You Can Go Home Again Isaiah 55:1-9 February 27, 2016 Northminster Presbyterian Church Michael D. Kirby

Transcription

1 You Can Go Home Again Isaiah 55:1-9 February 27, 2016 Northminster Presbyterian Church Michael D. Kirby It was the book it seemed everyone was talking about in 2010.Emma Donoghue s Room and now, it s a small independent film nominated for four Oscars tonight. The book is riveting. Told from the perspective of five-year-old Jack, we find ourselves with Ma and sometimes Old Nick in Room not the room but capital R Room It s like a character in the story this place It takes a while in the novel, but we figure out things Jack doesn t understand. This is not some post-apocalyptic story.it s not some sci-fi horror story.it s an all-too-real story of the horrors that humans do to one another. At the risk of upsetting those who haven t read or seen it.room is the story of a young woman who is kidnapped by an older man and imprisoned in a shed for years She eventually bears his child.jack but protects Jack from him. Indeed, like the imaginative father in the Oscar winning Life is Beautiful, who creates a fantasy world for his son so he can survive the horrors of a concentration camp, Ma creates an alternative reality for Jack where Room is the only thing that is real and all of the rest of the world is make believe on the television. Eventually, as one might expect, Jack and Ma must come to terms with being freed from Room. The last half of the book and movie are about that journey. It poignantly asks the question can you go back home to a home you ve never actually known? Room tells that story painfully, yet beautifully. It is a story of deconstruction and reconstruction. When Jack learns that his whole life has been a lie that all he has had to count on as real isn t he takes each of us to those places. As film essayist Jeffrey Overstreet puts it, We can all name a room that we ve experienced a space that was too small, a contest that was too oppressive or confining, a scenario that limited our freedoms or kept us from access to the truth. 1

2 Today we encounter the children of Abraham and Sarah on the verge of freedom from their Room It s roughly 520 years before Jesus is born. Almost 70 years before Babylon conquered Judah the last piece of what had been the Kingdom of David a few hundred years before and took the elites into exile, dragging them back into present day Iraq. Now, Cyrus the Great of Persia has risen in what is modern day Iran and he is marching west conquering everything in sight and the Babylonian empire the oppressors of the children and grandchildren of those taken into exile.is burning before their eyes. Cyrus governs his vassal states with more carrot than stick so he is going to send the exiles home even rebuild their temple So here they are a couple of generations ago, their grandparents were displaced by powerful and oppressive forces.they became forced refugees in a foreign land longing for home, but with each passing generation, growing more desperate and less confident that they can go home. In that writings of that time before Cyrus, they imagine that God has turned away from them completely no longer hears their cries or their prayers. And then almost overnight this great power has arisen from the East.crushing their corrupt oppressor s regime and then the word comes.you can go home again but not one original refugee, or at least certainly no one who can remember it remains From their priests they hear the echoes of the promise of that home but like Jack freed from the Room their principle reaction is disorientation. And perhaps it is no surprise that some do not want to go home They have grown accustomed to life in the big city or at least in the refugee camps on its edge They are attracted to the sophistication that even Cyrus invasion can t keep down for long 2

3 Do we really want to go home? they ask themselves not overcome with Stockholm Syndrome not really but the confining oppression they have known is now their new normal they know where their food will come from they know what the day, the week, the year will bring it may not bring freedom but it is also not mysterious or unknown Into this dilemma comes the voice of the prophet Chapter 55 is actually the final chapter of what we frequently call Second Isaiah.the prophetic writings from within the Exile the writings that are seeking to recast the vision of the life their people had once known. Today s passage is the prophet s closing sermon And oddly enough he begins with the voice of the street vendor hey, you come and eat come and drink very nice offerings today all for you. Where they are right now they have access to food oh, sure, not much and yes it comes at the price of loyalty to the empire that is falling down around their ears but they have not died in exile they have not starved. Like Old Nick, Nebuchadnezzar has given them food in return for behaving properly and now the prophet of Yahweh is saying here is food without price. Isaiah scholar Walter Breuggemann suggests that this literally is trying to show that the way to human hearts is through the stomach: We must eat. On the other hand the food that is eaten is transformed into loyalty, energy, work and care. The one who provides the food we eat governs the loyalties we embrace. (Cadences of Home, p. 130.) So, the prophet is saying, but not saying when the people return home it will be without the feeding hand of a despot, it will be YHWH on whom they must depend. But they have gotten out of the habit of depending on God. They ve spent their entire lives depending on themselves or on the oppressive kingdom that has been their home. They weren t t born in Jerusalem, where the Spirit of Yahweh was said to make and earthly home in the Temple, but on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. They don t remember the temple, they only remember the tabernacle in their village. 3

