Shelter

Scripture: Isaiah 32:1-5; Psalm 137:1 Series: 2022

Second sermon in the ‘Survival’ series, preaching Isaiah 32:1-5’s image of just rulers as a shelter from wind and storm. Using his Appalachian Trail experience of learning to rely on public backcountry shelters, Wilson argues the church is meant to be shelter for the soul. He applies a wilderness ‘four W’s’ checklist (wood, water, wind, widowmakers) to congregational self-examination: Do we have resources/fuel (stewardship)? Are we drawing people into new life and baptism? Do we protect rather than expose the vulnerable, refusing to act like Pharisees and vultures toward our own? And are we honest about looming dangers (widowmakers) rather than lying about the church’s condition? Set against Isaiah’s exile context, the sermon insists a true church promotes justice, righteousness, and holiness or should shut its doors, and points toward upcoming congregational vision-team meetings.

Illustrations: appalachian-trail-shelters, mountain-climbing-exposure, grandfather-left-church-money, four-ws-of-shelter, vultures-in-the-church, three-three-three-survival-rule

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June 26

Shelter

See here: A king rules to promote righteousness;
 rulers govern to promote justice,
 each like a shelter from the wind
 and a refuge from a storm,
 like streams of water in a wasteland,
 like the shade of a massive cliff in a worn-out land.
Then the eyes of those who can see will no longer be blind,
 the ears of those who can hear will listen,
 the minds of the rash will know and comprehend,
 and the tongues of those who stammer will speak fluently and plainly.
Then a fool will no longer be called honorable,
 nor a villain considered respectable.

• Isaiah 32:1-5

After college, I started hiking the Appalachian trail from Maine down to Georgia. I brought a tent with me because I grew up as a Boy Scout. I grew up with family camping trips with tents for a shelter. I grew up camping often in the fall or the spring, when mosquitoes and bugs were out like crazy in Texas. And the tents were mostly used as a large mosquito net, but still, that’s what I was used to. When I made it up to Maine and started hiking south, I carried my tent with me. People have been camping and hiking along the Appalachian trail for many years. And they built these series of shelters. Almost every three to five miles, from Maine to Georgia, there is a shelter in the back country. Usually, with three walls, a roof, a floor, a fire pit, and near some kind of water source within a half mile. It didn’t take me long to realize that I didn’t need to take my own shelter with me. But if I was going to stay in the shelter, that meant I had to be willing to be in public. That meant I had to be willing to sleep in a space with strangers, with other people. Sometimes this would mean three people to a shelter, and most of the shelters were designed for eight max. Sometimes it would mean 12 people in a shelter designed for eight. When you are hiking 25 miles a day, you learn to pick and choose what you want to care about. And what I chose was that I would rather carry two pounds less weight than to be particular about the space next to my sleeping bag when I was sleeping. I mean, the the shelter companions, I was most annoyed about weren’t the fellow humans. It was the chipmunks in Virginia. But I learned to adapt around them.

My friends, we’re continuing our series on Survival, looking at how to survive in the wild, but also the wilds of this broken world. How to survive with our soul and what God offers us and how God gives us grace and peace in this time. Last week, we talked about the first rule of survival, which is don’t panic. You can’t do anything else if you are panicking. After that, after we realize we need not panic, we go to the next step. The standard rule of thumb in survival situations is that you can survive three hours without shelter, three days without water and three weeks without food. And so over the next three weeks, we’re going to look at shelter, water, and food, in that order. Now, some of us may invert that list and think that we could only survive three hours without food, and possibly we could go a long time without shelter, but shelter really is a priority. Food is useless if you are stuck in a monsoon. Now we don’t have to worry about rain as much this time of year in Texas. It’d be great. It’d be so much better if we could worry about some rain. We need shelter here, where we are, from the heat. We need shelter from exposure. Now this is a word I didn’t really come across until I started climbing mountains. Exposure is how close you are to falling to your doom. You would ask, how exposed is that position? If it’s not very exposed, then if you trip and fall, you won’t be going very far. If it’s very exposed, then you’re going to go a long way down. For us today, this gets to how we think about the stakes of our own existence. Now, many of us are blessed with comfortable lives and we may not feel very exposed. Some of us, on the other hand, feel like we have been walking on the edge of a cliff for some time and it is hard to know when it is going to stop. In either situation, we still need shelter. We need shelter for our souls. When you think about your soul, when you think about who you are at your core, there’s a lot of exposure in this world and not just for our children.

The prophet Isaiah lived in the period of Jewish history called the exile. It was a time after the Judges and the Kings after David and Solomon and then a bunch of bad Kings. And then king Josiah, who was a good king, who sought the Torah of God, sought to follow the ways of God. But soon after Josiah the Northern kingdom was absorbed by Assyria and the Southern kingdom absorbed by Babylon. Many Jews were taken to Babylon. The exile challenged the self-understanding of the people of Israel: if things are really bad, what does that mean about the God we worship? I thought God was going to protect us. And now we are, as it says in Psalm 137: By the rivers, rivers of Babylon, there we sat and we wept when we remembered Zion. What do should we do during those times? What should we think of God?

Now in this early part of Isaiah, there’s this passage that I read earlier about what a ruler and the king does a king rules to promote righteousness, rulers governed, to promote justice. Each like a shelter from the wind, a refuge from a storm, like the shade of a massive cliff and a worn out land, justice and righteousness offer us shelter in this world.

