SERMON The Lessons of Matriotism

Pentecost 6C Isaiah 66:10-14

Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today I’d like everyone to spend a few moments thinking about a place that is especially important to you. Think of the place that someone else would have to see in order to really understand who you are--a place that’s more than just a spot on a GPS to you. Maybe it’s Grandma’s farm, or the old neighborhood. Maybe it’s the site of an annual camping trip or a ballpark or the edge of a river. It might even be a place you’ve never been. Maybe you’ve longed to visit the country your ancestors came from. Maybe you identify with a place where you’ve never lived. When I was a little kid, I was a rather fierce Danish patriot despite knowing very little about the country. Finally when I was 25 I had the chance to visit, and my brother and I took a picture of ourselves by the Baltic Sea in the town our great-grandfather Marius Dueholm had emigrated from 112 years before.

Most of us have one or more places like that, places that help to define who we are. These places are bound up with memories, both individual and communal, and with groups of people who share those memories with us--our families, our neighbors, our fellow citizens. They cannot really be shared with anyone else. Visitors to our country will view the Springfield home of Abraham Lincoln with historical interest. The people silent with awe at the great man’s house and tomb will probably be Americans.

This, in one sense, is what patriotism is. It refers literally to an attachment to our fatherland--not just a nation-state but any place that shapes us and helps make us who we are. And of course we are attached to those places and to the people with whom we share them. What exiles and expatriates often learn is that they can’t reject their country and their people without also rejecting part of themselves. Patriotism in this sense is not chauvinistic and superior. What we truly love we want to be good. This is why we sing both of heroes’ liberating strife, and patriot dreams on one hand, and of God mending our every flaw on the other.

The sentiment of patriotism perhaps begins to describe the hopes expressed in our lesson from Isaiah this morning. “Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her; rejoice with her in joy, all you who mourn over her--that you may nurse and be satisfied by her consoling breast; that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious bosom.” This is a striking image. Jerusalem here is a mother, and the people are her children. And not her adult children either, but infants still sucking at her breast. “For thus says the Lord: I will extend prosperity to her like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream, and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm, and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.”

Perhaps this is a surprising, or even uncomfortable image for some of us. Breastfeeding is a dicey topic in our society, in a way that it wasn’t back when there was no alternative. And the maternal images for God and for God’s holy city may ring a little oddly on ears accustomed to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But live with this image for a moment. You could call it patriotic, since it is attached to a homeland. Except that the feelings expressed are more powerful than what we’re used to. Call this sentiment ‘matriotism,’ a love of the Mother Country.

Jerusalem was, and is, far more important in Judaism than most of us can probably imagine. It was great-grandpa’s homeland, grandma’s farm, Lincoln’s tomb, and the summer camp where you met your first girlfriend all rolled into one, and then some. It was the heart of the nation’s historical memory. The Holy City was unique in all the world as God’s particular dwelling. The Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem was the earthly image of God’s throne in the heavens. The Temple and the city together were what we would today call a microcosm--a little version of the universe. It was, in that sense, the center of the world for Judaism. When it was captured by the Babylonians and its walls and Temple destroyed in 587 B.C., it was as if the world had ended.

Our lesson this morning probably dates from the time after the exiles from Jerusalem were allowed to return and restore their home, some sixty or seventy years after the fall of Jerusalem. But even this was a difficult, halting process. There were conflicts and setbacks. The Jewish people were still scattered, many of them never to return. Yet the prophet holds out this image, that a Jerusalem in ruins still bears the image of God’s love for the people, that the power of God will still be revealed to the people and that they will be held in her arms and bounced on her knee.

In the 25 centuries that have followed, Jerusalem did not fare much better. Sackings, conquests, destructions, massacres and expulsions of Jews have come and gone. Jerusalem is of course still in struggle today. And why would she not be? Think back to that place that means so much to you. We don’t love these places because they are perfect, and more than we love our fathers or our mothers because they are perfect. We love them because they made us who we are, because to forget them is to forget ourselves. And so it is with this tiny footprint on the world where God chose to be revealed in a special way. For centuries, every Passover, Jews have ended the holiday meal by saying, “next year in Jerusalem”--people who had never been and never would go to Jerusalem.

What can we learn from this ardent matriotism? We learn, for one, that we may be nourished and comforted even by less than perfect homelands. We learn that we can love something that is in ruins and we are never foolish to hope for its restoration. We learn that being faithful to the land that mothers us is always something for which we should strive.

Early Christians read this passage as referring, in the age after the coming of Christ, to the Church as the mother of all the faithful. And so we see our mother here in Wicker Park in need of a little work, in need every day of the gift of faith that sustains us in our daily lives, in need of the Spirit’s calling and blessing. We see our mother in the wider church suffering through violent disagreements and awful demographic shifts. Yet here we are, as children dandled on her knee and fed and carried and blessed and flourishing. Rejoice in joy and rejoice in mourning, you who see beyond the years the alabaster city, undimmed by human tears--the city of God’s constant presence and of God’s motherly love. Amen.

Rev. Ben Dueholm

July 4, 2010

Wicker Park Lutheran Church