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Christmas I

 Isaiah 62

6 O Jerusalem, I have posted watchmen on your walls; they will pray to the LORD day and night for the fulfillment of his promises. Take no rest, all you who pray. 7 Give the LORD no rest until he makes Jerusalem the object of praise throughout the earth. 8 The LORD has sworn to Jerusalem by his own strength: “I will never again hand you over to your enemies. Never again will foreign warriors come and take away your grain and wine. 9 You raised it, and you will keep it, praising the LORD. Within the courtyards of the Temple, you yourselves will drink the wine that you have pressed.”10 Go out! Prepare the highway for my people to return! Smooth out the road; pull out the boulders; raise a flag for all the nations to see. 11 The LORD has sent this message to every land: “Tell the people of Israel, ‘Look, your Saviour is coming. See, he brings his reward with him as he comes.'” 12 They will be called the Holy People and the People Redeemed by the LORD. And Jerusalem will be known as the Desirable Place and the City No Longer Forsaken.

The greatest privilege of my job is hearing stories. Personal anecdotes, treasured stories, even the occasional tall-tale: they reveal both the teller and life in the city. Three examples:

Alex, whose father built houses in the 1930’s, and the day that a gentleman bought one of them, in cash, in three one-thousand dollar bills. His best guess was that the house was being bought for the mistress of a bootlegger.

Jack, who worked at the TTC maintenance yard, and participated in endless speculation about how fast a streetcar could really go. One evening, while crossing the Bloor Viaduct, a driver answered the question when he reached 70 mph before reaching the Danforth side only to be met by a cop. Needless to say, it was his last trip.

Rose, who worked for 42 years at the pen counter at Eaton’s. While some might wonder how fulfilling her work selling fountain pens was, she would remind them that she was one a first name basis with most of Toronto’s business elite. She was sent to Montreal on at least one occasion to tour the Waterman factory, and also conducted a clandestine friendship with the “pen girl” at Simpson’s across the street in the day when Eaton’s employees were not allowed to fraternize with the enemy.

Hearing the stories, listening to the intonation of the teller, one cannot help but be drawn into an abiding sense of innocence. Certainly stories of bootleggers and speeding streetcars and outhouses being tipped over on Halloween have some edge to them (that’s why they are great stories) but the underlying tenor of the stories is a kind of sweetness that belongs to a different age.

And these stories make you wonder about 2020. What kind of stories will we tell? How will we explain the pandemic in 20 years, or 40 years? And what kind of frame will be put around these stories, both in terms of lessons learned and the long-term result of a global crisis? Obviously time will tell, since it seems we are still very-much in the centre of the storm. Yet even as the storm breaks, and 2020 is assigned to the past, we can begin to look for perspective. And when we look for perspective, it’s always best to begin in the Bible. Hear the prophet Isaish speak:

Jerusalem, I have posted watchmen on your walls; they will pray to the LORD day and night for the fulfillment of his promises. Take no rest, all you who pray. Give the LORD no rest until he makes Jerusalem the object of praise throughout the earth.

The exile has ended and the Israelites have returned to a city they can hardly recognize. The object of their desire, the city they heard described in story and verse is no longer there. So the civic leaders struggle to recreate a community amid the ruins and begin in a most disarming way: they post watchmen atop the city walls to pray aloud and remind God to fulfil his promises to the city and those now returned from exile. The effect is electrifying, and the voice of the prophet animates God’s response with these words:

Go out! Prepare the highway for my people to return! Smooth out the road; pull out the boulders; raise a flag for all the nations to see. The LORD has sent this message to every land: “Tell the people of Israel, ‘Look, your Saviour is coming. See, he brings his reward with him as he comes.’” They will be called the Holy People and the People Redeemed by the LORD. And Jerusalem will be known as the Desirable Place and the City No Longer Forsaken.

This is a reading for the time after Christmas precisely because this is what incarnation does: a Saviour is coming—look he is already here—and he will bring the reward longed for in a people redeemed and a city with two new names: The Desirable Place and the City No Longer Forsaken. He will bring hope.

It was William Countryman who said “hearing the good news is the beginning. The rest of our life forms our response.” To understand that God has entered our world once more through a tender babe means that God will help us transform the ruined places and create The Desirable Place and the City No Longer Forsaken.

And so we look forward to 2021 and the changes to come. A city inoculated against the pandemic, along with people everywhere. An economic recovery based on helping the greatest number of people. Food banks and drop-ins for people in emergency situations, and not a way to solve problems that our governments seem incapable of solving. And a new look at racial justice, hoping that when people remember 2020 it will be for the year Black Lives Matters entered our common consciousness—and not just the pandemic.

The only positive thing about returning to a destroyed city was that the Israelites, for the very first time, were equal. They were having a common experience, an experience that led them to imagine new ways of forming and maintaining their society, new ways of seeing each other. Exile and return became a new beginning, where compassion happened more readily. This was then translated into the birth of hope found in Jesus, and the grown-up teachings we read throughout the year. In many ways the message is the same: understand Jesus and you will see God. Love him and follow in his way. See him in others, and remember that he walks with us still. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 11:40 AM