I had two very satisfying experiences this past week with fellow Pilgrims, both related to housing. The first was the DC Habitat for Humanity build a week ago Saturday, where about ten of us joined a couple dozen other Presbyterians from nearby churches to help new homeowners put a roof over their heads. I got to wear a tool belt, climb on scaffolding, swing a hammer, and operate a power saw– for someone who often spends way too much of the day behind a desk, all in all, it was a pretty fun day. And at the end of the day, in addition to being a little sore, we could stand back and see what we had built. The house wasn’t done, by any means, but there was real progress, and you could see it.

      The second experience was this past Tuesday night at First Rock Baptist Church in far southeast DC, where almost twenty of us gathered with nearly five hundred members of the Washington Interfaith Network. We also celebrated progress, this time progress we have made over the past five years, especially the commitments that Mayor Fenty has made since his election last year to create and preserve affordable housing. The commitments were real and specific: Five hundred new units of supportive housing for the homeless in downtown DC. Seventy-five units of Nehemiah homes on Dix Street for new homeowners with incomes as low as $20,000 a year. Immediate action to preserve affordable rental housing at 1483 Newton Street and 1020 Monroe in Columbia Heights. A pledge not to allow rent increases or condo conversions for buildings that have persistent code violations.

      It’s one of the things I like most about organizing with WIN. It’s easy to get discouraged when faced with pervasive and growing problems in the world like poverty, homelessness, violence, war. Most of the time it’s hard to look at the world around us and feel like we are making any progress on any of these things. But when you break it down into a set of specific steps– five hundred units of housing here, seventy-five units of housing there– you feel hopeful and encouraged. Not that the problems go away. At the WIN action Tuesday night we were reminded again and again how much work we have yet to do. But we were given hope, as one of the speakers put it, to “keep on truckin’.”

      That was something of what the prophet Isaiah was up to with the returning exiles in Jerusalem. The exiles had returned believing that the Kingdom of David would be restored, the Temple rebuilt, and God’s reign established once and for all on Mount Zion. Yet that’s not how things worked out. Instead, they found a city in ruins, and the rebuilding to be costly, painful, and dangerous. The task of the prophet was to keep Israel’s hopes alive.

S outh African theologian John de Gruchy suggests that there were three kinds of hope in the Old Testament following the exile. The first was messianic, for the restoration of the Davidic monarchy. The King would be put back on the throne, and all would be right with the world. These hopes, de Gruchy notes, were narrowly political. You might compare them with the work of the Religious Right to get their nominees on the Supreme Court. If we just get the right person in charge, everything will work the way it’s supposed to. The second type of hope was apocalyptic. The world has gone so terribly wrong and is so utterly beyond redemption that only a whole-sale destruction of the world as it is and a new world order established by God can provide any hope for the future. In our day, the “Left Behind” series embodies this sort of hope. A new day is coming, but only after everything we know has been destroyed. There’s not much for us to do about it expect wait for that great and terrible day to arrive, and hope we’re among the ones who are raptured.

      The third type of hope, de Gruchy suggests, is what we find in the prophet Isaiah. It’s not narrowly political, nor is it pie in the sky apocalyptic. It doesn’t pin it’s hope on a single historic figure, nor does it speak of catastrophic re-ordering of the world. Instead, it paints a vision of the world as it should be that is both concrete and specific, and grounded in the real world as we know it. At the same time, the vision that Isaiah paints is beyond our capacity to create on our own. God will do this, God will bring this about, yet there is an invitation in Isaiah’s vision to be at work in the world creating the new heaven and new earth that God will finally bring in to being. It is astonishing that Isaiah could pen these words twenty-five hundred years ago, and they still speak to our own immediate situation as well as they did to the exiles who first heard them in Jerusalem:

      No more shall there be...

              an infant that lives but a few days,

              or an old person who does not

              live out a lifetime...

      No more... shall they build houses

              and another inhabit them...;

      No more... shall they plant vineyards

              and another eat their fruit...

No more... shall they labor in vain,

              or bear children for calamity...

      And then, the prophet declares...

      The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,

              the lion shall eat straw like the ox...

      They shall not hurt or destroy

              on all my holy mountain.

      This is not a description of the world as it is. Sadly, we still live in a world where children die in infancy, and the elderly languish in neglect, where the poor are exploited for their labor, and safe and decent housing is but a dream. Just this past Sunday Pat and Mary Lib and I took a tour with WIN of the Franklin School shelter where many of our city’s homeless are warehoused in rooms where the bunks are so close together you can reach out from your bed to touch the bed across the aisle. And guess what: Most of the men who live at the Franklin School have jobs. That’s the state of housing in our nation’s capital. You can work full-time on minimum wage and still not be able to afford a place to live. And here’s the kicker: The Franklin School is just across K Street from some of the most high-priced lobbying firms in the nation.

I f it’s all up to God, there is not much for us to do except just sit on our hands and wait. If it’s all up to us, we might as well give up hope right now. I am enough a product of the Reformed tradition to know that even our best efforts are tainted with sin. Even organizations like WIN, for all the good they do, sometimes sputter and die. The 20^th century is littered with the dashed hopes of one failed revolution after another. We when imagine that it is all up to us, we are especially prone to take violence into our hands to achieve our aims. The world at times makes progress in astonishing ways, but it is not inevitable, and history will record that Isaiah’s hopes were never fully realized, not in the 4^th century before Christ after the return from exile, not in the 20^th century with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and certainly not in the 21^st century with the fall of Bagdad. Even in our best moments, human history takes at least a half-step back for every step forward. Twenty-four centuries later, Isaiah’s vision of the world as it should be still beckons us forward. Now just as much as then, we need to know that the future belongs to God. De Gruchy writes:

      The future breaks into our present struggles awakening hope and strengthening faith and love in the expectation that there is always more that God wants to give us. God is always ahead of us, always creating the new, always opening up new possibilities. So the true prophets are not awakening false expectations but rather proclaiming that there is always more that God wants to give us, more that God wants to do. The prophets know that unless that hope of the more is kept alive we will simply give up and begin to accept things as they are instead of reaching out to receive the more which God has in store for us.

      Having found help for today’s sermon from a theologian from South Africa, it seems appropriate to affirm our faith with an affirmation that was important in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. This affirmation may actually have originated in the church of South India, but it was popularized in an address by Allan Boesak to the World Council of Churches in 1983:

It is not true that this world and its inhabitants

are doomed to die and be lost;

This is true: “For God so loved the world that God gave the only Son so that everyone who believes in him shall not die but have everlasting life.”

It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death and destruction.

This is true: Jesus said “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

It is not true that violence and hatred shall have the last word, and that war and destruction have come to stay forever.

This is true: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given in whom authority will rest and whose name will be the Prince of Peace.”

It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil that seek to rule the world;

This is true: “to [Jesus] has been given all authority in heaven and on earth and is with us until the end of the age.”

It is not true that we have to wait for those who are especially gifted, who are the prophets of the church, before we can do anything.

This is true: “I will pour out my spirit on all people and you sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young people shall see visions and your old folk dream dreams.”

It is not true that our dreams for the liberation of humankind, our dreams of justice, of human dignity, of peace are not meant for this earth and this history.

This is true: “the hour comes, and it is now, that true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and truth.”✞