Creekside Church Sermon of February 23, 2003 "Turning Brown Into Green" Isaiah 43:18-25	Rev. David Bibbee
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Traveling through the southwest United States is an awesome experience for lovers of landscapes. It's fascinating to watch the terrain change traveling on Interstate 40 from Oklahoma to California. For me, a sight that remains vivid is the western panorama leaving Albuquerque, New Mexico. As far as the eye can see is a trackless expanse of blue sky and desert. Dust devils are frequent sights, little tornado-like funnel clouds dancing over the desert floor picking up debris as they go. The creek beds are full of rocks and sand but not a drop of water. Convection currents radiate from the sun-baked pavement. The pet walk areas of roadside rests have sign saying, "Beware of rattlesnakes!" Blue signs along the interstate say, "No services next 120 miles."

Stark and stunning are words that describe the desert. There is certainly beauty in it, but if I had but one word to describe the desert, it would be…brown. Brown isn't my favorite color…green is. I love the green canopy and floor of the woods. I love the verdant green forests which rim the perimeter of northern lakes. I was taken back by a photograph of the Wisconsin lake I have fished the past twenty-five years. It was taken in 1910. The landscape today is laden with forests, but at the turn of the last century, it was barren. The Weyerhauser Lumber Company logged every tree in sight. What a contrast from the brown of then to the green of now.

I heard an Old Testament scholar say the story of the Bible and indeed, the story of Christianity unleashed in the world, can be described as turning brown into green. "In the beginning the earth was without form and void." Brown. Then God said, "Let their be light and land and living creatures of every kind." Green. God began creation with chaos and turned it to cosmos. God's creation continues. There is a story in which a demon in hell asks Satan, the fallen angel, what he missed most about heaven. Satan replied, "I miss the trumpets of creation every morning." God is not finished creating. "Morning by morning new mercies we see…"

God is creating order from disorder; hope from hopelessness. Rough ways are made smooth, crooked ways are made straight. Death yields to resurrection. "As for mortals (that's us, incidentally), their days are like grass; they flourish like flowers in the field, the wind passes over it and it is gone-but the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting to those who keep his covenant." Brown into green.

We want to believe that God has a green thumb and that green shoots of hope will appear as God goes on creating. This is one reason we come to church…to better see what God is up to…to point toward his latest coloring project. People come faithfully, Sunday after Sunday, year after year, hoping that what they will find will at least be a little better than what they could have found poring over the Sunday paper, reading a book, or going for a leisurely walk in fresh Sunday air.

People keep coming in hopes that the message will get through and enable them to believe there really is a God who hallows life with his love. It's been said that when it comes to belief in Jesus, we must choose between three options; he is either a liar, crazy, or he is who he said. We hope Jesus is who he said. We hope we have more than a fighting chance against sin and death because he is the right man on our side.

Why is this important? The news from the human landscape is brown and getting browner, while hope hobbles around. It's no surprise hope hobbles because the world has nothing much to appeal to except self-interests and market forces. What is so surprising, no what is so sad…no, make that, "What is so shocking," is the absence of hope in many churches. Christ's church exists to hold hope high for all to see. His church is a citadel, an emerald island oasis in life's sea of troubled waters. But, the church is showing signs of brown. It is hemorrhaging people. Hearing our denomination is still losing members, but at a slower pace than before, some have the audacity to call it a hopeful sign.

Christians come in red and yellow, black and white, but they are green inside, and growing. A hopeless Christian is a contradiction in terms. Who needs a church full of people that cannot attest to the hope that is in them? Who needs a church that is clueless about its mission and cowers in fear of the future? No one…God included.

When Israel was carted off to exile in Babylon in 587 BC, the marks by which they defined themselves were gone. They lost their land. They lost their temple. They lost their king. They lost their sense of being God's people. In the first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah, Israel is preached to a pulp. Isaiah pronounced God's judgment upon them. Being carted away to Babylon was God's exacting judgment for Israel's sin and faithlessness. It goes on for thirty-nine chapters, but then comes a change of tone. Israel had been mired in misery long enough. God was about to lead them into a hopeful future.

"Remember not the former things…Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth." God will make a way in the wilderness where there was none. Rivers will flow like ribbons across the desert. Though people didn't honor God, God forgave them. "I am he who blots out your transgressions." God's memory failed. "I will not remember your sins." Israel could now go home. God was turning brown into green.

A competitive runner never breaks stride looking over the shoulder to see if anyone is gaining. Looking back can spell the difference between winning and losing. "Don't remember the former things," Isaiah says. "Don't dwell upon sins long since forgiven and forgotten. Don't dwell upon the past. You might miss the new things God is up to. Don't hang on to the glory days…they are not as glorious as you remember."

God is up to something. In the midst of this brown, old world, things are changing color. The Holy Spirit is orchestrating renewal in the church. The church is recovering the wonder of worship with God at the center, and what it means to worship with the head and the heart and the body. There is a hunger the world over for spiritual life which connects us with God and directs us where he would have us serve.

The Holy Spirit is up to something the spirit is preparing us for something. The world is not getting better and better. The early church was surrounded by a pagan world that was indifferent and then hostile. The first christians dedicated themselves to Christ and each other. They held the torch high as a beacon for hope in an otherwise dark world. History is repeating itself. The Holy Spirit is greening us up so we will stick close to God and each other in an increasingly brown, pagan, hostile, world.

There is no way I have of knowing all the ways God gives us hope. I only know that the answer of it all comes down to an event that happened long ago. A dead Jesus was buried on a Friday, and somehow raised on Sunday to give us hope. The promises of God are to bring us hope. They will get us through the devastating moments of our lives.

Addie's older sister was having a party. She asked him to stick around the house and just "be there" at her party. He wasn't at all comfortable. All who showed up were teenagers. He was just twelve and didn't fit in. He just sat there staring out a window until a sixteen-year-old who had been at a prep school walked up to Addie and said, "I learned the manual of arms last semester. Want to see it? Have you got a rifle?"

Addie returned with a .22 caliber rifle from the closet. After the sixteen-year-old demonstrated it, he handed the rifle to Addie and taught him parts of the drill. Addie had no way of knowing what would happen next. While he twirled the rifle, he accidentally pulled the trigger and a shell no one had checked struck Ruth Merwin in the head. She fell to the floor dead. Addie stared at her in shock, dropped the gun, and bolted into an upstairs room.

It was ruled an accident. But Addie would have rather done time if he thought it would lessen the self-doubt and unworthiness he felt all his life. But though the tragedy would always plague him, it didn't destroy him.

Ten years later he graduated from Northwestern University and practiced law in Chicago. He became an assistant Secretary of State. And in 1952 he was bestowed with an honor he never could have imagined on that dark brown day so many years before. He became the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. In response to the honor, Adlai Stevenson offered these words; "I should have preferred to hear those words uttered for a stronger, a wiser, a better man than myself."

Grandpa Bibbee always called for silence when ever Tennessee Ernie Ford would sing on radio or tv, "It Is No Secret What God Can Do."

God turned chaos to cosmos. He turned Hebrew slaves into a great nation.

God turned himself into a man who came to draw the world into abundant life. Instead, we took his life.

But God turned cruel death into glorius resurrection and God turned an odd mix of very fallible men into the church against which the gates of hell don't prevail.

God is still at work turning brown into green.

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