This year’s Golden Globes nominations for the year’s best movies are out, and
tonight the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will give out the awards. For
those of you who don’t know, I’m kind of a movie buff. I write a movie review
blog for the Journal Sentinel’s Waukesha web page. So I follow this stuff
closely.
One of my favorite movies for this year is one called “The Fighter”. I think
it’s a real contender for the Best Picture Oscar. It’s about two brothers from
Massachusetts who are both boxers. The older brother, Dickey Ward, is a washed
up fighter who once fought Sugar Ray Leonard.
But in the ensuing years he has screwed his life up with drugs and the wrong set
of friends. His younger brother Micky is a promising young boxer who struggles
with the fact that his own mother is managing his career poorly. Even worse,
Dicky, who is supposed to be his trainer, can’t keep to the training schedule
because he’s always on drugs.
Micky’s career is going down the tubes as a result. At one point the fight
Micky’s scheduled to fight comes down with the flu on the day of the fight.
Rather than sacrifice the chance to make some money, Micky’s mother finds
another boxer to fight him, even though this boxer is 18 pounds heavier than
Micky. As you might imagine, Micky almost gets his head taken off as he loses
the fight.
In the movie Micky meets a young woman named Charlene who he falls in love with.
Charlene convinces Micky that he can be a successful boxer if he finds a new
manager and a new trainer. As you might imagine, Micky’s mother and brother are
not pleased when he comes to the house and announces that they will no longer be
training or managing him.
All through this time the audience is watching this and saying to themselves,
finally he’s going to break free of the control of his dimwitted family and make
a comeback. When Micky begins training with his new trainer and fighting
appropriate opponents, he suddenly begins winning again.
I won’t tell you how the movie ends, but Micky’s comeback is amazing. He hast he
audience on his side. It’s always great to see someone who was being kept down
suddenly make a comeback.
We love those kinds of stories. And, in fact, that kind of imagery appears in
the passage Eric read for this morning. This passage comes from somewhere in the
late 540’s, early 530’s BC when the people of Judah were living as exiles in
Babylonia.
If there was ever a story about the little guy who envisioned a big comeback,
this is it. The land of Israel had been split in half over 400 years earlier,
and the northern half had been invaded and destroyed almost 200 years earlier.
The southern half, which was called Judah, was also invaded and destroyed by the
Babylonians about 40 years earlier. To add insult to injury, the Babylonians
took the upper crust of Judah’s population into exile in Babylon and kept them
there for about 50 years.
But toward the end of that 50 years, rumors started flying about another army
from Persia led by a guy named Cyrus. This prophet believes that Cyrus is
unwittingly going to be used by God to invade the Babylonians and free the Jews
to return to Judah. He’s going to help the Jews make a comeback.
This prophet calls Cyrus God’s “messiah”. He tells everyone that God is with
Cyrus, and that Cyrus will liberate them from captivity. I know, it sounds kind
of strange to call some gentile, who has no knowledge of Judah’s religion, the
promised “messiah”. He sounds like an unlikely candidate for the job.
But for all the hope and talk about Cyrus and liberation and Messiahs, the
passage we read sounds as though Cyrus may not have been living up to their
expectations. This prophet sounds as though people have been questioning whether
or not the prophet himself is really speaking for God.
He reacts to those doubts and question by reaffirming his calling by God. He
says that God called him to be a prophet before he was born. God named him while
his mother was pregnant.
He compares his words to a sword, and a sharp arrow. His speech on God’s behalf
was to be powerful and persuasive. God calls him God’s servant. God will be
glorified by what this prophet does.
But he acknowledges that people have not always responded to him in the way he
expected. In fact, he sounds like Micky Ward after a fight with someone a lot
bigger than him. “I have spent my strength for nothing”. He’s clearly had a
problem persuading people that he has something relevant to say.
But he also remains convinced that God will reward him. In fact, he says he’s
going to make a comeback of his own. He says God is going to use him to gather
back all the lost people of Israel living in all the far flung areas, those
scattered by the invasions and wars.
