A Epiphany 5 BFC 2020
Isaiah 58:1-12
February 9, 2020
The first congregation I served as ordained clergy was in Atkinson, Illinois, the northwest part of Illinois, about an hour east of the Mississippi River. One of the great honors I had before I left Illinois was to go back as an invited guest and speak at their church’s anniversary. You may remember last week that this was a church that had heavy involvement with the Ku Klux Klan to oppose the powerful Knights of Columbus over at the Roman Catholic Church. There is nothing quite like opposing the white, conquering patriarchy with more white, conquering patriarchy. I said great honor because I loved the folks: loved the powerful quilter group, making tons of apple pies, eating bbq chicken pizza from Casey’s with my best friend, Al Van de Woestyne, at his junk hog lot, and the time Jim Schroeder and I tried to hide our laughter when Myron Naugle showed up at church one Sunday with a new toupee. I was terrible. And . . . I’ve never laughed so hard.
One of my best colleagues while I served in Atkinson was the Associate Pastor of Church of Peace in Rock Island, Illinois, Rev. Michael Swartz. Michael and I developed a strong relationship as we car-pooled to various Illinois Conference meetings in the Chicago area. Michael learned about the trials and travails of serving a rural church like Atkinson Congregational, the details of my family life, and just about every other detail one might share in construction-infested, four-hour car rides to and from Chicago. I learned about Michael’s family, his wife, Nancy, and their two daughters, the trials and travails at Church of Peace of Rock Island as he went from Associate to Senior Pastor and the particular challenges and glories of serving a once thriving church that at one time resembled its neighborhood during the years when John Deere boomed and supported the local economy. But now that same faith community was struggling in a neighborhood that looked less and less like the members. Through those car rides, shared perspectives, and mutual ministry together, Michael and I became great friends.
A little about the history of Church of Peace in Rock Island. Church of Peace had a strong German Evangelical history which it downplayed with the advent of World War II. Friedenskirche became Church of Peace. Many people changed their German surnames to blend into the wider community. You could see it on their memorial plaques. As implied, when John Deere waned and went bust, so did the economy and the neighborhood around Church of Peace. The largely white population left the area and many of the families who attended the church were only showing up at 12th Avenue and 12th Street now only on Sunday mornings. More and more, a white congregation became surrounded by an ever-more poor African-American population. Once beautiful homes fell into ruin and rubble. The local park became a notorious site for public drug trafficking.
The congregation had taken an unsuccessful tack historically: to wax nostalgic about the good old days . . . when people poured into the church . . . in nostalgia the plan was to try to find and cull “people like us” (I’ll leave it up to you to decide what that meant.) remaining in the neighborhood. Michael asked them to think in a different way. Rev. Swartz began asking them to think of their surrounding neighborhood as a mission field—where they might learn about God and faith from the neighborhood. And where they might also be a presence in God’s love for that neighborhood.
With that understanding, Rev. Swartz began talking to me, in those long car rides, about the old parish house directly connected to the church building. It was vacant with running water, a good kitchen, and plenty of space. Reserved for the pastor in a former time, I guess the present clergy decided that living connected to the church might make the job that much more 24/7. Ewww…..good choice.
What if, Michael wondered, that parish house could be used to host people from outside of Rock Island to learn more about the work being done in his fair city to bring hope and healing to neighborhoods like the one that surrounded Church of Peace? We both talked about what a great experience that might be for youth groups across the Illinois Conference, a short, four-day experience for youth groups who could not afford to travel somewhere extravagant or exotic like . . . Billings, Montana.
Rev. Ward Malloy, who used to serve a UCC church in Freeport, Illinois, helped us out by beginning to regularly take his youth to this work camp experience, presumably because it worked for them. As Youth Pastor at Community UCC in Morton, Illinois, I also agreed to have some of our Senior High Youth be the guinea pigs for such an experience.
For four days the youth worked on rehabilitating one of the formerly beautiful homes in the area, served and dined with guests at a homeless shelter in Davenport, Iowa, dialogued with community workers about what could be done in a place like Rock Island, and discussed with those at a Catholic Worker House why they had decided to live out the gospel by making radical decisions on behalf of the poor.
All of these encounters the youth had with people in the area were with organizations or leaders already at work. It was to remind youth that they were not there to save Rock Island. They were there to participate in the work of salvation done by so many organizations. In Rock Island, the youth group rehabbed houses through one such organization, a group similar to Habitat for Humanity, called “Breach Menders.” Breach Menders had us scraping, painting, lugging, and blowing insulation into these old, beautiful homes and then selling them back to families who had built sweat equity into the repair and restoration of these homes. The hope was to, house by house, restore neighborhoods, and, in restoring neighborhoods, rebuild community. Pride and ownership would lend itself to more permanent and long-term investment into each neighborhood instead of the survival culture which had become so much a part of the Rock Island societal fabric.
That name, Breach Menders, was taken from the Hebrew Scripture passage we have before us today, Isaiah 58, an encouragement to returning Jewish exiles who must now decide how they will piece together their torn and fragmented lives after returning back to their homeland after years in exile. “To what spiritual life is God calling us to in this day and age?” they must have asked. “Do we need to renew our devotion? Build worship centers? Do we need to make good and right animal sacrifices? Up our pledge? Do more spirituality—prayer or fasting?”
Fasting is mentioned several times in the text, over and over again, asking if this is the fasting God wants. Finally, the writer of Isaiah 58 responds: “This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the imperial domination[1]; setting free the oppressed, breaking every form of violent domination; sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed; your vindication shall go before you, and the glory of the Living God shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Living God will answer, you shall cry for help and God will say: ‘Here I am!’ If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation, and malicious speech; if you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; then light shall rise for you in the depths and the gloom shall become for you like midday. Then the Living God will guide you always and give you plenty even on the parched land. God will renew your strength, and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring whose water never fails.”
