Steadfast Love

“All flesh is grass.” Have you heard that at a memorial service? That verse has been taken to say that human life is short, and that’s how the Greek version of Isaiah 40:6 reads.  The Hebrew version says: all humans are unreliable. “Their chesed is like the flowers of the field…  The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.” Chesed is used many times in the Hebrew bible, and it is usually translated love, or kindness, or steadfast love. Psalm 136 repeats twenty-six times: God’s steadfast love endures forever.  God’s chesed endures forever.  And, according to the prophet, ours does not...

If we are expecting people to satisfy our expectations for love and respect, says the prophet, we can expect to be disappointed.  If we expect ourselves to be unfailingly loving and kind, well.  What pushes your buttons?  We all have buttons. The worst part is that when somebody provokes us, and we defend, it looks to the other person like attack. That’s how the downward spiral begins. But God’s steadfast love endures provocation.  Relying on that love, we can halt the downward spiral.  And this, my friends, is Good News indeed.

Full sermon below
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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ                                        
December 10, 2017

Prepare for the Prince of Peace

40:1    Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

2          Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her

            that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid,

            that she has received from the LORD’S hand double for all her sins.

3             A voice cries out:

            “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,

                        make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

4          Every valley shall be lifted up,

                        and every mountain and hill be made low;

            the uneven ground shall become level,

                        and the rough places a plain.

5          Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,

                        and all people shall see it together,

                        for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

6             A voice says, “Cry out!”

                        And I said, “What shall I cry?”

            All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.

7          The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it;

                        surely the people are grass.

8          The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.

9          Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings;

                        lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,

lift it up, do not fear;

            say to the cities of Judah,  “Here is your God!”

10       See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him;

                        his reward is with him, and his recompense before him.

11       He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms,

                        and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

Welcome to the second Sunday of Advent, a season for preparation, anticipation, and hope.  Today we lit the Advent candle of peace.  I want to ponder with you the hope we have for peace, since Jesus so clearly teaches us to be peacemakers.  How can we prepare for peace?  That is a question worth pondering.

“Comfort, comfort, O my people.”  The passage we heard from Isaiah is one of the most familiar from the Hebrew bible.  As good poetry, it touches the heart.  These words spoke to the Jewish followers of Jesus as they tried to fit him, and John the Baptist, into the framework of what they knew, or thought they knew, of God.  John the Baptist, that unforgettable wild man, becomes this voice crying in the wilderness.  All four gospels invoke this passage to describe John the Baptist.  It fits! A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

The writings of the biblical prophets usually fall into one of two themes:  afflicting the comfortable, or comforting the afflicted.  Here in chapter 40 of Isaiah, the author was writing not to afflict the movers and shakers of the little hill kingdom of Judah, but to comfort demoralized exiles who had been taken from Judah to Babylon as the spoils of war.  They were stunned, and utterly demoralized.  Had their God given up on them?  How could they sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? (Psalm 137) They needed comfort. They needed hope.  And so this passage closes with the assurance that God still cares for the people, as a shepherd cares for his flock, up to and including nestling lambs on his chest. 

And in between the comfort and the lamb cuddling, are two challenging metaphors: road construction, and people as grass. 

The first metaphor: “All flesh is grass.” Has anyone heard that at a memorial service? That verse has been taken to say that human life is short, and that’s how the Greek Septuagint version of this passage reads.  The Hebrew version says: all humans are unreliable. “Their chesed is like the flowers of the field…  The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.” Chesed is used many times in the Hebrew bible, and it is usually translated love, or kindness, or steadfast love. Psalm 136 repeats twenty-six times: God’s steadfast love endures forever.  God’s chesed endures forever.  And, according to the prophet, ours does not.

We humans are not reliably loving or kind.  But God is, and God will nurture and protect us.  No wonder this passage is a classic; it affirms what Jesus taught; the promise of reliable forgiveness and reconciliation with God, despite our failings. 

If we are expecting people to satisfy our expectations for love and respect, says the prophet, we can expect to be disappointed.  If we expect ourselves to be unfailingly loving and kind, well.  What pushes your buttons? We fail each other, and we fail God.  The worst part is that when somebody provokes us, and we defend, it looks to the other person like attack. That’s how the downward spiral begins. But God’s steadfast love endures provocation.  Relying on that love, we can halt the downward spiral.  And this, my friends, is Good News indeed. 

Nadia Bolz-Weber, the tattooed Lutheran pastor of the House for All Sinners and Saints, gives an interesting orientation to new members of her church.  “Welcome to our church,” she says. “We will disappoint you.”   She wants people in her church to know that her community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if.”  She explains, “We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens.”  Her experience is that when we face our failings or disappointments instead of walking away, that is when God can work in and through us, to do some powerful transformation, and reconciliation, and healing.  She’s Lutheran, so she calls it grace. All flesh is grass. But God’s steadfast love endures forever.

The second metaphor in the reading is of road construction.

3             A voice cries out:

            “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,

                        make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

4          Every valley shall be lifted up,

                        and every mountain and hill be made low;

            the uneven ground shall become level,

                        and the rough places a plain.

5          Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,

This promise of restoration is also a command from God: do the work.  Build a highway in the wilderness so God can get through to you.  Road construction.  Get out the earthmovers, which in those days were brigades of people and animals with carts, and start building that peaceable kingdom we say we want.  Bulldoze the mountains of pride and greed.  Fill in the valleys of despair and suffering.  God wants to enter into our lives: do we want to do the heavy construction work required to receive God’s love fully?  It sounded just as improbable in the prophet’s day as it does today.  And just as necessary. 

