Healing What We Wish For

Sermon

Momilies are wisdom sayings, usually bestowed by mothers and grandmothers and maiden aunties for the purpose of equipping us as civilized human beings. They offer an easily accessed set of advice, interpretive data, and good ideas from which to draw. Perhaps, like me, you were crammed with momilies. “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.” “To have good friends, first be a good friend.” “Don’t start anything unless you intend to finish it.” Or this one: “When one of your friends gets on your nerves, make sure it isn’t really their reflection of you that is so troubling.” I wish today’s scripture meant this momily: “Be careful what you ask for or you might get it.” Israel has been acting like they don’t need God, as if they have pulled themselves up by their collective sandal straps, and they’ve got a king to handle treaties and trade agreements to ensure safety, and a Temple elite to do faith for them. Prophets have been sent to tell them otherwise, and in an effort to get them to return to the covenant, Isaiah casts a vision of the kind of life God has always offered them. And like my dog pretending not to hear my command to “Come!” they are turning their long sheltie noses away from the noise and ignoring it.

A context offered by Kate Bowler speaks of Lent as the long, slow undoing. What she’s talking about is the waiting and longing that goes into our collective time of preparing for Easter. Sometimes we cast this waiting as penitence, sometimes as fasting from what distracts us from right relationship with God and humans. This year, Westminster is casting Lent as an examination of healing. Last week, the Reverend Junha preached on healing through resistance; the week before, the Reverend Gregg preached on healing from temptation. What I kept seeing in the scripture texts for today, given the current chaos we are experiencing as a culture, what I kept seeing, is healing what we wish for.

It would be inauthentic and delusional if I ignored the current state of the world. As my dad might say, things are currently all “up in a heaval.” Change is afoot, and that always means a certain level of chaos. Many spiritual writers, including Richard Rohr, summarize this universal pattern of growth and transformation as a mirror of the birth-death-resurrection pattern of creation. Rohr calls his pattern order-disorder-reorder, and he references this in his most recent book, The Tears of Things, subtitled Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. As regards the prophetic message, he says God’s concern is not with the redemption of individuals but with the redemption of a whole people. In other words, the prophet’s message is corporate redemption.

Isaiah addresses a culture whose situation is strikingly similar to our current disorder. Interestingly, the text is very hopeful. Isaiah draws on the Torah understanding of God’s design for Israel as he casts a vision of community living in plenty, with equality among people, equitable wealth distribution, respect and peace from neighboring nations. There is to be no monarchy, no land speculation, no lending at interest, and debt forgiveness every seven years. Isaiah’s prophetic vision of what God wishes for Israel is in sharp contrast to the reality in which it is spoken. The prophetic critique of the monarchy had been there since the beginning, but Israel begged for a king like all the other kids and, like a doting parent, God permitted it. Be careful of what you wish for because you might get it. And sometimes that is the punishment. As the kings and their cronies became hyper-rich, they shut down systems meant to protect the vulnerable in order to line their own pockets. They formed unholy alliances with historic enemies, had too many wives, and mistreated their children. The hyper-rich men are getting richer and the vast majority of the poor are getting poorer. Meanwhile, religious practices are ever more restrictive, with piety executed by professionals. Chaos and disorder are the norm, famine is around the corner, siege is about to become a reality. Rather than harping on Israel’s complicity, chiding them for casting themselves as powerless victims, Isaiah simply reminds Israel of what God has wished for them all along.

We are becoming familiar with chaos and disorder, not at Israel’s level, of course, but my perception of governing practices these days has little to do with what I learned in high school civics class. Every day, my directees speak to me about their prescription prices unaccountably rocketing, pension checks not arriving, fears for their disabled children in school, friends being deported. And one sweet woman paused in her litany of fear and disorder to realize, “Now that we are missing these things, we can name them and say why we value them.” I think this was the beginning of reorder for her, that even in the disorder she could recognize and reassess what we really wish for, to claim God’s invitation. Not in a momily sense, but in the redemption sense.