4 The Dead Sea, the kingdom of David the brave, the covenant with Abraham? Fairy stories from grandmom and granddad. But here? Here in Babylon? There are great temples and commerce and a civilization far more advanced than that backwater on the other side of the desert. Oh, the government may be about to fall but not the commerce, not the engines of cash and militarism. New face on the coin, but it s still money. Why on earth is everyone making such a big fuss about this Adonai God? Even if he was real, he was defeated by the gods of Babylon two generations ago. These folks just need to get over it they lost so make peace with what they call the War of Northern Arabian Aggression and move on. Or do they? Breuggemann suggests that the Stay in Babylon Let s Trust Cyrus camp vs. the Let s Go Home camp is comparable to the lives each of us lives today the life of dependence on the world and ourselves for safety, for identity, for affirmation verses the life of the disciple who places her trust in, who draws his identity from the God we experience in Jesus Christ. The prophet s call to go home again is an invitation to reclaim an identity based in the dependable things that God has provided. In their day that was largely concerned with a covenantal relationship with Yahweh and the Law of Moses providing the structure and ethical framework that they could trust. The people can live ethically, fairly, can have their bread and milk and wine the gifts of the land if they go home to their land, to their bread and milk and wine. They can live in the land of dog-eat-dog and likely be consumed by a bigger dog, or they can go home and rebuild based on the ethics and promises that made them a people the last time they returned from exile. Citizenship has its privileges, and the reality is that these folks have two choices eternally being refugees with no land, no home, no identity or returning to the land God gave them once before and now, by raising up Cyrus, is giving them again. 4

5 Their choice, be food for the dogs or to be a people. The ones who stayed? No one remembers.the ones who trusted and went home they are still today we are still today choosing In the early 20 th century, a young lawyer was faced with a similar choice, he could succeed as a lawyer with permanent second-class status as an oppressed subject of an occupier or claim his true identity, break free from being defined as a colonial subject and live as though he was/is already freed from the tyranny that surrounded him. Seventy-six years ago this coming Thursday, Mahatma Gandhi decided, though he didn t change his address.to go home again. Declaring his refusal to participate in a system that oppressed him and his people, he began the first of many fasts. He was not successful, not that time, not at first. But he would continue to use fasting a refusal of the symbolic bread and milk of an oppressive regime to ask the people who would they be in whom would they place their trust their loyalty their future? Today as we seek to follow Jesus on the Journey to Jerusalem, we also have an invitation to come home and to answer the question.where will we turn to get our sustenance? Where will we choose to find our spiritual food, our worth, our strength, our sense of self? In the crumbling Corrupt Kingdom of Babylon with its legacy of oppression and exploitation? In the Hopey Changey Kingdom of Cyrus which might be new but still relies on threat and violence to keep the peace? Don t these kingdoms too often leave us hungry for more having to acknowledge that no matter how well we do in them much of what we enjoy is born out of the exploitation of others and nothing satisfies us for long. 5

6 Or can we choose instead to find our sustenance on the free lunch Isaiah is promising the lunch back home that will likely end up with us rolling up our sleeves to feed others. It s an important question, because the one who feeds us has a right to demand our loyalty ASP is feeling us pancakes today and their great but what will feed your soul tomorrow? What will feed mine? The cheap nuggets of a fast-food cookiecutter, go-along-with-the-masses life? The prestige of a I ve got mine and I don t ask who suffers for it elitist life? Or the bread of life and the cup of salvation? Where will we find our strength, our being? While we contemplate that this week Jesus is already moving ahead.already setting that table for next week already reminding us that if we will let ourselves come home free ourselves from those Rooms that limit who we are how we see the world, we can taste his bread of grace a bread without price and drink richly of wine of compassion and hope wine without money. Only thing is once we ve really tasted what it can be nothing else will ever fill us up again. Thanks be to God. 6