Dune

Propers: The Third Sunday after Epiphany, AD 2023 A

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.

There is something sublime in the desert. And I mean that in the old sense of the word: something so terrible that it becomes beautiful. You look out upon oceans of sand, oceans of time, and you think, “Nothing can endure here. All is swept away.”

Once upon a time, a Persian Emperor named Cambyses sent an army into Egypt, 50,000 strong, in order to take on a rebellious sorcerer. They were all of them lost in a sandstorm, every last man. Not so much as a sandal has yet come to light. Deserts are ominous places, the graveyards of oceans. Each speck of sand is immeasurably ancient, shells from seas now long dried up, remnants of rocks inexorably worn away to nothing.

There beneath the merciless sun, there where nothing seems to grow, one feels one’s humanity dissolving into the infinite. Little wonder then that the desert produced Moses, Jesus, Muhammad: nobodies in the middle of nowhere, yet each of them changed the world. To whom could I compare them? Buddha in the mountains, Socrates by the sea?

God is in the desert. God and the demons.

Forgive me; I’m waxing romantic. It isn’t as though the Holy Land were the Sahara. If you were there today, you’d be amazed by what all they grow, by how the desert blooms. Israel is the intersection of the unspeakably ancient and the astonishingly modern. But what really sweeps the pilgrim away is the memory of the place: memory such as Americans can hardly comprehend, not just centuries but millennia. Egyptian ruins are found in a park in Joppa. One treads upon pottery fragments from the time of Solomon while hiking the hills of Megiddo.

People who died thousands of years ago are alive in that place, alive in vivid ways. Their stories continue. Their legacies live. The past is not simply contained within books over there. You swim in it wheresoever you may go. To read the Bible where it was written, to hear the stories where they took place, and to realize that you’re a part of it now—that’s religious.

4000 years ago, Abraham had a son named Isaac, Isaac had a son named Israel, and Israel had twelve sons who would become Twelve Tribes. After these Tribes escaped from slavery in Egypt, they returned to the Promised Land of their ancestors. And each of them took an inheritance, a portion of land in perpetuity. Two of those Tribes, Zebulun and Naphtali, settled in the north, the region we call the Galilee. That’s ancient history to us. But it was living reality for the Prophet Isaiah.

Isaiah—the first one, anyway—prophesied during the eighth century before Christ, which places him well over a thousand years after Abraham and some several centuries since Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. Yet he takes for granted that the people of Israel and Judah will know exactly what he’s talking about when he references Zebulun and Naphtali.

“There will be no gloom for those who were in anguish,” proclaims the prophet:

In former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them light has shined.

In Isaiah’s day, the northern half of the country, which we call Ephraim, or the Kingdom of Israel, had been conquered by the Assyrians, a particularly nasty people sometimes credited with having invented crucifixion. Isaiah, living in the southern half, in the Kingdom of Judah, promises that God has not forgotten them in the north, that a king would come to liberate them, that they were still the people of God.

He probably means Hezekiah, his own king, the King of Judah. Isaiah hopes that God’s chosen people will liberate their brethren. It doesn’t quite work out that way. Another power comes along, the Neo-Babylonians, who conquer both Assyria and Judah alike. But even so—the prophet, or his successor, follows the people into Exile, into Babylon. And eventually they will be freed. Eventually they will go home. God does not forget His people. God does not rescind His promise, from age unto age.

Leap ahead another 600 years, and we come to the Gospel of Matthew. Much has changed; much has not. The Assyrians are gone. The Babylonians are gone. After them came the Persians, then the Greeks, both of whom have fallen now. Empires rise and empires fall, yet there always seems another eager and ready to take their place. The new big boy on the block is Rome. Rome is the might of the nations now.

And here comes Jesus, in off the desert, walking along the shores of Israel’s only freshwater lake, in the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, Galilee of the nations. And He comes across Simon and Andrew, James and John, two pair of brothers who share a contract with a Roman agent which allows them to fish on the lake. In exchange, they must supply a certain quota of fresh fish for the Legions, for the armies of Rome. Jesus says to them: “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

Immediately they leave their nets and follow Him. We know not why. John’s Gospel tells us that they had known Him before hand, when they were disciples of John the Baptist. But Matthew gives us no such explanation. For Matthew this is the fulfillment of prophecy, the promise given by God to Isaiah so many centuries ago: “The people who dwell in darkness have seen a great light.”

Imagine reading a 700-year-old prophecy and thinking, “This is for me. This promise applies to my people today. It’s about Jesus. It’s about the Messiah, and it always has been.” Imagine viewing the Bible as something so ancient and yet so alive. For Matthew, it’s all led up to this, you see: Abraham 2000 years earlier; Moses some thousand after that; Isaiah half a millennium after Moses; all has led up here to Jesus, who walks along the shore and proclaims the Kingdom of God.

It’s risky business, mind you, proclaiming rival kingdoms. Rome didn’t murder Christ for claiming He was God. They couldn’t care less about that. Rome murdered Christ for acting like a king, when there can be no king but Caesar. Simon and Andrew, James and John, dropping their nets is in some small sense an act of defiance, an act of rebellion, an act of allegiance to Christ as their King. A few less fish might seem no big deal, but an army does march on its stomach.

We are such an ephemeral people, you and I. We have no sense of history, no sense of ancient roots. I confess that I’m rather proud to have had an ancestor on the Mayflower, but what is 400 years compared to the worldview of the Bible? It’s nothing, hardly half the span between Matthew and Isaiah. To us everything is passing, everything’s a fad, everything is now, with neither past nor future.

How different the books of the Bible, of the desert, of the rolling dunes and vast expanse. How desperately we need it, that perspective, that prophecy: there where man is small and young and rides on ancient tides; there where the families of Abraham still dwell, and still squabble as only brothers can.

The vastness of that scope is but a glimpse of God’s own mind. His vision encompasses all peoples, all places, all times. To Him we are all one—one in Adam once, but now we’re one in Christ as well. To Him we are His Son, every last one of us. This book, this Bible, is our story, our legacy, our promise; not in the sense that it belongs to one group of people and not to another, but in that it records the rough and rocky story of our relationship with God, of our exile and our homecoming.

My hope and my prayer for all of us here, and for every Christian across the globe, is not that Scripture be a law book, a science book, a history book, but that it be a trove of living stories, the tales of our family, the vocabulary of life together. I want you to read it and wrestle with it, fight it and forgive it, disagree with it and love it nonetheless. I want it to kill us and make us alive again, crucify and resurrect us.

Because this is the Word of God. And all of it—all of it!—is Jesus. And so are we. The Bible is our story because the Bible is His story, and we are all made one in Him: one in His Name, one in His Spirit, one in His Baptism, His Body, and His Blood.

Out in the desert, time melts away, and all that’s left is you and God. That’s what I want you to find in this book. O Galilee of the nations, Christ awaits you on the shore.

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