He has a vision of God using his words to bring them all back, to reunite Israel
into one nation again. Maybe he expects word to spread to all of these places
that Israel’s going through a renaissance. Maybe, through the power of God, they
will gather their stuff and go back to join the rest of the Israelites.
Now that sounds like a pretty tall task. If he’s successful in doing that, I
think most people would agree that he’s done his job for God and for the people.
But God tells him that when they get back to Israel, the comeback will just be
starting.
Not only will all the long lost people return, but Israel’s status in the eyes
of the other nations will rise. Israel will be seen as the place to be, the
nation that other kings look up to, the people others envy instead of the people
everyone laughs at.
It’s true. People from the surrounding nations looked at Israel and said, “What
a joke. They talk about how powerful their God is, and yet any army who wants
just plows through there without much resistance. What a bunch of losers.”
This prophet envisioned a day when that would all change. Their neighbors would
see as the lost Israelites returned and as Jerusalem was rebuilt that their God
was indeed with them and was helping them make a comeback.
The prophet said that God wanted Israel to be a light to the nations, an example
of a godly nation who was blessed by their God. The transformation would be so
impressive that kings of other nations would take notice; princes of other
nations would bow before God.
That’s not just a comeback, folks. That’s winning the world championship. What I
find interesting is the way in which this prophet sees this process of
restoration taking place. I think there’s a lot of truth for all of us as we
think about being the kind of people and the kind of congregation that really
serves as a light to the nations.
This morning I want to make a case that these things have some relevance to us
as we try to make our way through some very challenging years in our lives.
First, let’s focus for a moment on this issue of scattered people. Most of us
have people in our lives with whom we have lost contact over the years.
Sometimes it’s because of a conflict, other times it’s because whatever brought
us together with them in the first place no longer does.
Now imagine if this prophet had said, “I’m rally sorry those people were driven
from our land. But I’ve got enough to worry about just trying to rebuild this
place and keep everyone on the same page. It certainly isn’t my job to try and
bring back all those scattered people.”
You see, he couldn’t envision a restoration, a comeback, as long as those people
were estranged. It just wouldn’t be complete. The idea of being freed from
captivity wasn’t just about going back to Judah and rebuilding. It was about
bringing people back together, all of them.
The problem is that many of us have a long list of broken relationships or
estranged friends. And we all still hurt from the way in which those
relationships ended. God also created us as relational people. We are no islands
unto ourselves. We need our family and friends and loved ones in order to feel
as though all is right with the world.
It’s pretty hard to make a comeback without them. This passage encourages us to
make peace with them, to seek their welfare, to take the initiative in inviting
them back into our lives.
I remember serving as a chaplain at the University of Kentucky Medical Center
after seminary. My first assignment was to work with the patients and families
of the various intensive care wards. Since this hospital is a level 5 trauma
center, they got some of the most gruesome cases sent to them from all over the
state: car wrecks, shootings, work accidents, etc.
One of the things that struck me was the way in which an Appalachian family came
to support a loved one who was gravely ill. I remember going into the waiting
rooms and talking with the families of folks who were in intensive care.
But unlike what we usually see here, there would be about forty family members
sitting around waiting for news about one patient. We’re talking about cousins
and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. And they would be there for weeks.
They had to make some big sacrifices to be with their loved ones at such a tough
time, but their sense of family was such that they couldn’t just let their loved
ones deal with the trauma on their own. Sometimes I think we can learn a little
from that sense of family.
Part of being a whole person is to develop that group of friends, to reconnect
with loved ones, to make peace with those you may have alienated. Real godliness
isn’t just about making individual choices in your own life that are godly.
It’s about doing what this prophet did and doing what Jesus did: seek out the
lost, bring them back into the fold. You can’t be whole without them.
