November 13, 2022

Isaiah 65:17-25

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

For half of the book of Isaiah, the prophet has been warning the people about trouble that will befall them if they do not mend their ways. The second half describes what has happened to the people and what their restoration will look like.

People sometimes read the Bible as if it was always perfectly true in any one moment. They quote a verse or two at a time, out of context, to get some point across, like shape up or bad things will happen. But the Book of Isaiah is a long story, one that likely spanned beyond any one person’s lifetime. It begins historically in about the year 730 before the Assyrian Empire moves into the neighborhood and ends two hundred years later. Not only has the Babylonian Empire already risen and fallen, but the new Persian Empire has also just taken over.

Isaiah would not have lived to see the conclusion of his own book, which of course means someone else picked up where he left off. This is not unusual in the Bible, even if by tradition one person is credited as the source. That is the purpose of the Bible, to offer the wisdom of a people across the centuries. It is only in recent times that this has been transformed from a collection of ancient lessons and allegorical stories into wooden literalism and harsh morality.

But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.

Now that the Babylonians have been defeated, things can return to the way they were. Well, mostly. The Persians would still be in charge, but the people could return to Jerusalem and to their way of life. This reversal of fate is so significant that the Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great, is referred to as a messiah, one chosen by God to deliver the people of Israel from suffering and despair. “Messiah” is not a unique term in Judaism but a title of high status reserved for those acting at the direction of God. The word means anointed one and would be used by the followers of Jesus during his lifetime to describe him as the leader who would save their people once again, like Cyrus.

No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.

It is interesting to consider this passage in a modern context. An infant dying is tragic rather than commonplace. Not everyone lives to be a hundred, but it is far more likely that people will live many more years than was normal in ancient times. An improvement.

They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.

This part references the life of bondage the people had lived, many dislocated in far off Babylon serving their captors. But the people would now be able to build their own houses, to plant their own crops. They would enjoy and keep the fruits of their labors.

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.

This passage is often interpreted eschatologically, meaning it has to do with the final days of humankind and the ultimate fate of this world. But that was not likely the intention behind these declarations in the time of Isaiah. It was more poetic hyperbole, a way of conveying the jubilation the people once their years of captivity were over. That is not to diminish the meaning but to reconsider how these words have been characterized 2,500 years later by more literally minded interpreters.

This leads me back to where I began. We heard from Isaiah, For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

Even if we think of these words as relating to a time long past, it is worth imagining what it would mean for everything to be made new. Is it even a good idea? Well, I imagine that depends upon whether everything is already good for us. Good for me, good for you, good for someone. But is it good for everyone?

What would it look like for the new world to be good? From the Book of Isaiah, it would be about freedom from oppression and occupation. The freedom to make their own way in the world, but notice people are still planting crops and tending vineyards. This is not utopian fantasy, but a change in how people might lead their lives. And then there is that obvious hyperbole, with the wolf and lamb eating together, the lion eating straw, the serpent feeding on dust.

If we are to look at this passage as not literal but allegorical, we must consider what, or who, is meant by these animal images. The age Isaiah and his people lived through was one of great conflict, with imperial powers trampling across the Middle East again and again. The wolf eats the lamb, the lion eats the lamb. Regular people are of course the helpless lambs at the mercy of all these predators, of those more powerful and war-like. The new heaven and earth would hinge upon a fundamental change in that dynamic, with people no longer being preyed upon by others.

The serpent eating dust is an obvious connection back to the story of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and were punished, having to toil for their nourishment rather than simply eating freely in paradise. Isaiah was not describing paradise. He was not describing an unattainable state of being. No, this was intended to be possible. How then might we get there?

Well, in some ways we have gotten closer. People live longer. Children do not frequently succumb to childhood illness and hunger. Of course, that is a rather limited and privileged perspective. In the United States, people live longer, children live longer. The blessings of one place do not make their way every place. Even in the United States, there are marked differences in how people can live and how long they might live. What should we do about that?

What would a new and better world look like? One that is more than the promises of thousands of years ago. One that is more than poetic hyperbole. What would a new world look like and how might we bring it about?

Any number of people have tried to change the world. They have written philosophies. They have offered up divine revelations. They have designed communities with these philosophies and revelations in mind. Some of them were utopian in nature. Bear in mind that the word “utopia” was intended as a Greek pun, with the word meaning both a good place and no place at all.

When thinking about how to bring about change in the world, there are different approaches. There is maintaining the status quo, so really no changes. There is reforming a society, meaning fixing from within, meaning relying upon the existing system but changing this or that to bring about a better overall result. And then there is revolution. Revolution means clearing everything away and starting from scratch. But even revolutions have to build on existing foundations. No one starts a revolution and then tries to invent a new language.

And the more radical the proposed revolutionary changes, the more resistance one might inspire from ever larger groups of people. During the French Revolution, for example, there was an effort to rename all the months. One of the summer months would have been Thermidor, meaning the hot month. The effort to make that fundamental change to the calendar was considered the true beginning of the end of that wave of the French Revolution.

Why bother to change the names of the month? To demonstrate one’s commitment to breaking from the past. But it is difficult to break such longstanding historical connections. In fact, it is so difficult, that people rarely do so. They often suggest they are doing that, but then they do something far less radical.

