I figured there was some better way of describing it. So, again, I went to the tombs. And on the headstones of many who now abide in the communion of saints, or what we call “The Church Triumphant,” were words that spoke of honor and mission, of fulfilled lives, and ultimately of triumphant hope…that is, that our grave is not the end, that death has not won and that its defeat is sure. That’s why I have come to call this grace that is yet to come “Triumphant Grace.”

A couple of weeks ago, on a brief visit to my family, I stopped by the place where my mother’s parents are buried in West Paducah. My granddaddy died in 1987, when I was six, 11 years before Papaw (my dad’s dad) died. My grandmother died when I was 16. They’re buried and on their tombstone, you will find these simple words – “God is Our Refuge and Strength.” I looked at others nearby and on one I found a peculiar message where another husband and wife were buried that said, “Death does not part us.”

When I got back to Jackson, I spent a couple of hours walking through Riverside Cemetery and discovered that I had parked immediately adjacent to the place where Bishop Isaac Lane was buried. He was the one after whom Lane College is named and was one of the founding members of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, what is now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, which was founded out of this very congregation (Jackson First UMC) and resides across the street at Mother Liberty CME Church. These words are inscribed at the place where he lay – “His philanthropy knew no race, and his ministry was to all mankind.” Sounds a bit like John Wesley’s well known motto: “The world is my parish.”

Relatives of Bishop Lane had these remarkable words upon their graves – James Franklin Lane, who died in 1944: “He lives on!! Immortalized by thousands as a world benefactor;” Mary Edna Johnson Lane: “She lives on! As a symbol of Christian living, and as an inspiration to future generations.” Some other messages of hope at Riverside – Mannie Cole, who died in 1911: “She lives with her Jesus, the lover of her soul”; Dr. Alexander Jackson, who died in 1879: “We shall meet again”; Lizzie Cartmell, who died in 1899 at the age of 46: “Her mother died when she was eleven years old, but her counsel and fine example were never effaced. She was educated at Salem, N.C., and was a devoted Presbyterian, her faith never faltering under any trial, and she lived and died with such perfect trust in God that we know that when the earthly house of her tabernacle was dissolved that she found a heavenly one waiting her”; Mary Jane Cartmell, who died in 1865: “Having faithfully performed her earthly mission, her pure spirit is gone to dwell in the bosom of her redeemer. Neither can she die any more for she is equal unto the angels”; Milton Brown, who died in 1911: “Not lost, but gone before”; someone with the last name Winham: “Her life was beautiful in ardent love, to all her family and all her friends; her charity akin to that from above, which to every human need extends.”

What will be our epitaph? How will we be remembered, in our living and in our dying? In 1650 and 1651, an English clergyman named Jeremy Taylor, influenced heavily by the Latin tradition known as ars moriendi (Latin for “the art of dying”) wrote a two volume set of devotional books called, The Rules and Practices of Holy Living and Holy Dying. These writings were so influential upon the mind and heart of our movement’s founder, John Wesley. Perhaps most helpful for us to hear as we think about the triumphant grace that greets us at the end of this life and carries us onto the next are the words that John Wesley spoke upon his deathbed. Hear these words of a witness to John Wesley’s last moments:

we hoped that if he had anything of moment on his mind, which he wished to communicate, he would again try to tell us what it was, and that either Mr. Horton, or some of those who were most used to hear our dear Father’s dying voice would be able to interpret his meaning; but though he strove to speak, we were still unsuccessful. Finding we could not understand what he said, he paused a little, and then with all the remaining strength he had, cried out, “The best of all is, God is with us”; and then, as if to assert the faithfulness of our promise-keeping Jehovah and comfort the hearts of his weeping friends, lifting up his dying arm in token of victory and raising his feeble voice with a holy triumph not to be expressed, again repeated the heart-reviving, words, “The best of all is, God is with us!”

My Papaw was alone in a field building a fence around some hay bales (the very ones seen in the picture on this post) on a hot August day in 1998 when his earthly life came to an end. Twenty-one years prior he had had a massive heart-attack; thirteen years prior his and my father’s business had gone under and he broke his back as he fell from a piece of farm equipment; after that accident, he was offered a job at the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, where he worked in downtown Paducah, Kentucky until he retired in 1995.