The church can offer shelter in this world. It can offer shelter for our soul. The church, at its best, offers us a space where Jesus is present, where the Holy Spirit is moving and active where God, the Father is worshipped where people care for each other, lift each other up. But the church has not always been at its best. We have to admit that we have to be honest with that. Our God is a God of truth. We do not need to lie about the state of the history of the church. The father of lies, the devil wants us to lie about it. The devil wants us to put a pretty spin on everything and pretend that things are okay. But when we are lying to ourselves, we’re keeping God away. When we think everything is peachy keen. We are keeping God out of our hearts.

Thinking about Isaiah and the church makes think about how looking for shelter in a survival situation could inform how we are honest with the church.

When you are looking for shelter in the wild, there are four things you should look for.

• Wood
• Water
• Wind
• Widowmakers”

The first W stands for wood. Be sure to ask yourself the following questions each time you stop to camp:

Do I have a close source for the wood I need to accomplish any tasks I plan for this camp setting? Is there firewood to last the time I will be here? Is there enough deadfall, or will I need to cut wood? (Depending on what tools you have with you, this can be significant.) Are there construction materials close by that I can use to build shelter framing, cooking gear, or any other crafting I have planned?

“The second W stands for water. As with wood, there are important questions to answer before you set up camp:

Is there a water source within short distance of camp that will be convenient for easy collection? Is the water source a flowing source or standing source? A standing source will evaporate in summer and poses the threat of stagnation as well. Any ground-source water will need to be boiled at a minimum, but both filtering and boiling is preferred when possible. Is the water source large enough to hold food fish? Is the water attractive to other animals that will use it, such as frogs, crayfish, turtles, and the like? Is the source large enough to attract mammals to use it as a daily source of water?

These questions can help when you’re making decisions about where to set up a base camp.”

The third W is wind. Wherever you choose to camp, wind is a concern both for the threat of fires running out of control and for the ability to combat or take advantage of convective breezes.

The fourth W stands for widowmakers. These are standing dead trees that may easily fall or break if subjected to wind. They could cause serious safety issues if they are close enough to fall into your camp area or the area into which you will frequently travel to get wood or water.”

Let’s think about this with the church. The first W is wood. Wood for fuel and wood for building supplies. Is there enough fuel for what we’d need for what God is doing? Is there enough wood to build more? Is there enough wood to keep the fire going? Do we have the resources we need here to do what God is calling us to do? Do we need to find more resources for doing it? Are we giving enough as a church for what God is doing here? Are we responding to God’s call? That is a deep and important question we need to ask. I don’t ask for money a ton from the pulpit, but it matters. My grandfather left a Methodist church because the preacher asked for money. So I have an aversion for that. And yet, but God has a vision for us here that’s exciting to be a part of. It is exciting to find the place where God’s call and our heart come together for the mission of the kingdom of God. That is where we will find the fuel for what God is doing here. I see that in sharing Jesus with our children. I see that with sharing our food from the garden, with our neighbors. I see that with bringing people back to church who haven’t been in a long time, or who’ve never been. I see that with pub theology, with questions about God in surprising places.

The next “W” is water. The water of life. Does our shelter have water? Are we drawing people into new life with Jesus? Are we baptizing children? Are we baptizing adults? Are we offering new professions of faith? Are people changing their lives here? The third is wind. Are we giving protection? To people here? Can people come to church and Bee Creek and find protection? Are they less exposed? Are they protected in their? Or do they feel more exposed? Do they feel like the vultures are inside or outside the church. And that’s really when the church has not been at its best. When the church has been at its worst, Christians have been acting like vultures to their own inside. Instead of protecting all who walk through the door, loving all who walked through the door, Christians have turned on our each other. Christians have become Pharisees and holier than thou and forgotten the rock hard reality of how all of us need mercy. How we should show mercy and grace to whoever walks through our door, whatever they’re wearing. And even that, that gets to the last one: widowmakers. Is there anything hanging over our head that could fall at a low moment? Are we lying about it or pointing it out? This means looking to our future as a congregation. Now at the end of the summer, we’re going to have a series of vision meetings about that. Six vision teams will be gathering together around different themes. These are open to the whole congregation. They are open to members and visitors alike. If you want to be a part of that, of that future. So we do not let the widowmakers hang you there. So we look to what are the concerns of our community, of our congregation? How can we face them and meet them? What are the possibilities? How can we face them and meet them? That is the shelter that we can be. But as Isaiah says, a king, a ruler promotes justice and promotes righteousness. Yes, the church that is true to who God is promotes justice and promotes righteousness, promotes holiness. If we are the church, if we are not making people holy, if we are not offering new life, we need to shut down the walls, shut down the doors. If we are not offering people a new experience with Jesus, if we’re not offering new life in this space, we need to shut down the doors. If we are not building a more just society, that looks like the kingdom of heaven here and now, we need to shut down the doors. We are not a shelter. We’re lying to ourselves. Thanks be to God. I feel like that is not the case. That God is present here. That new life is happening here. That we are offering shelter, not just from the wind. We are offering fuel for the fire. We are offering the water of new life and we are not blind to the dangers in front of us. My brothers and sisters, survival in the wild and survival in the world are not so different. We need shelter before anything else, we need a safe place to be and to grow. We need a place of transformation. We can only be that together. And it takes commitment. It takes a commitment from the people who are here, but it takes also a commitment to receive new life, new vision, new blood, into what God is doing here.

Let us pray. Heavenly father, thank you for offering us new life. Thank you for giving us hope. Please remind us that we are safe in your arms and under your wings. And especially when we receive your justice, your righteousness, your holiness, your grace, to be the people we were created to be. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen