When I read a passage like the one for this morning from Isaiah 65, I often feel that to really grasp an image of it, it needs to have a theme tune to go along with it, so we not only have a passage, but a tune in our heads is. And so, like any person interested in music, I went to some of the great artists for inspiration. I turned first of all to Justin Bieber’s website to see if I could find something that would be encouraging. Or, maybe even The Trews, who I know personally, I might add. Then, I thought, “Maybe U2?” Then it dawned on me: the theme tune is from Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony – The New World Symphony! There it is! That is what I want to capture! There is something about The New World Symphony that speaks with such passion, and undergirds everything that we found in our passage from Isaiah today, it is almost uncanny!
Dvorak, as you know, was a Bohemian, and he was performing at the end of the nineteenth century in New York City. When went to the New World, to the United States, he was influenced and overwhelmed by a number of things, but most of all, the wide open spaces. After the teaming, claustrophobia of old Europe, the wide open spaces of the American prairies were an inspiration to Dvorak. This is something that he wanted to capture: an expansive vision. But he also fell in love musically with Negro spirituals, finding the spirituals uplifting, and he borrowed from the tone and the meter of many of these great pieces. He loved many of the songs and the music from native aboriginal tribes, and he wanted to capture that, having read Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Dvorak painted with a broad brush. He borrowed from many different inspirations, and The New World Symphony is an expansive and a glorious piece of music and it has been timeless really, played for a hundred and more years. This is because it captured the breath of the image of the time.
He wrote it in 1893, when there was tremendous enthusiasm about the New World. Chicago had the World’s Fair, and many of the great things that were manufactured and produced in society arose from that World’s Fair. It was a time of excitement! It was from the World’s Fair that we got the idea of a spray can, Wrigley’s gum, a dishwasher, Aunt Jemima’s Pancakes. All of these arose from the great World’s Fair! It was a time of new things and new opportunities, even the zipper that we know so well came out of that time as well. Dvorak’s New World Symphony and the World’s Fair in Chicago was a sign that the New World was emerging, that Canada and the United States and the Americas were capturing the imagination of Europeans, and a new world beckoned at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
I realized that Dvorak’s symphony is so profound because in many ways Isaiah is writing about a change. He is talking about a vision, and an expansive vision. This was an expansive vision of a world that was evolving into something new. But Isaiah’s vision is not, as some have accused it as being, Utopian. You see, the Utopian vision sort of started out with Sir Thomas More in 1516 in his famous book, Utopia, which was based on a remote American island in the ocean that would be perfect and beautiful: it would be a Utopia. Nor is the vision from Isaiah what would in Greek be called eutopia, a good place, a place again of perfection, but a place that has no room for a supernatural power, no room for God. Isaiah is not talking about building a Utopia. Rather, he is suggesting that God is going to be, and the language that he uses, “creating something new”. It is not going to be something that is built by human hands or imagination, but rather arises out of the very being of the Creator himself, and that the new world, the new heaven, the new Earth that is coming is going to be something that God does. What Isaiah wants the people of Israel to do is to grasp that image and hold on to that future and believe in that God.
One great nineteenth century preacher described this passage from Isaiah 65 as the “Magna Carta of the Divine Order”. In other words, that in these words are encapsulated the way that God wants the world to be, the way that God had created it from its very purpose, and that before the events that happened in the Garden of Eden and everything else that followed, this was God’s wish, this was God’s purpose. All Isaiah is doing is reclaiming that Magna Carta! He is stating again, “This is what God wants the world to be like.” But Isaiah also knew that we live between two worlds. We live between the world of the past and the present: the present with all its flaws and all its brokenness, and the world to come in all its glory and goodness. Where we are and in the condition that we are, we need to hold out the vision of what is to come: to live it, to embrace it, to encourage it, to proclaim it, and to wait for its fulfillment.