But retirement wasn’t really in Papaw’s vocabulary. His heart was in his faith in Christ and devotion to living that faith out; his hands knew not of prolonged rest. He found fulfillment in close proximity to working in the dirt, the earth, and the care of his livestock. That August day, he was alone in the field, and by appearances knew his time had come: he took off his glasses, put them in his shirt pocket, grabbed his hammer in one hand and a fence post in the other, and lay down and breathed his last. That was his legacy – a legacy that proclaims: “Until the kingdom comes in fullness that we read about in the closing chapters of Revelation…until that day, I will work for that glorious day.”

And here is where the good news of triumphant grace meets us this day – in the promise and hope of a new heaven and new earth as John describes for us in Revelation 21. This hope is not a mere wish, but a confident assurance that death has lost its sting and victory belongs to life. It is based on nothing else than the resurrection of Jesus the Christ, which foretells our own resurrection.

If we can say confidently with the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians: “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” – if we can say that, it is only because of the victory that Christ had over death and the grave in his resurrection.

Last year as I was reading Matthew’s account of the resurrection in chapter 28 of his gospel, something struck me that I hadn’t ever noticed in all the times I’d read the account before about the stone being rolled away. Think about this: for whom is the stone rolling away?

It might seem apparent just from thinking about it, that the stone rolling away is how Jesus could escape the tomb. It’s the opening of the door so he could get out, we tend to think, right? In fact if you read the account in Mark, Luke, and John, you might think that were true. But Matthew tells us something that the others don’t – Matthew tells us that the women who went to visit the grave actually saw the stone rolled away themselves. Matthew tells us, then, that the stone rolls not for Jesus, but for Mary Magdalene, for the other Mary, and then…for you and for me. The stone rolls, church, for us, that we can see that death does not have the final word, that death has lost its sting, that death cannot contain Life; that we may see that Jesus is alive once again and forevermore!

The bells that tolled, according to John Donne, were a sign to those who heard that we are all mortal and meet the same end known as death; that when one dies a part of all of us dies. The stone that rolled, according to Matthew, was a sign to those who witness it that the end known as death is not, in fact, the end; but that when this One is made alive again, a part of all of us becomes alive again, and that all who believe and trust this Resurrected Lord will know of the same resurrection that Jesus himself experienced nearly 2,000 years ago! Church that is good news! That is Easter!

And therefore, it is okay to send for whom the stone rolls. It rolls for thee! The stone rolls for us! And when we hear the sound of the stone rolling, it rings in our ears that the main thing that draws nearer to us is not death, but resurrection! Triumphant grace! Grace that declares death doesn’t have the final word. But that one day there will be no more crying, no more death. As Mumford and Sons sing beautifully in “After the Storm”: “There will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears; and love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears; get over your hill and see what you find there; with grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.”

John Wesley was right: “The best of all is, God is with us.” Now and forever! In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

See Romans 3:21-26; 5:20 for this sermon’s text.

The Barna Group conducted a poll several years ago to see what some of the most widely known Bible verses are. The poll turned up some interesting results. Among the top Bible verses was this one: “God helps those who help themselves.” Does anyone here know what the problem is with this? It’s not in the Bible! Further studies from the Barna Group showed that a majority of Christians in America agreed with the statement and felt that the Bible teaches this idea.

If those statistics are representative of the congregation gathered here, then I may about to become very unpopular by what I’m going to say: Not only is “God helps those who help themselves” NOT in the Bible, it also goes against the very grain of the entire scriptural witness. In fact, I think that if we say God only helps those who help themselves, that is just an excuse to not offer help to anyone who needs it. But that’s another sermon for another day.

If it were true that God only helps those who help themselves, then friends, we’re all in a world of hurt because we’re all incapable of really “helping” ourselves. If it were true that God helps those who help themselves, then the grace we sing about that’s amazing to save a wretch like me, is really not so amazing after all. Think about it: how would the lyrics of that beloved hymn be different if it were true that “God helps those who help themselves”?

Here would be the first verse:

Mediocre grace, how pleasant the sound

That gave a little extra to such a self-reliant person like me,

I once was a little misguided, but I got myself out,

Had blurry vision, but took some Visine and now I see clearly.

Instead, it’s this:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost, but now I’m found

Was blind, but now I see.

