On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
⁷ On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
⁸ he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.

 ⁹ In that day they will say,

   “Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.” (Isaiah 25:6-9)

Family in Christ:

Few of us will ever forget where we were on that Tuesday morning ten years ago.

I was headed to my Shakespeare class at Dordt College.  Late as usual.  As I hurried down the hallway, backpack bouncing, coffee sloshing, I noticed something strange.  Every classroom I ran past had a TV on.  Every face was upturned.  Every eye was locked on the screen.  And every mouth was silent.  Nobody spoke.  No student.  No professor. Just silence—draped over everyone like a heavy winter quilt.

As I slid into my seat, the reason for the silence soon became clear.  For just as Dr. De Smith began to explain to me that something terrible was happening inNew York City, the second plane appeared on the right side of the TV monitor, banked suddenly, and smashed into the second tower, causing an enormous explosion.

During the days that followed, I watched and re-watched that sickening footage again and again.  So many of us did.  It’s like we needed convincing that it wasn’t just some terrible dream; it’s like we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe what we were seeing.

Perhaps we couldn’t believe that such a horrendous evil could be perpetrated by other human beings; couldn’t quite believe the darkness of human hearts; couldn’t quite believe just how right the teacher in Ecclesiastes was when he wrote: “The hearts of men are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live.” (Ecc. 9:3).  But we also couldn’t seem to believe that such a terrible monstrosity was happening to us—here, in theUnited States, in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  How could something so terrible happen in a place with so many wonderful freedoms and such progress and amazing technology and such massive defense budgets?

Maybe we couldn’t believe it.  But something tells me that Isaiah the prophet would not have shared our surprise—either about the darkness of human hearts, or the darkness of that day in general.  Because even though it has often been said that “everything changed” on September 11, 2001, Isaiah might observe that really, that day was just more of the same.

Notice: In verse 7 of our text today, Isaiah speaks of a “shroud that enfolds,” a “sheet that covers.”  Isaiah is using the imagery of funeral parlors and gravesides.  The imagery of death. And Isaiah says that death’s dark shroud is draped over every person, the sheet is wrapped tightly around  every nation.  There are no exceptions.

This sounds obvious enough.  We all know (at least on some level) that nobody gets out of here alive.  But Isaiah isn’t only reminding us of our mortality; he’s not only observing that that at some point, maybe sooner but hopefully later, our meter’s will expire and our time will be up.  When Isaiah talks about the dark “shroud that enfolds all people”, he’s talking about something far more sinister. Not only a life ending event.  But a life consuming power.  According to Walter Breuggamann, Isaiah thinks of death as a suprahuman power that “crowds in upon every chance for life.”  In his words, “Death here is…an active force that moves to counter and cancel and prevent all well being…. ‘Death is all that circumscribes life, that limits…humanity, [and] that diminishes well-being.”[iii]

This, says Isaiah, is the dark shroud that hangs over all people.  This is the sheet that has entangled all nations.

And this is the shroud that we became so painfully aware of on September 11, 2001.  We felt the shrouds staggering weight; felt the sheets stifling, suffocating power.   And we have been trying to shake off that shroud, to free ourselves of that sheet, ever since.

Author Sarah Vowell was living in New York City at the time of the attacks.  She recalls that in the days after 9/11, she desperately wanted to do something.  So when the TV news announced that rescue workers were in need of toothpaste, she lept at the chance.  She clicked off the TV and marched down to the corner store—only to discover that she was too late.  Half her block had already been there and all the shelves with the name brands were all empty.  So she ended up hauling fourteen tubes of Sensodyne—the toothpaste for sensitive teeth—to the rescue worker’s headquarters.[iv]

It was, I think, her own small way of trying to push back the shroud.  Of trying to shake herself—and her corner of the world—free of the sheet that entangles.  I think much of what we’ve done as a nation during the past ten years (especially in the name of national security) has been an attempt to do the same.  And I suppose that from a certain perspective, we’ve been successful.

A friend of mine visited Ground Zero last month.  As he surveyed the scene, he says he got tears in his eyes.  Tears because of all the loss and sorrow.  But also tears that grew out of pride.  And, he says, a “profound sense of hope.”

