Old Clothes

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.24.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 51:1-6

I‘m really bad about getting rid of clothes.  My wife reminds me of this, regularly.  “Honey, you really shouldn’t still be wearing those pants,” she’ll say, shaking her head, as I wander around Annandale in jeans so shredded they’d embarrass an eighties glam-metal band.

She’s right, of course.  I do hang on to things.

There, in my drawers and in the third portion of our bedroom closet space that I get to use, there are garments that have accreted over the nearly thirty years since I finally stopped growing.  There’s a shirt with a bright yellow sun, a shirt that a certain eighteen year old girl gave me.  It was her first present to me, purchased when she went down to Florida to visit her grandparents, just weeks after we’d started dating.  It’s threadbare and worn to the point where it might just dissolve if I washed it again, but I can’t quite bring myself to be rid of it.

There in the closet is a deep navy collar shirt, still neat and comfy, part of the uniform I wore when I was working as a stock clerk at a little shop and restaurant in Williamsburg, all of twenty-two years of age.  That, I still wear.

There rolled up in the back of a drawer is a strange mottled tie-dye, one purchased when my new bride and I took a honeymoon taxi jaunt into the green hills of Jamaica with this much older couple we’d met at our high security entertainment resort compound.  Thinking back, that couple must have been, gosh, maybe in their early thirties.  The shirt was a bargain, mostly because it was an ugly mess.  You want to buy that shirt?  The one that looks like mud and bile?  What you been smokin’, mon?   Even though I wouldn’t be caught dead in it now, I can’t be rid of it.

I have clothes, still, that were handed down from my grandfather.  I have clothes, still, that were handed down to me from my wife’s grandfather, who was just my size.  When we went, with family, to the gravesite as part of the Jewish tradition marking a year after his passing, I was wearing one of his shirts, and a pair of his pants, and his jacket, and his socks.

I have inexplicable clothes, like the shirt neatly rolled up in the back of my tshirt drawer.  On it, pictures drawn by every child in my younger son’s three’s class in preschool.  It’s a tiny little thing, a shirt that looks made for a stuffed animal.  I’d be hard pressed to fit it on my head as a hat.  And yet once my now 14 year old fit into it.

I just don’t like getting rid of clothes, especially if they’re imbued with positive memories, and double-especially-plus if they still fit me, even if only as a hat.  We like holding on to good things, we do.

Part of the reason for that may be that so much of what the world clings to seems dark and bitter.  At every turn, the world seems like a ruin.  You can’t power up your laptop without being bombarded by images of war and loss and horror.  You can’t drop onto Facebook for a kitten-picture-fix or a vacation image update without someone pitching up some reminder of the world’s brokenness.

The media hums and crackles with hysteria, every headline and talking head talking about the darkness, it’s easy to yield to the sense that what matters about humankind and our relationship with God is simply that we are an utterly irredeemable mess.  What seems permanent, etched forever in stone, is the brokenness of humankind.  We see it everywhere.  We see it in the violence and distrust on the streets of Ferguson, in the seemingly intractable mess in Gaza.  We see it as diseases straight out of our darkest tales of horror burn across Africa.  We see it as bombs and bloodshed still rage in the Middle East, and as Afghanistan teeters towards chaos and collapse.

What are you going to do to cheer yourself up these days, watch a Disney film?  You could pop in Aladdin...oh...wait.  Sigh.  

It feels sometimes like we are trapped in mess, wrapped up in mess as inescapably as a 19th century madman in a Bedlam straightjacket.  In that dark place, we lose our ability to see any other possibility than darkness.  We can feel trapped, helpless, and alone.

From the Book of the Prophet Isaiah today we hear a message from a time in which--for an entire people--the struggle to get around the brokenness of the world seemed insurmountable.  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 Second Isaiah, which was written and preached over five hundred years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah. Its visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters. They assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, that they are slaves, that they are surrounded by the proud power of the world’s greatest empire.

What those enslaved people saw, around them, were some of the most impressive structures that humankind had ever built.  They saw towers and gardens, wonders of the world.  They saw great golden statues to strange and alien gods.  They saw the force of arms of a mighty empire that dwarfed even the greatest aspirations of their people.  In the hands of those who had enslaved them, all the power of the world seemed to reside.

There just seemed no way out of it.

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

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied their hopelessness. It was a word of intense and shattering 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 bring about restoration.

For the oppressed and the brokenhearted and the captives, the prophet affirmed the devastation that they were experiencing. Yet in the face of their suffering...and in some way because of their suffering...the prophet declares that God’s love is infinitely greater than the powers of darkness that seemed so mighty all around them.

In this passage, he goes back to ancient promises to their ancestors, promises that were fulfilled.  He acknowledges that they’re in a wasteland, and doesn’t mock their experience of suffering.

What he does do is put into the context of the Creator of the Universe.  Look at everything you, Isaiah says.  Look at it.  The heavens?  They are no more substantial than smoke before a strong wind.  Those powerful people?  Their lives are as short as the lives of tiny flies.  And the seemingly tight knit power of the world?  That comes apart like a Kmart tube sock on the foot of a teenage boy.

It wears out like a garment.

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 in the darker places of our lives, as many of us look fearfully out at the seemingly insurmountable power of the broken world around us.

In his reaffirmation of God’s eternal power and love for all of his people, the prophet is affirming two things to those who despaired.  

First, that the only way out of a broken place lies in not allowing that brokenness to become the only thing you see.  That’s the great challenge that lies in those times when our lives seem to have closed in around us.  God’s capacity to make things new stands without boundary, and without limit.  But we too often hold on to the broken things, the darknesses and the griefs and the angers, and allow them to define our view of existence.  

That’s a place devoid of hope, and if we let ourselves be wrapped in it, it becomes a shroud.  That, more than anything, is the dark lie of depression, which whispers that there can never be change, never be good, never be anything again.

Second, the prophet affirms that no matter what happens, God holds on to those good things.  Salvation will be forever, and deliverance will never be ended, says the prophet.  Promises once made remain, and promises yet unfulfilled will be written forever into the book of life.

Whatever may shroud you now, whatever snares you and holds you, that’s not God’s will.  Let it fall away, and trust that this is God’s desire for you, a strong promise to a beloved child.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.