Stewarding Beauty, Bodies, and Place in Light of Future Christian Hope

A Sermon on Isaiah 65:17-25 Originally Preached at the Mission Cincinnati

Well good morning, friends.  For those of you who don’t know me, my name is the Rev. Kristen Yates, and I am the Associate Pastor for Formational Discipleship here at the Mission, and it is my delight as always to share the Word of God with you.

So lately, I have been thinking a lot about a quote from Corrie ten Boom that says, “What feeds the soul matters as much as what feeds the body.” 

Well, if my Facebook feed is any indication of our culture at large, we live in a time when a lot more effort is placed on feeding the body as compared to the soul.  We work hard to eat well, to lose weight, and to become physically fit.  We educate our minds and regulate our emotions so that we can live productive lives in our world.  We take time to slow down and meditate in order to relax our bodies, free ourselves from anxiety, and prepare ourselves to jump right back into world of action again. 

And while all of this can be very good – in fact, later on in the sermon, I’ll talk about the importance of our bodies, I do wonder if we end up focusing so much on the body that we neglect the soul.  For after all, it is often easier to see the progress we are making in the physical realm rather than in the spiritual realm. 

And yet, care of our souls is vitally important.  When we take time to cultivate love, joy, peace, faith, and hope in our souls; and when we regularly meditate on beauty and God’s purposes for us and our world; the long-term impact on our lives, others’ lives, and world around us becomes ever more apparent.  This is especially true in times of stress and difficulty.  People who tend to their souls often seem to have a better ability to persevere, to show resilience, and to act in loving and kind ways towards others even in difficult circumstances.  Case in point:  think about some of the amazing people who survived the concentration camps of the Holocaust, people like Victor Frankl, Ellie Weisel, Corrie ten Boom and others.

According to Viktor Frankl, who was not only a concentration camp survivor but also a psychiatrist, those who acted out of love and kindness, spent time contemplating a loved one or other things of beauty, and found meaning even in the most unimaginable circumstances, were able to cultivate a true hope for life, and thus had a better chance of survival.  This contrasted with those who had false hopes in particular outcomes, which when they didn’t come to pass, sent the people into despair.

As for Viktor, himself, he imagined one day teaching what he had discovered in camp about love, meaning, and purpose in all life circumstances, and he wrote out his lectures.  This kept him from despairing.  As for Ellie, despite losing faith in God for some time, he was able to fight despair by trying to stay alive out of love for his aging dad.  And as for Corrie, she cultivated hope in God’s ultimate care for her and others as she led informal worship gatherings for other prisoners and gave thanks for the little gifts that God continually bestowed upon her (gifts like ants which most of us don’t think of as gifts).  As Corrie would say, “one can never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God”, and thus she kept on living life to its full despite the atrocities all around her.

Therefore amazingly, against all the odds, these men and women and others like them were able to survive the concentration camps rather than dying in despair, which is what took the lives of many during this time.  They were able to look upon a sunset and say as one concentration camp prisoner said, “How beautiful the world could be.”  For these men and women, love, meaning, purpose, and beauty gave them hope in the absolute worst of times, and this hope kept them alive.  Friends, would you pray with me. 

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you that in the midst of a broken world where it is easy to sometimes fall into despair, we have been given great hope in your promise of eternal life.  Lord Jesus, would you now help us today grasp more fully the nature of this future hope so that we can rest in your promises and live our lives now to the full, no matter what the future days may bring us.  Amen. 

So today, we continue our sermons series, Soundtrack, which looks at the art, music, and poetry of the people of God found in the Scriptures and explores how these unique creations have helped both Jews and Christians express their unique identity, purpose, and destiny throughout the centuries.  Today, we specifically explore an example of prophetic poetry written by the Prophet Isaiah in the latter days of Judah before its fall and the fall of its capitol, Jerusalem.  When we get to today’s passage, which is close to the end of the Book of Isaiah, we encounter a poem of great hope, which we’ll explore in some depth, however, before we do that, it is important that we know what comes before this passage. 

So, throughout the Book of Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah alternated between messages of judgement and messages of hope, all done in a poetic fashion.  In his messages of judgement, he laid it out clearly for the people:  after generations of the Jews failing to live out God’s commandments, falling into idolatry and failing to uphold justice among its people, God was going to allow the Jews to reap the consequences of their sins and to be exiled by the Babylonians just like the Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been exiled by the Assyrians.  No doubt, this was going to be a difficult experience for the people as they lost their homeland and temple, faced oppression, and questioned their very identity, for who, after all, were they without the Promised Land and without God’s presence in the Temple?  The Exile would be an occasion for great lament, and in fact, we’ll hear from Charles next week on the nature of this lament once the people found themselves carried away to Babylon.    