What’s with this “wretch” theology? I think that’s the part that really disturbs us. Perhaps that brings up memories of the message of our depravity being drilled or hammered into our spirits by parents or teachers or preachers to make us feel awful, guilty to the point of being paralyzed. Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”comes to mind as he describes sinful humans in this way:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Whew! Grace, anyone? Doesn’t that make us feel trapped in the belief that we will never be able to do anything good and will only be able to do everything wrong? Who wants to live in that sort of trapped existence?

Well, in an attempt to avoid this sort of wretched theology of hopeless depravity, we Christians in the Wesleyan/Methodist tradition have often glossed over a point that was right in the thick of Wesley’s understanding of grace. What I’ve witnessed is that some often move from the wonderful message of God’s prevenient, initiating, wooing grace directly to the message of God’s desire to sanctify us and renew the creation. The problem is that in narrative terms, this is like going straight from the beautiful message of Christmas directly to the empty tomb. But in the midst of that we have a bloody, torturous cross that bears an Innocent Redeemer who cries at the hour of his execution a piercing word – “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” Who exactly is “them”? The religious authorities who put Jesus on trial? Pilate and the Roman soldiers who authorized his torture and execution? The crowds who shouted “Crucify him!”? Are we among the “them”? Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Or is Paul wrong when he said “we all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory”? Was Paul mistaken when he said in the epistle to the Ephesians that we were all dead in trespasses and sin? “Well, he must not have been a good Methodist like us. He was too pessimistic!” Honestly, that’s an overcorrection. There’s truth in Paul’s message, there’s reality in the belief that we are among the “them” for whom Christ pleads forgiveness. If we desire that Christ brings us the grace to renew us and breathe new life into us, that admits quite simply that there is something about and in us that is old and dead and in need of being renewed. So, somehow, someway we must come to terms with that in ourselves which isn’t as it ought to be, and to admit that we are not able to make ourselves be what we ought to be on our own. We needn’t necessarily go down the road of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to get this message of realizing our deep and abiding need for saving grace from beyond ourselves, but we need to come to terms with our own need for forgiveness.

And regardless of whether or not we want to admit it, this is thoroughly Wesleyan. It is the movement of grace that we call justification. John Wesley had a very succinct definition of “justification” when in a sermon on the subject he said this: “The plain scriptural notion of justification is pardon, the forgiveness of sins.”

This sermon came across as quite counter to what was being proliferated among some in the church at the time. There were church leaders who were teaching that in order to be justified, or have the assurance of pardon, people would first have to be sanctified or purified. Said Wesley, “Who are they that are justified? The ungodly…for it is not a saint but a sinner that is forgiven, and under the notion of a sinner. God [justifies] not the godly, but the ungodly; not those that are holy already, but the unholy. Does then the Good Shepherd seek and save only those that are found already? No. He seeks and saves that which is lost. He pardons those who need his pardoning mercy.”

Think of it this way – if sanctifying grace, the goal, is what God does in us, then before we can get there, we need to accept the grace that declares what God does for us. That is, forgiveness, or justifying grace.

Listen to our words of absolution that are offered prior to receiving the Lord’s Supper, in agreement with Paul in Romans 5 – “Hear the good news: Christ died for us while we were yet sinners; that proves God’s love toward us.”

You see, even if we don’t like the term “wretch,” I think deep down if we are honest with ourselves we know that we are helpless on our own and we need the type of help that comes from a source from on high. We need that amazing, justifying grace. Forgiveness. Oh, it sounds so delightful to be forgiven, to be found because we had been lost. Even Charles Wesley got this when in the third verse of “And Can It Be That I Should Gain” he wrote beautifully:

He left his Father’s throne above, so free, so infinite his grace!

Emptied himself of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race.

Tis mercy all immense and free;

for O my God, it found out me!

Tis mercy all immense and free;

for O my God, it found out me!

Forgiveness. How generously we want it for ourselves. How sparingly we are tempted to be in dispersing it to others. Johnny Jeffords, who serves as pastor at St. John’s United Methodist Church in Memphis put it this way recently: “We sing ‘Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,’ with such passion and meaning. And I’m truly thankful to realize that there’s a measure of grace that imparts mercy and love at my most wretched. The problem is that while I’m ever thankful for grace that ‘saved a wretch like me,’ I’m not so sure I’m glad that the same grace ‘saved a wretch’ like you.”

