How many of you have ever been to a family reunion? What was it for? Was it someone’s 50th anniversary, or 80th birthday, or a regular event - every few years or so, to keep in touch? One of the things I really love about living here is how close together the families are. For most of you, even if you’re not related, you’ve known each other forever. And part of the reason I value that is that the only family reunion I’ve ever been to wasn’t mine. That is, it wasn’t my family that was re-uning. It was my first year here, I think, and the first time my god children - actually, the only time all of them were here - came to visit, and we drove down to the Blue Ridge mountains and back up through Jamestown and Yorktown and
wound up at the Hayward-Walker-Winter family reunion in Silver Spring Md. I think they have been getting together every 5 years or so for two or three hundred years or thereabouts. But you know what? From what I gathered from listening to the conversations, the reunions get smaller and smaller every year, as the patriarchs and matriarchs moved on to a better world, families moved apart, and the connections between great-aunts and third cousins twice removed got less and less important. The hold the past has on us gets looser and looser as the years go by and new family ties pull in different directions. Someday perhaps the old family home there in Silver Spring will be sold, and people will gather around another family home and another tradition will begin.
Have any of you seen that happening in your own families, with children and grandchildren moving farther and farther away, and family get-togethers taking place less often and perhaps more sparsely attended?
That’s because they’re connected to the past. And the desire to be connected competes with the desire to move forward, to make progress, to build.
One way people have managed to deal with this need to be connected is to get very involved with their ancestry, with their culture or ethnicity - whether or not their immediate blood relatives are involved or not. I’m part Scottish, and in addition to the fact that one of my ancestors was a patron of John Knox who founded Scotch Presbyterianism, I also get a feeling of connectedness through the worldwide Scottish clan network. It gets held together partly because of pride of history, and partly because the clan tartans and the pipe music and so on are colorful and fun. But I think of all the ethnicities in the world who have managed to
retain that sense of group identity, the Jews have got all the rest of us beat by a country mile.
Stop and think about it for a minute. They’ve been a distinct people, with a common language and heritage and beliefs and identity for something in the neighborhood of 4000 years. And it’s not as though they’ve had it easy, either. They’ve been wanderers from Abraham on. Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees -
remember, Chaldea became Babylon, which is between Baghdad and Basra, and went to Canaan, which was God told him was supposed to belong to his descendants forever. But first they got sidetracked by a famine and wound up enslaved in Egypt for 400 years or so, and then a few centuries after they had actually managed to put together a country, they got conquered and then taken off into exile - first by Assyria and then by Babylon. Well, they came back and rebuilt the country - and the temple, and their religious institutions, but then Rome destroyed the temple in 70 AD and sent the surviving Jews to the far ends of the empire where they were, no doubt, expected to quietly blend into the local
communities and stop being such a dad-blamed nuisance to the authorities.
They were pretty much homeless for almost 1900 years. First one country and then another would either massacre them or kick them out. Ethnic cleansing and genocide were not invented during this century.
What on earth kept them together?
Well, the simple answer is God. There’s a wonderful book by Max I. Dimont called Jews, God and History which traces the astonishing story of the survival of the Jews as a people against all odds. And if you don’t believe the Jews were God’s chosen people before you read it, you won’t be in any doubt afterwards.
But what kept them together was not just the fact that God chose Abraham, commissioned Moses to bring the Jews out of Egypt, and brought the law down from Mt. Sinai. It wasn’t just their common heritage from the past that kept them together, that brought them back time after time from exile, and finally in our own day led them to create - and the rest of the world to endorse - the creation of the state of Israel.
No, it wasn’t just a common heritage. It was a common hope.
And it’s the same hope that we share.
Let me explain.
When the Northern Kingdom of Israel was taken into captivity by the Assyrians, and sold into slavery over all the known world - from China to India to Africa - Isaiah told the Jews of the southern kingdom of Judea that if they didn’t shape up and learn their lesson from what the northern kingdom had done - namely, forget God and living however they liked - they, too would be conquered and taken away into exile. Well, this hardly seems fair, does it. After all, there were people in Judea who were listening to Isaiah, who loved justice and mercy and walked humbly with their God. What about them? Would they be swept away along with their backsliding brothers and sisters?
And Isaiah answers them: “On that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that is left of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Ethiopia, from Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea. He will raise a signal for the nations, and will assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of
the earth. [Is 11:11-12]
But what day is that? It is the day when “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. [Is 11:1-2] It is the day when Jesus comes, the Messiah, the savior of Israel. All of the exiles will be gathered
back together, and they will enter into a righteous kingdom at last.
