Building from the Ruins

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
Rev. David Williams; 12.14.08
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11

Several months ago, anyone traveling across the Washington metropolitan area on our painfully inadequate public transportation system would have begun to notice some rather striking advertisements posted in Metro stations.

They weren’t the usual fare of metro maps or Macys ads or charities begging for you to remember them during a United Way campaign. They didn’t involve rail thin models looking at each other poutily while crammed into boot-cut jeans sized to provide a relaxed fit for skeletons. They weren’t pitching the latest Omnia touch screen phone from Samsung, with 3G browsing, an HD camcorder, and optional surgically implanted neural dock.

These ads showed stark images of a bleak Washington landscape after a nuclear attack. In the background of one ad, the Capitol building stands as a shattered ruin, nestled on a National Mall now painted with a mix matte grey ash and blast-black. In the foreground, a faceless warfighter stares out at you through the lenses of a bio-chem armored helmet. In another ad, the Washington Monument stood silhouetted like a broken, bony finger against a similarly grey sky, great gashes torn from it’s sides.

These ads got noticed. For those who have lived in the Washington Area long enough to remember the Cold War, such pictures of destruction are enough to stir up memories of the nuclear nightmares of childhood. For those who were in this area during the horrific moments of September 11, and felt the fear that held the whole region in a chokehold of anxiety after the anthrax and sniper attacks, this vision of WMD effects wasn’t particularly welcome either. People complained to the metro board. People wrote angry letters about the ads the Post and the Washington Times. Articles discussing the propriety of the ads and the product they were pitching appeared in the media. The ads themselves became news.

In other words, this was an insanely, wildly, gloriously successful marketing campaign.

What was being pitched was a game called Fallout 3, the latest from a well regarded Bethesda software publisher. The game is set in the post-apocalyptic remains of the Washington Metro Area, generations after a nuclear exchange between the United States and China leaves the world in ruins. Reviewers describe it as an absolutely haunting game, filled with a level of primal violence and survival-of-the-fittest moral ambiguity that makes Lord of the Flies look like good storytime reading for preschoolers.

So, of course, I’m playing it...for purposes of sermon research, of course, and only well after my boys have gone to sleep. It is relentlessly grim, both spare and tense, and filled with intelligent writing and voice acting. It completely engrosses you in it’s world, giving a profoundly realistic sense of the depths to which human beings will go to survive after everything they’ve known and the whole framework of their society has been obliterated. The struggles to rebuild something, to live something resembling a worthwhile life...well...they feel painfully real.

From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah today we hear a message from a time in which the struggle to rebuild from the ashes of a society was front and center. In our Bible studies over the last few weeks, we’ve discussed how most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has it’s own particular focus.

Today’s section comes from what is known as Third Isaiah, which was written and preached perhaps 510-515 years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. It’s visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They also do not assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, like chapters forty through fifty-five. The context of the last ten chapters is clear: the Hebrew people are struggling to rebuild.

What they’re struggling to rebuild is their whole society, wiped from the face of the earth in by the relatively low-tech but nonetheless effective implements of the Babylonian Empire. After Babylon was defeated by Persia, the Hebrew people were encouraged to return to their ancestral lands. They were filled with hope at the prospect of return, but what they came back to was the ancient equivalent of stepping out of a fallout shelter. There was pretty much nothing left.

The walls of Jerusalem had fallen, and the temple had been razed. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up. The people returned thinking that things were going to be easy, and things were the farthest thing from easy. Life was hardscrabble, a serious struggle from day to day. The bricks that had been part of the walls of Jerusalem did not leap up on their own and autonomously reassemble themselves into Zion Gardens Condos and Suites.

It was hard. It seemed hopeless. People began to despair.

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied that despair. It was a word of intense hope, a word that comes directly from the prophet’s sense of being anointed with the Spirit of the Living God. It’s a word of intense confidence in the power of God to work through his people to bring about restoration.

For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives who had returned to the land and still despaired, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing and the ruins in which they found themselves. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love for justice and covenant presence will make his people an instrument with which he will rebuild the brokenness of their land.

It’s a word that they needed to hear, and a word without which their hearts would have been too broken to continue. It’s also a word that many of us need to hear right now, as many of us look fearfully out at the seeming chaos and confusion of our economy.

With banks and businesses both small and large failing, families struggling with foreclosure and job loss, and retirees reading their investment reports with trembling hands, it is easy for us to fall into the same kind of despair that seems to have afflicted those Hebrews upon their return. With the media humming with hysteria, every headline and talking head warning of a new depression, it’s easy to give in. We feel an uncertainty that can paralyze us, allowing us to turn from the task of rebuilding. We become overwhelmed. We hunker down.

In his reaffirmation of God’s essential justice and care for his people, the prophet is telling those who despaired that no matter what happens, God will show grace to a covenant people. If we’re willing to accept that grace, and to practice it, those places of ruin will be rebuilt.

It won’t be easy, and it won’t come quick. Nothing good does. But if we turn our will towards righteousness...meaning care for one another...and praise...meaning care that glorifies God...then the garden will spring forth.