Matthew 24:36-44
Isaiah 2:1-5
SERMON Another World
Scholars generally consider the prophetic age to coincide with the Jewish kingdoms, before Palestine was reduced to colony-status by a succession of foreign invaders. The first of these independent realms was the singular kingdom established under the warlord, Saul, expanded by the usurper, David, and maintained by his son, Solomon. After Solomon, age old resentments between tribes re-surfaced, resulting in the period of two kingdoms, the Northern Kingdom, generally called Israel, and the Southern Kingdom, called Judah. The prophet was always the outsider, challenging priests and kings.
There are prophets we know only from the histories, like Nathan and Elijah, the latter one of the most significant in the Jewish imagination.
There are twelve minor prophets, giving us powerful texts like Micah 6:8, at the heart of my personal faith, our congregational identity, and the Social Gospel movement. It calls us to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
Then there are the three major prophets, Isaiah, both the original prophet as well as the school of prophecy that expanded that text across generations and contexts, as well as Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
Today’s readings, one from the Jewish Bible and one from the Christian Testament, come from the prophetic tradition.
As we begin a new lectionary year focused on the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, we find Jesus speaking about an apocalyptic re-ordering of creation, an event that begins with the arrival of a figure called the Son of Man. This is easily confused with the phrase Son of God, though these are very distinct figures.
The Son of Man is drawn from the Book of the Prophet Daniel, a combination of folktales about a character during the Babylonian Captivity and an apocalyptic text written in the Second Century B.C.E. The Book of the Prophet Daniel has the distinction of being the only text partially composed in Aramaic, the same language Jesus would have spoken with others in Galilee.
These ancient languages were gendered, and pre-Rabbinic Judaism was patriarchal, so translators have defaulted to the masculine with Son of Man, but we might better translate the phrase as The Human One, an archetypal “every” person, or maybe as a fulfillment of human possibility.
Our reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah is from the original prophet of that name. He was active during the final years of the two kingdoms, and saw the fall of Israel to the invading Neo-Assyrian army. These events took place more than seven centuries before Jesus was born, more than five centuries before the Book of the Prophet Daniel was written, more than two centuries before the Babylonian Captivity.
The gap between Isaiah Bin Amoz and Jesus is difficult to wrap our heads around. We cannot think of it in terms of cultural continuity. For example, there was neither an American culture nor Protestantism seven centuries ago. We’d even be on the far side of the Black Death, the devastating Medieval bubonic plague.
And yet, despite this massive contextual gap, Isaiah and Jesus share one thing in common: an absolute belief that the society in which they lived was suboptimal. In other words, things don’t have to be like this.
Sometimes that discontent and hope is geopolitical, Isaiah warning against provoking an unnecessary war, just as the Rev. Dr. King named the immorality of U.S. conduct in Vietnam, just as prophetic voices today warn against Donald Trump’s war crimes and his determination to provoke a war with Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves. A man who is pardoning narco-traffickers does not care about drugs.
But mostly, the prophet looks locally, sees the poor, and says: things don’t have to be like this.
They had greed and corruption back then too. When King Ahab wanted to purchase a vineyard and the owner wouldn’t sell, the king got it anyways, the owner’s blood on Queen Jezebel’s conscience if she actually had a conscience.
The prophets warn against false weights, an ancient version of shrink-flation. A man cannot get to the healing pool when the waters are stirred because no one cares about him enough to help until Jesus comes along. In an ancient mix of bad theology and Social Darwinism centuries before Darwin, people assume that the man born blind deserves to have been born blind because of some sin committed by his parents, because humans seem to love seeing someone worse off than themselves.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
No matter what you believe about how Jesus may or may not save us, no matter what you believe about heaven and hell and life after these bodies, we can all agree that Jesus called people to a new way of being in this world, one that radicalized the already justice-oriented Mosaic Law. When I was unjustly imprisoned, you visited me. When I was hungry, you fed me. You didn’t intentionally cut off my SNAP benefits, and you didn’t ask who sinned to cause me to need them.