And you know what? It happened! On that day almost 2000 years ago when Jesus came into Jerusalem, the “great crowd that had come to the festival” [Jn 12:12] were exiles who had returned from every corner of the earth where they had been scattered. These were the same people who were present at Pentecost, when they all heard Peter speaking to them in their own languages - “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11
Cretans and Arabs.." [Acts 2:9-11] They didn’t all know about Jesus, many of them hadn’t been in Jerusalem long enough to hear about the Galilean rabbi who was creating such a stir in the countryside and making the Pharisees so nervous. It was simply their habit, during the festival of Passover, to line the roads leading into Jerusalem cheering for everyone who had come back to worship at the temple with them, cheering for their brothers and sisters from distant lands who were coming “in the name of the Lord.” But there were some there who had heard about Jesus, and so when they saw the simply clad figure mounted on a donkey they realized that something special was happening.
What they didn’t know was that the Messiah would come twice. You see, the Anointed One, the promised redeemer, had two missions. The first was the one Jesus proclaimed when he began his ministry three years before in his home town of Nazareth, quoting again from the prophet Isaiah, “The LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor... [Jn 61:2 That was the mission Jesus had come on this time. And as you can see God had brought them all back for this momentous event, just the way Isaiah had promised.
But they forgot that Isaiah’s prophecy included some other words, some ominous words. Verse 2 doesn’t just say that the Messiah would “proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,” it said he would also bring “the day of vengeance of our God.” That second mission would wait at least another 2000 years to be fulfilled. That second mission is what John describes in his Revelation.
And just like the first time, many people began to believe that God had forgotten, that they had somehow misunderstood the prophecies. Others believed that the Jews, having failed to recognize the Messiah, were now toast, and that only the new Israel - that is to say, the Christians - would make it into the second, the final, the true and complete Promised Land. Well, I’m not going to get into the complex theological arguments about what will happen to present day Jews when the Messiah returns - unless you’d like me to spend an extra half an hour or so on the subject - ? I thought not. Anyway, the point is, that God’s promises are just as solid right now, in the year of our Lord 2003, as they were that spring day so
long ago when Jesus came into Jerusalem.
And he will bring back the exiles from everywhere they have been scattered, and not one of the ones who belong to him will be lost. John heard the angel say that 144,000 would be “sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel: From the tribe of Judah ... from the tribe of Reuben ... from the tribe of Gad ... from the tribe of Asher ... from the tribe of Naphtali ... from the tribe of Manasseh ... from the tribe of Simeon ...from the tribe of Levi ... from the tribe of Issachar from the tribe of Zebulun... [Rev 7:4-8] That is every single tribe of Israel, except for Dan, which voluntarily chose to abandon the land God had assigned to them and went up north to carve out their own territory. Everybody else was sent into exile by God, and so would be brought back by him. Now some people think that this 144,000 should be taken literally, but that is not the way numbers are used in prophetic literature. The numbers are almost certainly used symbolically, with 12, the number of God’s people, squared, times 10 cubed. It means absolutely everybody .... everybody who is in fact a true member of Israel, both the old and the new.
The point is that each of these family reunions - the one which welcomes Jesus as Messiah the first time, when he came to bring good news to the captives, and the one which gathers around the Risen Lamb at the end of time - are focused not on the past but on the future. We gather today to remember the entry of the Messiah into Jerusalem that long ago Passover festival, but we also gather in anticipation of the coming of the Messiah in the last days to finally bring the justice and peace Isaiah promised so long ago.
This family will not die out. This family will not forget and scatter. This family will not lose its connection to each other, or to God - because we are linked not only to the past, but to a future more glorious than any of us can imagine.
And if any of you doubt that Christ will come, or that all who follow him will be gathered together according to God’s promises, look what he has done for the first Israel, Abraham’s heirs according to the flesh. He has kept them, preserved them, and restored them - through exile and persecution and genocide. They have not been forgotten, nor have we. As the prophet Habakkuk said, “If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. [Hab 2:3]
Our hope is not in our past, no matter how precious, no matter how glorious. Our hope is out in front of us, where Jesus has gone ahead, and our charge is to hear and follow his voice. Sometimes it’s hard to hear, in all the noise and confusion of our times, but if you listen you can always hear him, because he is always calling us forward, into community with him and with one another. In Christ all things hold together, and in him we are never alone.
