Us vs. Us
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.
But be glad and rejoice for ever
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.
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.
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.
They shall not labour in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—
and their descendants as well.
Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
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 a perfect continuation of last week’s scripture passage from Haggai. Last week we found ourselves in post-exilic Judah—God’s people were finally allowed back into their promised land, and they were tasked with rebuilding their grand temple; really rebuilding an entire society. It was a time that should have been joyful and exciting, but instead was frustrating and discouraging. It was taking forever to make progress on the temple, people weren’t getting along, so Haggai had to come along to encourage his people and cheer them on to really start making progress and have faith in God.
Well this week, our passage from Isaiah is actually set in the same post-exilic period. And I know this passage that Meredith just read for you today is really beautiful, but I’m really sorry, I’m gonna have to be a Debbie downer for a second. Because you’d never know it from today’s beautiful and poetic words, but this all comes after chapters of division and turmoil. This section of Isaiah goes into the reasons that the temple was slow to be built, reasons we really didn’t get in any detail in Haggai. People just weren’t getting along, they weren’t agreeing on how to properly worship or practice their faith in this renewed homeland, and after years of anticipation and optimism, things just weren’t coming together as they had expected. And so what happens when our expectations are shattered? We get discouraged and we look for someone to blame. We become so focused on all the problems and all the divisions that we lose sight of the end goal, we lose sight of what really matters.
Remember what we talked about last week—this younger generation has entered a promised land they had never known, they had only heard about. They’ve been in exile pretty much their entire lives. To be blunt, they have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re getting bogged down in the uncertainty and their own frustration, and nothing is getting done.
Now, talking about division, if we look at the results of the midterm elections that just passed, and if we look at headlines, all we see and hear on the surface is rhetoric like “a nation divided!” If we find ourselves in our usual social media bubbles and echo chambers, we’ll see all the same narratives we always see, the kind of things that make us feel holier-than-thou; or we’ll find new ways to be angry, new politicians or pundits to rage at. It’s a vicious cycle fueled by these internet echo chambers, fueled by the news media that makes so much money off of angry retweets and shared articles. The angrier we are, the more money they make; the more divided we seem, the more money they make.
But you know, we’re as divided as the media or the powerful make us out to be. Yes, this country is clearly divided by party lines, but I love looking at ballot measures. More often than not, voters of states vote to expand Medicaid if it’s on the ballot. In Florida a few years ago, the people voted to allow former prisoners who had served their sentence have the right to vote returned to them. Most recently, reproductive freedom measures continue to pass in states, regardless of whether or not they’re red or blue. Now, what this leads to me to believe is that we ultimately all want the same things. We want people to be healthy. We want people to have rights to choose their leaders. We just want people to be safe and comfortable. We want this for ourselves, and we want this for one another.
And this isn’t just something I’ve personally seen anecdotally— there have been studies, and different ways of analyzing statistics that show that we’re not as divided as it would seem on the surface. One article from WBUR points out that data continually show that there is a “striking consensus across political groups that reforming policing and addressing racism are necessary.” That same article goes onto note,
Early on in this public health crisis, we read stories about communities coming together in solidarity, even as they were forced apart by social-distancing. The murder of George Floyd forced a national reckoning by appealing to a common humanity. …After extremists trashed the U.S. Capitol and surrounding areas [on January 6th], the aftermath told the story of the real America. A legion of veterans, upset by…the rioters, cleaned up trash left on the streets; a teacher organized a campaign to send “thank you” notes to Capitol custodial staff. Neighbors similarly came together to clean up after the unrest in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis.
These are more than just feel-good stories. They are emblematic of extant strands of our culture that are very different than the polarization we are so often reminded of.[i]
Ultimately, the people of this country want reform, they want fairness, they want people to be healthy and safe and comfortable. But we’re so bogged down in the chaos, in surface-level anger, in a government that seems to be in a perpetual deadlock. It makes it so hard to see that most of us really have the same goals.
When we were talking about the beauty of today’s passage at Bible Study this week, we noted that what is described is here a truly utopian world, a perfect place harkening back to God’s original creation. And sadly, I think it’s easy to be dismissive of writings like this, because it feels so out of reach, so unreal in today’s world. But this is simple because, as Brian noted in Bible Study, we have a tendency to get so bogged down in the immediate, in the frustrations of the here and now. We have a tendency to get totally overwhelmed with all the myriad problems happening right now, and it’s nearly impossible to see the big picture, nearly impossible to imagine that a world where people actually get along is, indeed, possible.