Thankfully, however, this calamity wasn’t the end of the story for the Jews, and in Isaiah’s messages of hope, he makes clear that God would remain faithful to his people, even considering what they were about to face.   Yes, judgement would come in the form of the Exile, but in the grand sweep of God’s timing, this judgment would be just a blip in time.  For one day, God would restore His people and fulfill all His promises to them.  This restoration would begin with the coming of the Suffering Servant and Messianic King who would die to atone for the sins of His people and would culminate in the establishment of an everlasting Kingdom of blessing for the Jews, as well as for all nations. 

It is this everlasting Kingdom of blessing that is explored in today’s reading from Isaiah, and Isaiah chose to capture this Kingdom of blessings with poetry.  Why poetry?  Well as Brian Zahnd says, “Prose is the vehicle for inert information; but poetry is the magic carpet of prophetic imagination. . . . poetry is the mystical means of imagining what could be. . . .  poetry unlocks the door to infinite possibility.” 

In short, there was no way for Isaiah to describe precisely what this everlasting Kingdom would look like.  It would be far more beautiful and glorious than anyone could ever imagine or try to describe.  Nevertheless, Isaiah could point to some key realities of this Kingdom through his poetry, and these realities could instill hope in the people. 

So, what were the realities that were important for the people to know?  Well, it was important for them to know that this Kingdom would be a return to, restoration, and a fuller blossoming of Eden, that place where the first humans continually lived in intimacy with God.  Indeed, there would be a new heavens and new earth where that ancient snake who wreaked so much havoc in the first garden would eat dust and where the animals would live in harmony, the people would not die prematurely, and the people would enjoy the fruits of their labor.  Indeed, all the curses for disobedience outlined in Deuteronomy 28, curses such as losing children and not enjoying one’s home and vineyards, would be reversed.  As such, this future kingdom would be full of great rejoicing.  As for the former things of life, including suffering, distress, violence, and weeping, they would be no more and would not even be remembered. 

Thus, as Isaiah prepared the Jewish people through his poetry for a future of displacement and loss of loved ones and beloved places, he also prepared them for a much greater and everlasting future, filled with great joy. This would give the Jews great hope in the coming years and would help them to live fully in their unwanted circumstances, and in fact to even build houses, plant gardens, and seek out the welfare of Babylon, as Jeremiah would later counsel them. 

This message of hope would sustain the Jewish people in the coming centuries.  And later down the line, this message of hope, accompanied by the Revelation of John on Patmos, would also sustain the Christians, as well. For what would become clear in the ensuing years with the return of the Jews to their homeland, which ended up being a rather underwhelming experience, was that this Everlasting Kingdom had not yet arrived. 

However, with the arrival of Jesus, the hope for this Kingdom would be sparked once again.  It would become extremely clear to the early Christians that Jesus was Isaiah’s prophesied Messianic King and Suffering Servant, and through John’s Revelation on Patmos, it would be clear that Isaiah’s hope of a New Heavens and New Earth would still come to pass.  God loved His people and would absolutely be faithful to His promises, however, His people had to wait just a little longer. 

In the meantime, the Christians could look for signs of the Kingdom breaking forth throughout the earth, be guided and strengthened by the Holy Spirit, and most importantly, sustain great hope in midst of terrible persecutions in the first few centuries of Christianity.  For they knew that one day, the New Jerusalem would come down to earth, all tears would be wiped away, and the earth would be restored to what God had originally intended for it when He first created it.  This would be Eden renewed and fulfilled.  This would be the complete merging back together of Heaven and Earth, the place where God reigns and the place where people dwell.  And this vision gave the Christians meaning and purpose, and filled them with great love, so much so that many were willing to lay down their own lives for the sake of God and the sake of others.  

These stories of these early Christians, as well as those throughout the centuries, who lived their lives to the full because of the great hope they held onto, are very much worth telling, and if I had more time this morning, I would share some of these with you, but for today, I want to spend the remainder of our time together asking what this hope of a New Heavens and a New Earth means for us?  For if we are being honest, many of us, even those raised in the church over many decades, have not really understood what our future hope is. 

In fact, many Christians have come to believe an unbiblical view of the afterlife.  The popular view that many of us have held is that after we die, our souls depart from our bodies and earth and float off to this other blissful place called Heaven, well that is if we are believers. Thus, in many ways, our main goal in life is simply biding our time and looking forward to our eternal home, which is heaven. 