And if you do all those things, the writer of this passage says, if you do all these things, here is the promise: “The ancient ruins shall be rebuilt for your sake, and the foundations from ages past you shall raise up; ‘Menders of the breach,’ they shall call you, ‘Restorers of ruined homesteads.’” A breach—an opening, a tear, a rupture, a disruption of friendly relations, an estrangement[2]--to be mended as part of what it means to be faithful in your spiritual practice.
I have regularly used this passage as part of liturgy to send out missionaries. I suggested it to the soon-to-be Rev. Lisa Harmon for her candidating sermon at this church—that we might be a small part of that spiritual practice of repairing the rupture, and bringing to an end the estrangement experienced. We pray that missionaries might be “menders of the breach, restorers of the ruined homesteads” as we seek to be every day in the Yellowstone River Valley.
So, as I had promised, as Youth Pastor at Community UCC in Morton, Illinois, I took some of the Senior High Youth to the Rock Island experience designed and developed by Rev. Michael Swartz. And, as those who go with me on these mission trips know, I am very insistent that every morning and evening we intentionally enter into some form of examination and reflection. This is usually done, early on in a delegation, to much groaning and complaining. By the end though, a rhythm is developed, and people on a delegation generally begin to recognize this practice as seeing the Divine working in their lives on a daily basis. It changes their perspective.
On this delegation, intentionally, for our last night of reading and reflection, Isaiah 58:1-12, was before us as we sat on the parish house floor in a semi-circle. We read Isaiah 58 in our newly minted Breach Mender’s t-shirts. Certainly all the clues were there, weren’t they? These youth would get it, right, after being through all of this work and reflection over the past four days? I repeated the words . . . “restorers of the ancient ruins” . . . “mender of the breach.” Clearly, the holy light of God emanating from the Youth Pastor was not seen by everyone else in the world. How could this be? Why could they not see the beautiful water to which I had led them? Drink! Drink up, o youth! For I have brought you to the river of truth!
Rats! Nothing. This usually happens when I expect people to see the holy light emanating from me.
So I looked at those five young people and said, “Listen, this Scripture passage, it is in the Bible not because it worked just one time way back in ancient history. It got communicated and stayed in the Bible because people experienced it as truth over generations. You all, this week, you did this Scripture. You are the restorers of the ancient ruins, menders of the breach. You became a small part of God’s work in Rock Island.” Finally, I looked around at each of them and began to see their shoulders straighten. There was this palpable feel in the room that nothing was out of the reach of these five young people in one beautiful moment in time. Nick, Theresa, Scott, Laurie, and Monica all knew that they had done Scripture, and, maybe for the first time in their lives, heard themselves as a holy people.
Isaiah 58 is a narrative meant to give people hope who had long lived in exile. It was a sermon to remind people who must have looked at their situation, the rubble and ruin that surrounded their lives, and the lives of their city and community and said, in exasperation, “This is too hard! This is too large for us! Where do we start?” This narrative was intended to say that God was with them in their holy task to build up a foundation, repair the ruin of their lives and their communities, to let them know that what was once broken and torn and ruptured could be repaired step by step, house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Sometimes, particularly in UCC churches, I think we either ignore Scripture because we consider it too antiquated and old-fashioned to ever hold any wisdom for us, or, we think Scripture so untouchable, so unreachable, that we fail to engage the place where ordinary people are trying to make meaning out of their lives. Jesus preached to communities in ruble and ruin in rural Galilee about farmers and wayward sons, made references to salt and light, so that everyday people knew themselves as holy people.
We may be much like those Jewish people who look at our church, our neighborhoods, and our communities, and experience some of the same hopelessness that they did. And there’s a little ruin and rubble to Billings First Congregational Church. Much like those folks at Church of Peace, we might think that all will be right with the world when all the former members of Billings First Congregational Church take back their traditional pew and lift up those traditional hymns we all once knew and loved. Well, not that hymn. Maybe that one. Oh, that’s right, I didn’t like that one either.
The vision of Isaiah, however, is that the breach is mended and community restored when our spiritual practice remembers our most deeply held values—those of justice and compassion.
We may be the holy people. We may release those bound unjustly, share our bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless, and clothe the naked, and as we do so, we do Scripture. When we rebuild the ruins and mend the breach, the place where rupture, division, and estrangement exist, we are the holy people. We are the people who not only can but are the living words of Scripture to our community. What we are told is when we are actively doing those things, we are the menders of the breach, the sew-ers of the city, the restorers of the streets, the tailors of community, the rebuilders of the ruins. When we are actively doing those things, God has our back and shows up and says, “Here . . . am . . . I.” And we see God show her muscle, roll up his sleeves, and get to work, from below, side by side, and become that inexhaustible source of life-giving water. Mni Wiconi. Water is life. This we know from holy people.
And all of a sudden, our bones are fortified to testify. Our food deserts are transformed into oases of hospitality. This is the fasting and worship that the Holy One desires, comes close to, and makes real as a source for our work and rest together.
May we continue to be the menders of the breach, the sew-ers of the city, the restorers of the streets, the tailors of community, the rebuilders of the ruins, as God’s blessed and holy people. Amen.
[1] The word “yoke” has been used in Scripture to connote imperial oppression or domination. Jesus even uses it in the Gospels to say that what he offers is far different than what is offered by empire.
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