A Sermon for XXVI Pentecost (Proper 28) All Saints' Church, Southern
Shores, NC November 17, 2013 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Last week I talked about the differences between living
in a world that seems shaken and living in a world that seems gently stirred,
and now I want to take a look at living in a world that seems shattered. In my
daily Morning Prayer, the Lord gave me a memory of the end of the service and
Paul’s advice to the Ephesians: “Now to God who by the power
at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask
or imagine, to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all
generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (3:20, 21)
The lessons for today are about living in a world
that has been shattered. In the Hebrew Testament lesson from Isaiah, the people
have come back from exile and they find total devastation. The walls which
protect them are gone, the Temple is destroyed, and property claims are all
sorts of confused because other families have taken over abandoned homes and
fields. There is a complete void in their lives, and as their entire community
will need to be rebuilt, there is a fear that the void will never be filled. In
response to the fear brought on by this shattered sight, Isaiah has a vision, a
dream of the community coming together and opening themselves to their
re-creation by God in this place. The vision depicts something greater than
merely returning to normal. Isaiah’s God dares to pass on a greater vision where
God’s peace will flow through the people and their neighbors and enemies and
then into the lands and environment where even, as he sings: “The wolf and the
lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the
serpent-- its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy
mountain, says the LORD.” In Isaiah’s
vision, the shattering is the beginning of something new, which is greater than
they can ask or imagine.
When Paul writes to the Thessalonians in today’s
lesson, he sees some giving up hope in the face of what they believe is the
shattering of their lives, and he urges them to gather together as a community,
as a community of hope, to live into a new vision.
In the Gospel lesson Jesus warns of the time of
devastation to come. It did not take special vision to see that the Romans
would sooner or later lose patience with this rebellious province. There is the
old piece of advice about “reading the Bible with one hand and the New York
Times with the other”. It is a metaphor
for the way Jesus understood the world, that he paid attention to the Spirit of
God and to the undercurrents of the events of the world at the same time. Luke’s Gospel is written because the Jesus
movement remembers Jesus warning them of how the Temple would be destroyed -
and they had seen it happen. The Gospel, the good news, sees this catastrophe
as the beginning of something greater than they can imagine. There is a
difference between hope and wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is ignoring the facts of the present and portents of
the future, whereas hope is the trusting in God’s help and strength in the
middle of the harsh facts and portents. Wishful
thinking is the closing of eyes and crossing of fingers, whereas hope is the
joining together of hands and building a new community together.
We have only
to look at our major news stories this past week for examples of the lesson
from the Gospel. We saw the Typhoon smash through the Philippines and devastate
the islands. The country has been shattered, and it will take the world
community to come together to try to fill the void caused by the entire
destruction of the infrastructure and the critical need for food and clean
water.
Maybe it was a coincidence (I prefer to see it as
synchronicity), but this week in my Netflix mailing, I received two movies of shattering,
movies I had chosen months ago. One movie was Fill the Void,
The second movie really relates to the disaster of
nature. The Impossible, a 2012
Spanish film directed by Juan Antonio Bayano, is based on a true story about a
Spanish family on vacation nine years ago at a resort on the coast of Thailand
when a tsunami hit. It recounts how they were tossed by the waves, ripped apart
by the force and, due to the collapse of the area’s infrastructure, unable to
find each other until the end.
These are disasters clear across the globe and yet
they are universal. We are all vulnerable to death and nature. The second movie
had a special resonance with its focus on people who are in a beautiful and
vulnerable place where a freak event could wipe out everything they know. Sound
familiar to us on the Outer Banks? If not, please look at the projections of
what Southern Shores will look like with just a one foot increase in sea level
and a storm surge, which can be found at
and then type in the zip code- in our case 27949
Let
us just say that Duck Woods Golf Course will have a beauty of a water hazard,
and we would have to swim the labyrinth. But let us go one step further - now
combine that with an off-shore earthquake! What would happen if this church
building was shattered and destroyed? What would happen if the resulting
tsunami with a thirty foot wave just ripped through these walls, and the
Baptismal font, pianos, organ, my office, even me, the Rector, and all the
outward signs of the religious institution got swept into the middle of the
sound? Would the church itself be destroyed? I think the institution would be
shattered, but my hope is that All Saints’ would gather together and hold hands
and turn to the power greater than ourselves - and see and work for a vision
that is greater than we could ask or imagine in helping our neighbors. The work
of the church is not about trusting in people, places, and things but about
honoring the Holy Space between us as God is working within and between us for
a new creation.
We live in a world that is filled with minor and
major shatterings, and we cannot keep them from happening. But we can gather together and hold hands and
turn to the power greater than ourselves, see and work for a vision that is
greater, and sing “Now to God who by the power at work within
us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to
God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and
ever. Amen.”
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