A New Creation
2 Cor. 5:14-17; Ezekiel 17: 22-24; Mark 4:26-34
June 14, 2009
Almost 30 years ago, President Ronald Reagan, quoting Thomas Paine, remarked in a speech setting forth his agenda to reshape the federal government, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Last week in Cairo, President Obama paraphrased them both, saying, “We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning.”
A direct line stretches through Paine to Reagan to Obama, and touches a great many American leaders along the way, and that direct line demarcates an American heresy.
For as much as our American mythology would like us to believe that individually and collectively we have it within ourselves to make the world anew, John Calvin would have recognized the heresy at the heart of the mythology.
For Calvin was an excellent reader of Paul, and Paul understood quite clearly that while renewal and rebirth are profoundly important and necessary aspects of faithful living, we do not have it within ourselves, by ourselves, to make the world anew.
Listen for a word from God from the prophet Isaiah: “behold, I am about to do a new thing.”
“I am about to do a new thing,” says the Lord.
Not Thomas Paine and this nation’s Founders. Not Ronald Reagan and his followers. Not Barack Obama and his.
If there is to be a new creation, in Paul’s words, it will be God’s doing. If something new is going to spring up on the mountaintop, in Ezekiel’s image, it will be God’s doing. And if there is to be, among us and within us, something new, it will be God’s doing.
Why raise this today, at the beginning of summer when the planting is done and the harvest is still far off and mostly we want to kick back and take it easy?
Several reasons: first, these are the texts that the lectionary places before us this week, so we ought to attend to them and listen to them for a word from God.
But more importantly, these are words in season. They are ripe for us right now, especially coming as the Sabbath season of summer breaks upon us.
Finally, they speak to us of something new at a moment when we desperately need to be reminded of that possibility, for we have been reminded close to home this week of the ancient hatreds that mark the old patterns of human behavior and relationship that Ezekiel and Paul and all of the other prophets and apostles, and most decisively for us, Jesus, called people to set aside and be done with.
In the passage from Mark printed in the bulletin this morning, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed and uses harvest imagery to remind his listeners that the kingdom of God does not arrive like other kingdoms with military power and grand pronouncements from on high. Instead, God’s kingdom – God’s beloved community – comes subtly and unnoticed by most. It presses in from the margins and is embodied initially by those furthest from traditional sources of power.
That is no doubt why signs of the kingdom of God seem so scarce to us. We live in Rome – the heart of the empire – the most powerful city in the most powerful empire in the history of the world.
Jesus came preaching repentance and the kingdom of God, the gospels proclaim. His clear message: Rome was not the kind of kingdom that God had in mind. These texts before are ancient and speak from specific cultural, historical and political contexts to be sure, but they also speak to our time and the message should be just as clear: America is not the kind of kingdom that God has in mind either.
No empire, no matter how conceived nor to what purpose dedicated, will ever be what God has in mind. For the God revealed in and through the life of Jesus is profoundly anti-imperialist for the plain and simple and abiding reason that every empire is established by and maintained through violence.
The question for followers of Jesus in the face of this truth is equally plain, simple and abiding: how shall we be the church in the midst of empire?
The question is an abiding one because the church in every age and context faces it anew, because thus far in the 2,000-year history of the Christian movement every age has been the age of empire. That historical fact begs a crucial question: is empire simply part and parcel of human life? Is there something innate in human being, in our psychology, in our nature, in our living together that results in organizing the polis around structures and institutions of violence?
Is the violence of empire in the heart of each of us?
After all, violence breaks in all around us. In the past few weeks violence has twice desecrated holy ground – in the murder of a doctor in his church and in last week’s shooting at the Holocaust Museum. You don’t have to look through more than one day’s edition of the Post to find violence tearing apart neighborhoods close to us, or violence rending the fabric of families in our town. War is not confined to contests between nations. Often we are at war with ourselves within our own souls, as anyone who has struggled with addictions or mental and emotional illnesses well knows.
This insight is probably as old as human thought. Indeed Lao Tzu, who lived 500 years before Christ, put it this way:
If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
In this ancient wisdom lies the key to understanding Paul’s notion of a new creation, and to grasping how that notion of new creation informs our understanding of the kingdom of God that Jesus compares to the mustard seed.
The new creation begins not with the work of great empires, but in the heart work, the soul work of each of us. That does not mean that public action and public policies are unimportant – far from it. But it does mean that the peace we long for must begin within each of us.
As Ghandi put it, “we must be the change we seek in the world.”
The crucial role and, indeed, the ultimate purpose of the church of Jesus Christ is to be the community that shines forth this change because we are living it out in our own lives and in our common life together.
When we gather as the church in worship we are not merely a spiritual filling station through which we gather strength to endure another week in the world as it is. Instead, we gather together to gather strength to change the world into a place that we do not merely endure but in which we share in abundant life. Moreover, we gather to be a community which opens a window – not matter how small and smudged and occasional cracked it may be – but a window nonetheless on how the world might be made anew.
We gather as the church to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God, the beloved community, a new creation. We are the mustard seeds being planted for the birth of a new creation in which people can go to work and not worry about violence shattering their lives, in which children are fed and cared for and educated, in which our elderly live with dignity and independence, in which, as Isaiah envisioned, nation shall not life up sword against nation and they will study war no more.
If you want to live in such a world, do not look to the White House to create it. Do not wait patiently for such a world to be created by the mighty and the powerful. Instead, look with a certain holy impatience within your own heart and open it that God’s work can begin there to bring a new creation.
Let us close with a prayer for New Zealand that speaks to this longing and openness:
Lead me from death to life,
from falsehood to truth;
lead me from despair to hope,
from fear to trust;
lead me from hate to love,
from war to peace.
