Hopes and Fears: Beauty First Baptist Richmond, January 20, 2019 The Second Sunday after Epiphany Isaiah 62:1-5

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1 Hopes and Fears: Beauty First Baptist Richmond, January 20, 2019 The Second Sunday after Epiphany Isaiah 62:1-5 You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. On a Sunday night in April, 1865, the City of Richmond began to burn. Historian Jay Winik describes it like this: [As the Union Army approached], orders were given to torch all commodities, including the tobacco warehouses. The initial flames began, innocuously, with thin wisps of bluish smoke curling upward from the doomed windows of these embattled buildings. But then they quickly raced through the dry, fragrant leaves and began to scale the walls and roof. From that moment on, no one knew exactly how the fires spread. Soon, however, entire buildings were ablaze. Then a stiff, southerly breeze began to blow. The flames widened and lengthened and finally began to leap from one building onto the next. The closer the flames came, the bigger they began to grow. Nor was this simply illusion. Like a funeral pyre, the blaze rolled up from the waterfront, hissing and sparking and crackling. The old colonial timber undergirding much of Richmond didn t help; it made the fire insatiable for more. Suddenly, in building after building, plaster dust came down. This was soon followed by a series of thunderous crashes as charred beams buckled and split. Walls began to break. The air was abruptly filled with flying brick and broken glass. And then came the earsplitting sounds of whole structures collapsing into rubble, crushed like paper bags. As the sun rose the next morning, the fires were still burning. Everywhere were broken houses, charred buildings, and dead animals lit by the glow. Old businesses, fine hotels, elegant residences, newspapers, restaurants, all were destroyed by the indiscriminate inferno. i I ve seen the pictures of the city after that fire, the still-smoking remains of Shockoe Bottom, with Richmond ladies wearing black dresses walking in numb grief among the ruins. I ve tried to imagine what it was like for the people of First Baptist 1

2 Church, whose building still stood at the corner of 12 th and Broad Streets, well above the smoldering timbers of those tobacco warehouses. Did they gather for worship the next Sunday? Were they able to, after their city had fallen to the enemy? And if they did, what did their pastor say to people who had lost almost everything in the space of a week, including their hope for the future? In these Sundays after the Epiphany we ve been talking about the hopes and fears of all the years, and drawing some parallels between the experience of Israel in exile and our own experience as a nation. Today I want to talk about what it was like for those exiles to come home to Jerusalem, which had fallen even more dramatically than Richmond. The Book of Jeremiah describes it like this: When the Babylonian army came to Jerusalem, they broke down all the walls around the city. They set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. They burned down every important building. ii And then they carried its leading citizens into exile, where they remained for nearly fifty years. But then the Babylonians were conquered by the Persians, and Cyrus king of Persia let God s people go. They were able to return to Jerusalem. What did they find when they got there? The blackened remains of their once-proud city: the walls broken down, the temple reduced to rubble, with weeds growing in the place where they had once worshiped the Lord. If they wept when they were carried into exile what do you think they did now, coming back to a city that had once sparkled like a jewel in the sun, but was now almost unrecognizable in its ugliness? What did their pastor say to them on that first Sabbath back? We can t be sure, but today s Old Testament lesson may hold a clue. Scholars divide the Book of Isaiah into three parts: chapters 1-39 (before the Exile), 2

3 chapters (during the Exile), and chapters (after the Exile). Today s reading comes from that last section, where the exiles have returned to Jerusalem. Picture the prophet, standing in that ruined temple in the place where a pulpit might have been, and saying: For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch. The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory; and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give. You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married. For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you. Think how they went home from worship that day hopeful, and how, even in the blackened rubble of that city, they began to imagine the beauty that would be. That s how I want you to go home from worship today, any of you who are distressed by the state of our nation. I ve been talking about that in the past few weeks, describing the deep division that exists in America and characterizing it as a battle between the Republicans and the Democrats. But last week I got from one of my more thoughtful critics who said that kind of talk perpetuates a media myth. Yes, he said, you ve got extremists on either end of the spectrum, but the vast majority of Americans are simply seeking a way forward. He added, I think the divisions in our country have been largely overstated, and that they have little to do with being Democrats or Republicans. He may be right about that, but he does not deny the fact that we are divided. As I re-read his message I noticed his reference to the media and wondered: is it our chosen media outlets that are at war with each other? Is it not the Republicans vs. the Democrats so much as Fox News vs. National Public Radio? Or is it something more 3

4 subtle than that? I may be way off base here, but I wonder if the division in our nation could be traced back to something as simple as the Like button on Facebook. Facebook was founded in 2004, when George W. Bush was president. It happened almost by accident, when a college student who d had a fight with his girlfriend posted her picture on the Internet and asked viewers to choose between her picture and the pictures of other girls at his school, letting him know who they thought was prettier. iii His little revenge strategy went viral, and when he later turned it into Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg added the Like button, so that when users posted pictures of their girlfriends, or their beach vacations, or the restaurant where they were having dinner other users could let them know if they liked it. It sounds harmless enough, but when I log onto Facebook these days and scroll through my feed what I m being asked for, again and again, is my opinion. Do I like this picture, or not? Do I like this statement, or not? Do I like this president, or not? And maybe that s how we got so divided. We have been invited to share our opinions publicly, on everything from last night s dinner to this morning s political controversy. And as my thoughtful critic has pointed out, it s not everybody. Not everybody is on Facebook. Not everybody is blasting their opinions into cyberspace in all capital letters at all hours of the day and night. But a lot of people are, and that poison has seeped into the system. It has spread, until the entire nation has been affected by the rampant, public sharing of personal opinion. Do you remember when people used to keep their opinions to themselves? Do you remember when the news was just the news, without commentary? Do you 4

