Proper 28-C, November 18, 2007

No defense lawyer, at least no defense lawyer that I know, if he or she would read this Gospel passage, would ever take Jesus seriously when Jesus says that one need not and should not prepare one’s defense in advance. No such lawyer, no matter how certain he is of the innocence of his client and no matter how self-assured he is of his ability to mount a convincing defense, will go into court unprepared. That would be foolish.

Rather, he will spend hours ahead of time, days even, if necessary, putting all his convincing ducks in a row so that no matter what the prosecution throws at him, he will have the proper and adequate response. That is the only way to win a case in court, the only way.

And yet Jesus says that when we are called to defend our actions as Christians, there is no need to prepare ahead of time words that will justify why we did what we did. When the time comes for such defending, says Jesus, the proper words will flow from our lips, so much so that those who are persecuting, and perhaps even prosecuting us, will not be able to contradict anything we say. We will win our case every time. Or will we?

It is true, of course, that good deeds need no defending, that loving actions speak for themselves. Or so it would seem. But the truth is that whenever someone wants us to justify a loving action, there is nothing we can say that will convince that person that we did the right thing. If our accuser cannot see the rightness of our cause, no words will ever make any difference no matter how profound those words.

Jesus himself is our prime example here. When he was put on trial, Jesus kept silent before his accusers. He knew his words were a waste of time on them. No matter what he said, it would be rejected. And even when he did make a defense, all he said, in essence, was that his actions spoke for themselves. But his accusers were not listening. They had no intention of listening. They so wanted to convict him that they were willing to accept false testimony over truth itself. Or as Pilate hauntingly asked, "What is truth?"

Besides, who of us even justifies to ourselves why we are doing something that is good and loving? We just do it. And if later on we happen to think about what we have done, our only justification was and still is that it was the right thing to do. What more need we say? If that defense does not hold for others, so be it. It’s the only one we will make. It is the only one we need make. It is the only one we can make.

In the meantime, as Jesus notes at the beginning of today’s Gospel reading, life will go on, as it always has and it always will. Buildings will crumble with age; wars will be waged for whatever reason wars are waged; nature will be nature, bringing with it floods and hurricanes and tornadoes; people will suffer from famine, either because the soil will not produce fruit or because those who have will not share with those who have not; plagues and sickness and disease will never be totally wiped out: when we conquer one disease, another, perhaps even more deadly, will rise to take its place. Such is life on this earth.

Jesus did not come to change life itself. He came to change lives. Jesus did not come to remove all the obstacles people and nature devise to make life even more difficult than it sometimes is. Jesus came to show us how to live this life in spite of all the difficulties and obstacles we encounter each and every day, some of our own making, some because of the sinfulness and selfishness of others, others simply because of the vagaries of life itself.

Sometimes we misunderstand all this. Sometimes we think, or are led to believe – as, it seems, were many of the people Jesus himself was encountering in this passage – that Jesus came to bring back the Garden of Eden, or something close to it. Many believed that the Messiah would institute a reign of God where all things would be made new and nothing bad would ever happen.

As is evident from all of Scripture, neither God nor Jesus ever promised the proverbial rose garden. All that was and is promised is that God will be with us to help us live life in this world with all its difficulties and problems, with all the sinfulness and selfishness that abounds both in our own lives and in the lives of others.

That promise to be with us is enough. It is even more than enough. There are certainly times when we do not deserve God’s love and assistance, grace and strength, so stubborn and stupid and silly are we in the way we live out our lives of faith, partial faith, or simply lack thereof.

No matter what happens to the world around us, Jesus reminds us in this passage that God is always with us. Our task and responsibility is to remain with God by seeking and seeing and serving the Jesus we meet in everyone we encounter every day. If and when we do that, the picture Isaiah paints in today’s first lesson of the peaceable kingdom on earth could become a reality. I repeat, could become a reality if we all did our part.

Several years ago in Spokane I heard Tony Compolo speak to a group of civic leaders in town. He used this text from Isaiah to encourage them to appropriate it for themselves as both a vision to uphold and a rally cry to make that vision become a reality. I have read this passage many, many times, but must admit I had never seen those words in this kind of light before. I had read and seen them in their original context: a vision of hope for the people while they were in exile.

The truth is we are in exile, are we not? We are not living in the kind of world God created for us, a world where infants do not die, where everyone lives a full life, where we can build our own homes and live off the produce of our own crops, where no one is an enemy of another. That is the world God has in mind and in store for us, if only we would see the vision and dream the dream and do what we can, each of us in our own lives, to make that dream and vision begin to come true.

Without a vision we perish because we have nothing to live for. Yet, so often, the visions we claim to have are all too narrow and our dreams too shortsighted. We set goals that are too easily reached and our dreams that are too easily accomplished. We also make them too self-centered. Isaiah’s vision was for the whole world, a world where what he dreamed would become a reality and not just for his own little corner of the world.

Compolo urged those in attendance to think big and broad and not small and narrow. Isaiah did the same. The vision is placed before us. It has been there for several thousand years. In so many ways the Millennium Development Goals are precisely just that. Is it not time we begin to take that vision seriously, make those goals our own, and then work to make it happen? We will not need a defense lawyer to justify our actions. They will speak for themselves. In the process we will be living out our faith, doing God’s work and making Isaiah’s vision a reality.