It is Time to Rebuild

The Lord will make his people into a watered garden and a foundation for the generations.

The first reading from Isaiah chapter 58.

Isaiah 58 · chapter mention

Is not this the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house, when you see the naked to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily, your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer, you shall cry, and he will say, Here I am.

If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.

And the Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your desire in scorched places, and make your bones strong.

And you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail, and your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt.

You shall raise up the foundations of many generations.

You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in.

The word of the Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

When severe weather causes damage, people are quick to chip in and lend a hand.

So if you have a neighbor and your neighbor's tree comes down, you're gonna be out there firing up your chainsaw, dragging branches to the curb, and getting it cleaned up.

And likewise, I know that if I were in this moment to inform you that a member of our congregation had sustained damage to their roof in a recent storm, this church, you would not make it through those doors before you had left behind literally thousands of dollars to help make repairs to that house.

Because this is what we do.

We rebuild.

Now, rebuilding physical structures like buildings is straightforward.

Sweat equity and money are sufficient to get the job done.

But how do you go about rebuilding a society?

What do you do when people no longer share the same values and instead they have values that come into conflict with one another, and you wind up with a nation that is split into warring factions?

How do you put the family back together again when it has been broken for generations?

How do you turn the hearts of people to see others not as objects to be used for their own ends, but as persons to be loved and served?

See, we live in this strange paradox where the physical structures around us are in fine repair.

We live amid incredible prosperity, and yet inside hearts there's so much emptiness, so much hurt, so much anxiety, so much hopelessness, so much heartache.

And that is the case because we are living in the rubble of a society that perhaps at one point knew and functioned decently enough, though of course never perfectly, given human sinfulness.

But after decade upon decade of deconstruction and cynicism, we're living in ancient ruins.

We are living in what's left behind after you develop an atom bomb and a Cold War follows it.

We are living with the effects of the declaration of free sex and the way that that shattered marriage and severed even that sacred tie between parent and child.

We are living with mass meaninglessness and worry that the machines are going to take our jobs and make us irrelevant.

We are living with a culture of death on demand.

We are living where print and picture and song have turned to vulgarity and pornography and cruelty and hateful speech.

We're living where communication is often spiteful and vengeful.

And we're living with this constant stream of change which brings with it this exhausting cycle of worry because we just don't know what's coming next.

And that is why we need to hear the words of the great prophet that comprise our first reading today, the words of Isaiah.

For in these verses, Isaiah speaks of four R's.

He speaks of rebuilding, he speaks of raising up, he speaks of repairing, and he speaks of restoring.

And he speaks these words to people who would need to rebuild both the physical structure, the city, as well as their once great society that had dwelled within that city walls.

Now, when Isaiah was preaching these words, the city of Jerusalem was still standing intact.

It hadn't yet been destroyed.

But Isaiah had been there in the days when it had been threatened, when a force of over a hundred thousand Assyrians had made their way all the way up to the walls of Jerusalem and struck terror in every single person's heart there.

Isaiah had been with the people when at the very last moment possible the Lord had delivered Jerusalem from those Assyrians.

And you would think that if you lived through that kind of unexpected deliverance, that it would serve as a wake-up call, that it would shout out to you that it was time to repent and to return to the Lord.

But you have to understand that this heart of ours, corrupted by sin as it is, is not always primed to hear even the clearest messages or the loudest calls that come to us to turn to God and to amend our ways.

Centuries after Isaiah lived, the great pastor and Bishop Augustine was serving a church in a city in North Africa when across the Mediterranean Sea the city of Rome was sacked, and Augustine saw refugees coming from that city, coming from Rome to his own city, and he expected them to come fill the pews in his church, but what he discovered was that they preferred to go to the theater, because Augustine said they preferred to be entertained rather than to come to church where they would learn to repent.

Something like that is what happened in the days of the prophet Isaiah.

Having been delivered from the threat of the Assyrians, the people of Jerusalem took it as their opportunity to double down on their self-gratifying way of living.

And so Isaiah had to call them out on it.

You see it in these verses, you see the kind of actions that they were accustomed to.

See, they they knew how to objectify persons.

They knew how to oppress and enslave.

They knew how to take advantage of the poor.

They knew how to point the finger of blame and how to use their words cruelly to speak wickedness, to tear down.

They knew how to live for self and self alone and they knew how to behave in a meme-based, performative day, thinking that if they could spread a veneer of religiosity, like a public day of fasting out across the culture, that that would be enough to get the big guy in the sky on their side.

And so the prophet Isaiah's task was to tell them that this is not at all what the Lord was looking for.

That in fact, if they continued down this path, then destruction was going to come, that the day would come when an army wouldn't stop at the walls of Jerusalem and when there wouldn't be a miraculous last-minute deliverance from God.

But the city itself would be destroyed, the physical manifestation of that spiritual decline, of the rot that had begun in their hearts.

That happened in the days when the Babylonian Empire came and tore Jerusalem down to the ground and carted its inhabitants off into captivity.

But Isaiah saw even beyond that, to a day when years later a remnant would return, when a few people would straggle back from Babylon, back to Jerusalem, and find themselves living amid those ancient ruins.

And it's specifically to them, to this remnant who are looking around them and saying, We need to rebuild.

Well, it's precisely to them that Isaiah is speaking these words.

You see, when you find yourself living amid the heaps of rubble, there are specific temptations that are going to come your way.

