Sermon Archive

"Changing the Wind"

The wind—like the one that chilled us to the bone last Friday&mdashthe wind seems somehow to be sneaking its way into this year's Advent sermons. Last week Cheryl quoted a line from the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (1967), a line that goes: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

And this week, let me observe that according to the Reverend Jim Wallis, you don't need a weatherman to check out the wind because politicians are already doing that quite well. As Wallis has put it: "They're the ones ... who walk around [Washington] with their fingers held high in the air, having just licked them and put them up to see which way the wind is blowing. It's quite a sight&mdashmen and women walking all around the Capital [sic] grounds with their wet index fingers pointed at the sky. The political leaders are really very good at figuring out the direction of the wind, and are quite used to quickly moving in that direction." (God's Politics, HarperSanFranciso, 2005, p. 21)

"Change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political decisions are being made, and you will change the outcomes." End of quote. (God's Politics, p. 22)

Thank God that neither the prophet we know as "Second Isaiah" nor the prophet we know as John the Baptist was a politician. Thank God that both of these proved instead to be "wind-changers."

Now, "Second Isaiah" is the person who gave us this morning's First Lesson. He prophesied some two and a half millennia ago, around the year 545 B.C. His people, the Jews, were in exile, held captive in the land of Babylon, far from Jerusalem and their native land, with little or no hope of ever being allowed to return home to rebuild the temple of God that had been destroyed. But "Second Isaiah" addressed his people's pessimism and despair by changing the wind. In place of the words of gloom and judgment that people were accustomed to hearing from their prophets, "Second Isaiah" proclaimed instead words of hope:

"Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God." (Isaiah 40:1a) "Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken." (Isaiah 40:4-5) "Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, 'Here is your God!' See, the LORD God ... is like a shepherd who feeds his flock, who gathers the lambs in his arms, who carries them in his bosom, who gently leads the mother sheep." (Isaiah 40:9-10a, 11)

Yes, in place of the words of gloom and judgment that people were accustomed to hearing from their prophets, "Second Isaiah" spoke words of hope and deliverance. He changed the wind. And within just a few years time, the prophet's words of hope had found their fulfillment in concrete action. For in the year 538 B.C., the Jewish people did win permission from their new sovereign, the Persian emperor Cyrus, to start their trek home.

Then, about 565 years later, John the Baptist became another wind-changer. In that time, when a pall of gloom and oppression once again overspread the Jewish people, God sent this prophet as a messenger to proclaim and prepare the way for the Messiah, to proclaim and prepare the way for the One who would baptize not only with water but also with the fresh-blowing wind of God's Holy Spirit. And it was not only the wind that was changed, but all of history as well.

On this Second Sunday of Advent, when our lessons remind us of these two great wind-changers from our religious past, we can also hear in these lessons God's summons to become wind-changers ourselves. We can also hear God's summons to join our hands and voices to those of others of our contemporaries, so that together we, too, can become a prophetic force capable of changing the wind, of turning our nation in a different direction.

Now, according to various Pew Research Center surveys conducted over the past several months, the number of Americans who right now have confidence in Congress, or the President, or the Supreme Court, or business corporations&mdashthat number has now shrunk, in all of these categories, down to the range of just 40&mdash45%.

The factors responsible? Well, how can I count them? Iraq; Darfur; tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes; the worldwide rise in HIV infections and AIDS deaths; the rise in our national debt and deficits; the rise in poverty both here and around the world; the degradation of our planet's environment and the devastating impact of global warming; our government's imperial pretensions; our federal budget's misplaced priorities; the increase in health insurance costs for 2006 by 30% or more; the coming on line in 2006 of a new set of tax cuts that give 97% of their benefits to people earning more than $200,000&mdashall of these downers have been and still are feeding the wind of our skepticism, pessimism, cynicism.

Just last Thursday, The New York Times columnist David Brooks, who's actually a conservative, put it this way in his op-ed piece (Dec. 1, 2005, p. A33). He wrote: "...a brackish tide of pessimism has descended upon the country. Roughly two-thirds of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction... In this atmosphere of exhaustion, the political pendulum swings from engagement to cynicism.... [And] when skepticism is tinged with cynicism, as it is now, skepticism turns into passivity.... [P]eople are quick to decide that longstanding problems, like poverty and despotism, are intractable and not really worth taking on. They find it easy to delay taking any action on the distant but overwhelming problems, like the deficits, that do not impose immediate pain.... As the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman has observed, Americans begin social reforms when they are feeling confident, not when they are weary and insecure. Already the resolve to rebuild New Orleans and seize the post-Katrina moment has dissipated. The bipartisan desire to do something ambitious about energy policy is going nowhere. Even the problem of Darfur[, genocide,] evokes little more than sad sighs and shrugs."

Yes, we've got to change the wind. But how is that to happen, if we've lost our confidence?

