2020 Vision

The scriptures referred to are Jeremiah 31:7-14.

The first time our family had to evacuate from a hurricane, we were living in Brownsville, Texas, where I worked as Production Director and copywriter at a radio station. Gilbert was called the storm of the century and, unlike in the Keys, we had 2 possible routes out. We could go north, up the coast towards Corpus Christi. The problem is that we wouldn't be putting a lot of distance between us and the Gulf of Mexico, where Gilbert was intensifying. The alternative was going northwest, towards El Paso. If the storm followed us inland it would be reduced to a heavy rain storm by the time it got to us. Apparently our thinking was not that original and we crawled along the choked highway. As we approached El Paso, we tuned to local radio stations only to hear that every hotel in the area was filled. So we turned north. About 11 pm, after passing innumerable “No Vacancy” signs, my daughter began having severe stomach pains. It was obviously her anxiety over our having no clear destination for the night. Seeing a Best Western that was sold out, I was reminded of their radio jingle, which put their national reservation phone number to music. There were no cellphones or internet at that time, so I pulled into their parking lot. As I walked to the reservation desk, the clerk was about to tell me they had no rooms available when I cut her off. “I realize you are full but could you call your national reservation number and ask where your nearest vacancy is?” She did so and we made the reservation in San Angelo, in the middle of the state. It was another 4 hour drive but reassured that we had a place to stay, my daughter's tummy ache receded and she went to sleep. 14 hours and hundreds of miles after we started, we arrived at a safe place to ride out the disaster. Ever since then, the first thing we do when evacuating from a hurricane is select a city and a hotel and make a reservation before setting out.

If you don't want to wander through life, you first pick a destination. Then you can plot your route to get there. People do not become professional athletes or doctors or ordained members of the clergy or tops in any field of endeavor by accident. You might at first stumble onto the idea or into an somewhat related job without intending to. But to actually achieve any worthwhile goal, you have to plan and work hard at it. And to maintain your position, you have to keep up on the latest developments, reading and taking continuing education courses. Only the gullible and con artists think there is a way to bypass the hard work and magically achieve enduring success.

But it starts with having a vision of what you want as the final outcome. No cathedral was the result of just putting one stone on top of another and seeing what happens. Shakespeare didn't just begin by putting random words on a page and then trying to to rearrange them into characters and a plot. Scientists come up with an hypothesis before designing their experiments. If you are going to be a good archer, you first need a target to shoot at.

When humanity started to misuse and abuse each other, God didn't wing it. He had a vision for how the world should be. And he communicated it over and over through the prophets. In their book Kingdom Ethics, David Gushee and Glen Stassen look at the prophets and Jesus' teachings and point out 7 marks of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is characterized by deliverance or salvation, justice, peace, healing, restoration or rebuilding the community, joy and the experience of the presence of God. You see all of these elements most fully in Isaiah but our passage from Jeremiah contains some. And we can look to Jesus for the rest.

It starts with joy. “Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise...” We often forget that one of the elements of having a relationship with God is joy. It is the second fruit of the Spirit Paul mentions after love. God is the source of all goodness. Every good gift comes from him: love, the beauty of nature, the order and stability of the laws of physics, our creativity, the very fact that we can understand and enjoy such things. We get jaded as we age. We need to rediscover the joy children take in exploring and interacting with the world God created.

The immediate cause of the joy in this passage is the salvation and deliverance God promises. “Save, O Lord, your people, the remnant of Israel.” Jeremiah is writing about the exile. Israel was defeated, the nation decimated and every person deemed valuable by their conquerors was marched to a distant land, leaving only the poor behind. The people were devastated. God's promise to bring them back home was a reason to rejoice. And take note: this is not a merely spiritual return to God. They needed to physically come back to their homeland. They needed to see Jerusalem again. Too often we Christians spiritualize everything and this lets us evade actually doing something about a situation. We talk a good game but we often fail to back up what we say about things like justice and peace and reconciliation. Had the Jews not come back from Babylon, I doubt their faith would have survived for long. God's faithfulness was seen in how he followed through on his promise to rescue his people.

Much of our passage is about the restoration and rebuilding of the community. “See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth...” The far flung people of Israel will be gathered together and brought home. And it won't just be the strongest. “...among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor together, a great company, they shall return here...” The Babylonians took only the cream of society into exile. But God includes everyone. And he will make provision for those who would otherwise find the journey impossible. “I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.” There is a similar verse in Isaiah, which expands on this: “I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.” (Isaiah 42:16) In Isaiah the blindness is probably metaphorical. Which makes God's accommodation of the blind all the more gracious. Physical blindness is not usually the fault of the person suffering it. But spiritual blindness is abetted by willfully looking away from the truth.

Jesus dealt with both kinds of blindness, shining light on moral issues, both murky and clear, and healing those who literally couldn't see. And Jesus saw his healing as a very clear sign of the kingdom. When John the Baptist sent disciples to ask if Jesus was the one they were waiting for, Christ said, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and good news is proclaimed to the poor.” The majority of those things are healings. Again God is interested in more than spiritual health. He wants to restore people to physical health as well.

