Sunday Worship 16 November | Lectionary Proper 28: God's Dream

Reading | Isaiah 65:17-25 

“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labour in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them. Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,” says the Lord.

I want to start by saying that I am working on the assumption that this message is not just for Jerusalem. It was addressed to Jerusalem because that is who God was talking to in that moment, but there are plenty of places in scripture that talk about all being blessed and all nations coming to God’s holy mountain, so I think there is promise here for all of us.

This is a great reading to hear the week after Remembrance Sunday, because it reminds us that we are not tasked with reimagining the world on our own. God promises to do something new, and so reimagining the world is really about understanding God’s heart for it. I have sometimes taken readings from Desmond Tutu’s Children of God Storybook Bible, which uses the language of “God’s dream” to translate passages about the kingdom of God, and I love the way it evokes a sense of hope and possibility, and invites us to share in that dream.

So what is the dream we see in this morning’s passage? You may remember that last time we encountered Isaiah, we learnt that the book is sometimes divided into three sections, written before and during and after the exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. These verses we heard are taken from Trito-Isaiah, which many scholars think was not actually written by Isaiah, but by an anonymous prophet or prophets in the post-exilic period, when the people were tasked with rebuilding the city and the temple. The first sixteen verses of this chapter are judgement, so as throughout the book, there is a sense of swinging between lament at the failings of the present and hope for the promises of the future. The dream is grounded in reality, which is good because that is where we start from.

There is some confusion or disagreement over the translation of the first verse. Some versions have “I will create”, some have “I am about to create”, some have “I create”, and others have “I am creating”. I do not know enough about Hebrew to have any idea which is most accurate, but I suspect there is some ambiguity in the original which translators have resolved in different ways, and I think the ambiguity is perhaps intentional and revealing. Maybe it tells us that the act of recreation is both present and future, something that has already begun but is not yet complete. 

We see the same kind of “now and not yet” in the way Jesus speaks of the kingdom, and in the way this passage both calls back to Isaiah 11 and is picked up in Revelation 21. Revelation 21 shows us “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away”, and tells us that “God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them”. Isaiah 11 uses the imagery of the wolf and the lamb, and also speaks of the one who will come with righteousness and justice. Renewal and recreation have the final word, and their fulfilment will come through Christ.

Let’s get into the details of this dream for a moment, because it is tempting to be distracted by the poetry of the peaceable animals, or to assume that if it is not all down to our imagination after all then we can sit back and let God do the work, but there are some really grounded elements to this dream and so there are some really practical things we can do to help realise it. We see people living long and full lives, dwelling in their own homes and enjoying the fruits of their own labours, with no violence or destruction. If we break it down, there is a vision here of good healthcare, with a particular focus on maternal and elderly care; a vision of the dismantling of systems of land ownership and economic dependency, which see the rich profit from the work of the poor; a vision of a commitment to peace and justice, so that no one needs to live in fear. That is a vision we can put our energies into, so that we can be glad and rejoice forever in what we will create together with God.

 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers and sisters, to keep away from every believer who is idle and disruptive and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, labouring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” We hear that some among you are idle and disruptive. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the food they eat. And as for you, brothers and sisters, never tire of doing what is good.

“The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat”. Let’s start there, because this verse has at times been used to draw a straight line from poverty to laziness, as if it also works in reverse and the one who does not eat must surely have been unwilling to work. From there it has been used to justify policies that would punish the poor by dismantling the welfare state, but I believe this is a misuse of the text which is based on a false premise and ignores the preferential option for the poor seen throughout scripture. People find themselves in poverty for a variety of reasons, many of them systemic and beyond individual control, and one of the most consistent commands in scripture is to provide for those on the margins of society.

As always when reading scripture, context is vital. That is perhaps especially true when we are considering letters which were written to a particular community at a particular time. It is clear from chapter one of this second letter to the Thessalonians that the church is suffering trials and persecution, and it seems from chapter two that this has become so intense that some believe the end times are upon them. Against this background it is possible that some people are giving up in despair, becoming idle and disruptive because they are disconnecting from the realities of life, and so perhaps Paul is trying to draw these people back into the full life of the community. “Pull yourself together” is not always the most helpful or appropriate advice, especially if someone is deep in depression or anxiety, but being active and giving back are good for our wellbeing, so this may have been the encouragement that some needed.

Another important bit of context is that we are told in Acts that the early church held everything in common. We don’t know the details of how that was worked out in the community in Thessalonica, but we can assume that their lives were shared more fully than is usual in the modern church. They probably ate together frequently, they may have shared homes and possessions, they perhaps all contributed to a common purse. So perhaps what Paul is saying here is that you shouldn’t expect to benefit from the community if you’re not willing to contribute to it. This is not about pushing a work ethic which defines worth according to labour, or demands that we earn our right to exist, but is simply about being fair to one another.

What needs to be said but isn’t here is that we each contribute as we are able. I think the way Paul uses the metaphor of the body to speak of people contributing to the life of the church in different ways suggests that he would have understood that, and I hope it is only unsaid in this letter because the church already understood it too. There are many ways to contribute to the life of a community, beginning with simply being present. If that is all a person can do, then that is enough. This passage is specifically about those who are able but unwilling to work, not those who cannot work because of health or age or other circumstance. And we know that one of the roles of deacons in the early church was providing for the widows in the community, so there was a system of mutual aid in place, and I don’t see anything in this passage to argue against that.

Paul is concerned with the way things work within the church, but is there anything here that we can apply to the way things work in wider society? I think we can certainly say that the welfare system should be for the benefit of those who need it, and should not be abused by those who simply do not want to work. But I also think there’s something here that says we should have compassion on those who appear unwilling, because perhaps there are things going on for them that we can’t see, and even if tough love is necessary it should be for encouragement not punishment, because ultimately we want people to be part of the community. I would also suggest that it is better to favour a system that risks helping those who do not need it, rather than a system that risks not helping those who do.

I also want to suggest there is a more radical way of reading this passage. Where it has been misused in the past, it is because it has been weaponised against the poor, but the criticism is levelled at those who are living off the labour of others, and that could equally apply to the very wealthy with their passive income and inherited wealth, and those who evade taxes so that they put little into a society they take much from. If we're going to say that everyone needs to contribute fairly such as they are able, then everyone needs to contribute fairly such as they are able. As we began to see in Isaiah, God's dream will require a drastic overhaul of many of our current systems, and sometimes that will mean working against the interests of the powerful. That will not be easy, but that is why we must not tire in doing good.