A Glass Half Full

by

Stephen T. Martorella

This is my best recollection of a sermon freely rendered

on August 19, 2007 based on Is 66:1-5 and Rev. 21:1-5.

Isaiah 66:1-5 (KJV)

Isa 66:1 Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest?

Isa 66:2 For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.

Isa 66:3 He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man; he that sacrificeth a lamb, as if he cut off a dog's neck; he that offereth an oblation, as if he offered swine's blood; he that burneth incense, as if he blessed an idol. Yea, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations.

Isa 66:4 I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear: but they did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in which I delighted not.

Isa 66:5 Hear the word of the LORD, ye that tremble at his word; Your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name's sake, said, Let the LORD be glorified: but he shall appear to your joy, and they shall be ashamed.

Revelation 21:1-5 (KJV)

Rev 21:1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

Rev 21:2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Rev 21:3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.
Rev 21:4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Rev 21:5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

When we think of the prophet Isaiah, we most often think of those passages we read during the Advent and Christmas season that foretell the coming of Jesus. These passages often invoke images of peace and Jesus as a messenger of peace. But a great deal of the material in Isaiah is harsh and frightening, offering contrasting prophecies of doom and death against visions of salvation and eternal grace. Chapter 66 in particular is surrounded by some grisly images, and the material chosen for this morning’s reading does not reflect the true terror of those passages. So too with Revelation, this most beautiful vision of the Holy City read this morning is surrounded by apocalyptic passages of wholesale death and destruction.

Prophesies have been most often interpreted in a morality context, measuring reward and punishment based on good or bad behavior, a carrot and stick approach. This has led critics to suggest that God seems to be a rather immature and unruly god who meets out retribution and reward on a whim. One is reminded of a Star Trek episode where an intergalactic force dispensed lightning bolts alternatively with medieval feasts of plenty as if like a god. He turned out to be an errant intergalactic adolescent who had gotten away from his parents’ guidance and was running out of control with his “game-playing” against our heroes of the starship Enterprise.

Non-skeptical Christians, too, have difficulty with these passages and often solve the problem by just skipping them. We read the good stuff, but go into denial about that which makes us uncomfortable. I call this a Disneyland approach to the Bible, just wave a magic wand and everything is good. Often we explain these passages by saying that that they were written by and for an unsophisticated, primitive and superstitious people who needed to be frightened in order to keep them under control and maintain their loyalty.

My friends, I don’t believe that for a minute. On the contrary, passages like Psalm 8: “O Lord, what is man that you are mindful of him…[that you] crowned him with glory and honor” show a depth & probity that suggests a highly sophisticated, deeply philosophical, and intensely modern and pragmatic people. Indeed, we marvel at the scientific advances of even the most ancient cultures, who plied the seas and measured distance as well as time and season from observing the sky. What could not be explained was treated with great imagination and respect, showing the creativity of the ancient world to be able to still envision what it could not fully grasp.

The histories of the Bible show a high degree of detailed information, showing an organizational mind and an eye for specifics. Particularly in the numbering and sorting and giving of dimensions of buildings and in the descriptions of rituals, there is not only attention to detail, but a great deal more. We don’t even bother to read these passages, because to our pragmatic 21^st century minds, we want our numbers and measurements to be real numbers. When we read dimensions for a building we want to be able to envision the building. Of course, try finding a real number when sizing clothing.

Biblical numbers were not meant to give accurate counts or specific measurements; they were symbolic numbers that were filled with different meanings. Numbers were meant to explain the “why” and not the “how”. For those numbers to be meaningful to us, we would have to know what meanings were symbolized by the primary number set, and then understand that the multiples of those numbers were expressions of hyperbole, exaggeration that showed emphasis. We tend not to read these passages that don’t make sense to us because we would have to work a bit to arrive at what they mean. But if we were to take the time to study that material ahead of time we would be rewarded richly with meaningful explanations of the significance of why we do such things as religious rituals. Those meanings could well apply to New Testament rituals as well as Old.

So what do we do with our prophesy passages? If we only read one side of the story, we have that proverbial half glass of water, half empty or half full depending on what we focus on. To illustrate the inadequacy of such an approach, just imagine a sermon that tells us “we are all doomed to burn in an eternal fire, that’s today’s lesson, now we can all go home,” an expression of the bad without the good, the opposite of the Disney version. There have been many sermon illustrations on that half glass, but that is not what we are going to do today. We are treating the half glass as its own entity, and asking “Is that all there is?” Yet, God promises us “a cup overflowing”. How do we get there from where we are now?

I would like to offer an alternative way of looking at these prophetic passages, one that attempts to understand the balance between good and bad. Such a balance and division into two planes exist throughout the Bible. The heavens were divided from the earth, night from day, Cain from Abel, and so on.

Interestingly, and again showing the sophisticated wisdom of biblical writers, Eve is not divided from Adam, as some other ancient creation myths propose, but was co-created from a common element.
Simply put, let us consider the prophetic literature as a macrocosm of our lives. In the lives of the ancients, just as in our lives today, people awoke to mainly bad news, and occasionally some good news. The prophecies are a reflection of that, but in God-language they are expressed in hyperbole. As God is magnified, so are the prophecies, both the good and the bad, in balance, showing what is and what could be.
Here is where the morality part comes back in, as in all things there is accountability whether we want there to be or not. The morality exists not for its own sake, but is rather a reflection of what is, if you wish, simply a part of the natural order of things. God is telling us in the prophecies that if we focus on God, at the start and end of each day, for example, that our lives will be better. The prophecies simply are a magnification of what is already a part of the natural order of our lives.