Miroslav Volf was born and raised in Croatia and teaches theological studies at Yale Divinity School. He wrote this recently, “According to a Croatian saying, ‘people talk about what they don’t have.’ We talk about forgiveness because we live in a sentimental but unforgiving culture.”

Volf wrote this amidst telling the story of his older brother Daniel. When Miroslav was but one year old and Daniel was five, they were being watched by their nanny whom they called Aunt Milica. Volf tells the story that one day Daniel,

slipped through the large gate in the courtyard where we had an apartment. He went to the nearby small military base – just two blocks away – to play with ‘his’ soldiers. On earlier walks through the neighborhood, he had found some friends there – soldiers in training, bored and in a need of diversion even if it came from an energetic five-year-old.

On that fateful day in 1957, one of them put him on a horse-drawn bread wagon. As they were passing through the gate on a bumpy cobblestone road, Daniel leaned sideways and his head got stuck between the door post and the wagon. The horses kept going. He died on the way to the hospital – a son lost to parents who adored him, and an older brother that I would never know.

He would go on to say, “Aunt Milica should have watched him. But she didn’t. She let him slip out, she didn’t look for him, and he was killed. But my parents never blamed her.” And they certainly could have blamed the nearest soldier who could have been put on trial, but they didn’t. In fact, he said, “the soldier felt terrible, so terrible in fact that he had to be admitted to the hospital. My father, with a wound in his heart that would never quite heal, went to visit him, to comfort the one whose carelessness had caused him so much grief, and tell him that my mother and he forgave him…they wouldn’t press charges, he said. Why should one more mother be plunged into grief, this time because the life of her son, a good boy but careless in a crucial moment, was ruined by the hands of justice?”

They forgave essentially because of one integral belief – that they themselves were forgiven people. They knew amazing grace couldn’t be begrudging. Forgiveness, real forgiveness, is so costly. Yet there is a mystery and paradox in that while this amazing grace of forgiveness cost so much, yet it comes to us, as the title of Volf’s book suggests, “Free of Charge”; Wesley called it “free grace,” affirming what Paul said in that we are justified freely by God’s grace that comes through the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ.

I was ten years old when I began to understand a bit of what it means to be justified, when asking my parents one Sunday morning before church what it means to be saved, they acknowledged that to have faith and trust in Christ in salvation I would need to make that decision to own it. Now granted, I was raised in a grace-filled home, but I remember the conviction of needing God’s forgiving, justifying grace when later that morning the song was sung,

Come every soul by sin oppressed; there’s mercy with the Lord;

and he will surely give you rest, by trusting in his word.

Only trust him, only trust him, only trust him now.

He will save you; he will save you; he will save you now.

Let us now reflect a moment on our need of forgiveness. Here’s where we are: prevenient grace is God’s “yes!” to us long before we could ever say “yes!” to God. We know pardon, we know justification, when enabled to respond, we say “yes!” to where God has already said “yes!” to us.

That is but the beginning of the journey, and is when we start to experience the process of God’s sanctifying grace working in our lives. But in this moment, in this space, let us acknowledge our deep need for God’s grace in offering this confession:

We confess to you, all-knowing God, what we are. We are not the people we like others to think we are. We are afraid to admit, even to ourselves, what lies in the depths of our souls. But we cannot hide our true selves from you. You know us as we are, and yet you love us. Help us not to shrink from self-knowledge. Teach us to respect ourselves for your sake. Give us the courage to put our trust in your guiding power. Raise us out of the paralysis of guilt into the freedom and energy of forgiven people. And for those who through long habit find forgiveness hard to accept, we ask you to break their bondage and set them free; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer. Amen.

The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. If any one sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, the just One; and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!

In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!

Thanks be to God!

There’s a story behind why I couldn’t stand up to preach…in short, I had a case of vertigo and wasn’t physically capable of standing to deliver my sermon. So at the last minute my wife volunteered to do deliver it for me. She had heard me rehearsing it the night before and fortunately I had a manuscript of what I wanted to share. So she courageously stepped in and delivered this text that I had prepared for the first Sunday in Advent.