What does this Magna Carta look like? What kind of a world does God want us to live in? Well, one where we forget about the past and reject the hold it has upon us. The language that he uses is interesting: that we must forget what has gone before. There was a good reason why Israel needed to forget what had gone before, for what had gone before was terrible. The Book of Isaiah, whether you break it up into three prophets or two or one, it doesn’t matter; the fact is all the previous prophesies, were of a flawed nation, a broken people and a crumbling system. After all, it was Isaiah who pointed to the idolatry of the nation, where they wanted things for themselves more than they wanted things for God. He pointed to the injustices of the past and the injustices on the poor and the oppressed. He pointed to the immorality of the leaders, particularly the kings and the monarchs who were not living up to the great Davidic tradition. Isaiah had some pretty poignant words. Even six chapters before, Isaiah wrote these incredible words of indictment about the present and the past:
The way of peace my people do not know, and there is no justice in their past. Their roads have made crooked. No one who walks in them knows peace. Therefore, justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We wait for light, and lo, there is darkness, and for brightness! We walk in gloom. We grope like a blind along a wall, groping like those who have no eyes. We stumble at noon as in the twilight among the vigorous as though we were dead. We all growl like bears; like doves we moan mournfully. We wait for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far away from us, for our transgressions before us are many, and our sins testify against us. Our transgressions are indeed with us, and we know our iniquities. Justice is turned back and righteousness stands at a distance. The truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and whoever turns from evil is despoiled. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him. And, there was no justice.
Ouch! Not a good picture!
Isaiah did not want the people to go back to that. That is why he said, “We must forget what has happened in the past.” This is not to suggest, as I mentioned last week that we do not listen to those who have gone before us, that we do not take heed from those who have preceded us. Of course we do! Isaiah is one of them. But that we do not become trapped by the failings of the past and by the gloom and the doom of things that have gone astray. I like to call what he is suggesting “a healing amnesia” a forgetfulness of the things of the past that hold us back from embracing the vision of God today. We all have these – every era, every society, every culture, and every individual! We have things in our closets that need to stay there. Things that we have done that we should not have done; things that we have left undone that we should have done; sins that we have committed for which we still feel guilty; inadequacies that still hold us down; relationships that we have broken and should have mended. We all carry around the pain of the past. There is not one who does not have something in their soul that they regret.
There is no going back. Isaiah does not want the people to dream of dreams of long ago, for the dreams of long ago are dreams that will only stop them embracing the vision now. Old hatreds will only resurface. Old injustices will only come to the fore. He says this is a time for “a healing amnesia” to forget what is past, and embrace a new vision. There used to be an ancient tradition, and I loved it, an old preacher friend of mine brought it to my attention years ago, where people in ancient times used to go down to the ocean and it was as if they threw all their sins and all their problems into the ocean – metaphorically speaking! They cast them on the waters and their hope is that they would all somehow settle in the waters and drown. This great preacher friend of mine said, “If that is the case, if that is what we do with all the sins of our past and all the inequities and injustices of the past, then there should be sign put up on the beach that says, “No fishing!”
This Magna Carta of Isaiah’s speaks of a new world in another way: God’s joy is greater than our human frailty. When you read this passage you can’t help but think what an incredible vision it is of a new world, of a new hope. But you also realize that this is in response to a world that needs newness, to a world that desperately needs to have a different vision. He prays that there will be no infant mortality. Clearly, that suggests that at the time the birth rate might have been high, but the death rate of infants was also high, and that the poor and the dispossessed and the people who were continually on the move had nowhere to bear their children. Sounds very Christmas, doesn’t it? But there was the hope that there would be a way for young people to find a fulfilling life, and the language here is that young people would in fact find some meaning and purpose. This was the vision. It was the vision that people would labour, and then that phrase “but not in vain” implying that they had been working in vain, working for their oppressor, working for somebody else to succeed, pleasing those who were above them in a position of authority and crushing them.
