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A sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Eugene C. Buie on November 5, 2006.
Readings: Isaiah 25:6-9 and Revelation 21:1-6
This morning our texts from Isaiah and Revelation speak to us about the Creator's forgiveness and redemption of a broken and sinful world.[1] We recall from the stories of Genesis that the world was initially created "good" by its creator, JEHOVAH. But a proud and covetous humanity resisted and rebelled against the divine authority, plunging the world into a condition of alienation from its Creator. Nevertheless, the Creator chose to seek out, redeem, and heal the divine-human relationship that humanity had broken.
In our text, the great prophet of the First Testament, Isaiah, describes a joyous banquet on JEHOVAH's royal mountain. The imagery used by Isaiah suggests an inauguration celebration reminiscent of an earthly king's reign, envisioned here as God's kingdom established on earth. On the royal mountain, we witness a true communion prepared by the KING himself, symbolizing a restored relationship between JEHOVAH and his redeemed people.
"On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine…..the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth. The LORD has spoken. (Isaiah 25:6-9. NIV).
You may recall, in the ancient Temple at Jerusalem, there was a curtain or shroud that divided the "seat or presence of the LORD" from the people. This shroud, Isaiah testifies, will be destroyed, as happened when Jesus Christ died on the cross and the curtain was mysteriously torn in two. This destruction of the curtain/shroud meant that the LORD had acted through Jesus Christ to redeem the people of the world from sin, death, and the grave. Death itself, Isaiah proclaims, will be swallowed up by JEHOVAH. This powerful act of the Creator God was understood as a dramatic reversal of pagan Canaanite mythology which taught that death swallowed up everything in the end. Instead, JEHOVAH has changed everything. Sorrow and suffering, caused by human rebellion, will be replaced by God's tender loving care, and Israel's faithfulness will be vindicated. The people will praise the LORD of heaven and earth, saying,
"Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the LORD, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation." (Isaiah 25:9. NIV).
It is worth noting at this point that the Greek word for "trust," used in Isaiah, is the same word translated as "faith" in the Second Testament.
In the Book of Revelation, the visionary, John, describes the coming of a new heaven and a new earth, a time when JEHOVAH will dwell with his redeemed people in a restored relationship. Again, John prophecies, every tear will be wiped away and death will be no more. (Read Revelation 21:5-8). It is comforting to hear of God's grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. But if the grace of God is to have any real meaning for us, we also must be prepared to hear of the divine judgment that foreshadows this text in Revelation. The same warning of divine judgment precedes the great banquet described by Isaiah. Let us return to Isaiah and read Isaiah 24:1-6.
See, the LORD is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it; he will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants. It will be the same for priest as for people, for master as for servant, for mistress as for maid, for seller as for buyer, for borrower as for lender, for debtor as for creditor. The earth will be completely laid waste and totally plundered. The LORD has spoken this word. The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers, the exalted of the earth languish. The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. (Isaiah 24:1-6, NIV)[2]
In both Isaiah and Revelation, we are reminded that divine judgment must precede divine grace. However, judgment is something many Christians in today's Western cultures have chosen to ignore as inconvenient or incompatible with modern thinking. We have, in many respects, traded God's judgment and forbearance for the human ideas of tolerance and relativism….and left God's grace hanging or forgotten. Relativism tends to deny the authority of a Supreme Being, specifically JEHOVAH, who revealed the divine self to Israel in the midst of a pagan world that did not and could not know the Creator God. Tolerance tends to enable relativism and denies both the existence of divine judgment and the forbearance of judgment we call grace. The forbearance of JEHOVAH is not without its limits. It should not be confused with the idea that the LORD is tolerant with those who disobey the laws, violate the statutes, and break the everlasting covenant, thereby defiling the earth. Eventually, there will be a day of judgment. Even forgiveness comes with a price that is paid by God and should not be confused with tolerance. While Christians are called on to forbear with the actions of a pagan world, as does the LORD in the name of mercy, Christians must not imply that we accept or are willing to passively tolerate those behaviors that have broken the divine-human relationship.
Nevertheless, a curious thing has been going on in our Western culture among Christians: judgment has become an unpopular concept. Do we prefer to think that Christ died on the cross just because God loves us and cannot bear to see us die the final death? Do we seem to think that because Jesus Christ died on the cross, we no longer need to concern ourselves with God's cosmic moral judgment? Do we appear to think, because of Jesus' death and resurrection, we are now outside the laws, statutes, and everlasting covenant that constitute God's judgment? Have we forgotten that we are already under God's judgment as people lost in sin (separation from God), who cannot save themselves (restore their relationship with God, where there is life)?
