Texts: Isaiah 65: 13-25; Luke 21: 5-19

Every once in a while when I feel sorry for myself -- that’s not too often -- I think about the lady in front of the deli near the Federal building where I get my honey ginger tea. Sitting in a wheelchair she has a paper cup nestled between her thighs because her legs are amputated, I guess from diabetes. She always has the same coat and hat and doesn’t say much really. My practice is to never give money but I always get her a cup of coffee, light and sweet, and a buttered roll. I have absolutely no idea of what her name is. I’ve just never asked. She smiles and chats sporadically with the two or three other street people who frequent that space near the corner. Whatever has happened to her in the past, she is certainly experiencing some tough times now.

I usually think, “There but for the grace of God go I,� but I wonder if that’s really the case. By accident of birth, where God’s grace really matters, I was born white into a lower middle class family that taught me the value of education, hard work, thrift, and community. Each of those has put me through some tough times. Education, of course, because that put me in more of a position where I could make choices for my future; hard work and thrift because even when things have been tight, I’ve been able to survive. But the most important thing that has put me through my tough times and, I imagine, for most of you, through yours, is community.

Community is what puts most of us through our tough times, whether it’s been a community of family, a community of friends, or a community of faith. Each of these different communities play a different role in our lives, whether they tell us of our own shared past and how we came to where we are, whether they tell us of our present and how we can rely on each other, or whether they point to a hope of creating something that will survive our own time on this earth. We are nurtured by our communities and they are our support when times are tough.

Sometimes, however, communities experience so much stress that they can come apart at the seams. War and natural disaster often are the major causes of societal breakdowns, but economic meltdown leading to significant changes in life choices, such as the one we are experiencing now, can lead to such rending. The question is how do we repair the garment, so to speak, or do we need to take a seam ripper to the fabric before we stitch everything together again.

This is one of the questions that’s raised every election season. We heard it all ad nauseum this past October. On one side some candidates and their supporters cautioned against throwing out the baby with the bath water; on another side, some said it was time for fundamental change. Hmm-mm-mm. Heard that one before. What I found lacking in all the campaign rhetoric was the importance of community as a fundamental building block of our society. That was true of the ones I voted for as well as the ones I opposed. No one really addressed the question of what it means to live through tough times.

The section of Scripture sometimes known as Second or Third Isaiah, depending on which scholar you read, celebrates a time when the people of Israel had survived a really, really tough time. Defeated in war, their leaders had been carted off to Babylon and had lived in exile for more or less 60 years. Obviously, the countryside was not rendered totally devoid of people but the leadership of the community was taken and that resulted in some significant developments in Judaic thought, literature, and culture. The times had been tough, to be sure, just as they are in many places around the world today, destroyed by war. Our focus on Afghanistan and Iraq has caused us to lose sight of the world’s deadliest war since World War II, namely the one still going on in the Congo in spite of a so-called peace deal signed in 2003. Every once in a while we see an image of rape and murder beyond our comprehension and we shake our heads and turn the page or change the channel. We are focused on our own tough times, both here and abroad.

So, let’s look at our situation here and abroad. We have become a people and a nation of immediate gratification; we no longer have any patience, no sense of having to wait for anything. We see it in our instant messaging, like trivia and gossip can’t wait? We want it and we want it now!!! Unemployment is at an all time high, but instead of getting together as a community of people with a common purpose, all we do is bicker. Once the art of the possible, politics has become little more than lines in the sand, each side unwilling to compromise. Our greed has driven us to the brink of collapse, both economic and environmental, and all we do is grouse. On Friday the man who cleaned my furnace was telling me that he actually meets people who want their thermostats set at 76 degrees having no sense of protecting oil resources for the future. What has happened to the idea of our posterity?

Yes, we live in tough times, but much of it is of our own making. The question for us as a community of faith becomes how we move beyond what we have created for ourselves and develop into a community that moves us into a future beyond the tough times. That’s where our faith should lead us. That’s where we need to go.

Let us pray: God of eternal verities, enable us to build communities again so not only we but others get through the tough times. Amen.