Hope a big word at Ground Zero.  My friend was even given a plastic bracelet that says, United by Hope.  And I think I know what my friend—and the people who made the bracelet—are getting at.  I’m enough of a patriot that I want to wave my flag this week, and maybe puff out my chest a bit, let the world that nobody is going to keepAmerica down because we’re going to come back bigger and stronger than ever.  This week, I am proud to be an American.  And I’m thankful that (despite some of the political nuttiness that’s gone on in the last decade), our nation still has a future.

So I understand pride.  And gratitude.  And even optimism.  But I wonder.  Do we have hope?   And I mean real hope.  Hope that isn’t only sunny optimism about the future.  But hope that also says something about the past?

In one of his novels, Jonathan Safran Foer tells the story of an eight year old boy named Oskar Schell.  Oskar lost his father in the WorldTradeCenter.  Oskar says that to him, the loss is a giant “the hole in the middle of [him] that every happy thing [falls] into.”[vi]   At night, Oskar lies in bed and he cries.  He cries so much that he imagines that, if he could invent a special drain to put beneath every pillow in New York to collect all the tears of all the people who cried themselves asleep at night, and if that drain would funnel all those tears into a reservoir in Central Park, it wouldn’t be long before people would need to start filling sand bags and building levies, lest the reservoir overflow its banks and flood the entire city with tears.

When you’ve shed that many tears, when you feel the sheet wrapped that tightly around you, it’s going to take more than some flag waving and chest thumping, more than a new national security plan or an act of congress to dry your tears and disentangle you from the shroud.  As fine as those things may be, for people like Oskar, they probably don’t do much more to create hope than fourteen tubes of Sensodyne.   Because the kind of hope someone like Oskar needs is more than hope for a future where things are all right.  It’s hope for a future where even the past is put right.  It’s a future where that reservoir of tears is completely dried up, because “everything sad can come untrue.”

In other words, it’s the kind of future that only God can provide.  And the kind of future God promises to provide through the prophet Isaiah.

The incredible promise that comes through Isaiah is that one day, God will wipe away all tears, because he will not only tug back the corner of the dark shroud draped over humanity; he will not only loosen the sheet that entangles every nation.  But he will do away with the shroud and the sheet completely.  He will tear it up, shred it, toss it in the back dumpster.  Isaiah says that death will be crushed to death.  This force so often pictured in the ancient world as a gaping mouth, as the Great Swallower, will itself be swallowed up.  God will “take it in his jaws, crush it, chew it, reduce it, eliminate it.”[ix]

That’s the promise God makes through the prophet Isaiah.  And it’s the promise he keeps in his son, Jesus Christ.  As one of my teachers was fond of saying, on the cross, Jesus Christ absorbed all the power of evil without passing it on. On the cross, he let the forces of death do their worst on him.  And in his resurrection, he proved he had exhausted their power.  The Apostle Paul says it this way in Colossians 2:15: He “‘disarmed the powers and authorities, having made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

For many of us, one of the enduring images that emerged in the days and weeks after 9/11 featured a pile of cement and rubble—the remains of what used to be the World Trade center.  Towering above the wreckage were two iron beams.  Together, they formed a perfectly symmetrical cross.

For those of us who put our faith in Jesus (crucified, died, and risen), that imageis a fantastic picture of the hope that we have been given.  And the hope that the world has been given.  Because it’s a reminder that there is something bigger than terrorism.  Something more powerful than death.  Something that has and will overcome all those forces that threaten to destroy us, that try to reduce our world to a smoldering heap of rubble.  And that is the Cross of Jesus Christ.  On the cross of Jesus Christ, death was put to death, everything sad began to become untrue.  Because of the cross of Christ, every tear will be wiped away.

In Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel (which I mentioned to you earlier), there are no words on the last twenty or so pages.  Instead, these pages feature flip book made by young Oskar.  It’s the kind of thing kids make when doing basic animation—usually featuring a cow jumping over the moon, or a stick figure dancing the robot.  But Oskar’s book pictures a lot more than cows or stick figures.  Oskar’s book pictures hope.  Real, Christian hope.

Oskar’s book starts with a crudely drawn picture of the crumbled towers, nothing more than a pile of rubble on the ground.  But as you flip through the book, the towers reconstruct, bit by bit.  Up, up up, they go.  And then, the enormous cloud of smoke and flames begins to recede back into the building.  Down, down, down they go.  And finally, the image that haunted Oskar the most—the picture of those people hurling themselves to the ground—is reversed.  The little stick figures figures rise up from the dirt and rubble.  Up, up, up they go.  Back into the windows.  Back to their little desks.  Back to the way things are supposed to be.