The people of Israel were living under the tyranny of oppression, where their labour was in vain, but also their land. Their land did not seem to bear fruit for them. The wine they were able to make, they could not drink; the food that they produced, they could not eat. The land was in turmoil. So you see, the picture is of one of human frailty, of sadness really about the state of the world. How does Isaiah put it? He puts it in the affirmative: there will no longer be infant deaths; there will be the fulfillment of young people’s lives; and people will live to be older people; that labour will not be in vain. The land will be bountiful and beautiful, because God is up to something. God is doing something great. While it might look right now for the people who are reading this that this was an ideal beyond their experience, it was always predicated on a God who beyond them, and above them, and yet for them.
What was the opposite vision to Isaiah’s? What was the opposite vision of a world of justice and truth and equity? What was the opposite? Nihilism! This is a sense that there is no hope, that there is nothing more than the here and now, and that injustice is our lot, and death and war are the things that we live with. And if nihilism is one of the great characteristics of cultures over the years, it seems to me that Isaiah is the antidote to that, because he holds out what God’s vision is. God’s people should then not embrace the vision of nihilism even if others around do, even if others say, “This is the state of the world and we give up hope!” For the people who follow the God of Isaiah, the vision is always greater than the spirit of nihilism, which is full of doubt and fear. There is a vision here of peace, and it is the most beautiful vision of peace in the whole of the Scriptures. It is where God’s peace is greater than our transgressions and our tribulations.
Growing up in Bermuda, one of the things I liked to do – against all advice, wisdom and rational thought – was to go swimming and diving in the middle of a storm. Where I lived on the south shore of Bermuda, my home backed on to a patch where there were some cows, and then on the other side of where the cows were, was a cliff and a drop down to the ocean. It was perfect! The only things that saw me bathing were cows! I would walk through the field and climb down the rocky hill to a little beach that nobody knew was e there. I would put on my diving gear, and in the midst of a storm, with waves crashing and winds blowing, I would go diving. It was the most beautiful time to dive! This is because once you get to around twenty feet or say ten meters, maybe a little deeper, you realize that the water below is perfectly still. The fish are still moving slowly; the plankton is still waving, the coral is still pretty. It is peace. You don’t hear the storm; you don’t know what is above you. You just feel that you are in this beautiful space. And then as you ascend, the winds and the waves crash against your head, and you desperately try and find the shore, you get out and go home. But for a moment in the midst of the storm, at twenty feet below the surface, there is peace. I have never forgotten that. It is one of those places where when life is a turmoil I go back to in my memory – a beautiful place!
I think that the kingdom and the vision that Isaiah had was like those quiet waters, that all the froth and ferment and the torment and the storms of life, and all the violence and inequities and nasty language and hatefulness and abuse, they are all churning away, still there is in all of this a place where God is, where God’s peace is greater than the torment that we human beings create. This is the image Isaiah had. I mean it is extreme language. If you read him in his time, you would realize how extreme it was. He says, “Look, the wolf is going to be eating with the lamb.” The wolf, the ultimate predator, will be eating with the sheep, who are normally the wolf’s food. And the lion will be eating with the oxen. The lion, who roars, devours, sneaks up on the oxen, will be dining with them. This incredible vision of peace! It might be a vision of peace and it might be something for which Isaiah awaits, but it is one that the world should never forget. It is one that people of faith should never forget. It is so easy to become seduced into believing that the storms on the surface are all there is and that there is nothing deeper or better, that there is no grace.
I think it is fair enough to say that Isaiah hoped for and waited for One who would embody this vision, and that this why this is Christ the King Sunday. The fulfillment of the hope that the Prince of Peace would be found in Jesus of Nazareth, the embodiment of the vision of all that God wished and desired for the world. So often it seems to me that we do not take that vision seriously. We think somehow it has failed, is failing or is not possible, and we reject it. Maybe because in the midst of the storms of life we like to turn to somebody else to put things straight. Maybe we turn to princes and kings, religious leaders or presidents, maybe we turn to things to make us feel better, or we embrace a vision of strength and power. Or maybe, if we believe, if we truly believe to have a vision of Isaiah, where the hurting finds solace, the poor find strength, the meek are lifted up, those who feel are heard. Maybe it is a place where those waters of the deep wash over us, and we never forget that in the midst of the storm that there is a God. Amen.