Seeing With New Eyes

Seeing With New Eyes

Isaiah 2:1-5[1]

Instead of my usual sermon, I’m going to tell you a story today. It’s the story of my relationship with the Scripture lesson from Isaiah 2:1-5. I want to tell you this story because I hope that it will help you make sense of one of the themes of my preaching: the hope of God’s new creation that includes everyone and everything. I’m going to let you “look up my sleeve” to get a glimpse of how I work with the Bible to understand not only what it was saying in its original setting, but also what I believe to be the enduring truth of its message for today.

The story goes back about 40 years. One of the first times I encountered this Scripture lesson was in the early 1980’s, when I took a class in college on the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. I don’t really remember it making that much of an impression on me at that time, because I was reading Isaiah from the perspective of the call to repentance in the first chapter. I do remember distinctly preaching a sermon on repentance from Isaiah chapter one in those days.

The first time I truly remember Isaiah 2:1-5 making an impression on me was around 1990. It was the year that I spent studying at the University of Tübingen in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar. One of the goals I had set was to start reading through the Bible in English once more. I started with Genesis, Isaiah, and Matthew and read simultaneously from each section daily.

I remember encountering this passage at that time because it was the first time that I really heard the Bible speak about “all the nations” streaming to the “house of God” “that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths” (Isa 2:2-3). You see, I had been raised in the traditional faith most of us grew up with: that each of us is responsible for our salvation. Whether or not we choose to place our faith in Jesus in this life determines our final destiny.

What struck me about this passage was that there don’t seem to be any limits on who can come to “the mountain of the Lord’s house” in the end to be instructed in “the word of the Lord.” In fact, the prophet Isaiah speaks of an ultimate future in which “all the nations” come “streaming” to know God and to learn his ways. It sounded to me like the prophet believed that there would come a day when all people would turn to God! It was hard for me to understand how that could be true if only those who trusted in Jesus could be “saved.” I don’t know exactly how long I wrestled with this problem, but I can tell you, it was years!

In the meantime, I kept reading my Bible. In fact, over the course of that decade I read through the Bible about 5 or 6 times. And I discovered something in the process Isaiah 2:1-5 isn’t the only Scripture that talks about “all people” coming to worship God. In fact, there are many. Take, for example, Psalm 22:27-28: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.”[2]

That took me to another Bible passage that I knew: Philippians 2:10-11: St. Paul says that God exalted Jesus at the resurrection “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”! The cross references in my Bible showed me that St Paul was quoting Isaiah 45:22-23. There, the prophet says, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.’”

From my original perspective that only those who trust in Jesus in this life will be saved, I believed that St. Paul was saying that everyone would acknowledge God through Jesus whether they wanted to or not. But that’s not what Isaiah says. According to the prophet Isaiah, God invites “all the ends of the earth” to “turn to me and be saved,” and goes on to take an oath that in fact that is what would happen![3]

This was like an earthquake for me, like scales falling from my eyes. Once I was able to see—to really see—this amazing hope in Scripture I was shocked that I hadn’t seen before.[4] I hadn’t seen it because I was looking through eyes that couldn’t see it. I had been so schooled in the traditional view of salvation that when I read passages like these they just didn’t make an impression on me. Until they did!

By reading through the Bible over and over I began to see with new eyes the promise of God’s salvation, not only for everyone, but also for all creation. At that point I went back to the very beginning of God’s saving work: back to Abraham.[5] You remember how God called Abraham to leave the land of his ancestors and go to a place that God would show him. And God promised that he would bless Abraham, and that, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3). I finally realized that it had been God’s plan all along to “bless” all the families of the earth, not just a select group. After that, I really couldn’t look at Scripture—any passage of Scripture—without this in mind.

