A World Unborn

Midweek Worship, Twenty-Third Week After Pentecost

Semicontinuous Reading: Isaiah 65:17-25

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Isaiah is a book of books. That’s the first thing you need to know about. It isn’t the work of a single prophet, though of course there was an Isaiah ben Amoz in the eighth century before Christ, and he did record his prophecies in this book. But obviously people kept adding to his corpus. We have prophecies here that span generations: before, during, and after the Exile. Scholars, in fact, subdivide the Book of Isaiah into First, Second, and Third Isaiah, from these different periods.

Yet even this does not sum up the authorship. There were more than three Isaiahs, so to speak, many nameless contributors. Each section is really a collection, like commentaries on commentaries, or a playlist of someone’s favorite songs. Because the second thing you need to know about the Book of Isaiah is that it’s written in verse. The prophecies are presented as poetry. It’s a hymn book.

The section we read tonight is from Third Isaiah; that is, written from a post-Exilic perspective. When the Neo-Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah, they shipped all the movers and shakers, the wealthy and the nobility, the princes and the priests, off to Exile in Babylon. Only a remnant were left behind, and these tended to be the poorest of the poor, the least likely to cause trouble for their new imperial overlords. Someone needed to farm, after all, to shepherd the flocks. And so the meek indeed inherited the earth.

But after a couple generations—70 years or so—a new empire arose. There’s always a bigger fish. Cyrus the Great united the Medes and the Persians into a force even the Babylonians could not resist, and so the conquerors became the conquered. In modern terms, it would be as though Iraq conquered Israel, only then to be conquered by Iran. And in the ancient tradition of the enemy of my enemy becoming my friend, the Judeans rejoiced at the coming of Cyrus, who let them all go home.

Great news for the Exiles, though many had put down roots in Mesopotamia and were in no hurry to return to their homeland. But not so great for the Judean remnant, who had stayed, who had never left, who had persevered under Neo-Babylonian rule. As a Persian province, Judea now had to reabsorb returnees. And both sides viewed the other with suspicion. The Exiles had been changed by their time away; their religious identity now had more to do with books and Law than land.

The Exiles viewed the remnant left behind as corrupted, as half-Jewish at best; while the remnant considered the Exiles to be interlopers, practically foreigners, returning to a land that was no longer truly theirs. Obviously this led to friction. There is no hatred like that betwixt brethren. And this passage from Isaiah, the one we read tonight, presents the perspective of that remnant, who lived through the trauma of Babylonian overlords, and who now must struggle with the Exilic leadership.

The prophet yearns for a world not as it is but as it ought to be, as God intends for it to be: a new heavens and a new earth, when the pain of former things may be forgotten; where no-one steals your home or your land, no-one dies tragically young; where violence has no place, not even among the beasts of the earth. It is a vision of healing and of peace, a prophecy of immanent divinity, whereby God leaps to answer prayers before we can even manage to speak them.

It is not quite apocalyptic, though we can see how it’s getting there. Apocalyptic literature, you may recall, is a genre appearing at several points in the Bible, always to communities in crisis. Apocalypses tell us two things. First, they assure us that for as bad as things may be, it’s not the end of the world. There is an end, a good one, that God will have in store, and this isn’t it.

Second, apocalypses show us the mysterious providence of God, the workings of His mercy beneath the surface of worldly things. Apocalypses take current events and interpret them in spiritual ways, religious ways, assuring that God is ever with us. In so doing, apocalypses utilize fantastic language, spiritualized language, where monsters represent empires and falling stars reveal a new socio-political order. A new heavens and new earth for Third Isaiah might mean an era of sacred peace. Isn’t that what we all want, for which we all yearn?

There is in Jewish tradition—the tradition of Jesus Christ—the notion of tikkun olam, repair of the world. It’s the idea that Creation is not yet final, not yet complete. Whether due to a primordial Fall from grace, as Christians tend to affirm, or simply to God resting on the seventh day, that we as His stewards might complete His work, every human being is called to contribute to the healing and repair of this world.

Our model in so doing is not some lost golden age, but a vision of Creation at union and peace with God, where there is no violence, no oppression, no stealing, no exile, where children do not die young and old people do not suffer needlessly. It is the promise of a better world, a perfected world. And this is remarkable, when you think about it. I mean, all of humanity has this notion, this conviction, that the world is not as it should be, not as it ought to be; that our world is somehow broken, fallen, incomplete.

Whence does this knowledge arise? To what are we comparing our entire world? It can only come from God, whether by prophecy, poetry, or both intertwined. And it can only be realized in humble submission to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, expressed not simply by religious devotion but by selfless love of neighbor. That’s our real home, our hope, our destiny and our dream: a perfect world, a new heavens and a new earth. It awaits us in eternity, granting glimpses here below.

Yet we are called not simply to go there, to travel home, but to know that God brings this home to us, heaven to earth, Creator to Creation; so that this promised, perfect world might not only be an ideal in eternity but a reality in our hearts here today. Just a crumb of this promised Kingdom—faith the size of a mustard seed in a Kingdom not of this world—is our salvation on this earth. It is the promise that contains its own fulfillment; the tree already present within the seed, already and not yet.

Look around and know that this world is but halfway born, halfway formed. God will bring it to completion in His Kingdom for us all. We pray simply that His Kingdom come in us, that Christ work through us, for the healing and the repair of all this fallen, broken, beloved world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.