January 4, 2004
Look Toward the East
Riley E. Jensen
The Lesson from Baruch: “I set my hope of your deliverance on the Eternal, the Holy One; your everlasting Savior has filled me with joy for the mercy soon to be granted you. With mourning and tears I watched you go, but God will give back to me with gladness and joy forever. As the neighbors of Zion have now seen your captivity, so they will soon witness God’s deliverance to you, which will come to you with the great glory and the radiance of the Eternal. My children, endure with patience the wrath God has brought on you; your enemy has hunted you down, but soon you will see him destroyed, soon put your foot on his neck.”
“Take heart, Jerusalem! He who called you by name will comfort you. Wretched will they be who maltreated you and gloated over your fall; wretched the cities where your children were slaves; wretched the city that received your sons! She that rejoiced over your downfall and was jubilant at your ruin, that same city will grieve at her own desolation. I shall strip her of the multitudes that were her boast, and turn her pride into grief. Fire from the Eternal will be her doom for many a day, and for a long time to come she will be the haunt of demons. Jerusalem, look eastwards and see the joy that is coming to you from God.”
This is the first Sunday of our New Year when the hope of new beginnings springs eternal. This is also our Epiphany Sunday when the wise men came out of the east like an otherworldly apparition to confirm with their nobility the unlikely royal coupling of human and divine. However, I have chosen as my text for this morning a passage that mocks whatever expectations we bring to this day.
I call your attention to the 36th verse of the 4th chapter of the Book of Baruch. Baruch! You say! I knew I couldn’t slip that one by such a biblically informed West Michigan congregation. If I was back in the theological desert of my native Northwest where going to church is ranked somewhere between watching the grass grow and mud wrestling; where Starbucks has a larger congregation sipping its lattes than are gathered singing hymns at St. John’s by the gas station, the eyes would still be glazed over and the heads nodding with implied piety.
I know that because every year I would give my congregation in Seattle a Bible knowledge test by asking them where the Book of Hezekiah is located in the Bible. And every year with the predictability of Lucy pulling the football out from under Charlie Brown, half would enthusiastically raise their hands for the Old Testament while half were just as sure it was in the New Testament.
Nevertheless, while most of you don’t need to leaf through your Bibles to know that the Book of Baruch is not there, you would also be hard pressed to figure out how your minister would find something so obscure sufficiently inspiring for prime time.
Let me take a stab at enlightening you with the risk that you will still be scratching your heads after I have finished. Baruch is known as a Deutero-canonical book which means that it didn’t quite make it into the original Bible as influenced by the church father, Irenaeus, but was part of a group of books that the Council of Trent decided to include in the Catholic Bible after the Protestant Reformation.
Therefore, I draw from Baruch this morning as a way of reminding us that there are those whose Christian Bibles are more expansive than our own, and yet are still within the Christian tradition. Baruch himself is known to have been friend and secretary to the prophet, Jeremiah. Perhaps Irenaeus and others did not include this book among the original canon since much of its message seemed to overlap Jeremiah’s.
But be that as it may, I want to take as my text for this morning Baruch 4:36, “Jerusalem, look eastwards and see the joy that is coming to you from God.” It used to be that church architecture was always oriented to the east where the chancel and the altar were found. In fact a little bit of digging into the archives of our own church reveals that at one time our pulpit and chancel were located over there at the east end of our sanctuary.
A quick word study might be helpful here since I am obviously going to make a big deal out of the big E that appears on our maps. The easterly direction has always had special significance since the dawn of civilization because it was the direction of the rising sun. Having once determined the place of the rising sun a person could then get oriented. Hence the word “orient” became a synonym for “East”.
Before the beginning of Christianity, the worship spaces of the ancient sun worshippers were oriented, as it were, to the East. Since early Christian worshippers inherited space once occupied by pagans, it was natural to accept the pattern while changing the meaning.
In our text for the morning, Baruch is locating himself in Jerusalem and asking us to look eastwards. This old prophet, the sidekick of Jeremiah for so many years, was writing in the sixth century B.C. The east for any inhabitant of Jerusalem at the time could only mean one thing -- Babylon. Babylon in its day occupied much of modern Iraq. It was the greatest civilization of its time, wealthy beyond imagining, powerful beyond any competitor, extending its domain throughout the ancient east.