The problem with renouncing or even ignoring the reality of divine judgment lies in a paradox: if we do not accept God's judgment and our need for repentance, we will not have access to God's grace. As a long-term consequence of denying the judgment, are people beginning to forget there is a need for forgiveness or reconciliation in their lives? In other words, is it not true that without the acknowledgment of God and God's judgment, and without the conviction of sin (motivation to change our brokenness and separation), there would be no need for a faith we can call Christian? Perhaps, then, this is the ultimate goal of a pagan world: to depreciate the idea of divine judgment and, thereby, negate the existence of the divine authority represented in judgment and deny the need for grace.
We can be thankful, however, that despite modernity's "centuries-long" movement toward godless secularism, North America has not yet completely shaken off its awareness of the "Fall and Redemption" as a way of making sense of our broken world. But neither has this movement toward the secular been stopped. The pagan world wants to believe that by denying God, the world can be freed from the idea of divine judgment. In the 1960s, a revised version of the Fall-Redemption theme went something like this: "Man never experienced the biblical event known as the Fall. We are innocent still. But the abuses of society cause us to do wicked things, becoming dysfunctional in our own environment. Thus, reforming society, or dropping out of it, is necessary to restore personal emotional and spiritual well-being." Since the 1960s, the West has generally embraced the belief that society can be re-engineered to our advantage. By our own efforts, we think we can bring about our own redemption or salvation.
From a Christian point of view, nothing could be farther from the truth. The father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, argued that the human will is in bondage to sin and alienated from God; only Christ can set us free. If human society is abusive, it is a consequence of human sinfulness, and only a redeemed humanity can bring about a redeemed society. Because Western culture was formed primarily out of Judeo-Christian values, the idea of self-redemption has brought about a clash between those who hold to traditional Christian ideas of redemption and those who now wish to re-engineer Western culture without Judeo-Christian influences. These clashes have become more evident and more destructive to North American society in the last forty years.
We now find ourselves faced with a redesigned culture that has no place for the notion that there is a Supreme Being or authority to which human beings are accountable. In other words, modernity is saying religion is ill-conceived for society, particularly the Christian religion. Consequently, as far as modernity is concerned, there are no divine laws to be disobeyed, there are no divine statutes to be violated, and there is no everlasting covenant. In short, there is no judgment and, therefore, no need for the grace and forgiveness of a supremely authoritative Being.
Is this something new? Not really! In some respects, it is a resurgence of an old enemy of the Christian faith, Gnosticism. Gnosticism first appeared when early Christian thought merged with Greek pagan philosophy in the first century. Its influences remain, buried deep within our pagan nature. Gnosticism took the Platonic idea of the separation of spirit and matter, and the Aristotelian idea of divine impassibility (the gods are unaffected by human activity), and blended them with the teachings of Christ and the Apostles. Out of this merger grew the Church's teaching that matter was "evil" and spirit was "good." It followed that the material universe (that was evil) could not have been created by God (who was good). Rather, the universe came into being as the "demurrage" of a lesser being, perhaps ultimately opening the door to the more recent idea of chance or accidental evolution. Thirdly, the human body (being matter and evil) was a prison for the human soul (good). Therefore, some decided that Jesus (who was the fullness of goodness) was not really human and only appeared to die on the cross. Thus, Gnostics came to say, salvation was not a holistic reconciliation with God through Christ, but rather the soul's escape from the prison of the body. This escape was achieved through mental enlightenment (gaining the right knowledge) and intellectual separation from the influences of one's physical existence. In other words, humanity would be able to redeem itself by disconnecting from the world through isolation and privatism, ending society.
Finally, Gnostics would say, any morality expressed through the body (which is evil) becomes a matter of indifference, leading to asceticism or libertinism. Asceticism was the practice of punishing the body to free the soul from its influence. Libertinism was the act of abandoning all moral limits, since what one does with one's evil body is unimportant. Guess which one was and remains most popular. Psychologically, this leads to a flight away from relationality and a desire to deny one's basic need for other people and for God. How close is this to describing North American and European society today?
Now, I don't know how to explain our situation today in clearer terms, although it is certainly complex. Neither do I know how to adequately emphasize how important your Christian witness is at this time in human history. The problem with religion rests in its many and varied institutional abuses. The Gnostic understanding of matter as evil and spirit as good was certainly adopted by the Church and led to many abuses. Christendom, Constantine's merger of the church with civil government in the fourth century, has sacrificed both its integrity and its witness countless times during the last 1,600 years, and is now in sharp decline. Of course, Christianity will survive, but it will do so through those who live by faith and who have felt the judgment of God, repented of their rebellious spirit, and been redeemed by God's grace. As Paul said, it is by grace we are saved, through faith, and not of ourselves.