The primary Scripture was Isaiah 64:1-9, and I used the Common English Bible, which was crucial to illumine a couple of points that were made in the sermon.

So today begins a new church year as we kick off the season of Advent this morning. I’ve come to cherish Advent more and more as the years go by. It’s not that it is my favorite because it means Christmas is so close, which was likely what I felt growing up, but because, as I see it, Advent is the season that probably gives us the most honest assessment about the way things are in the world. At its best the season of Advent and its relationship to Christmas mirrors that of Lent and its relationship to Easter. Advent, for some time, had seven weeks (not four), and was designed to be a season of repentance, fasting and preparation for the great mass, or worship celebration, for Christmas. But it was and is also a season that prepares us for the second coming of Christ, when all things will be summed up and the new heaven and new earth are joined together at last.

Now, if we can learn to fully appreciate a season of anticipation, of expectation, and waiting and not rush to December 24-25 as we are so prone to do, then we will be able to really allow the sense of aching and hope to linger long enough for us to get genuinely thirsty for the coming of the Lord. For this reason, in recent years I have found myself drawn toward the words of the prophets who so frequently spoke as people in waiting, longing for God’s appearance, during the season of Advent.

Simon and Garfunkel quipped that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whispered in the sound of silence.” At the beginning of the song, they sang, “Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.” Advent meets us in the darkness, in the silence. So do the prophets.

Polish-born Jewish rabbi Abraham Heschel, who lost many family members because of the holocaust, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. for the civil rights movement in the 1960s, wrote what is in my mind the best summary work of the lives and writings of the prophets. Here are a few of his comments that I thought fit particularly well given the context and content of our passage from the prophet Isaiah from this morning:
• “This is the marvel of a prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible.”
• “Instead of showing us a way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums. To us a single act of injustice—cheating in business, exploitation of the poor—is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. Their breathless impatience with injustice may strike us as hysteria.”
• “The prophet’s ear is attuned to a cry imperceptible to others. The prophet’s ear perceives the silent sigh.”
• “Instead of cursing the enemy, the prophets condemn their own nation.”
• “The words of the prophet are stern, sour, stinging. But behind his austerity is love and compassion for mankind…he begins with a message of doom; he concludes with a message of hope.”
• “The prophet’s word is a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.”

There are many more that are worth quoting, but something Heschel challenges is the notion that has gotten in some of our minds that prophecy has to do with a distant, impersonal, implacable God who serves as judge and who uses these obscure persons to serve as a sort of mouthpiece, which renders the work of the prophet as a mere technical function. Heschel wrote, “The prophet is not a mouthpiece, but a person; not an instrument, but a partner, an associate of God,” and that what is behind the message of the prophets isn’t merely an emotionally detached discussion about justice, but is rather the pathos, or feeling, of God with regard to the events of the world and the behaviors of God’s people. Heschel continued, “it is more accurate to see the prophets as proclaimers of God’s pathos, speaking not for the idea of justice, but for the God of justice, for God’s concern for justice. Divine concern remembered in sympathy is the stuff of which prophecy is made.” Indeed, “God’s role is not spectatorship but involvement…The God of Israel is never impersonal.” If this is true – if God is so concerned with the plight of the people and passionate about the cause of justice and at the same time is all-powerful – then the question that rises to the surface is, what is behind the complaint of Isaiah this morning, “if only…” or “why haven’t you torn open the heavens and come down? All would be settled, mountains would quake, enemies would flee or at least tremble.”

It comes as a cry from a people who have experienced the redeeming power of a God who overtook oppressing enemies to make things right. So where is this God? Heschel said, “in a stricken hour comes the word of the prophet. There is tension between God and [humans]. In the presence of God he takes the part of the people. In the presence of the people he takes the part of God.” So Isaiah reminds God of the former deliverance that the Lord procured for his people. “From ancient times, no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any god but you who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.” That was the distinguishing mark of the God of Israel: patience and deliberative involvement in acting for those who wait on God. As far as the prophet could tell, there weren’t any other gods who were patient or longsuffering. And this has been evidenced in cultures throughout history as the greatness of a god was directly related to the greatness of the king and his army. When the people of a god were conquered, that god would disappear and usually the survivors wouldn’t hesitate to wreck the images of the gods in whom they had previously trusted.

