Hope for Unity

( Lectionary for November 13, 2016  Isaiah 65:17-25)

There can be no better text than Is 65 to ponder after the startling victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election. So many, including me, were so certain of a victory for Hillary Clinton, that the very thought of a Trump presidency was unthinkable. Now we all must think it, for it has come to pass. I readily admit to a profound fury and deep sadness in the face of this new reality. How could it be that a narcissistic, xenophobic bully has gotten himself elected to become one of the leaders of the free world? I was quite literally sick to my stomach as I watched the returns roll in, indicating his win, and I slept poorly, imagining the many ways that his elevation to the presidency could negatively effect so many things I hold dear: climate change, immigration policies, international relations, our very standing in the world. When the sun rose on those new facts in my country, I opened my Bible and found that this was the text for this Sunday, the Sunday after I imagined that something like a political apocalypse had occurred.

The opening lines were like balm to my grieving spirit: “Watch! I am creating (or “create” or “will create”) new skies and new earth. Former things will not be remembered nor even rise up in the mind. Rather be glad and rejoice continuously over what I am creating. Just watch this! I am creating a joyous Jerusalem and a glad people” (Is 65:17- 18)! This wonderful text has been misread in several terrible and dangerous ways, and some of us grieving this day may easily fall into one of those traps. We might hear the prophet saying, “Yes, today is just awful! The election was a disaster for us and for our nation. Thank God that some fine day, some day far in the distant future, some time in some distant heaven, God will make it all right. Trouble don’t last always, and Donald Trump’s four year presidency is merely a blip on the radar of God’s own time.” We could hear the oracle as an escape hatch to leave the world that has grown strange and inhospitable for us, a rescue pod announcement that soon I will be done with the troubles of the world, and I am going to be with God. “Pie in the sky, by and by,” is a long-held way of dealing with a world become too terrible to inhabit. I think that would be a mistake to hear Isaiah like that.

Equally mistaken would be to hear the prophet to be saying that God is about to end the world’s pain in a divine cataclysm, is about to come in fury and clear the innocent (me?) and destroy the guilty in fireballs of Godly rage. “New skies and new earth” are in fact so new as to render the present arrangements of skies and earth as null and void, places to be forgotten, not even considered any more. Such a belief has lead to apocalyptic nightmares where the righteous go to be with God while all the wicked (take your pick concerning just who you imagine the wicked to be—Donald Trump and his followers, for example?)—are tossed into a lake of fire to be tortured for all eternity. Meanwhile, we righteous ones sit placidly and serenely on our individual clouds, witnessing with delight the agony of our tormentors, singing in perfect four-part harmony our favorite and much-loved hymns. I trust I need not convince you that such an image is nothing less than monstrous, no matter how many religious mountebanks continue to spew its supposed truth. You really don’t believe such rubbish, do you?

Well, then, just what is Isaiah saying, and just how is it balm for the grieving spirit? I wish that we knew more precisely when Isaiah wrote these words and just which “Isaiah” it was who did the writing. There is little doubt that this member of the Isaianic school did his work sometime well after the exile of Israel in Babylon. Perhaps he was speaking to a community of returned exiles, now living among those who had never left Jerusalem in the first place, around the time of the reconstruction of the temple, an event that occurred in 516 BCE. Haggai, the prophet, offered very precise dates for his work that preceded the finishing of that temple work, just a few years earlier. His words reflected what many thought about that new temple, rising from the ashes of the old one. “You look at it and think it to be nothing,” he said, no doubt echoing the thoughts of many of those engaged in the work. “This is the great temple?” some must have said, either muttered to themselves or grumbled to one another in private. None of them knew that the rebuilding Jerusalem was about to enter into a sort of “dark age” when very little is known about the activities of the Judeans. This age lasted for some 200 years, until the Macedonian Alexander roared onto the world stage and changed Judah, along with the rest of the known world, forever.

Isaiah, like many who witnessed the struggles of Judah to rebuild, to reconstitute their society in the image of their sweet memories of the glory days of David and Solomon and their successors, offered to his hearers and readers not simply more of the same. That is why he emphasizes that those former things will not be remembered. Do not fix yourselves in the past, he warns. That way lies danger. To remain in the past, more of the same old, same old, is to vegetate, to expect nothing new, to hope for little more than what we have already seen. He does not speak of the need for a new David or a reborn Solomon. No. But at the same time, the new thing of God does not mean that all former things are useless. As it has often been said about God’s new sky and earth, “God does not make all new things; God makes all things new.” That is, the current things of earth are not worthy of total destruction; they are prime for transformation, for refurbishing in the light of God’s eternal plan for unity and wholeness for all things created by God.

During the presidential election now ended more than a few evangelical voters were questioned about their support for Donald Trump. After all, he seemed to represent nearly everything that such believers said they abhorred; crude language, multiple marriages accompanied by tales of adultery, abuse of human beings who were somehow “different” from the white model he espoused, and on and on. Their response was often something like this: “God can use any sort of person for God’s work. Just look at the so- called “heroes” of the Bible; all were seriously flawed in one way or another.” I can only agree with that claim; the Bible is indeed rife with weak and dangerous characters, none of whom who would pass many modern tests of morality. And because I agree with these evangelical colleagues about this biblical idea, I come to the reason why I find such comfort in Isaiah’s words at this special time in my life and in the lives of my fellow Americans. “God does not make all new things; God makes all things new.” God is in the business of creating anew out of the material that God has created all along.

Listen to Donald Trump’s words after he had learned that he had won the election:

“Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely. Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division. We have to get together. To all Republicans, Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.”

I readily admit that I find that statement little less than astonishing, given the tone of the rhetoric we all have heard over the past 18 months. But, remember, “God makes all things new,” and that promise from 2500 years ago rings true still. In that new-making God I put my trust.