It was in 587 B.C. that it conquered Israel and raped Jerusalem in the fashion of the day by exporting a large part of the population to other parts of the empire thus depriving its new conquest not only of wealth but also of leadership. But for those exiles Jerusalem was always home, and it was the dream of returning which motivated them. The dream was that one day justice would be done and the tables would be turned. In the words of Baruch, “She that rejoiced over your downfall and was jubilant at your ruin, that same city will grieve at her own desolation.”
Therefore, when one would walk atop the walls of Jerusalem and come to the Damascus Gate, they would look eastwards with longing and imagine the joy they would feel when they saw those exiles returning home. And so the old prophet Baruch invites the Jews in their suffering, their captivity, their state of depression, to look in their troubled moments to the east for liberation from captivity.
The waiting continued through one generation and into another until the liberation finally occurred under Cyrus in 538 B.C. They had indeed looked to the east for many years but instead of finding fulfillment, they were disappointed again-and-again. Does that sound like anybody you know? Promises, promises, promises! We hear them every Advent; we make them every New Year; politicians offer new ones every political cycle.
I had a person in my office not long ago (not a member of this congregation) who had grown up on what I call a triumphalist brand of Christianity. It thrived on emotion and preached victory in Jesus. "If you have a strong enough faith you can do anything,” he was told, "and then success will beat a path to your doorstep." But then things went tragically wrong. His wife divorced him. His health deteriorated. He lost his job. But the most crushing thing of all was when he turned to his church for a measure of support, his pastor wouldn’t see him.
I don’t mean that he was too busy to see him. I don’t mean that the church was so large that counseling was someone else’s responsibility. The pastor wouldn’t see him because his suffering meant that he was under the judgment of God. Presumably when things got better the mark of Cain would be removed.
Not long after that encounter I had another visit from a person who was considering membership in Westminster. Her story was different but similar. It was the story of a faith journey that had been characterized by searching and questioning and struggle. When she heard people talk about a relationship with Christ, she would both laugh and get angry. What in the world could that mean? It all sounded so cozy and unreal to her.
While she desperately wanted the comfort, security, and love of a spiritual home, it all seemed so elusive to her. But then she came to Westminster and she began to grow in her faith as she never had before. She found that relationship with Christ. It was hard to define but real nevertheless. A lot of questions were still there but she was experiencing the ability to put them aside for God to answer in due time.
When we talked, it was around the question of commitment for she had been disappointed so many times before. What would happen if she became a member of this church and it did not live up to her expectations? What would happen if once again she got her hopes up only to be let down again? What would happen if this church home wasn’t everything she wanted it to be? In short, what would happen if the promise outran the fulfillment, and she was once again let down by promises that were not kept?
I am not going to tell you the end of that story because it is the story of all of us isn’t it? We have this gold standard for life and somewhere along the line we were told to settle for nothing less than the best. I certainly used to feel that way. I fantasized that there was a church out there that had its act together and then they would call me and we would share the thrill of riding the crest of the wave. You’ve had that fantasy too because you have longed for a minister who didn’t have the peculiarities and the inadequacies of the last one but rather combined the strengths of all your favorites.
Maybe it is God’s cosmic joke on all of us that such is not to be. All of our questions will not be answered; all of our struggles will not be satisfied. But, my friends, we are here because we have looked to the east and we have seen something. Maybe it was just a thin ray of light reaching over the horizon to pierce the darkness. But whatever it was, it was a moment of grace that has given us hope that God is with us.
The truth is that we have looked to the east with longing and we have seen something. We have seen Baruch’s vision of the joy coming to us from God. That strange grouping of nobility coming out of the east has confirmed that God has not forsaken us but that God is among us as Emmanuel, God with us.
My friends, the Epiphany for each of us is that moment of joy when we realize that we can have a relationship with the one who connects us to God. Feelings are ephemeral. They come and they go. But there is a rock of reality that God allows each of us to have that we call moments of grace. And therein lies the kind of joy that gives us an ultimate sense of well being whatever may happen.
Therefore, as we are about to come to the table, look toward the east. As we look to the dawn, the beginning of a new year, let us remember to look toward the east, O Jerusalem, O Grand Rapids, O Westminster, and the joy that is coming to you, to us from God is more than we can imagine and more than we can desire.
Amen.