Recent Sermon from Myers Park Baptist Church

This is a sermon about new things springing forth and fishing on the other side of the boat.  It is a sermon about a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  About fishing all night and taking nothing and then an amazing catch waiting just on the other side of the boat. 

Isaiah is speaking the word of the Lord to the Jews who are in exile in Babylon far from their home in Jerusalem.  Having captured Jerusalem, the Babylonians pillaged the temple and carried off the brightest and best of the Jews to far off Babylon.  How, the psalmist wails, can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? They did so for several generations. The Jews were exiled in that strange land from 597 until about 535 BC.  Our text this morning is Isaiah speaking to the people when they are on the cusp of leaving and heading home.

Isaiah speaks of the Lord who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.  He refers, of course, to a way through the Red Sea waters recalling the Lord liberating and setting them free from slavery in Egypt.  You will remember that Pharaoh's armies follow them through the parted waters only to be swallowed up by the sea, extinguished, quenched like a wick. And then, oddly, Isaiah seems to contradict what he has just said.  He is now telling the people in Babylon to not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  Having just reminded them of what the Lord did for them long ago, the prophet tells them to no longer remember former things or consider such things of old.

Should we remember or not?  Recall or forget?  Recollect or erase the past?   A number of us here this morning struggled together with this text and its seeming contradiction only a few weeks ago.  Our reading was mostly that Isaiah is saying to not forget the kind of Lord you are dealing with — a Lord who is always opening prisons, breaking shackles, leading you out and sending you home. But, at the same time, do not get stuck there, defining God by this one event of old, thinking you have God figured out, that you now know how God always operates, that you understand how holiness happens, that you comprehend and have deciphered the mystery.  Do not assume that God is going to be doing God's thing today in the same way God did it yesterday. 

And history agrees with Isaiah.  The deliverer and liberator of the Jews from Babylon was Cyrus the Persian who defeated the Babylonians in 539 BC and sent the Jews home to Jerusalem.  If they had sat by the waters of Babylon waiting for a Moses to come along to challenge the king and part the sea they would never recognize Cyrus, Persian enemy of both Jews and Babylonians, who is the only non-Jew in the Bible to be called "messiah of God" or "anointed one" or translated into Greek, a "Christ."  Read your life only through the lens of Exodus, Isaiah warns them, look only for another Moses and you will be sitting in that strange land far from home for a very long time -- like forever!  Isaiah says that the Lord, instead, is already doing new things.  New things are springing forth even as he speaks.  And if you don't perceive it, its because you are prisoners of more than Babylonians.  You are a captive of your old God and all those assumptions from your past and expectations about God that are already ancient history.

In our Friday noon group at St. Peter's downtown, after we had talked this way for a while, Sarah said Isaiah's song would be "Don't Fence Me In"!  The prophet is telling the people to not fence God in with sacred texts and holy history or temple veil.  It was 1944, World War II, Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters were singing

Oh, give me land,
Lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride thru
The wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.

Don't fence me in, the Lord is telling them, by your great cathedrals and grand liturgies.  Don't fence me in.  Don't limit me by what I did in Egypt or Babylon or Jesus or Paul.  Don't fence me in with what you learned from your grandmother or in Sunday School class or from Carlyle Marney or, even God forbid, Gene Owens, or maybe even Bill Dols.  Isaiah waves a red flag over the noise of our solemn assemblies, tired old prayers, doctrine and dogma, mutters of worn out theology.  The prophet warns that to the degree we keep God in our Holy of Holies or church box or spiritual abstractions, captive in creeds and catechism, we are likely to miss the point. God is rather alive and busy springing forth and doing new things that like Cyrus the Persian will surprise and astonish and disturb and anger and even enrage us.  However you conceive of God, the prophet reminds us, you cannot predict and thus control the Holy One.