So in a stricken hour, will we wait on the Lord? I don’t mean sitting down twiddling our thumbs. Nor did Isaiah. John Oswalt said it well when he wrote, “biblically speaking, ‘to wait’ is to manifest the kind of trust that is willing to commit itself to God over the long haul. It is to continue to believe and expect when all others have given up. It is to believe that it is better for something to happen in God’s time than for it to happen on my initiative in my time.” It is an active type of waiting that seeks to live rightly with relation to God and neighbor.

To get there we have to come to grips with something about ourselves that is really quite difficult, and this is the part no one really enjoys preaching or hearing about. But it’s something that is absolutely necessary and is evidenced in what Isaiah admits about the behaviors and attitudes of the people – sinning and doing wrong, being unclean – to such a degree that all our righteous deeds have become like filthy cloths, or as you heard it read this morning, a menstrual rag.

I didn’t read this version to gross you out, but there is something in this statement that illumines our own brokenness as we approach the God of compassionate mercy and justice. You see “sin” is like a contaminant that infects the whole body and it had become such a problem among the people of God that it infected even those things that we would typically deem as righteous acts. Even those had been contaminated to such a degree that the works weren’t signs of new life coming, but of the lack of conception (hence, “menstrual rag”), because all they do is self-serving and self-enhancing. They’d become a charade of the real thing.

Okay, I think I’m done with that analogy for the day. I suspect my email inbox will be filled with many messages from parents letting me know their children will be coming to ask me some questions that came up because of today’s Scripture.

Now let’s get really uncomfortable and see where this passage really addresses the darkness that remains in our world – Ferguson. What is the response of the people of God to the tragic death of Michael Brown and the events that have unfolded there and elsewhere since? Chances are when I simply mentioned the name of the town just now, there were several different internal reactions and emotions among the people in this congregation. Yet let us be honest that while our political ideologies and opinions on this and related problems are various within this church, we are nonetheless a rather affluent congregation comprised primarily of white people.

We also ought to recognize that systemic injustice still exists despite our lofty dreams and naïve ideas that we have somehow arrived at a utopian society where all are equal. It is true that African-American men are more likely, by virtually every measure, to be arrested, sentenced, executed, or murdered than white men. And if that causes us to shrug our shoulders in apathy, then we are not in tune with the God of justice. If we think it’s no big deal, we are tone deaf to the wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. who wrote from a prison cell that, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” If we are numb to the reality of privilege and of the responsibility that comes along with it, then we are a far cry from our movement’s founder John Wesley, whose last letter was written to encourage William Wilberforce to persevere in his cause of championing the abolition of the slave trade in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century. If we remain apathetic, or even worse hold onto prejudices and fear of others because of the color of their skin, then we will be like the people for whom Isaiah and the prophets wept because they did not call on the name of the God of justice.

If only…if only you would come, God, Emmanuel. The cry of Advent is not merely a preparation for Christmas, it is really the final cry of the New Testament in the Revelation. “Maranatha! Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus!” If only you would come; I mean fully and really come all this would be reconciled. No more death, no more need for protests or riots, no more destruction, just the fulfillment of all our hope – a place of eternal shalom!

But as we cry, “Maranatha!” let us at the very least be the people who actively wait. And that involves listening – for God, to our neighbors – for they have a story to tell and experiences to share that are often very different than our own. Are we willing to be clay in the potter’s hands in this season? Take us, mold us, use us.

To close this morning, I want to share with you a blessing adapted from a Benedictine prayer. It’s not any normal blessing, though; it is one that carries with it a challenge to be a prophetic witness in a world that doesn’t often care much for the prophets. So here goes:

May the Spirit bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships so that you will live deep in your heart.
May the Spirit bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people and the earth so that you will work for justice, equity and peace.
May the Spirit bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer so that you will reach out your hand to comfort them.
May the Spirit bless you with foolishness to think that you can make a difference in the world, so that you will do the things which others say cannot be done.

In the name of the Father whose pathos, love and compassion burned hot for the people of God to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with their God; and of the Son, who didn’t consider his privilege as something to use for his own gain but emptied himself to become human and really the lowest of the sorts—a slave; and of the Holy Spirit, who with open arms embraces us and welcomes us into the holy mystery of being the children of God. Amen.