Let peace fill our heart,
our world, our universe. Amen.
June 14, 2009
Almost 30 years ago, President Ronald Reagan, quoting Thomas Paine, remarked in a speech setting forth his agenda to reshape the federal government, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
Last week in Cairo, President Obama paraphrased them both, saying, “We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning.”
A direct line stretches through Paine to Reagan to Obama, and touches a great many American leaders along the way, and that direct line demarcates an American heresy.
For as much as our American mythology would like us to believe that individually and collectively we have it within ourselves to make the world anew, John Calvin would have recognized the heresy at the heart of the mythology.
For Calvin was an excellent reader of Paul, and Paul understood quite clearly that while renewal and rebirth are profoundly important and necessary aspects of faithful living, we do not have it within ourselves, by ourselves, to make the world anew.
Listen for a word from God from the prophet Isaiah: “behold, I am about to do a new thing.”
“I am about to do a new thing,” says the Lord.
Not Thomas Paine and this nation’s Founders. Not Ronald Reagan and his followers. Not Barack Obama and his.
If there is to be a new creation, in Paul’s words, it will be God’s doing. If something new is going to spring up on the mountaintop, in Ezekiel’s image, it will be God’s doing. And if there is to be, among us and within us, something new, it will be God’s doing.
Why raise this today, at the beginning of summer when the planting is done and the harvest is still far off and mostly we want to kick back and take it easy?
Several reasons: first, these are the texts that the lectionary places before us this week, so we ought to attend to them and listen to them for a word from God.
But more importantly, these are words in season. They are ripe for us right now, especially coming as the Sabbath season of summer breaks upon us.
Finally, they speak to us of something new at a moment when we desperately need to be reminded of that possibility, for we have been reminded close to home this week of the ancient hatreds that mark the old patterns of human behavior and relationship that Ezekiel and Paul and all of the other prophets and apostles, and most decisively for us, Jesus, called people to set aside and be done with.
In the passage from Mark printed in the bulletin this morning, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed and uses harvest imagery to remind his listeners that the kingdom of God does not arrive like other kingdoms with military power and grand pronouncements from on high. Instead, God’s kingdom – God’s beloved community – comes subtly and unnoticed by most. It presses in from the margins and is embodied initially by those furthest from traditional sources of power.
That is no doubt why signs of the kingdom of God seem so scarce to us. We live in Rome – the heart of the empire – the most powerful city in the most powerful empire in the history of the world.
Jesus came preaching repentance and the kingdom of God, the gospels proclaim. His clear message: Rome was not the kind of kingdom that God had in mind. These texts before are ancient and speak from specific cultural, historical and political contexts to be sure, but they also speak to our time and the message should be just as clear: America is not the kind of kingdom that God has in mind either.
No empire, no matter how conceived nor to what purpose dedicated, will ever be what God has in mind. For the God revealed in and through the life of Jesus is profoundly anti-imperialist for the plain and simple and abiding reason that every empire is established by and maintained through violence.
The question for followers of Jesus in the face of this truth is equally plain, simple and abiding: how shall we be the church in the midst of empire?
The question is an abiding one because the church in every age and context faces it anew, because thus far in the 2,000-year history of the Christian movement every age has been the age of empire. That historical fact begs a crucial question: is empire simply part and parcel of human life? Is there something innate in human being, in our psychology, in our nature, in our living together that results in organizing the polis around structures and institutions of violence?
Is the violence of empire in the heart of each of us?
After all, violence breaks in all around us. In the past few weeks violence has twice desecrated holy ground – in the murder of a doctor in his church and in last week’s shooting at the Holocaust Museum. You don’t have to look through more than one day’s edition of the Post to find violence tearing apart neighborhoods close to us, or violence rending the fabric of families in our town. War is not confined to contests between nations. Often we are at war with ourselves within our own souls, as anyone who has struggled with addictions or mental and emotional illnesses well knows.
This insight is probably as old as human thought. Indeed Lao Tzu, who lived 500 years before Christ, put it this way:
If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
In this ancient wisdom lies the key to understanding Paul’s notion of a new creation, and to grasping how that notion of new creation informs our understanding of the kingdom of God that Jesus compares to the mustard seed.
The new creation begins not with the work of great empires, but in the heart work, the soul work of each of us. That does not mean that public action and public policies are unimportant – far from it. But it does mean that the peace we long for must begin within each of us.
As Ghandi put it, “we must be the change we seek in the world.”
The crucial role and, indeed, the ultimate purpose of the church of Jesus Christ is to be the community that shines forth this change because we are living it out in our own lives and in our common life together.
When we gather as the church in worship we are not merely a spiritual filling station through which we gather strength to endure another week in the world as it is. Instead, we gather together to gather strength to change the world into a place that we do not merely endure but in which we share in abundant life. Moreover, we gather to be a community which opens a window – not matter how small and smudged and occasional cracked it may be – but a window nonetheless on how the world might be made anew.
We gather as the church to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God, the beloved community, a new creation. We are the mustard seeds being planted for the birth of a new creation in which people can go to work and not worry about violence shattering their lives, in which children are fed and cared for and educated, in which our elderly live with dignity and independence, in which, as Isaiah envisioned, nation shall not life up sword against nation and they will study war no more.
If you want to live in such a world, do not look to the White House to create it. Do not wait patiently for such a world to be created by the mighty and the powerful. Instead, look with a certain holy impatience within your own heart and open it that God’s work can begin there to bring a new creation.
Let us close with a prayer for New Zealand that speaks to this longing and openness:
Lead me from death to life,
from falsehood to truth;
lead me from despair to hope,
from fear to trust;
lead me from hate to love,
from war to peace.
Let peace fill our heart,
our world, our universe. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
7:16 AM
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