5 remember when we didn t know what the letters IMHO stood for? Now we do. They stand for in my humble opinion. And often those opinions are not very humble. So, what do we do with the deep divisions in our nation? How do we go forward from here? I don t want to blame it all on Facebook and I don t think canceling our Facebook accounts is going to solve the problem. Somebody, at this very moment, is watching this service on Facebook Live and I m grateful to Mark Zuckerberg for making that kind of technology available (I probably need to write him a thank-you note). But we ve got to do better than we ve been doing as a nation. We ve got to come together. You may have heard me say last week that when I was dreaming up this sermon series I was looking at these texts from Isaiah and thinking about the state of our nation when I wrote: In a time like this we need Jesus. I stand by that statement. In today s Gospel lesson Jesus is at a wedding where they ve run out of wine. It s not a perfect metaphor, but it s not bad: if wine was the fuel of celebration then that wedding s tank was empty. It had come to a sputtering stop by the side of the road. But there was Jesus, and there were six stone jars that each held twenty to thirty gallons of water, and the next thing you know those jars were full of the best wine anyone had ever tasted, and a party that was running on fumes was suddenly in full swing again. Because this is what Jesus does, and this is what the author of John s Gospel is trying to tell us: where there is scarcity Jesus brings abundance; where the cup was empty only a moment before, now it is full and running over. It s not a straight line of connection, but I believe the One who can do that is also the one who can heal our deep divisions or at least show us the way. I think about what Paul wrote to the Philippians 5

6 when they were divided: he said, Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. iv Which raises the question, What would Jesus like on Facebook? More to the point, what would Jesus not like? And what would he not say if someone shoved a microphone in his face and started the cameras rolling? There is a kind of ugliness about our national discourse these days that cannot be denied. Again, it s not everybody; maybe just those on the extremes. But the global perception seems to be that we cannot keep a civil tongue in our heads, we Americans. We say hateful things about each other, and often we do it publicly. If ever we were of one mind with each other, if ever we had the same love, being of one mind and in full accord; if ever we did nothing from selfish ambition and conceit but in humility regarded others as better than ourselves; if ever we looked not to our own interests but to the interests of others; if ever we, as a nation, had in us the same mind that is in Christ Jesus we have it no longer. The moral landscape appears to be as burned and blackened as the City of Richmond after that devastating fire, as reduced to rubble and overgrown with weeds as the City of Jerusalem after the Exile. We stand here surveying the damage, letting out sighs too deep for words. In a time like this we not only need Jesus, we need hope. So did those exiles, and in their discouraging circumstances the prophet said that Jerusalem s vindication would shine out like the dawn, her salvation like a burning torch. The nations shall see your vindication, he said, and all the kings your glory; and you 6

7 shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give. You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. Do you hear that? These people, who were sent into exile for their ugly behavior, would become a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord. You shall no more be termed Forsaken, the prophet says, but you shall be called My Delight is in Her. Do you hear that? These people, who had bowed down before every pagan altar they could find, would become the ones in whom the Lord delights. As a bridegroom rejoices over the bride, the prophet says, so shall your God rejoice over you. That s probably why we are reading this passage today, when the Gospel lesson is about the wedding in Cana. Someone probably went looking for an Old Testament passage about weddings. But there isn t a more hopeful time in anyone s life is there? When the groom looks so handsome in his tuxedo and the bride is as beautiful as she will ever be? When they haven t yet had their first argument as a married couple, and when anything seems possible? That s where our Scripture readings want to take us this morning to that most hopeful of all places or maybe to the kind of faith that can remain hopeful in all places, even when there is no apparent reason, simply because we know that the One who stands among us is able to turn water into wine, scarcity into abundance, and ugliness into beauty. I was talking to an architect last Tuesday morning who was headed to Shockoe Bottom: that part of our city that burned to the ground in I said, Hey, while you re there, would you mind taking some pictures and sending them to me? He said he would be glad to, and within a few hours I had all these images as perhaps only an architect could see them of a city that has risen from the ashes, that is, at this time in 7

8 history, arguably more beautiful than it has ever been before. And what about Jerusalem? Within a few centuries of the exiles return that city had surpassed its original beauty, with a gleaming temple even more splendid than the one that had been there before. May it be true for America. May we find a way to move past our differences and heal our divisions; may we become a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord and a royal diadem in the hand of our God; as a bridegroom rejoices over a bride, so may our God rejoice over us. I believe we can get there. But I believe that we the church will have to show the way. And I believe the way is the Way of Jesus, In whose name we pray. Jim Somerville 2019 i Jay Winik, April 1865: the Month that Saved America (New York: Harper, 2001), pp ii Jeremiah 52: iii I got this information from a scene in the film The Social Network. I cannot be sure of its accuracy. iv Philippians 2:2-5. 8