Now, remember from Jeremiah a few weeks back, when he brought God’s new covenant to the people—no longer would the younger generations be punished for the sins of their ancestors. This passage reads to me as a continuation of that new covenant—“They shall not labor in vain, / or bear children for calamity; / for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord— / and their descendents as well.” God, through Isaiah here, is saying, you can have this perfect life, and you will have this perfect life. The covenant is revised, there is no need for you to live in exile like your elders, there is no need for you all to bear the scars of their wounds. But the people weren’t there yet. They were too preoccupied with what was “supposed” to be, they were too preoccupied with the stories their elders told, and they were trying to recreate something that could not be recreated. But God is “about to create a new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” We have to forget about what came before; that’s not what creates this new and perfect world. It’s a brand new thing that’s coming.
Now, thanks to this constant rhetoric about a divided nation, we absolutely become too bogged down in the present tumult, we get nostalgic for the past we either don’t actually know or that we romanticize too much. In a different article from NPR, a researcher who uses behavioral science to measure perceived divisions notes that one study “…found that Americans believe members of the other party…dislike or disagree with their party about twice as much as they actually do. Respondents…had inflated ideas about how far apart they are on gun control, immigration, and coronavirus responses. [These misperceptions] trigger reactions in the brain that only harden the idea of us vs. them.”[ii]
So in these final chapters of the book of Isaiah, you have these Judeans coming into their promised land with a lot of optimism, but becoming overwhelmed with the work it takes to rebuild a society, and disagreeing on what’s right and what’s wrong, and pointing fingers at one another; in chapter 64 and the beginning of 65, you have God scolding them for behaving the way they are. God is scolding them for creating an us vs. them mentality, for getting too hung up on the nitty gritty logistics and losing sight of the fact that they all want the same thing—they want to honor their God with a new and grand temple, they want to rebuild so that what they have is better than before, they want to go beyond the memories and expectations of their elders, but they’re letting their cynicism and arrogance get in the way. So after quite a scolding, God reminds them of the ultimate goal. God reminds them of what they can and will have once they realize that they all want the same thing—no more weeping or crying; no more untimely deaths; no more invaders and pillagers taking over their homes and farms. And a world in which the wolf and the lamb feed together.
Imagine how this must have sounded to this group of people—a group of people who had only known exile wrought from war and violence; a people who had only ever known an us vs. them mentality. It’s no wonder that’s what they reverted to when they became frustrated and lost in their renewed homeland. I wish I knew what their reaction was to hearing God’s reminder of what could be. Unfortunately, we can’t know for sure because the rest of Isaiah is just God going on a little rant on how to worship. But the temple was eventually rebuilt, so one can assume they took God’s words about this perfect future to heart. I wonder if there were some who scoffed at God’s words though, not believing that in such a fractured society such a perfect world would ever be possible.
It’s hard not to be cynical today, for sure. From overblown headlines about what a divided country we are, to constant snark and pessimism rampant on the internet, to news of war abroad. But on this Sunday when we celebrate and honor veterans of our own country’s wars, let’s remember that the vast majority of us do indeed have the same goal. We want a world in which there are no more untimely deaths; a world where there is no more pillaging, no more overthrowing of governments, no more oppression, no more us vs. them. We want a world in where “no more [will] an infant…live but a few days, or an old person…does not live out a lifetime.” We want a world in which “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, / the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” Don’t we want this world for our veterans? Don’t we want this world for our children?
Church, we can have it. It only feels out of reach because we appear more divided than we truly are. Our country’s two-party system and various forms of media have poisoned us into exaggerating and emphasizing our differences. We are not as divided as those in power suggest we are.
“…for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be.” This is a reference to a verse from the book of Job, where a tree the resilience of a tree is described—“For there is hope for a tree, / if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, / and that its shoots will not cease.” Things may seem difficult, verging on hopeless; it may seem we are too at odds with one another to function properly, to create the change that we want in this broken world. But with God’s Love, we are resilient. We are blessed. We are capable of looking deeper past the surface to see that we are not so different. That we want everyone to be safe, to be happy, to be at peace. We are capable of bringing about this brand new world where the wolf and the lamb feed together. Amen.
[i] https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2021/01/20/biden-inauguration-polarization-unity-shaun-adamec-nat-kendall-taylor
[ii] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/884039395/new-research-shows-people-are-not-as-divided-along-political-lines-as-they-think