John reminds us to stop fishing over the same side of the boat where there are obviously no fish!  After all night of nothing, try the other side!  "Now I lay me down to sleep" was ideal for kneeling beside the bed at 4 years old or maybe even into college when we got scared and it still comforts in the emergency room and before they rub your back for a spinal — but — God is more — and growing up means letting God out of what may be an Episcopal Egypt or Baptist Babylon!

Throw your net over the other side of the boat!  There are plenty of fish waiting once you give up fishing where you have proven beyond much doubt there are no fish.  Stop looking over your shoulder, let go of what you are certain God must be or do, and see the way through the wilderness and rivers in your desert that are not about then but now.

Now none of this is surprising.  No grand revelation from the Bible and pulpit.  Everyone in this room, no matter how young or old, knows what it is like to get stuck in old assumptions and tired expectations of God, church, jobs, friends, those people in our lives who matter the most to us, ourselves and even life itself.  We know the agony of exile in old expectations and captivity of deadly assumptions that we make about who others are and who we might become.  We get stuck and de-pressed (pushed down into a hole) and sentenced to long nights fishing and catching nothing when we script the future to be just like the past.  We do it to parents who we never let grow up and sons and daughters who must bear our shoulds and oughts and unfulfilled dreams.  We do it to lovers who turn out to be human and fragile and get old but never get another chance.  We hold ourselves hostage to such assumptions in our hopes and ideals and longings that don't come true as the years race past.  In our anger or futility or frustration, we fence each other in just as we fence in God with how God is or must be.  And we fence ourselves in by believing like Popeye, "I am who I am," and will never change.  God is about such fences coming down.  

TS Eliot writes:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing:
wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing

The darkness, I think, is our unknown tomorrows, the shadowy unknown we dread and deplore and would defeat by making tomorrow only another today -- same God, same world, same spouse, same boss, same school, same me.  And we avoid the darkness which is where the unknown light waits hidden.  The hope is at the darkest hour of the longest night of an unscripted tomorrow, when we pull in the line and drop it on the other side of the boat, when we look around for someone like Cyrus.  It is when the fences of a certain and predictable tomorrow come down and everything I thought and figured out and understood crumbles and  collapses and hopes calculated on yesterday die, that fish happen and paths in the wilderness open and rivers run through the dry gulches of our lives and relationships that have been parched for years..

The promise is paths and rivers.  The threat is that they are in our wilderness and desert. What springs forth is happening in the last place I want to be.  The new is springing forth in those place in my life and me where I have abandoned hope and given up possibilities and despaired of anything different ever happening.  God, Isaiah tells us, is 3 am in the kitchen when we suddenly know that the wild animals will not destroy us and the ostriches and jackals will honor us.  It is awakening to life outside the fences where we discover what Soren Kierkegaard called "the terrifying possibility of being able."

The value of fences and boundaries is a sermon for another day.  Isaiah, this morning, speaks to the most of us who are hunkered down and hiding behind fences, safely protecting ourselves from the new that is forever springing forth in us unbidden and undeserved.

Leaving you I hear Isaiah and Jesus and Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters singing:

I want to ride to the ridge
Where the West commences,
Gaze at the moon
Till I lose my senses;
Can't look at hobbles
And I can't stand fences,
Don't fence me in.

Which is what I have experienced us doing for one another these 5 ½ years. We have given room to each other to breathe and stretch and lose senses and break hobbles and leap more fences than I ever imagined  — embracing the terrifying possibility of being able — fishing on the other side of the boat and hauling in 153 large fish, surrounded by wondering stillness and the haunting darkness where together we have danced.

I thank you for being a path through my wilderness and a river in my deserts.  And I thank God and past generations, sitting in these same pews and standing in this pulpit, who birthed and nurtured a Myers Park Baptist Church that is brave enough to dance even in the darkness.

Texts: Isaiah 43:16-21 and John 21:1-13
T.S. Eliot, "East Coker" in Four Quartets.
Cole Porter, "Don't Fence Me In," 1944.

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