Secondly, and this is actually said more clearly later in the chapter, the
prophet talks about the physical restoration of Judah. He talks about
re-dividing the land among the returning exiles. He talks about building roads
and apportioning pasture land for livestock.
All of those were healthy developments in a society that needed to rebuild
itself. You can’t function as a society without those things. But I want to talk
about the way in which we kind of rebuild and restore our own lives.
One of the effects of an economic downturn is that people are working harder and
harder to make ends meet. A long time ago people used to roll their eyes when,
for instance, a wife who had been a homemaker decided to take on a small job
just to help with the family’s finances.
Some people used to make that sound like an abdication of her duties. These days
I can tell you that it is still very difficult to make ends meet even with two
people working full time. It’s not just that younger people spend too much,
which they do.
But it’s also that good jobs require more education than ever before, and
college is more expensive than ever before. And we are paying more than we ever
have before for the cost of health insurance and healthcare.
Our employers expect us to be more productive than in years past. Workers have
generally been asked to do more with less. They are pressuring themselves to be
more productive because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Sure there are some
exceptions, but I want to give show you something that illustrates what I mean.
Slide.
People are working themselves to death and getting less for it these days. And
one of the things that gets lost in all of that rise in productivity is the
human toll. People don’t have time to take care of themselves. They don’t have
time for exercise. They don’t have enough time for the kind of physical
rebuilding required to be so productive.
Their families suffer. Their marriages suffer. Their children suffer. Their
faith suffers. They die earlier than they would normally. We all want to make a
comeback from what we’ve been through both personally and as a nation, but we
need to have time to rebuild ourselves and recover and develop good habits and
throw off our addictions.
We can talk all we want about creating jobs and keeping jobs and getting better
jobs. But what will we have accomplished if in the end people just work
themselves to death anyway?
Nowadays we look at a place like China with its booming economy and newly
created jobs and we envy them. Their lax environmental standards and relative
lack of workplace safety regulations have enabled them to surpass us financially
in some ways, but at what cost?
A World Health Organization (WHO) report estimates that diseases triggered by
indoor and outdoor air pollution kill 656,000 Chinese citizens each year, and
polluted drinking water kills another 95,600. Is that what we want?
We don’t just need to create jobs. We need to create a liveable society. We need
to create strong communities. We need to take care of our own bodies and create
healthy, productive lifestyles. That’s the kind of community building our
prophet has in mind.
Our Bible is full of stories about God saving people from various calamities.
This is but one of many stories of comeback in our scriptures. We must remember
that each time God intervened to save, it was done in a new and different
way—the result was the same—God saved the people; but each situation was
different; God worked in unexpected and surprising but wonderful ways.
It is too easy for those of us who remember when the churches were booming to
look back to the days when churches were growing and expanding. One pastor I
read about remembered how in southern California back in the 1950s, the mission
developer would put an announcement in the newspaper that a Lutheran
congregation was meeting in the local school building and the next Sunday three
hundred people would show up.
That world is gone. Leonard Sweet, one of the most astute observers of
contemporary Church life, predicted the coming of what he called “The Perfect
Storm,” the combination of post-modernism, a pluralistic post-Christianity and
even an almost post-human revolution in technology.
And in a storm of this magnitude, Sweet noted the worst place to be is trying to
ride it out in a supposed safe harbor. Remember the tsunami in 2005? Ships at
sea, would have experienced just a swell in the ocean. Those along the beach or
in what were supposedly safe harbors were dashed to bits.
What he was saying was that the Church must be daring and innovative, living in
the present and preparing for what is to come. The past is not coming back.
And I'm glad. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God the Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, is the One who promises to help us make a comeback, but not to
what we were before. In order to do that we need to reconnect and rebuild some
of the relationships we have lost.
We need to rebuild ourselves, our communities, knowing that God works through
those efforts. Our God tells us, “I am about to do a new thing.” God's love and
salvation is not just for yesterday but today and tomorrow and all the tomorrows
to come. Jesus is with us even to the end of the age. Amen.