Hilton Head Island, SC – June 30, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 32:1-8; Isaiah 28:14-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then your covenant with death will be annulled, and your agreement with Sheol will not stand; when the overwhelming scourge passes through, you will be beaten down by it.- Isaiah 28:18 (RSV)
Many old people become downcast and pessimistic as they get older. Maybe it’s because they know they’re getting closer to the end of the line. “The good old days” are farther and farther “back there,” and many elderly folks are feeling more and more diminished by advanced age, both physically and mentally. Of course this is certainly not true of all geezers, but it seems to be true for many old people.
From fifth grade on I intended to become a minister. That’s a very odd goal for any ten-year-old boy, and I admit it. I have always considered myself to be something of a peculiar person in several respects. For example, subconsciously I turned out to be more of a prophetic preacher than a pastoral preacher. That may be because, as a teenager, I was very impressed with the Old Testament prophets more than any other part of the Bible. I am more stimulated by social and political issues than by personal or pastoral issues, although I also realize the importance of preaching about personal concerns, especially those of a spiritual or psychological nature.
Originally I was going to preach only one sermon of OLD-preacher ponderings. Only this past Tuesday did I change my mind. From your standpoint, the bad news is that most of this sermon explicitly or implicitly will be about bad news. Next Sunday you will hear my good-news-ponderings. Knowing that, I hope you won’t get up and head for the door right now to avoid the bad news. Furthermore, I might feel bad if you did that. Next Sunday you’ll get a spoonful of sugar to make today’s medicine go down - - - but that isn’t going to happen today.
Here is a deliberately limited list of Big Things about which I often ponder. The peril represented by the present presidential political campaign (about which I will say absolutely nothing in this sermon). Climate change. The rapid decline of religion in many parts of the world. The demoralizing monetization of all levels of sports. The gap between the rich and poor. The trend toward authoritarian government in numerous nations. The part social media has played in fomenting that and other alarming trends. Our increasing dependency upon technology without sufficiently considering where that dependence is leading us. Artificial Intelligence, and ignoring the voices of those who helped develop AI and saw its tremendous possibilities but now are warning us of its possible apocalyptic dangers. There are more issues, as you shall hear, but that is a sufficient summary of unpleasant Big-Thing problems for one homiletical harangue.
Climate change is causing meteorological conditions never seen to the degree they are being experienced in numerous locations. Fires and floods, heat and droughts, and more devastating hurricanes, typhoons, and tornados are affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world as never before. Many ignored these realities until they could no longer be swept under the ideological rug. Alas, multitudes of others deliberately continue to ignore them, due to idiosyncratic irrationality.
Young people are abandoning religion in droves, as well as are many of their parents and grandparents. Covid has shrunken worship attendance virtually everywhere. The world becomes far more secular than it has ever been. Too many preachers and journalistic prophets are refusing to acknowledge this. Religion provides a strong foundation for every society, and its voice needs to be heard, but its influence is rapidly diminishing in the developed world.
High school sports are becoming what college sports have been. College sports have more similarities to professional sports than to what college sports used to be. The amount of money funneling into professional sports is a fiscal obscenity. Sports are by no means insignificant, but their essence should be pleasure, for both the athletes and the spectators, not profit. When profit is the main motive behind any sport, it ceases to be fun, and illustrates a cultural overemphasis.
Around the world long-time democracies are succumbing to smooth-talking hucksters in sheep’s clothing who clearly are authoritarians wanting to take over governments they believe are weak and ripe for picking. Social media, particularly promoted by cellphones, are aiding and abetting this worrisome phenomenon. Politically, authoritarianism and dictatorships are the greatest threat that democracy is facing everywhere it exists.
Technologies of many varieties have wondrously transformed the world, but they also represent scientific and ethical challenges that were not anticipated and are not being sufficiently addressed. The rapidly expanding growth of cybernetic artificial intelligence illustrates an issue which science fiction authors and political philosophers of former years conceptualized, but which is only beginning to engage the concern of the masses. What genies have we unleashed?
The Old Testament prophets concentrated far more on societal ills than on societal progress. Their main focus, quite understandably, was the relationship of Israel to God. They interspersed hope and encouragement in what they wrote, but they primarily wrote about weaknesses, not strengths, cultural maladies, not marvels, injustices, not ingenuities. Prophets were and are never named Citizens of the Year by any country anywhere. In both autocracies and democracies, they sometimes are killed.
Isaiah, the most widely read and respected of the biblical prophets, was an unsurpassed observer of 8th-century Judah, and wrote some of the most magnificent and uplifting poetry in any holy writ of any people anywhere. Some of that you shall hear next week. But Isaiah also could be and was an irrepressible nag on numerous occasions. You may have wondered why I chose the scripture passages I did for today. Observing alarming decay within Judah, he wrote, “The fool will no more be called noble, nor the knave to be honorable. For the fool speaks folly, and his mind plots iniquity: to practice ungodliness, to utter error concerning the Lord, to leave the craving of the hungry unsatisfied, and to deprive the thirsty of drink” (Isa. 32:5-6). Elsewhere Isaiah says, “”Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers…Because you have said, ‘we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter’: therefore thus says the Lord God…your covenant with death will be annulled, and your agreement with Sheol [which in this instance simply connotes death] will not stand; when the overwhelming scourge passes through, you will be beaten down” (Isa. 28:14,17,18).
The prophets refused to look at the world through rose-colored glasses (had they had rose-colored glasses to look through). They perceived things as they were. If they saw mistakes, they voiced them. If there was injustice, they attacked it. When sins were committed, they reminded the sinners of their failings. They praised the Israelites when praise was warranted, but they also gave them holy hell when that was warranted.