Yet, this view is not held by the Biblical writers such as Isaiah and John and Paul.  Our souls do not escape the earth and float off to heaven, but rather at the end of time, our bodies, united to our souls, will be resurrected, and we will dwell forever thereafter in the New Creation, the place where heaven and earth have come to completely overlap.  These new bodies and new creation will look different than what we now experience because they will now dwell under God’s perfect rule and continual presence.  At the same time, they will have continuity with our present bodies and present earth.  As such, what we do with our bodies and earth during our present lives very much matters; in fact, how we tend to them (or not tend to them) reverberates throughout all eternity.    

But tending rightly to our bodies and to our earth begins with us first rightly tending to our souls, something I mentioned earlier we have a tendency to ignore in this day and age.  We are to spend time grasping this picture of our future hope and resting in it.  We are to rest in God’s love and presence made available to us even now through the Holy Spirit.  We are to pay attention to all the ways the Kingdom is currently inbreaking in our world, to indeed see that “the world could be so beautiful”, even when there are signs of decay still all around us.  And we are to continually pray that God’s will would indeed be done on earth and in our lives even as it is done in heaven. 

Friends, when we meditate upon all this, what we will find is that we are sustained over the long haul.  In a broken world, there will be difficult days ahead for all of us, brought about by a groaning creation, our own failings and mistrust of God, and the failings and injustices of others.   As much as we would wish otherwise, there will be moments of great lament.  And yet, for those of us who have put our trust in Jesus, when these difficult days come, we can avoid falling into despair, for we know that our future is secure, and it is it immensely beautiful.

We also know that our future is embodied, and thus an important implication of this biblical vision of the new heavens and new earth is that we do not just bide our time now.  Rather, we have work to do as we anticipate that day when Heaven will completely overlap with Earth.  Now, what does this mean in practical terms?  Well, first, it means working to create beauty.  As N.T. Wright says,

“Part of the role of the church . . . should be . . . to foster and sustain lives of beauty and aesthetic meaning at every level, from music making in the village pub to drama in the local primary school, from artists’ and photographers’ workshops to still-life painting classes, from symphony concerts . . . to driftwood sculptures.  The church, because it is the family that believes in hope for new creation, should be the place in every town and village where new creativity bursts forth for the whole community . . …”

And taking N.T. Wright thoughts even further,  we can say that  the church should also be the place in every town where the work for justice begins and flows out to its surrounding neighborhoods.  Thus, the second practical outworking of looking forward to an embodied future in the new heavens and new earth is working for justice.  If we are serious in our prayers asking God for His Kingdom to come on earth as in heaven, then we cannot rest content in the world as it sits now, with its many injustices.  We are to partner with God in bringing rescue, freedom, reconciliation, and transformation wherever He invites us, anticipating that day when God will put all things fully to rights. 

And that, friends, bring us to the third practical outworking of our embodied future.  If our future home is heaven and earth, if materiality (in other words, our bodies and all of the earth) is good as God originally pronounced in the creation and then demonstrated powerfully again in the incarnation and His promise of renewed creation, then we are to care for the earth.  We are to be stewards of our bodies and environment, demonstrating the goodness of creation and also anticipating our future home in the renewed earth.  The local church should be the place in every town that demonstrates what it looks like to steward this particular place very well, while also thinking about the stewardship of the whole world.

Thus friends, the implications for us are clear.  Hope in a new heavens and a new earth means contemplating beauty and goodness wherever it can be found now; trusting God in difficult circumstances and knowing that one day, He will put all things to rights; and waiting in expectancy for the redemption of all things.   In doing so, we will tend to our souls deeply, and when we do that, we will then be prepared for the work we need to do, and that is creating beauty, working for justice, and stewarding creation – all very good and meaningful work that will require us to depend on the Lord’s strength to see our tasks through, especially when opposition comes and tempts us to despair.

Friends, this morning I began this sermon with the brief stories of Holocaust concentration camp survivors who were able to live against extreme odds and to eschew despair because they were able to cultivate hope, love, and meaning in their lives even in the worst of circumstances.  While none of us will hopefully ever experience the extremes of these people, I do believe that they have much to teach us.  And so do the lives of the Israelites in exile and the early Christian living under persecution.  For they teach us our need to cultivate hope, love, and meaning in a broken world, and I believe that as Christians, we can best do this by holding on to our hope in the New Heavens and New Earth and by anticipating this beautiful reality in the way that we live in our world now.   

So, Mission Cincinnati, let us tend to our souls and tend to our bodies.  Let us hold onto our great hope in the New Heavens and New Earth and let that be the inspiration for creating beauty, working for justice, and stewarding our creation.  Let us work to make the church the hub of all this work that will then flow out in blessing to our surrounding communities.  May it be so.  In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.