Have you ever been on a really bad road?  Take the road to my mom’s old house.  This September I drove it, hopefully for the last time.  Four long miles of hell.  Deep potholes. Gorgeous scenery, dirt and dust, sharp rocks that pop tires regularly, washboarding, deep ruts. Also switchbacks, blind curves, and trucks coming at speed. And did I mention the potholes?  When my mom drives it’s like watching her playing a video game, trying to weave the car around the potholes that have scraped off her muffler.  Inevitably, we land in some. I just hope not to break a tooth.  Nobody wanted to visit my mom when she lived down that road from hell.  She was pretty isolated.  She moved to downtown Santa Cruz in September, and now she’s entertaining all her friends and relatives.  Anybody want to buy a gorgeous house just 25 miles from Silicon Valley? It’s a screamin’ deal.  She still hasn’t sold it.  To my mom, oddly, that drive was no big deal.  When you endure something awful long enough, it feels normal; it becomes your normal.

I am left pondering:  what obstacles feel normal to us that should be unacceptable?  Besides parking on the 57 freeway, I mean.  How we treat each other.  What level of meanness and what level of suffering do we put up with or just tune out?

For instance, there’s TV news.  And not just the news of one political party.  I think a lot of TV news is toxic.  Yelling on TV is sport.  Hounding those who are suffering.  Reporting on unacceptable behavior as if it were normal. You may have worked up a tolerance to it and be able to survive exposure to it, but beware the small people in your life; they are at risk.  I’m still scarred from TV news in the 1960’s. And what might we be losing by constant exposure to incivility?  Not our muffler; just our memory of how to treat people with respect, or to value truth.  I do read the news to be informed, so it doesn’t hit me at such a visceral level.

We pay a dear price for our nation’s failure to show love and kindness on the world stage. We no longer draft our young people to fight our wars; if that were required, our leaders would have had to find other solutions.  Instead, we have normalized war by creating a mostly hidden,  self-selected class of people who undertake a body-and-soul-scarring duty, a sometimes fatal duty, on our behalf.  They do it for a war we barely know in a place that has been a battleground for almost two generations, a war that is unwinnable because it is a war against terror, and bombs and bullets only beget more terror.   In this and other ways, we have answered violence with more violence, and tolerated the intolerable.

Prepare for peace: how shall we start?  Have you heard of the peace that passes over misunderstanding?  Stop following the news altogether.  Say polite things to those who rant, and don’t spend any more time with them than we need to.  Avoid difficult topics, and do our best to shelter our own sense of peace.  Sometimes that’s the best we can do.  But the peace that passes over misunderstanding is a fragile and shallow thing.  What we long for is the peace that passes human understanding that Paul spoke of, the peace that comes from God.

The peace that passes understanding, even if we just experience it in flashes, allows us to stand in the midst of trouble and know that it is not our job to fix it, but it is our calling to act out for love and kindness no matter what the provocation, and name the violence and the incivility around us and say, “This is not normal; this is destroying our souls,” When we do so, are not alone.  We are paving the road for the Prince of Peace to work among us, bringing transformation, reconciliation, and healing.

Prepare for peace.  I recently joined the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL).  The Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, are one of the historic peace churches; those Christians who took Jesus seriously when he said “Blessed are the peacemakers” and “love your enemies.”  Their focus this year has been on military spending.  Like Citizen’s Climate Lobby, they advocate on both sides of the aisle. Though my Congresswoman hasn’t deigned to meet with us yet, we have met with the many candidates running against. Prepare.  Anticipate.  Hope. Remember: hope is what we rely on when optimism fails us.

I visited the Washington DC office of the FCNL with my neighbor Betty– she’s our Irvine coordinator.  They are the oldest faith-based advocacy organization in the country, started in 1943. They have their own building just a block from the Capitol, nearly a century old but recently remodeled to be very green– the highest LEED rating possible. I saw my first light pipe, sending light from the four-story roof all the way down to the first floor.  They gave us the grand tour; I think we met every employee and saw every green feature of the building.  Talk about hospitality.  Their shared some of the creative bipartisan legislation they are working on.  They make space for civil discourse by hosting private bipartisan discussions for congress people.  I envied the hope, maybe even optimism, I saw on so many of their faces.  I asked one of them if we had ever had such polarized political factions as we have today.  She grinned sheepishly and said, “Well, there was the Civil War, that was worse.”

Here is the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s mission statement:

We seek a world free of war and the threat of war.

We seek a society with equity and justice for all.

We seek a community where every person's potential may be fulfilled.

We seek an earth restored.

Those are words to live by. 

We prepare for a Prince of Peace. We will not despair. We hope and dream and of a world where all are safe, and respected, and loved, and have enough.  A world where God’s will is done.  It was the hope of the prophets and it is our hope.  And we are grass; we fail repeatedly to live up to this vision. But the Love we rely on does not fail, and is ever ready to pick us up and restore us, to comfort us and invite us back to this hard and joyful work of building a highway for our God. We will refuse to call our condition normal and acceptable.  We will learn the skills of peacemaking.  We will pave the way for the Prince of Peace to dwell fully in our families, our communities, our nation, and in our hearts. Amen.