Perhaps old people are more apt to get cranky than younger people. Maybe it is because they feel less capable than they once did, and they want to try to leave the world a better place than they found it, if they can. So they do their best to alert those around them to challenges they think they have come to recognize and about which they did too little to overcome. When they can no longer do much, they want to inspire those who can. They are John Adams, singing to himself in 1776, “Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?”
In June of 1980 Zbiegniew Brezezinski, then the USA national security adviser, received a late-night phone call telling him that the NORAD missile-warning system showed 2200 nuclear missiles from the USSR were on their way toward the USA. Should a retaliatory strike be instantly ordered, or not? Seconds later another call told him it was a false alarm because of a computer glitch. Nuclear war is far more likely to occur because of glitches than intentional launches. Or consider what would happen now if the national leader of any nuclear-armed nation were to order a tactical nuclear weapon to be fired at a large concentration of troops in an enemy nation? Would it immediately lead to a much larger nuclear exchange? We live in a very vulnerable world, and are we doing enough to mitigate the vulnerabilities? The Cold War managed to prevent a nuclear war. Will we be fortunate enough to have another non-nuclear Cold War with China? Those who don’t think about these things may be happy in their ignorance, but they aren’t helping to ensure a better future for Planet Earth. In democracies intelligent votes are the best kind of votes. Ill-informed votes can lead to ill-informed decisions by ill-informed leaders.
Here is another list of important matters I shall slowly cite, with no commentary at all; I only ask you to think about them - - - but later. If you receive my sermons and essays via email, I ask you to print today’s sermon and study it. If you aren’t online, please tell me, and I’ll send you a copy. Here are some no-commentary concerns: Cultural decline, with its concomitant use of foul language in movies, television, literature, and in the everyday speech of otherwise sophisticated people with other such people… starvation that could and should be avoided… racism… sexism… ageism… the widespread mistreatment of LGBTQs when everybody by now should know better… the vicissitudes of old age… the problems of the two generations below us, many of which WE caused unintentionally and intentionally… the causes and cures of inflation… not enough young people to support us old people, too many old people and not enough young people in too many developed nations, and too many people of all ages in too many underdeveloped nations… too much disregard by conservative politicians for old people who want to end their lives painlessly and those conservative politicians who pass laws to prevent them from doing so… LTL: “Living Too Long”, as my mother-in-law said… sex trafficking of anyone, but especially children… trafficking anyone to become 21st-century slaves anywhere… municipal government officials who give in to citizens who convince them they will be voted out if they pass necessary legislation that will unquestionably provoke NIMBY voters… too many other elected officials at all levels of government who willingly vote against vital legislation in order for them to remain in office because the proposed laws requires higher taxes… the sorry state to which American evangelical Christianity has allowed itself to fall… the sorry state to which American Mainline Protestantism has fallen for very different reasons… a deep concern for the severe decline of newspaper and news-magazine circulations because too many intelligent people are no longer willing to pay the necessary increased cost to keep these publications afloat, and then decide either to read no suitable alternative or to read or watch the wrong media, particularly on their smartphones, which make too many smart people less smart… anti-abortion advocates who refuse to think through all the issues for why abortions need to be performed… and finally, the Grand Old Party that decided to become the New Know-Nothing Party. I could come up with many other such harangue-ables with which to harangue you, but I will now cease and desist.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, America had many prophetic preachers among Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews. From the time a conservative Californian governor was elected president in 1980 until now, too few clergy have remained prophetic. They have become too worried about institutional or congregational survival or their own paycheck to ponder and then to speak out on what needs to be thoroughly pondered and then fearlessly addressed.
I assume all of you know that I am going to retire officially on Sunday, January 5. In the past few months I have frequently wondered whether I will miss preaching on a weekly basis. Most days I don’t, but some days I do, just as on some days I am not thrilled to be as old as I am, and on other days I question whether I was fortunate to have lived as long as I have lived.
I am absolutely convinced of this: God needs prophets. As it says in the Book of Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (29:18). We haven’t perished - - - - - - - yet. But the world’s people are slowly perishing, whether they realize it or not, and our species actually might destroy itself. If so, it won’t be because God willed it. Despite what the Bible implies in many places, it is impossible for me to believe that God would ever desire the destruction of the billions of people on this or on any of the other of the multitudes of inhabited planets that He created and in which highly sentient beings could be wiped out. We have the capability of obliterating not only the entire human race but perhaps all other forms of life upon the Earth. We also have the capability of making certain that will never happen. Nevertheless, we might do ourselves in anyway. For reasons known only to God, He will not prevent us from doing that. We are free and independent children of God, and not automatons.
I close with a recitation of the first stanza of a hymn that is not in our hymnal. It is in the two older Presbyterian hymnals from which I sang hymns for much of my life, but not in the two most recent Presbyterian hymnals. However, it probably isn’t in the newer ones because its opening line is, “God of the prophets, bless the prophets’ sons.” As we all know, such language has become politically incorrect, besides which it may be difficult to alter poetically. Nonetheless, that objection may say something about the Presbyterians, both back in the old days and in these days.
Anyway, courtesy of Denis Wortman, whoever he was, here is the first stanza of that outstanding if rarely sung hymn.
God of the prophets,! Bless the prophets’ sons;
Elijah’s mantle o’er Elisha cast;
Each age its solemn task may claim but once;
Make each one nobler, stronger than the last.