That’s hope.  That’s Christian hope.  Every tear wiped away.  Every sad thing undone.  And because of Jesus Christ—because Christ has died, because Christ has risen, because Christ will came again—that’s our hope.

            Let’s give him thanks and praise for that.

I’m not sure what my friend expected when he accepted the dinner invitation extended to him by a member of his congregation.  Maybe pot roast and apple pie.  Perhaps a lot of talk about the weather and church politics.   Surely, he never could have imagined what actually happened.  He described the events of the day this way in an email:

Not ten minutes after eating did we hear what sounded like fire-crackers outside, although the frequency was too erratic. Our host opened the door and stepped on the porch. He almost immediately jumped back in shouting, ”Those aren’t fire-crackers!” I had enough time to look outside to see three policemen, guns drawn advancing on something I couldn’t see before a bullet blew out the windshield of my HHR not 20 yards away. We ran to our kids and pulled them down to the ground until the entire episode was done 15 minutes later. We looked out our window and saw a man laying in the middle of the road. The EMT’s arrived and did chest compressions for some time… the guy never moved and they stopped trying not too much later. Two hours later we were let out of the house after two “witness” interviews with the police, though both our HHR (hit 4 times) and our pickup (hit 2 times) were impounded for evidence and won’t be released until tomorrow. It turns out that the guy showed up at the local Mormon church earlier that day, asked to see their bishop and then shot him. He ran and a few hours later was cornered on the street just outside the house we were visiting. No one knows why…

It’s an amazing (and sad) tale.  And as soon as I read it, I fired back my reply.  ”Wait a second,” I wrote.  ”When did you get a pickup?!”

I think they call that “missing the forest for the trees.”

I thought of this little interaction a few weeks ago while I was preparing a sermon on Matthew 5:27-30.  In this text, Jesus makes the astounding claim that any person who looks at a women with the the purpose of desiring her has already committed an egregious sin.   Did you catch that?  Not any person who casually hooks up with a woman and then refuses to return her calls.   Not any person who spends his Friday nights on sexual safari, always hunting for a new trophy to take home. Not even any person who is married but figures a little fun on the side really won’t hurt anyone (after all, its just sex).

Nope.  Just any person who looks .

That kind of talk about sex sounds crazy in our sex crazed world.  And I suspect that kind of talk is the very thing that makes Christianity unpalatable to many of us.    It sounds too uptight,  repressed, and archaic.   Since we can’t quite swallow what Jesus has to say about sex (or what we think Jesus has to say about sex–or money, or gender roles, or some other hot button issue), so we dismiss Jesus with a wave of the hand, a roll of the eyes, a shaking of th head.   Well, that’s not what I think.  So I don’t want anything to do with a religion that teaches that.

Maybe we don’t put it in such blunt terms.  But the thought is lurking there somewhere under the surface.

The trouble is that objecting to Christianity because of what the Bible has to say about sex makes about as much sense as asking your friend about his new pick-up when he’s just told you that he witnessed a shooting that made national news. In other words–it makes no sense whatsoever! This, too, is missing the forest for the trees.   Like my friend, Christians claim to have big news.  Unlike my friend, it’s good news!  Christ is died!  Christ is risen!  Christ will come again! If we are only willing to engage Christianity on what are, relatively speaking, minor details, then either we’re not listening.  Or somebody told us wrong.

In one of his books, Timothy Keller puts it this way:

“We should make sure we distinguish between the major themes and message of the Bible and its less primary teachings….  If you dive into the shallow end of the Biblical pool…you may get scraped up.  But if you dive in to the center of the Biblical pool, where there is consensus–about the deity of Christ, his death and resurrection–you will be safe.  It is therefore important to consider the Bible’s core claims about who Jesus is and whether he rose from the dead before you reject it for its less central and more controversial teachings.”  (113)

In other words: Keep the main thing the main thing.  Don’t become so fixated on a tree that you miss a bueatiful forest.  I think that’s good advice.  Both for those who are exploring the Christian faith.  And for those who are trying to explain it.

