Ordinary 33 Year C Isaiah 65:17-25

A Facebook Timeline enables certain visitors to see our past, at least the parts of it that we choose to make recoverable. These posts sit alongside the “Wall” scribbled with commentaries on the various pieces of mind we have cast upon the world, be they rants or kitten pics, whatever the range of our inspirations.  Timelines aren't really lines of course, being prone to lots of crooks and turns.  At any time the past can get thrown in our faces, and there is many a past we would hope to recover from - as the one mentioned in Isaiah 65.  Or a redemptive past, like some faded icon of former times shoved in the back of the closet we grab when the flood is lapping at the door.  Think of some aging boomer like me waxing eloquent on the lost glory of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young wailing "Teach your Children."  We try to be wise in these things, and we don't always have the luxury of seeing what can save us or damn us.  Looking back has its risks, as Lot's wife found out.  (She must have thought it must not have been all bad back in Sodom.)  The past is tricky because when God does a new thing it's not necessarily good news for what was back then and there.

At the moment I suppose we've got to decide who owns this Timeline.  We'll say Luke, especially since some of our traditions demand everything be routed in the gospel direction.  So for the sake of conversation we will let this stand for a bit: the Isaiahan consortium is posting on Luke's Timeline:

"For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind."

Luke never quotes or alludes to this.  It's a patch applied from lectionary schedulers, and an alternative patch at that.  Like Timelines in general, it follows ambiguous routings that it is rumored sometimes flirt with melioration and containment, especially for texts as tinged with apocalyptic as Luke's.  Apocalyptic makes authorities scratch at places they aren't even aware of.  But we are logged in with privileges to see it all.  And what we see is the twisted path of something wedged into Luke's unveiling story that could stand as a prayer in the aftermath of the U. S. presidential election of 2016:

"They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord."

Not all looking back turns us to stone.  Sometimes the stones are smashed. And being on Luke's Timeline, we are about what Jesus says concerning the pretty edifices:

"As for these things, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another." (Lk. 12:6 NRSV)

The old prophet's posting is really a scandal to those who like to say the Old Testament God is about law and vengeance, but the New Testament God is about compassion and grace.  That fiction is totally flipped here: the prophet has posted to his people: your suffering is over.  Do not think of it anymore; Jesus says to his people the suffering is just beginning, and the things you thought were going to be forever are coming down.  Hard.  He reroutes the old hope (permit me to steal from Isaiah): wolves will feed on lambs, and serpents will strike with deadly force.  Moreover, some of the beasts will arise within your own family.  God help them.

But the gospel lection sets a boundary with a finality that leaves us something to hope for: endurance produces life – soul (Lk. 21:19).  Your life – in the Greek it is plural, since Jesus is talking to several people – makes its way onto our Timeline as our life.  And this is where the Timeline, jammed against the wall of our representations of ourselves put out to the world, begins something of a tectonic shift.  The temple being scrutinized morphs into the holy of holies that harbors the icons of our loyalty.  What is really being cast down here, beckoning to us from the prophetic memories of the failed state of ancient Judah extending centuries out into the Roman occupation of the 1st Century Judea?  The lifestyles we have trusted?  The “American exceptionalism” that has kept us looking at the higher goals for being a nation in the world?  They converge into something that is otherwise, because the circumstances of our receiving them and being received in the receiving are always a new thing of God - a work of the Spirit, if you would, moving across the unaccounted turns of events of our lives.  The tearing down and suffering found in the Lucan apocalypse is not a tearing down for its own sake.  We often leaf back to the Magnificat to remind ourselves of this.  But rather this unraveling of our world is in order to make a way for our emerging life, psyche, or Soul writ large.   This former thing speaking of yet earlier former things, this vision of Third Isaiah, roots itself into the gospel – becomes the gospel.  New heavens and a new earth are required to abolish the agonistic presumptions of this age in all its illusions of what is supposedly real.  The world of crosses and other battlefield ordinance is becoming part of an unrecoverable past.  One that calcifies those who look back, yet clears the way for those who set their eyes on the road forward, even if that road is an untidy mess of construction full of potholes and detours.  At least it seems to be going somewhere that matters.  A place that is an opening out and not a closing up.  That's the vision posted on Luke's Timeline.

Once the way is clear we can go back to the lions.  Without fear.  To be loved by God and lions!  Who doesn't want to hug a lion and know it's okay - to have our faces licked in stinky acceptance?  We could put Isaiah last in the order of worship, substituting all the scary things we can think of.  We could even stand as we pray it.

© 2016 Andy Gay