Zechariah 8:1-8 "The City Park" Scott Hoezee

A friend of mine who lives in Zeeland told me recently that on September 11, the teacher of her fourth grader informed the class about what had happened in New York and Washington. But then, seeking to reassure the children, the teacher said, "But don't worry: those terrorists have never even heard of Zeeland." Well, whether they have or haven't, I suspect that many of us can identify with the sentiment behind that comment: sometimes you're glad not to live in a major city. Of course, the spread of anthrax through the mail erodes a little bit the safety buffers of geographical distance. But still, in times of war and terror, small town life has its charms.

Because who of us can forget the images of people fleeing vast billowing clouds of ash and dust in lower Manhattan or those throngs of Big Apple refugees walking on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge to escape the carnage behind them? All too-often in recent months and years we've seen cities around the world in turmoil: Kabul, Tel Aviv, Islamabad, Washington, New York, Sarajevo, Jerusalem. Even in the absence of war, however, we know that cities can be a bit dangerous at times. Some while back I told you the story of our first subway station experience in New York City last fall--the words of a well-meaning New Yorker that were meant to help us ended up frightening us a bit as to the perils of crime in the big city. There are even parts of our own city where we would just as soon not find ourselves walking around alone once the sun has gone down.

The Book of Zechariah is mostly about a city: a city called Jerusalem. The word "Jerusalem" means "city of peace and wholeness." And once upon a time in ancient Israel, Jerusalem was a fine place to be. David's splendid palace was there. Solomon's glorious Temple was the center of the city. Jerusalem's walls and ramparts, gardens and marketplaces were all glorious in the eyes of the Israelites, as you can tell by reading the Old Testament psalms that celebrate Zion. Pilgrims who traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover and other such sacred festivals would get teary-eyed the moment they caught a glimpse of the city in the distance. By the time they got close to the entrance, they had a bevy of songs they would start singing, celebrating the City of the Great King, the place where Yahweh himself dwelled upon the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple's Holy of Holies.

But then one year destruction came at the hands of the Babylonians. They trashed Jerusalem. They shattered the walls, tore down the guard towers, and tossed the gleaming gates aside. They dismantled the Temple and just generally turned all that had been good about the city into a nightmare of destruction. Jerusalem had become the "ground zero" of another time and place. And it wounded the Israelites to the core. That's why you can find those many psalms of lament in the Hebrew Psalter, quite a few of which are laments sung about the desecrated holy city. If you were here for the Calvin College Alumni Choir service last Sunday evening, then you heard one such psalm: Psalm 80. Among the most bitter cries of that lament are the ones about Jerusalem. "Why have you broken down its walls? Boars from the forest ravage the city, and the creatures of the field feed on it!"

A year ago last Saturday my family and I visited the Statue of Liberty. Last Sunday afternoon we watched the video footage we took that day--footage that included many shots of the World Trade Center and lower Manhattan. I can't look at that now without feeling enormous sadness. It was the same for the ancient Israelites, but magnified many times as Jerusalem was far more than just a pretty city with big buildings: it was the center of their religious faith, God's earthly headquarters, and the crown jewel of the Promised Land and all of the rich covenant theology bound up with that land. So when those Israelites glanced over at the shattered holy city, bile rose in their throats, sorrow choked their hearts, and the disorientation of it all made them dizzy with grief and anger.

Zechariah is all about the restoration of the city and so the re-flourishing of all hope. But if Zechariah were about only that piece of Middle Eastern real estate long ago and far away, then looking at this today would be little more than a history lesson. But as a prophet of the Most High God, Zechariah, like all the prophets, ultimately pointed to more than one horizon of fulfillment. Contained in the words we read today are sentiments that applied not just to a people who are not us in a city that is not our home. No, we can see in this holy vision a vision for also Calvin Church and for the creation generally. Something of God's fondest and dearest hopes for this world are in this passage. That's why we look at it today. That's why it is vital we catch this vision ourselves, particularly as we prepare next week to re-dedicate ourselves to God's kingdom service in also this city in the year 2001.