“What other church is there besides institutional? There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. I really don’t understand this naïve criticism of the institution. I really don’t get it. Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease, dehydration, death. So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn’t last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it’s prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.”
-Eugene Peterson

It was not what you would call the highlight of my musical career. 

My mouth was dry.  My leg shook uncontrollably.  My cold hands trembled even as they clutched the trumpet.  The three judges–professors in music departments at local colleges, I assume–sat in their folding chairs behind a table across the room.  One slumped back in her chair and chewed a pencil.  Another rested his elbows on the table and peered over the top of his reading glasses.  The third glanced at his watch and sipped his coffee.  They were waiting for me to begin. 

“Start with an E flat scale”, they’d said.  So, I took as deep of a breath as I could manage, and lifted the instrument to my lips.  I began to play.  Or–to put it more accurately–I attempted to play.  But try as I might, my lips refused to vibrate.  My fingers could not find the right valves.  The notes would not come out right. Some sort of sound came out the bell of my trumpet.  But it wasn’t an E flat scale.  I mumbled a quick apology to the judges, shook my head, and tried again.  Still nothing like an E flat scale.  I began a third time, this time charging through the missed notes.  When I finished the scale, I knew my audition was over.

I had prepared for that audition for months (years, actually).  I could do an E flat (and a B flat, and an A flat) in in my sleep.  But for some reason, when the judges were watching, everything fell apart. 

Judgment.  I don’t know any (self aware individual) who is excited by the prospect.  Most people feel a pang of anxiety when they hear the  word because most of us can remember I time when we were judged–and came up short.

  Not smart enough.

  Not fast enough.

  Not thin enough.

  Not rich enough.

  Not good enough.

Rarely is judgment a good experience for us.  All too often, judgment means rejection.  And so I was not surprised at the old saints reaction when I mentioned to her that I would be preaching on the phrase, I believe…he will come to judge the living in the dead.  She winced–as though she’d just grabbed hold of a live wire.  The unspoken question was written across her face.  How do I know that I can withstand judgment?  When I have to “give an account for every careless word spoken” (Matt.12:36), when every concealed thought and act is brought out into the open (Luke 8:17) and everything is laid bare (2 Peter 3:10), how can I possibly believe that I will endure God’s scrutiny?  How can I have any hope?  For her, the proclamation that Jesus will come to judge does not sound like good news.  It sounds like terrifying news.  It probably does to many of us.

And yet, when the writers of the Heidelberg Catechism pondered this phrase (Q&A 52), they insisted that we should anticipate Christ’s coming to judge (as the old translation put it) “with uplifted heads.”  We should be standing on tiptoe, straining our eyes toward the horizon, confidently awaiting his arrival.  Why?  Because the judge we await is “the very one who has already stood trial in my place before God.”  Or as Karl Barth once put it, “Our Judge has been judged.” 

Theologian Daniel Migliore observes that one of the crucial questions we must answer when pondering the meaning of the prhase he will come to judge the living and the dead is who our judge will be (the other is what the purpose of his judgment will be–but more on that Sunday morning).  Too often, write Migliore, we act as if there are two different Christs: the first Christ who came to Bethlehem to show us his love and grace and then a later Christ who will come to judge and show us his wrath and vengeance.  But this is simply not the case.  As the angel reminds the disciples in Acts 1:10, Jesus who ascended to heaven is the same Jesus who will return.  In other words, when Christ returns to judge, he will not have changed identity or purpose.  He will be the same Jesus we came to know two thousand years ago–the Jesus who came in the flesh to die in our place and save us from our sins, the Jesus who endured the just judgment of God for our sin.  He will be our judge.   

In a famous passage at the end of Romans 8, Paul throws out what appears to be a rhetorical question to his readers.  Who is he that condemns?  He asks.  Christ Jesus who died?  More than that, who was raised to life and is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us?    Paul seems to be saying it all with a bit of a smirk and a pa-shaw. Would the Jesus who died for you really condemn you?  Would he suddenly change his mind and decide that he wants nothing to do for you?  I don’t think so!  We may hear the voice of condemnation from our parents, our teachers, our coaches, our spouses, our friends, or from ourselves.  But Paul insists that we will never hear it from Jesus.  Our judge was condemned for us,  he says.  So for us, there is now no condemnation!