Jesus also talked about justice and peace in the Beatitudes. When he says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled,” we tend to interpret “righteousness” in terms of a personal virtue, according to Gushee and Stassen. But the Greek word used has “the connotation of justice.” And the probable Hebrew word Jesus actually used means delivering justice. They write, “In the Old Testament, 'righteousness' means preserving the peace and wholeness of the community, and is sometimes parallel with 'shalom' (peace) and, more often, 'justice.'” So they would paraphrase the 4^th Beatitude as “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for a justice that delivers and restores to covenant community, for God is a God who brings such justice.”

And Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” As God brings peace between himself and those who are sinners, so we are to bring peace between ourselves and those who are our enemies. The sad thing is that a lot of high-profile “Christians” have been going out of their way to make enemies, even with other Christians. They have been making deal breakers out of issues that are seldom or never mentioned in scripture and ignoring essential matters. Jesus said to the Pharisees, “You give a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, yet you neglect what is more important in the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness! You should have done these things without neglecting the other.” He compares their nitpicking to straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel. (Matthew 23:23-24) Jesus reprimanded the disciples for trying to stop someone outside their group who was successfully healing people in his name. He said, “For whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mark 9:40) And he never said that people would identify us as Christians if we agree on everything. He said, “Everyone will know by this that you are my disciples—if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)

Since peace or shalom means total wellbeing, healing riffs in the community counts as peacemaking. I recently saw a documentary called Church of Felons, about Polk County in Wisconsin which has the highest rates of alcohol and drug addiction in the country. That state has no minimum drinking age. The film focuses on 4 people whose addiction led to crimes that had severe impacts on themselves and others, including burning an historic chapel, a drug overdose, double amputation, and traffic deaths. Each of the people involved is trying to make their second chance work. No punches are pulled and no unrealistic hopes are given but we see how, years into recovery, they are sober and their lives are better due in part to their church which embraces and supports them.

Which leads to the last of the 7 marks of the kingdom of God: experience of God's presence. Remember how last week we said that in John's gospel God's glory or presence was revealed primarily in Jesus' works? Indeed it seems that throughout the Bible, people are more likely to see God in his acts, such as his interventions when liberating his people from slavery in Egypt and his leading them to the promised land. In contrast when God was seen as statically residing in his temple, people got complacent. This is why Jesus contrasted himself with the temple, saying both would be destroyed but he would be resurrected. (Matthew 24:1-2; John 2:19) He took its place as the locus of God's presence, empowered by God's Spirit. And at Pentecost his Holy Spirit is poured out on the church. So we are now each a temple of God's Spirit. (1 Corinthians 3:16) Of course, that's easy to say. The proof is in what we do with that fact.

God's grace has never been completely one-sided, him doing everything and we being totally passive. God led the Israelites out of Egypt but they had to decide to follow. Jesus healed the man lowered through the ceiling by his friends but then he had to get up, take up his mat and walk. Gushee and Stassen call it participatory grace. God gives us the opportunities and the power; we have to use that power to take full advantage of the opportunities presented.

So the vision of the kingdom of God is a place where there is joy because God is delivering justice, peace, and healing, while restoring and rebuilding community through acts that let us experience God's presence. And if that is God's vision for his kingdom, our church, this particular outpost of the kingdom, is part of that.

We cannot do everything a megachurch can do. There are some whose list of ministries look like a college course catalog. But we know this community and its needs—there are our opportunities—and we all have gifts given by the Spirit to perform ministry—that is our power. What we need is a vision for this church that fits within the larger vision God has for his kingdom.

Small churches can effectively provide simple focused outreach ministries. They take into account their assets: their land, their facilities, and the time and talent of their members. Some offer daycare for children or for seniors. Some do car care clinics. Some visit the homebound. Some help the homeless with basic supply kits with toiletries, bandaids, water and snacks. Some give out baby supplies for new mothers on limited incomes. Some sponsor a classroom. Some plant a community garden. Some offer grief groups.

Not that we want to become merely a social service agency, as ELCA Presiding Bishop Eaton warned. But long before Maslow came up with his hierarchy of needs, Jesus knew that until people have their physical needs met, they aren't likely to look to their spiritual needs. So he healed and fed people. They saw God in what he did and then they listened to hear what God had to say.

Proverbs 29:18 in the King James version says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." We have been drifting too long. We need a clear destination, a direction in which to take this church, a vision of what it can be to the people in this community. I am challenging you to pray and listen to God for his vision of what he wants this church to do and be. And then share it with us, so we can see what we can do to serve Jesus through serving others. And if they see God at work in our lives, then and only then will they listen to us tell of the glorious vision of deliverance, healing and restoration in God's joyous, just, and peaceful kingdom.