When you feel the weakness and vulnerability of your own position, then you're going to thirst for power, trying to grab control so that you can force your agenda upon others.

And when your God has withdrawn and let difficulty and hardship come upon you, you're going to be tempted to think that if you could just get a mantle of religiosity cast over the culture again, that that would fix everything.

And when you are trying to rebuild, but others are attacking you, you're going to be tempted to think that you should fight fire with fire.

And these, my friends, are temptations that face us.

When around us we see celebrations that put forward every way conceivable of violating God's sacred order and design for marriage and human sexuality.

And when those who support these causes look to Christians with our specific moral convictions grounded in Scripture and say that we are hateful for believing and living and ordering our lives the way that we do.

It can be hard to restrain yourself.

You can want to fight back, fight fire with fire, point fingers, speak wickedly in return.

Likewise, we know that it's tempting for us to think that the answer, the solution to every problem would be political, that if we could just gain power, that then we could force our agenda and everything would turn out well.

And you have heard as much as I have of the thought that if only we could get America to be culturally Christian, well then all of these problems would magically go away.

But when Isaiah speaks to the remnant living in the ancient ruins of Jerusalem, he doesn't tell them to do any of those things, does he?

His call instead is much more immediate and much more individual and much more direct.

His call is this: it's for each and every person to repent, to turn to God.

It's for each and for every person then to bring forth in their life fruits that are in keeping with that repentance.

It's for matching your words with actions.

It's for living in this way that the love of God that He has given to you would spill out of you into love for the place where your God has put you and for the people that He has surrounded you with.

This is, according to Isaiah, God's recipe for rebuilding.

And the right here and the right now of it strike me as being particularly significant for us.

Because when you look at the problems in the world, it's easy to excuse yourself from having to do anything because of the scale.

You say, look, these problems are so huge, so massive, I can't fix them.

There's no magic wand I can wave to change everything.

Therefore, the conclusion is I don't have to do anything at all.

But that is simply not the case.

No, of course, you can't solve global scale problems.

But neither has the Lord asked you to do that.

He has instead told you to look and face the problems that are immediately in front of you, the ones that you can do something about.

You can, for example, learn to see and care for and help the poor instead of turning a blind eye towards them and ignoring them, or worse yet, finding ways to take advantage of them.

You can stop the pointing of the finger and the use of language in vengeful and spiteful ways, the speaking of wickedness and hatred.

You can learn to see others as persons and to treat them as such with the care and dignity and love and respect that they need.

You can open up your heart and your home in hospitality to spread the bonds of human fellowship and kinship and love from within your own place of dwelling.

It's this right here, right now, that is so significant.

And think of the difference that it makes.

You know, imagine if this church building right here were to collapse into a pile of rubble and you were told that you by yourself were supposed to single-handedly put it back together again, that would be a really difficult task.

But what if the ask were much smaller than that?

What if every single one of us was told it's just that small little column of bricks right there?

All you have to do is pile those bricks back up again.

And if everybody were doing that, you see significant progress would be made.

So much so, in fact, that streets might even be restored for people to dwell in.

And that breaches in walls might even be repaired and replaced.

It's this right here and right now that means that no one's life is so small that he or she could not make a meaningful contribution and difference simply by reflecting the love that God has first shown upon them.

It's also important for us to keep in this in mind because there is this way of thinking that's easy for us to fall into, in which we come to the conclusion that the problem is anywhere but with me.

And so we think that if only I were in different circumstances, if only I lived in a different geographical location, if only the people around me were different than the ones who are there, if only I had a different job, if only I could range my life differently, well then I would be able to be this shining example of Christian love.

But that kind of thinking is simply not true.

You don't magically change just because the circumstances in which you find yourself change.

If you can't practice love for the people where you are right now, if you can't love the city, the place where you dwell, why do you suppose that that's going to change just because you move?

Isaiah's call again is towards the heart, it's to repent, it's to stop casting blame and look within and say, here, all rebuilding must begin with God's own action upon me and my own sinful and broken heart.

It must begin with me turning back to him and receiving from him once again all his gifts of forgiveness and love, so that I can recognize that he has placed me where I am for a specific reason and purpose.

So that I, right within my own apartment, right within my home, right on my own block, right in my city, right in my church, that I can begin right here to extend the mercy and love that my merciful Father has first shown to me.

Think about what a difference that makes.

When our lives are those reflections of God's love for us in Christ.

Small though that may be, this is the way that the rebuilding takes place.

And I've got to say, I think that there is a hunger for this, a hunger for what we know.

Because it is so hard right now, in this moment, for us to understand how to live out a life.

There is a hunger among the people around us for what we have and what we know, a hunger for fathers to come home and stay home, a hunger for family life to be built up, a hunger for stability, a hunger for caring for people, a hunger for seeing them as persons and not as objects, a hunger for communication, a hunger for listening, a hunger for talking with one another without the mediation of pixels on a screen.

There's a hunger for lives that are lived and ordered according to God's plan and the stability and beauty that results from that.

There's a hunger for it.

There's a hunger to rebuild.

So let's heed Isaiah's call and take up the task, each of us in our own small sphere.

Because he says the results can be quite incredible.

Who knows but that you might be the one to restore a foundation not just for yourself, but as the prophet says, to be the one to restore and raise up foundations of many generations.

That, my friends, is a thought.