...because He has made you beautiful. Isaiah 60: 9
June 8, 1972
For anybody anywhere near my age, this picture perfectly sums the absolute misery of the world. “In the picture, the girl will always be 9 years old and wailing "Too hot! Too hot!" as she runs down the road away from her burning Vietnamese village.”
Isaiah 60 is about hope. About God at work restoring beauty, and making all things new.
Whereas you have been forsaken and hated,
with no one passing through,
I will make you majestic forever,
a joy from age to age.
Somehow Cameron’s voice sang the soundtrack of my day today.
You make everything glorious
You make everything glorious
You make everything glorious
And I am Yours
What does that make me?
My eyes are small but they have seen
The beauty of enormous things
Which leads me to believe
There's light enough to see that
and
All this pain
I wonder if I’ll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found
Could a garden come up from this ground at all
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us
All around
Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found in You.
And as I was humming this song in my head, with those little ugly off-note outbursts that Dustin and Cameron and Alan know so well, I read this article about the napalm girt.
Who could have ever guessed? Hope from ashes. Beauty from dust.
And then Alan’s voice kicks in for the song for today. A song that I learned in the home group Bible study at Lucy and John Shaw’s before we headed off to the Dominican Republic for the first time. He gives me beauty for ashes. The oil of joy for mourning. The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.
for the Lord will be your everlasting light,
and our days of mourning shall be ended.
Your people shall all be righteous;
they shall possess the land forever,
the branch of my planting, the work of my hands,
that I might be glorified. Isaiah 60:21
Yesterday was filled with stories of hope. Snatches of God-at-work-in-lives-I-know and love. And while the late night at Juan and Lisa’s after the soccer game fell apart a little bit, talking about the injustices of the health care system in America and the injustices of American CEO salaries compared to that of workers and the beat goes on, I am not shaken.
The UnitedHealth Care policy is that a stroke victim only receives seven physical therapy treatments. That is not enough to allow him to return to his job, to his family, to his life. But that is the written policy. So he will spend the rest of his life flopping helplessiy in a chair somewhere, trying to avoid bed sores, even though he has faithfully paid almost $1,000/month in insurance policies for all of his working years. UnitedHealth Care made 94 billion dollars this year, an 8% increase over last year. And the CEO made $102 million dollars. "After adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century," the study says. Currently, CEOs of major U.S. companies average 263 times the average compensation of American workers.” While nonChristian countries such as Japan sport such ratios as 11:1 and Germany 12:1. When is enough is enough?
So yesterday we invited one of those first-time visitors who stand up and introduce themselves to join us for lunch at Bisonwiches. And it turns out that, however the conversation actually went with the pastor, his understanding was that the Vineyard was a conservative Christian church and he was not welcome there because he is a practicing homosexual. And that is the problem with reading Isaiah right after reading Luke while reading James trying to understand who Jesus is because somehow I can’t picture the same Jesus who welcomed the kissing and weeping harlot wiping his feet with her tears asking this hurting and slightly angry but obviously seeking to fill-the-hole-in-his-heart man to go to a more liberal church down the road. And nowhere in Isaiah does the prophet mention homosexuality, but boy oh boy on every page he condemns those who oppress their workers. And James too, the brother of Jesus, “Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.” And Ezekiel: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done. "'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”
So I figure that this same Jesus sat down and broke bread with white-washed tomb Pharisees who didn’t even offer to wash his feet. Looks like the door is wide open. And I can worship Him with my brother-in-Christ with the Jesse Kelley sticker on his brand-new car out front, and this visitor guy can come on in too. Jesse Kelly whose answers to the questions that face our country are “We have the highest corporate tax rate among developed nations, and I will vote to lower taxes and reduce burdensome regulations for all businesses so we can bring jobs and prosperity back to America,” and “Obamacare must be repealed in order to increase economic freedom for businesses” and of course my favorite, “We need to complete the double-layer border fence and give the Border Patrol the manpower and resources they need to secure the border.”
There is nothing new under the sun, as Isaiah 59 so vividly details. Our LORD God is just. And He will see justice done. He will come like a rushing stream, driven by the wind.
And He is framed by eternity. So our years are but moments to Him. But He declares, “I am the Lord; in its time I will hasten it.”
And He makes all things beautiful.
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