While the ancients of Israel certainly knew about war, disease, and death, they could never have envisioned airplanes flying into buildings, or the horrible mechanized weapons of mass destruction that are our reality today. Modern writers have commented on what would have been to the ancients the purely mythological and symbolic descriptions of strange beasts of destruction. They point out with irony how many of those descriptions resemble some of our modern tanks and flying missiles. What was hyperbole then is perhaps much closer to reality now. Could the Jerusalem where every tear is wiped away also be closer to us now than it was to the ancients?

When I was asked to start thinking about delivering a sermon, about a week and a half ago, two particular events of that week made a sharp impact on my mind. One was the mining disaster in Utah, and while that will be an ongoing investigation, it appears to be just a horrible and unforeseeable occurrence. We want to call it an “accident” but it appears that the mine collapse was due to seismic activity, the natural process of the earth correcting itself. We all understand stock market corrections. We don’t like them, but we understand them. So, too, does the natural world in which we live go through corrections, and some of the natural processes of our planet can be devastating to us. This is not the act of a vengeful or capricious god, but simply the natural order of things, even as is death itself.

On the other hand, the second event of that week, the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, also called an “accident” appears to have a much different cause, human neglect of our infrastructure. That’s a big word but it’s a simple concept. We don’t fix things because it is not politically expedient, and the infrastructure of cities and towns across America is in desperate need of repair. Apparently, early reports suggest that it was known that this bridge was insufficient to support the volume of traffic that was on it for some 20 years, but the plans to fix it were shifted to within 40 years. Now, the precise way in which this bridge collapsed showed the engineering precision and skill with which it was built. The hand of God was clearly apparent here as well, and while it is no consolation to those who perished, the potential for a massive death toll from the wall of stopped traffic plus the extra weight of construction vehicles on the bridge surely weighs heavy on the mind of the observer. It was truly a miracle that so many were saved. But for the grace of God, that could have been any of us for the great number of years we drove across the old Jamestown Bridge knowing full well that its deterioration was critical and its collapse immanent, especially being prone to collapse if struck by a ship or barge. (Ironically, there was an abandoned tanker that broke off its temporary mooring and was found floating around that area some years ago.)

So what would happen if our government leaders took the time to focus on God at the start and end of each day? Well, I suppose the ACLU would be all over them, but this is not a church state issue. This is about people’s personal ordering of their lives. The prophecies ask us to put God first. When I was with the Marionists in Baltimore, we were required to attend the first and last services of each day, the first being somewhere around 5:30 or 6am, the last about 10:30pm until 11. They recited the hours, and we were encouraged to attend as many of the services as we could whenever we were in the house, but were required to be at the first and last of the day every day.

One would have thought that schedule to be exhausting, especially given that the Marionists were by no means a prayer order. They were very much involved in the secular professions as doctors, lawyers, teachers, and musicians, to bring those skills into the church and impart religious values to the outside world. I confess that I was never so invigorated physically nor so personally fulfilled with peace and purpose as I was in that life.

Imagine…imagine…do you remember that song by John Lennon. It imagined a perfect society, where there was no more war, hatred or persecution. But Lennon’s society also had no God, “no religion too”. This reflects the thinking of those skeptics who see God as the author of our prejudice and religion as the crutch of our dependency. This indeed was part and parcel of Karl Marx’s Utopian vision for humanity that so attracted American intellectuals in the 20’s and 30’s. Nice as it sounds, look what happened. It simply didn’t work. No, I do not ascribe to Lennon’s Utopia, for we know that God is the author of all our gifts and blessings, and by ourselves we will only turn inward to our own selfish interests. That is how Utopian society was twisted by those dictators so hungry for power that “The World [was] Not Enough”.

Nevertheless, imagine…imagine…what if our society and its leaders so started and ended their personal day with prayer and retreat, focusing their thoughts on God’s altars instead of their own personal altars (the false gods). Might such a focus lead to a restructuring of priorities? Might such priorities lead to more efficient and sufficient government, a better environment, and a healthier American lifestyle? Imagine…so near, we can almost touch it…almost…touch it. But, alas, almost but not quite. We cannot change others, only ourselves. We can clean up our corner of the world by ordering our priorities and keeping our focus as God instructs us to do in the prophesies. And while we might not solve all the problems of our world, we will certainly be in a better place and more content in our own lives.

So how might we achieve that focus? Well, we can use some of this morning’s readings as a starting point. “Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness.” Consider that for a moment. Holiness is described as beautiful, and Beauty is described as Holy. Again, the ancients are way ahead of us. The ancient Greeks saw the human body as beautiful. Thus Olympic sport was considered an art. The model for musical composition in the 19^th century was based on a concept developed by a plant biologist. While most universities have a college of Arts and Sciences, few today realize the interconnectedness of art and science, or of aesthetics in general. But biblical writers understood this unity, for much of the Bible is poetry, and so many of the images and their musical languages are so very beautiful.

You probably realize by now that I preach better with my fingers on the keyboard than I can with words from this desk, so I am going to end this sermon with a musical thought. I am going to play the next to last piece from Robert Schumann’s Kinderscenen (Children’s Pieces). I say next to last because after a book full of musical pieces filled with a child’s adventures (these pieces were autobiographical for Schumann), the “Child Falls Asleep” and dreams. When he awakens, he is an adult, therefore the last piece is “The Poet Speaks”. But we are going back to the piece where the child dreams. We don’t know what Schumann’s dreams were, we do know he carried them to the asylum where he passed his last days.

Use the music to find your own dreams, by taking a favorite scripture passage and letting it speak to you through the music. If you can’t think of a passage offhand, use one from this morning’s service, “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness”, or Psalm 8, or the beautiful vision of the Holy City where God will wipe away every tear. One of my favorites is from Matthew: “Come to me all who are weary and I will give you rest.” Reflect on your scripture choice, while the child in you dreams…