Finally, I would say this to those who are lifting up Micah 6:8 in the context of re-engineering society today. The NIV reads:
"…and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness."
A careful reading of the Septuagint's Greek text reveals that the English translation is misleading. The word translated in English as "justice" is, in the Greek, "krima," which means "judgment." Specifically, it refers to God's judgment as a judicial verdict and mostly as condemnation. Therefore, this verse, which is used so often today by those involved in re-engineering modern society and the values under which society operates, is being taken out of context and misused to justify the tolerance of behavior that may not be consistent with the divine covenant. The focus of Micah is not on doing "justice," in the sense we use the term today. Rather, Micah is saying,
"…and what does the LORD require of you but to exercise judgment and to love mercy."
The translation poses some difficulties that would be better resolved by dealing with the actual word, "judgment," rather than by substituting the word, "justice."[3] If God's judgment rests on the law, the statutes, and the everlasting covenant, as it did in Micah's time, then it would seem that the prophet is concerned with the covenant obligation of God's people to live by Torah, where such judgment resides. Thus, to exercise judgment is to live by Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures). Having failed to do that and finding themselves and others to be under God's judgment, the people must follow the example of God, exercising judgment and loving mercy, which is for us, grace.
Therefore, we may say, wisdom in this life is to know and acknowledge the judgment of the Creator God, for we are embodied and, therefore, are relational creatures whose life is found in relation with the Creator God, JEHOVAH. We can be thankful that the LORD of heaven and earth values us, as a parent loves a child, and chooses to reveal the divine will to us through the law and the covenant. God would not have us be ignorant, but has revealed his divine judgment and offered his divine mercy or grace through Jesus Christ. Here the love of God is revealed and here we are called to love one another by sharing the good news of God's grace in a broken world. To sacrifice the reality of God's judgment in a pagan world is to lose both God's way and God's grace.
[1] With respect to the workings of the divine-human relationship, we refer to the familiar analogy of the potter (the Creator-God) and the clay (humanity). The potter prepares the clay, using material at hand (soil, minerals, water), throws it on a wheel, and shapes it with his hands guided by his creative imagination. The clay must yield to the potter's will, if the piece is to be completed. Any resistance or weakness in the clay can cause the piece to collapse. If the shape is not pleasing to the potter, he will destroy it. In either case, the potter will begin again. Then the piece is fired. If all goes well, the finished piece will emerge and be useful. If it is flawed, the piece may explode, breaking other pieces around it. Until the piece is fired, however, not even the potter knows how the piece will emerge from the kiln.
[2] It is important for us to take note that the earth was and is defiled by human decisions and actions. There are consequences to human disobedience and acts that violate the way the Creator made the world to work. As a result, the earth and those who inhabit it are under judgment. The guilt for this condition is humanity's to bear. The earth itself is a witness against us. This is the judgment for which human beings are responsible, and we cannot escape it without divine help.
[3] Justice (dike' in Greek) is a term found primarily in the Second Testament to denote what is customarily right and then the execution of a sentence or punishment in a judicial hearing. Just (dikaios in Greek) is a Second Testament term denoting a state of being right, whether judged by the divine standard or according to human standards. When said of God, it designates the perfect agreement between the divine nature and divine acts, which are the standard for all people. Judgment (krima in Greek) is a First Testament term denoting the consequence of the action to judge (krino in Greek), i.e., condemnation as God's decision passed on the rebellion of humanity. Judgment (krisis in Greek) primarily denotes a separating, followed by a decision of condemnation.
In modern usage, the idea "to do justice" can have many meanings depending on one's point of view. The question Micah proposes for us is not what it means to do justice (dike'), but rather what it means to act in accordance with God's judgment (krima) and how this is related to mercy or grace, not merely kindness.
With regard to calls for "tolerance" in today's diverse Western culture, the Christian should be careful to distinguish between (a) that which suggests tacit approval of behavior condemned by the law, statutes, and covenant as offensive to God and (b) that which forbears along with God while the divine process of redemption moves toward the "day of judgment" (krisis). Social tolerance is, generally speaking, public acceptance of personal or group variations in matters of appearance, lifestyle, personality, or belief. Tolerance is thus differentiated from approval, in that a society may tolerate diversity even when a majority of its members do not approve of the variant behavior.