I recently read of an incident in which a reporter asked the wife of Albert Einstein if she understood her husband’s famous formula, E =MC2.  Mrs. Einstein replied that she did not.  Then, after a pause, she added these words: But I know my husband.  And that is enough.  That answer, I believe, is a good start for us as we think about Jesus’ coming to judge.  There are, of course, many questions that remain.  We may not know where the lines will fall.  We may not know the fate of every person we know and love.  But we know our (judged) Judge.  And that should be enough.

“When we try to say that the cross means this, or that, or the other thing, we usually end up doing something analogous to playing a Beethoven symphony on a mouth-organ. We bring it down to the level of our own thinking and feeling, instead of allowing it to lift our thinking and feeling–yes, and our praying and living and loving–up to its own level.” (NT Wright, For All God’s Worth, p. 53)

Maintaining a robust view of sin, paradoxically, is the best thing the world for self-esteem.  If we truly value ourselves, we will not be satisfied with some mild, namby-pamby version of good enough.  The highest standard of goodness is the one that most highly rizes our humanity, most fiercely insists that we were designed to be something so much greater than what we are.  Christianity is picky about sin because of the magnificence of its goal: full reconciliation with God–perfect peace, perfect shalom.  Nothing less can satisfy the longing in our hearts and God’s.

….As long as you think you are good enough right now or could be soon, you limit yoruself at best to a dim shadow of goodness in this life.  Christians believe that even the brightest of these dim shadows is still a shadow, still an address in the neighborhood of sin.  But you could have something infinetely better: an entirely new kind of life, made possible by God’s power.  Sin is the lock on the door to this life; you can’t open the oor unless you recgonize there’s a lock and that you need a key.  This is not a reason to be discouraged but a reason to be glad.  Now you know what kind of problem you’re facing.  (Debra Rienstra, So Much More, pg 58-59.) 

I hope it’s not a sin to say I wish I had written that.

The matter is quite simple.  The Bible is very easy to understand.  But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers.  We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obligated to act accordingly.  Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself accordingly.  My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined.  How would I ever get on in the world?  Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.  Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.  Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?  Dreadful is it to fall into the hands of the living God.  Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament. 

“You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” 

True?

“Well,” said the woman , “I don’t know what happened.  I felt fine.” 

The eighty-something year old woman was laying in a hospital bed.  Machines beeped, nurses scurried, tubes dripped all around her.  She was there because she’d taken a fall on the sidewalk outside of her home.  Her legs had simply given out under her.  And she was baffled.  After all, she felt fine.

Later that day, the shroud of mystery surrounding the fall was removed.  The doctor came in and rattled off a long list of ailments afflicting the old widow.  I can no longer remember them all, but somewhere on the list was a virus in her bloodstream, pnuemonia, dibitating diabetes, and a pair of kidneys that could hardly function without the help of machines.  She was hardly fine.  No matter how she felt.

Human beings, it would appear, have an incredible ability to adapt.  We can get used to almost anything.  Our bodies can be filled with cripplying diseas and yet we can insist that we are fine.  The standards we set for ourselves can be remarkably low. 

At the center of the Christian message is the good news that Jesus saves.  But sometimes, it’s hard to believe that we are people who are in need of saving.  Me?  Really?  But I feel fine.  I don’t cheat on my wife or look at dirty pictures on the internet.  I never tell lies (or at least, not big ones).  I give money to the church.  I’m a nice guy (most of the time).  Humble too.   Why would somebody like me need a savior? 

 And then I remember my old friend in the hospital.  And I think:  Maybe my standards are a little low, too.  Maybe there is a terrible sickness in my soul–a sicknesess that I’ve grown so accustomed to living with that I no longer notice it is there.  Maybe I’m grading myself on a curve–and the curve is being set by a bunch of people who are also anything but fine. 

In an oft quoted line from Isaiah 64:6, the prophet laments the human condition.  All of our righteous acts are like filthy rags, he says.  Its a rather grim assessment.  But it seems to me that within this statement their is a hope that human beings have the potential to be more than we ever imagined.  If even our best works are like a pile of old shop rags, what might we be like if we were being the people that God made us to be?  In his famous sermon, The Weight of Glory, CS Lewis said that if we were to see each other as God made us to be–living up to the glory of God rather than falling short of it–we would be strongly tempted to worship one another.  We would be so much more than “just fine”!

But of course, right now, we are not.  We are people in need of a savior.  And in Jesus Christ, that is exactly what we get.