What’s the “moral” of this story? Well, there are several. First, the assumptions we bring to the Bible make a big difference in our ability to hear its message. That’s especially true with this “big vision” of God’s salvation. Another moral of the story has to do with the “good news.” I could never get past the notion in the traditional version that God was ultimately going to reject the vast majority of people. By the way, if you’re wondering why so many young people have left the church, that’s one of the main reasons they cite when they’re asked.

I guess for me the real “moral of the story” is that our salvation depends on God. In this life we all wrestle with the question of whether we really “matter.” For me, when I look back at the choices I regret, and those I celebrate, this hope helps me believe that what I do matters. Because it’s not just about me, but it’s about God’s “big vision” of salvation. I believe the one who had the power to create all the heavens and the earth, and the one who had the power to raise Jesus from the dead, has the power to make good on that promise. As we begin the Advent journey toward the birth of the one who personally embodies the fulfillment of all God’s promises, I believe this hope is one that’s worth celebrating.

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[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/27/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/_raNLlgK5ho .

[2] Similar affirmations in the Psalms include Ps 36:7-9; 67; 86:9; 145:10-13, 21.

[3] Cf. Similarly, Isaiah 55:10-11: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

[4] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.3.1:478, where he says regarding the notion of universal salvation, “If we are certainly forbidden to count on this as though we had a claim to it, as though it were not supremely the work of God to which man can have no possible claim, we are surely commanded the more definitely to hope and pray for it as we may do already on this side of this final possibility, i.e., to hope and pray cautiously and yet distinctly that, in spite of everything which may seem quite conclusively to proclaim the opposite, His compassion should not fail, and that in accordance with His mercy which is ‘new every morning’ He ‘will not cast off for ever’ (La. 3:22f., 31).”

[5] Cf. Galatians 3:8: “the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ ”

God's New World

 God’s New World

Isaiah 65:17-25[1]

The three most important Christian virtues—faith, hope, and love—challenging to all of us. But I think hope may challenge us in special ways. We’re people who need something almost physical to hang onto when it comes to our spirituality. With faith, we have Jesus, and with love we have other people. But hope is something that seems to be just “out there.” Of course, we have a tendency to frame hope in ways that are specific. Most of us focus on being reunited with our loved ones. I can identify with that, and it’s a part of my hope as well. For my part, I look forward to being able to stand face-to-face with Jesus and experience his love in person. I look forward to the smile on his face and the comfort of his arms.

“Going to heaven” when we die is the point of hope for most of us. And with good reason. The church has been teaching that version of the Christian hope for about 800 years. Before that time, the church focused more on the view that we would all share a common destiny, a view that’s grounded in Bible passages like our lesson for today. But in the 13^th Century, in the “High Middle Ages,” church leaders and wandering preachers started urging people to take their faith more seriously. And the way they did that was by teaching that each of us face our destiny alone.[2] They taught that we should be thinking about what will happen to us individually when we die. In this way the church used the fear of death and judgment to try to motivate people to become “better” Christians.

To some extent, we might say that effort succeeded. The fear of death and judgment those medieval church leaders introduced has deeply affected generations of people to try to be “good enough” to “go to heaven.” But I would have to say that in the end, using fear as a motivation cannot truly inspire anyone to live a more godly life. Jesus called for people to embrace the ways of God’s kingdom, the ways of love for all, even our “enemies,” the ways of caring and sharing, the ways of freely giving our lives for the sake of others. If we’re really going to “be Christ’s faithful disciples, obeying his word and sharing his love,”[3] we’re going to have to find a better reason than fear.

I believe that’s where passages like our lesson from the book of the prophet Isaiah for today come into play. They speak of God’s future for the whole human family, and beyond that, the whole creation. The hope that the prophet holds out for us is a beautiful vision: a whole new heaven and a whole new earth. Isaiah describes the destiny he saw as the ultimate outcome of God’s saving purpose for all people together. It’s a vision of all children thriving, and of all people living full and fulfilling lives. It’s a vision of houses built, and vineyards planted. It’s a vision that includes even natural enemies in the animal kingdom living together in harmony. Isaiah virtually breaks into song over the awe-inspiring future God has in store for the whole world.

