“Christmas: God’s Vindication of Creation”
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
12/17/17 – Advent 3
When a
storyteller begins a story with the iconic words, Once upon a time…, she’s doing more than taking us back. She’s inviting
us to imagine a future shaped by the characters and events in that story. Offered
to Israelites in exile, the prophecy of Isaiah has a Once upon a time…flavor. The prophet invites the people to see
beyond the past, beyond particularities of the moment, into a kind of all-encompassing
now in which Shalom, God’s justice and wholeness, permeate the creation.
Hardly a pie-in-the-sky proposition,
Shalom demands that we turn from things
that seem normal, comfortable, even commonsensical, and toward a life of radical
grace, compassion, and trust. And that’s terribly difficult to do in our world,
isn’t it?
My dad has called the
modern/post-modern age a “culture of vengeance.” And humankind does seem to
have decided that justice means,
first and foremost, retaliation. It means getting even. In a culture of
vengeance, everyone gets what’s coming to them – at least they should. “Bad”
people get shamed, maimed, and killed, while “good” people get rich and
powerful. The culture of vengeance is all about getting.
That also sums up the prosperity
gospel, which declares if one believes the right things, works hard, and
behaves, God will bless you with health, wealth, and happiness. And it sure is
tempting to buy into that heresy. Who doesn’t want a god who promises comfort
and security? It’s just impossible, with God, to harmonize the prosperity
gospel with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
But, Preacher, doesn’t Isaiah talk
about God’s “day of vengeance?” Doesn’t he say that God loves “justice” and
promises “recompense?”
Yes. And before lumping Isaiah in
with the Joel Osteens and Creflo Dollars of the world, I would invite us to acknowledge
the wider teaching of Isaiah. While the prophet speaks to exiles who have been
vanquished and displaced, he does not preach payback or personal gain. I say
that because in 61:2, where the NRSV chooses the word “vengeance,” vindication would be more accurate.1
Isaiah isn’t calling Israel to get even with her captors, because the justice
to which he refers isn’t about retribution. It’s about restoration.
The word restoration often makes us think about going backward, returning to
some previous situation. The guys who work on the old rail cars on Spring
Street are trying to restore them to something close to original condition.
When Marcy Hawley and her husband, Rick, purchased what is now the Hawley
House, they completely disassembled the interior from basement to rafters. They
catalogued every board, and refinished each one individually. Two years later,
their home – Jonesborough’s oldest structure, built on Lot #1 – was beautifully
restored.
Biblical restoration leads down a
different path. As Isaiah makes clear, and as Jesus makes clear when he quotes
Isaiah, biblical restoration has to do with vindicating
the oppressed, with redeeming the
brokenhearted, the captives, and those who mourn. There is no “again” to God’s
restoration. God does far more than return us to a place we inhabited prior to
some misfortune or trauma. Now, the Gospel does challenge us to make peace with
the past – that’s called forgiveness. But reaching forever forward, God’s
vindication turns our hearts toward the joyous encounter of things utterly new
and unexpected.
Perhaps some of the most significant
Advent/Christmas images, images of God’s vindication and restorative justice,
are found toward the beginning of the Old Testament: Abraham being told by God
to go, and Abraham stepping out in faith; Moses being told to confront Pharaoh with
God’s demand to release the Hebrews, and Moses, after some argument, stepping
out in faith; David being anointed by God as king of Israel when the only thing
on the young man’s resume is tending sheep on the family farm.
Advent doesn’t prepare us to return
to some place we’ve been. Advent prepares us for Christmas journeys. Journeys
forward, journeys out of mere existence, out of oppression, captivity, and
humiliation. Like Abraham’s, Moses’, and David’s journeys, Christmas journeys
take us from the humblest, most broken places toward unimagined possibility and
freedom. They propel us toward heights and depths of human experience that
vindicate and redeem both us and the creation. Because Christmas journeys
reveal to us how much love we are capable of giving and receiving, and how much
holiness we are capable of holding and enduring, they are also Easter journeys,
journeys through death and toward a life only God anticipates.
How’s that for a definition of
faith: Living in the reality of a life anticipated, as of yet, by God alone?
Isaiah alludes to this in chapter
55 when, speaking for God, he says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are
your ways my ways…For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts…[and my word]…shall not
return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed
in the thing for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:8-9, 11)
It seems to me that the accomplishment and the success to which God refers is much more
than some measurable goal or final answer. If the life of Jesus is any
indication, story, mystery, and ongoing transformation are the telltale signs
of God’s activity in the world. So, stables, riverbanks, and tombs are not
places of arrival and completion. They’re places of origin and departure. They’re
places where creation gets an extraordinary new start through invitation, emancipation,
and proclamation.
In his song Crooked Road, singer/songwriter Darrell Scott does an interesting
thing. He begins the song by singing: “I walk a crooked road to get where I am
going. To get where I am going I must walk a crooked road. And only when I’m
looking back I see the straight and narrow. I see the straight and narrow when
I walk a crooked road.”
Not only does that verse end where
it begins, the song concludes with the exact same verse. The singer begins and
ends in the same place, a place of mystery, inspiration, and wonder, a place
that is both ending and beginning. It’s like ending a story with, Once upon a time…
While Advent and Christmas don’t return
us to some happy remembrance, the vantage point of a new beginning does help us
to see the past with fresh and forgiving hearts.
One lesson in all of this is that Shalom, God’s justice and wholeness, becomes
possible when we understand Christmas as God’s invitation to recognize and celebrate the
incarnate holiness of all creation. Advent is our ongoing struggle of learning
to follow Jesus, God’s vindicating love made flesh.
To live and love as Jesus lives and
loves, we begin and end each day with gratitude, expectation, and hope.
We begin and end each day telling
ourselves and each other, Once upon a
time…
1William P. Brown, “Exegetical Perspective,” in
Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Westminster John
Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2008. P. 53.
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