We have for far too long tried to convince ourselves that our system is just. Jeremiah tells us everyone pays for their own sins. Micah tells us “everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree,” a phrase popularized by the musical “Hamilton” based on George Washington’s own use of the verse. Though those enslaved at Mount Vernon sure did not sit in the vineyard they maintained.
And our billionaires reap a harvest they do not sow. Many of us own stock, either directly or through our retirement plans, as does this congregation through its endowment. Today’s prophets point out that this disguises a horrific reality. Ninety percent of equity stock is owned by 10% of the population, meaning they receive 90% of the wealth derived from publicly traded companies. It gets worse. Fifty percent of equity stock is owned by just the top 1%.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
I could go on. Honestly, what is more idiotic than paying a rent-seeking middle man to prevent us from getting essential healthcare, or allowing private equity firms to destroy one established business after another, even commit murder, all in the name of capitalism.
And what, you may ask, does this have to do with hope? “Pastor,” you might say, “you promised us happy clappy stuff during Advent.” And indeed, I did.
Here’s the pivot. I have hope. I believe. I believe that there are more good people than bad people. Believe that we, those in this sanctuary this morning, those watching online, those reading later, can make the world a better place.
Slavery was abolished in the United States, mostly. Women have the right to vote, as do members of the BIPOC community, even if their votes are worth less than white votes in some states and in federal elections. I could get married, and queer folks don’t have to worry that they will go to prison for consensual acts in their own bedroom. Fewer people are starving to death or dying of preventable disease today than fifty years ago, and there is less colonial brutality despite Elon Musk’s destruction of U.S.A.I.D., part of his crusade to exact some sort of sick personal revenge on Sub-Saharan Africa after his family lost the racist privilege of Apartheid.
It is true that people are still dying from opioids, my own family among the grieving, but the numbers are coming down, we’ve identified and shamed the most evil of the murderers, even if they remain free, and funds have been recovered to support continuing efforts to save lives.
I hope for a better world despite all I know about human depravity, and you know that I know history, so I know human depravity. I believe in your ability to make a difference, in our ability to make a difference. I believe in our ability to learn and change.
If I didn’t, I could not stand up here Sunday after Sunday. If I didn’t, I never would have run for elected office.
My hope depends on changes at three levels. First, we must constantly change ourselves, become better selves. That means learning, opening our hearts and minds, seeking enlightenment in the vocabulary of Buddhism or having eyes that truly see in the language of the gospel, to see the ways we have been conned to believe our system is merit-based when it is anything but, conned to believe that life is a zero-sum game of winners and losers when it need not be, conned to believe that love is a weakness.
Second, we must engage in rescue missions, though we have to be careful, for all too often we “help” in ways that reinforce systems of oppression. Instead of toxic charity, charity that shames and strips people of their dignity, that sets apart and becomes poverty porn, we must look for direct missions that teach and empower and lift, things life cooperative economics in housing and food.
Third, we must abstain from, challenge, and eventually destroy the evil system that grinds up humans, that crushes human potential, that views some humans as expendable, not just an economic system that pumps us full of lies like inhabitants of the Matrix, but also cultural constructions like rigid gender roles and the great lie of race. As in the quote often attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, there comes a point when you have to stop pulling people out of the river and go upstream to discover and stop whoever is throwing them in. Like our revolutionary and rebellious ancestors, for we have revolutionary and rebellious ancestors, Protestant Reformers and American patriots, I have lost faith in the current systems, end-stage Neo-Liberal Capitalism, a Constitution burned-to-the-ground by the Roberts Court leading to state-capture, even the Christianity that has lost the idea of sacrificial love, perversely replacing selflessness with selfishness, aligning itself with nationalism and hatred.
Inch by excruciating inch. Exhausting sometimes.
And possible.
As the United Farmworkers’ movement famously declared, “Si, se puedes!” Yes, we can.
There are setbacks, always, in our individual lives, in our collective life. But to be a follower of Jesus, to be a follower of the prophetic tradition, is to speak the truth with love, the truth that it didn’t have to be like that and it doesn’t have to be like this, to hope for another world, to believe in another world, to work for another world. May we be part of its advent. Amen.