The Hebrew prophets, Isaiah among them, preached that social sin destroys the land and humanity. In my neighborhood, the new sidewalks were installed with inspirational quotations. This one from Carlotta Collette caught my eye this week as I thought about God’s vision for human community: “It seems that we choose our place to live because we love the elements of that place. When we listen and watch closely and long enough, we begin to see what needs to be done to preserve that place. It becomes a relationship. We do what needs to be done because we are in love.” That sounds like a Lenten practice to me, like a step toward reordering. Falling in love with where you are, working to preserve and reorder it, maybe even the way God wishes.

In a brilliant exegetical move, the lectionary pairs Isaiah today with Luke’s story of Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, warning his listeners about the coming disorder. Today he uses tragic news-of-the-day along with scripture. Figs trees are a thing in the Bible, and when Jesus mentions them, it’s about Israel’s relationship to him. His savvy listeners thus know this is a parable about them, about being given one more chance, and this one-more-chance is a reflection of the mercy of God. Jesus prefaces the parable with a call to “repent,” but he doesn’t mean repent as in, “Feel bad about yourself.” He means, “Here is another chance to bring reorder out of disorder.” God’s mercy is so generous!

“Mercy” has gotten a bad reputation in certain circles. But God’s imperative for redemption is so inexorable, so irresistible, we must speak of mercy. This week I read an article that has become my personal parable of God’s mercy. The story was about echidnas, which are spiny anteaters in the same family as the platypus. These two species are the only known egg-laying mammals. Echidnas have beady eyes, ear slits, and a long beak-like nose. Their babies are called puggles, and they are native to Australia. A few years ago, a remote Tasmanian island was deeply burned and had lost all of its plant and animal life. This was the culmination of a couple of hundred years of colonial agriculture with the attendant introduction of non-native species. In February, a trail camera caught a picture of an echidna, totally self-introduced to the island, and a miraculous sign of the land restoring itself, both ecologically and culturally. As if this is the outcome of, “Let me dig around the tree and give it another chance,” the assurance of God’s merciful hand in order-disorder-reorder.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently, a Gen Xer and Episcopal priest/Lutheran pastor. His parishes consist mostly of Boomers. His graduate work and spiritual direction practice are with Millennials. This gives him a cross-generational perspective on responses to our disorder. Boomers, he says, are in grief, mourning the loss of Camelot. You remember Camelot: the glamour of JFK, the Great Society of LBJ, a conviction that civil rights could be won and women would be liberated. My friend says Millennials aren’t mourning. They’re scared, yes. But they never had Camelot, so that’s not their loss. They are busy working the gig economy, trying to figure out what to do next, and quietly working for change.

That’s what we’ve got to do, my beloveds. If Rohr is to be believed, tears are a necessary component of that work for change. There are things to mourn. But maybe that’s how we learn what we value, what we want to include in the reordering. Going back to “the way things were” is not going to happen. And should not happen. But transformation is necessary. As the momily says, “Unless we transform our pain, we will only transmit it.” We are in this for the long haul, and since we’re talking about “healing what we wish for,” there is comfort in knowing that what God wishes doesn’t need to be healed. It is, in fact, the source of healing what we wish for, as Isaiah so brilliantly showed.

When I was younger in the faith, my prayers sounded like grocery lists—so many people to pray for, so many things to fix about them, about myself, so many pointers and logic to give God about what to do, how to do it, who to do it with. As an older person, I am coming to appreciate even more that a part of healing the world is to lament and grieve. Every Sunday we confess our corporate sin together. Not because we think we’ve done “all those things” but because these things exist in the world and we are part of them. That might be empathy, but it might also be also coming to see what it is that we have lost and what we value. In confession, we ask to heal what we want as a corporate body, ask to bring it more into alignment with God’s vision for our lives and our world. That might be “redemption” on a collective scale. It might be living into God’s hopes for us.

Mirabai Starr tells us that, as we sit with reality as it is, we notice and acknowledge our role in that reality, and then we are to do what Francis urged of his followers with his last words: to listen for “what is ours to do.” In mystical Jewish teaching, what is “ours” to do is called tikkun olam, the act of assisting God in mending the broken world and restoring it to wholeness. What do we wish for? And how does that align with what is ours to do?