Isaiah’s vision is filled with the language of God’s love, God’s freedom, God’s joy, and God’s life.[4] In a setting where conquerors continually displaced the people, taking their children away from them, throwing them out of their homes and off their own lands, Isaiah sees a people returned from exile to live free from fear. But Isaiah’s vision doesn’t just concern Israel; their restoration leads to the restoration of the whole world. Beyond that, this vision of restoration and renewal extends to all creation—even the animal kingdom will be transformed when God liberates all people. Isaiah’s vision is that what God will do at the end of all things will be consistent with what God did at the beginning: create a world full of beauty and love.

I readily admit that all of this may be incredibly difficult for us even to imagine. As the prophet put it, this hope for God’s new world would be something that doesn’t even compare with the “former things” (Isa. 65:17). While that may seem too much of a “pie in the sky” dream to put stock in, it’s entirely consistent with other promises about God’s future in Scripture. Promises like “I will wipe away every tear” (Isa 25:8), and “they will all know me, from the greatest to the least” (Jer 31:34), and “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ,” (1 Cor 15:22), and perhaps my favorite, “I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5).

These and many more promises point us to a future in which we all experience God’s salvation together with the whole human family, indeed together with the whole creation! While it’s true that the good news creates for each of us a renewed experience of God’s love on an individual level, that’s only the beginning of what God is up to in this world, not the end. In fact if we focus our hope of salvation only on ourselves, we’re selling short God’s purposes and the power of what he has done for us in Christ.[5] From the biblical perspective, our faith is about more than just the hope that we get to “go to heaven” when we die. It’s about the hope that the power to raise to life one who was imprisoned in death is a power that can restore everything and everyone to the goodness that God created in the first place.

It’s true that the hope of “going to heaven” when we die has a long tradition in the history of the church. And it’s also true that there are some Scriptures that speak of our destiny in individual terms. But I would say that one of the failures of that approach to the Christian hope is that by thinking about our own destiny, it turns us in on ourselves. Perhaps a bigger problem is that it leads us to assume that we don’t really have to take seriously the problems in this world because we’re looking forward to leaving it. But that makes the promise of God’s salvation “too small a thing” (Isa 49:6). Our hope in the risen Lord Jesus Christ points toward nothing less than God’s new world, a world of love, and freedom, and joy, and life for all. We put that hope into practice as we invest our lives through faith that looks forward to more than we can imagine and through love that empowers us to give ourselves away in service to others.

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[1] © 2022, Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/13/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/ZAT-qQdT6sM

[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 67-68.

[3] Book of Common Worship, 2018, 422.

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 124, 178.

[5] Jürgen Moltmann, Way of Jesus: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, 284-85.

The God of Life

 The God of Life

Luke 20:27-38[1]

Life has a funny way of teaching us the lessons we need to learn. As much as we may try to deny it, one of life’s basic lessons is that, as William Faulkner is famously quoted, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” All of us live our whole lives under the influence of our experiences. We can either make peace with our past, accept it for what it was, and move forward with our lives. Or we can try to ignore our past, making an effort to forget the memories that can come back to haunt us. But whatever we try to suppress festers to the point that it exerts even more power over us. And when it does come out, it’s usually quite ugly.

While it’s true that we can never escape our past experiences, I don’t believe for a second that we are trapped by them. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be much point in living. Then Benjamin Franklin was right when he said, “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” That kind of outlook is common, but it’s a prescription for a pretty hopeless view of life. From this perspective, death has the final word on everything. And that means that the human family is hopelessly trapped in the vicious circles of selfishness, hatred, poverty, violence, injustice, and despair. All that’s left is just to resign ourselves that “Life is useless, all useless,” as the “preacher” of Ecclesiastes says (Eccl 1:2, TEV). There’s not much room in that outlook for faith or hope or love.