For example, in Ireland one of the national saints of that nation is Saint Brigid. She was said to be alive around the year 500 or so and was an abbess, meaning the chief nun of a convent in Kildare. Brigid also happens to be the name of one of the ancient goddesses of the Celtic religion. She was particularly revered on the spring festival of Imbolc, which also happens to be the Feast of Saint Brigid. That is not to say that Saint Brigid did not exist, but her name and her feast date rather conveniently coopt ancient practices.

In two weeks, we will be celebrating a modern American feast, Thanksgiving. There are many ways of understanding this day. For many people, it is a time for families to get together from near and far. The song “Over the River and Through the Woods,” is a Thanksgiving song, though it sometimes gets lumped in with Christmas. Perhaps now that tune is now stuck in your heads. Apologies.

By the way, the song was written by Lydia Child, a 19^th century Unitarian, known for her work as an abolitionist and as an advocate for the rights of Indigenous peoples in the United States. That is a complicated legacy given that Thanksgiving is not considered a day of celebration to many Indigenous people in the United States.

It is for some a day of mourning, a day to commemorate the suffering of Native Americans at the hands of English colonists and the American nation itself. An uncomfortable story in many ways, and yet we celebrate it all the same.

The origin of Thanksgiving is interesting. Days of Thanksgiving were observed by English Puritans and their religious cousins, the Pilgrims. A Day of Thanksgiving would be called after a good harvest, or some other blessed event. As the story goes, the Wampanoag people had shared food with the Pilgrims, whose supplies had run low before winter. During the next harvest season, the Pilgrims celebrated for three days and invited the Wampanoag to attend.

One historical account of the event suggests that the Wampanoag, particularly their leader Massasoit, were trying to make an alliance with the well-armed Pilgrims. The Wampanoag were trying to shore up their defenses against the Narraganset tribe to the south in what would become Rhode Island. While the Wampanoag had suffered greatly from an epidemic of smallpox, brought over by earlier waves of Europeans, the Narragansett were mostly spared and were perceived as a nearby threat.

We can look back at that momentary alliance as a fleeting attempt at a longer-term peace. But it did not work out that way for the Wampanoag or for the Narragansett. Much like the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, these people were pushed out of their lands, lands which were occupied by others. And so, the Pilgrim inspired holiday and its place within our complicated national history can mean different things to different people.

Beyond this problematic example, the idea of giving thanks is ancient and common across many cultures. It is not the idea of gratitude that we must wrestle with, but the legacy of one group’s imposition of itself upon another. The Wampanoag and the Narragansett were seemingly at odds at one point, just as the people of Israel and Judah fought their own territorial wars against their neighbors. Someone can be both the hero and the villain, the victim and the victor, in a story. And if you tell stories over a long enough period, such labels can be swapped in and out time after time. That is the nature of the stories of the Bible.

The question then becomes how you change that narrative. How you change the cycle of violence and retribution that often typifies the history of this world. And it is not as if we can simply reverse the clock back to some point in history. There was no perfect moment when everything was right and fair in the world. There is no simple solution, no obvious way of repairing what was broken.

But if we think about our scripture reading again, we might begin to imagine a way to improve upon the past. The wolf and the lion do not get to eat the lamb anymore. The serpent does not get to have its way. And by the serpent, I mean ideas about the world that declare inherent winners and losers, the high and the low set in place for all time.

Because that is often at the root of these enduring injustices. One group thinks itself chosen while all the rest are here to obey. That is the playbook of every imperial power, ancient and modern. We deserve that land, that wealth, that power. We deserve it because our stories tell us so. And our stories would never mislead us, never lie to us, would they?

In the story of Thanksgiving, we tell one comforting truth about the history of that day while ignoring a wider truth about the history of our country. That does not mean we should not celebrate Thanksgiving. It means we should remember the good with the bad, the blessing of those people surviving another harsh year and the suffering of others who lost so much in the years to come.

Days of Thanksgiving would be called by the Puritans to mark their good fortune. And Days of Fasting would be declared in response to terrible misfortunes. The Puritans believed that God was the source of all blessings and all suffering.

We need not believe in such a mechanistic system to appreciate the good things we have received and to reflect upon the suffering in the world. We can feel gratitude and mourn losses. We can feel pride in our history and heritage without glossing over terrible things done in our nation. Terrible things done even by those we count as ancestors.

The proverbial wolves and lions of old can and should change. To turn from violence, of course, but also to expand their understanding of the past. I am not one to cast aside uncomfortable history. And I also do not think discomfort is reason enough to move quietly onto a different topic. History holds room enough for the stories of those who have suffered. And we must remember such stories because without them we may repeat that dark history.

We might cling to happy stories of golden ages in which oppressed people somehow enjoyed their bondage. We might try to come out as the hero, as the good guy, without realizing that we are just one story away from being the wolf or the lion, rather than the lamb. And we might be one more story, one more decision away from turning away from or embracing the serpent.

What is the best way to prevent such bad choices? Keep telling the truth to ourselves—the good and the bad. Try listening to the stories of others—the good and the bad, the ugly and the uncomfortable. We need to do this. We need to do this because the only way to protect the lamb from the wolf is to be able to recognize the wolf. And to remember that maybe, once upon a time, we were the wolf.

Amen.