Well, I can recall an earlier period of skepticism, pessimism, and cynicism in my lifetime&mdashthe mid-1960s, following the assassination of President Kennedy, when the principal struggle in our land was over civil rights. And I also remember that that was the only time in my life when I had the sense that I was being rushed, willy-nilly, into the frontlines of changing the wind, in the face of the great weariness and insecurity found throughout the land.

Do you remember the day in 1965 called "Bloody Sunday"? Well, it was March 7th, and the event that made it bloody happened in Selma, Alabama, just over the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Highway 80. Colonel Al Lingo's Alabama State troopers and Sheriff Jim Clark's Dallas County possemen charged forward into a column of 500 non-violent civil rights marchers, who that day were being led on the road from Selma to Montgomery by Hosea Williams and John Lewis. The troopers and possemen assaulted the peaceful marchers with nightsticks and teargas, and some 70 to 80 of the defenseless were bloodied and badly injured.

Margaret and I were living at the time just outside of Boston, in Arlington, Massachusetts, and on the night of March 7th we were watching a network telecast of Stanley Kramer's movie Judgment at Nuremberg, about a trial in 1948 of four German judges accused of being Nazi war criminals. ABC News interrupted that movie to show footage of that day's racial hatred and violence in Selma. And both of us were terribly shaken by what we were shown. Somehow Nazi crimes had morphed into American crimes.

The next day, all of us who were graduate students of religion at Harvard gathered at the Divinity School to strategize about what we could do. That era's prophet of hope, Dr. King, had called out, in the name of the God of justice, for supporters to gather by Tuesday for a second march in Selma. So the hat was passed, and that night five volunteers, including me, got on a red-eye flight to Atlanta, where, around 2:30 am, we rented a car and started the 210-mile journey to Selma. I recall that at one point during our 4-hour ride, both to keep ourselves awake and to give ourselves courage on the dark Alabama roads, we turned to singing some words from another song by Bob Dylan ("Blowin' in the Wind," 1962):

"How many years can a mountain exist Before it's washed to the sea? Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist Before they're allowed to be free? Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head Pretending he just doesn't see? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind."

Around sunrise, Tuesday morning, we arrived in Selma, at Brown Chapel, where we joined some 2,000 other marchers&mdashall of us determined somehow to "change the wind."

The events that ensued are too complex for me to summarize readily here in my sermon, but the long and the short of it is that within just a few months time the politicians in Washington had raised their index fingers and detected a changing wind. Yes, within just a few months, Congress came to pass the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, and on August 6th, President Johnson signed it into law.

Dramatic opportunities to participate on the frontlines of changing the wind occur infrequently in our lives, if ever. But less dramatic opportunities to help change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political decisions are made &mdashthese less dramatic, but no less important, opportunities to help change the wind are everywhere around us this Advent.

We do feel weary and insecure. But when we hear the Advent words of "Second Isaiah" and John the Baptist, we realize that we, too, are being called by God to have hope and to overcome our weariness, our pessimism, our cynicism. We realize that we, too, are being called by God to have hope and to lift up our voices&mdashin communications with our representatives in Washington, in water-cooler and lunchtime chats with our colleagues, in conversations with our family members, in letters to our friends.

Anguished about Iraq and Darfur? In hope, lift up your voice for the peace and reconciliation that is the way of God. Feeling that the current federal budget is an immoral document? In hope, forth-tell the Bible's concern for the poor. Disturbed that the 1,000th person since our nation reinstituted the death penalty was just executed a few days ago? In hope, speak out for Jesus-style restorative justice. Frightened that our nation isn't addressing at all effectively the spread of AIDS? In hope, propose a more humanitarian policy or two. Worried that the environment is down-the-tubes? In hope, proclaim God's desire for the preserving of Earth's integrity.

Walllis continues (p. 347):"Perhaps the only people who view the world realistically are the cynics and the saints.... And the only difference between the cynics and the saints is [that the saints trust in] the presence, power, and possibility of hope.... [You see, h]ope is not a feeling; it is a decision. And the decision for hope is based on what you believe at the deepest levels&mdashwhat your most basic convictions are about the world and [about] what the future holds... You choose hope, not as a naïve wish, but as a choice, with your eyes wide open to the reality of the world&mdashjust like the cynics[. But cynics are people] who have not [chosen] hope." Yes, as the "South African archbishop Desmond Tutu used to say famously [to his followers during the long struggle against apartheid], 'We are prisoners of hope.'" And may I add that it's precisely because we followers of Jesus are prisoners of hope that we can be wind-changers!

Yes, the key to changing the wind is replacing pessimism and cynicism with hope. And if this season of Advent is about anything at all, it's about rekindling our hope, as we prepare for the rebirth into our world of that greatest wind-changer of all: Jesus, our Savior.

Let us pray:

O God, blow upon us with the breath of Your prophetic Advent spirit, and kindle within us Your Advent gift of hope, so that we, too, may become wind-changers. In the name of Christ, we pray this. Amen.