In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus was responding in part to this kind of pessimism about life. He had been answering questions from various groups of Jewish leaders, each one intent on embarrassing him in front of the people. One question posed came from the Sadducees. They were the ruling priests who controlled the Temple. They were also the ones who cooperated with the Roman empire. And they were not above bribing the Roman governor for the privilege of serving as the chief religious leaders of the Jewish people.

As Luke tells us, the Sadducees didn’t believe in “resurrection.” They lived in a closed system, and they weren’t open to the idea that there could be anything more to life than what they already knew. The Sadducees came to Jesus and asked him about the practice of a man marrying his brother’s widow. Moses had told them to do this so that the first child would be the descendant of the dead brother, to ensure that his name would continue to live on through his offspring. This was the Sadducee’s view of “resurrection”: people “live on” through their children. Their question to Jesus was about seven brothers who in turn married the same woman. They asked him, “In the resurrection … whose wife will the woman be?” (Lk. 20:33). I don’t think they were really looking for an answer. They were just trying to make the idea of a “resurrection” look ridiculous. And Jesus with it.

But Jesus “corrected” them by recalling the time when Moses met God at the burning bush. There, God spoke of himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3:6). When Moses had this encounter, the patriarchs had been dead for centuries. Jesus drew the inference that this proves that the dead are raised, for he said that God is “God not of the dead, but of the living” (Lk. 20:38). Jesus went on to explain that in the next life there would be no need for ways to ensure that a dead man had descendants, because they would all be “children of the resurrection,” no longer subject to death (Lk. 20:35-36). In other words, their question was irrelevant.

I think one of the most important points Jesus was trying to make here is that you cannot limit God’s work to the past. If God is the God of life, he is also the God of the living. And that means that our future is not one that’s defined by death, but rather by life. God’s work in the world is based on promises that point toward a future with hope and life. Promises like “I will wipe away every tear,” and “they will beat their swords into ploughshares,” and “I am making everything new.” The Christian faith is at heart the hope that God has begun to do just that through Jesus Christ. Our faith insists that from God’s perspective, the final word that defines us all is not death, but life.

I think that how we choose to look at all of this makes a great difference in our attitude toward stewardship. As I mentioned last week, in the Reformed tradition we believe that stewardship is not just about money, but it’s about seeing our lives as a gift from God to be invested for the sake of the Kingdom. If we choose to live within a closed system and assume that there’s only so much to go around, we’re probably not going to be willing to take much risk when it comes to our money or our lives. But if we can look at things from the perspective of God’s open future, a future in which life is the final word rather than death, then perhaps maybe we can step out in faith. If we can see the future as one in which our “labor in the Lord” is “not in vain” but rather makes an important contribution to advancing God’s purposes in our community and our world, it puts our stewardship in a whole different perspective.

We all have the choice: we can live as if the past overrules any hope for the future, and death ultimately makes life “useless.” If we choose to assume that our best is back there in the past—which means it’s gone—I doubt that we’re going to be interested in going out of our way to invest anything for God’s Kingdom. But if we choose to live based on the faith that the “God of life” is at work around and among us to make everything new, then maybe we can have the courage to stake our lives on God’s promises. When we embrace God’s vision for the future, perhaps we’ll begin to realize that we have no idea what God can or cannot do in our lives, in this congregation, and in this community!

The next step is to put our faith into practice every day through prayer, giving back what we’ve been given, helping those in need, inviting others to join us,  promoting community, studying the Bible together, and joining together for worship on the Lord’s Day. When we invest our lives for the sake of the kingdom of God, it’s a big vision we’re taking on. None of us can do it alone. It will take all of us doing all we can together in a spirit of humble prayer, asking the “God of life” who is the source for everything we have to send us what we need. More than that, it will take God himself working in and through us, whose last word is not death but life!

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[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/6/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/JSjQzIxI7HE