You may not be very familiar with Zechariah, in part because this book is widely regarded as one of the most obscure in the Bible. It is filled with weird imagery like a woman in a basket, flying scrolls, chariots and crowns, a man with a tape measurer, and the like. Still, the overall message is not at all difficult to figure out: part of this message is contained in the very name of the prophet himself. "Zechariah" means "Yahweh remembers," and the fact of God's good memory is this book's source of hope and encouragement. Zechariah was written near the end of Israel's seventy-year-long captivity in Babylon. It was the time of Haggai, Nehemiah, Ezra, and the others who returned to Israel to begin re-building the walls and temple of the sacked city.

It was a time, in other words, of new hope and new dreams. Maybe they could begin again after all. Zechariah's message is that they could indeed because despite all that had happened, God remembered his people. And God had a plan. God had a vision. God still had the dream of shalom foremost in his mind, and it is this vision that was to become the blueprint for not just the restored city of Jerusalem, but for us yet today, too. In a way, the upshot of this shalom vision climaxes in Zechariah 8. Because in the verses we read this morning it becomes clear that in a very important sense, the kingdom of God is a city park.

How do you picture God's kingdom? How do you envision the new creation? Sometimes we relegate such thoughts to the realm of the wispy, the vapory, the cloudy and the insubstantial. Streets of gold, palaces of ivory and emerald, strumming harps and saints sporting wings are as common a way to picture "heaven" on a Hallmark greeting card as in the precincts of our own imaginations. The Bible itself has some of that same imagery, of course, particularly in Revelation. But many other times God's kingdom is depicted in far more homey, familar, and downright earthy ways.

In the case of Zechariah 8, the kingdom of God is a city park. It's a community in which old folks will no longer be relegated to the invisible fringes of society. They will be full of years and full of wisdom and they will be honored for both. They will enjoy the delights of the new city, will be sought for advice. They will take joy in the antics of the children. As Elizabeth Achtemeier once said in a memorable sermon, the kingdom of God will be like a city where kids can play and scamper without fear of harm or danger. The kingdom of God will be a city park without perverts hiding in the bushes, ready to lure kids off to dens of child pornography. The kingdom of God is a city park devoid of drug dealers who entice children with brightly colored pills or funny smelling pipes. The kingdom of God is a city park without guns and so without drive-by shootings.

The city, God says, will be a place where children and old people alike will fit, will have a place. They will not be abused, malnourished, forgotten, or endangered. In fact, the Hebrew word in verse 5 translated as "playing" can also mean to laugh, joke, be happy. The word drips with the juices of goodness and shalom because in God's sight the marks of a good city are not the characteristics to which we typically pay the most attention. A good city is not first of all one with a grand economy, strong industry, and good shopping malls. Instead the mark of a good city is that it takes care of its children and its elderly--those two groups that are otherwise so vulnerable to neglect and abuse.

These words must have been highly energizing for those ancient Israelites just returning from Babylon. That was one of the jobs of a good prophet, you know: prophets did not merely predict what might happen in the future. Instead their more immediate task was to sketch such vivid images of what could be true in the future as to enliven the present moment, too. Zechariah did not want to make people dreamy-eyed about what could be by and by but he wanted to pump them up and bring them to their feet because of what they could do right that very moment to make all this happen now!

Of course, Jerusalem was still a mess when Zechariah first preached this sermon. Wild animals abounded, making the streets anything but safe for small children. Thieves lurked in alleyways and along the roads. Buildings were riddled with holes such that if the temperature overnight dipped too low, the elderly could die of exposure, and babies could, too. There was work to be done if the city was ever going to line up with God's vision of shalom. Motivating them to do that work was one of Zechariah's fondest wishes and his most serious God-given assignment.

We have work to do, too, right here in Eastown and Ottawa Hills. For we, too, are surrounded by needs. These needs have not come about because of destruction wrought by war but they are no less glaring. In our city, we still have elderly people who lack adequate care. Old and young alike too often go to bed hungry, or without having eaten the right kinds of food. Some who work in the Grand Rapids school system say that many children come to school without having had breakfast--some even show up having not eaten a real meal since the school's hot lunch of the previous day! Ev Vermeer informs me that the federally funded lunch program does great work in feeding many children during the school year, but what happens to them during the summer when school is out? They don't get lunch, even though money is available to feed them if only someone will take it and provide the lunches.

Also, we don't need to look far to sense the ongoing threats provided by violence and drugs. Too many very young children wander the streets of our city at night with seemingly no parent missing their presence in a house somewhere, even after dark. There is work to be done if we are going to do something, anything, to help bring glimmers of Zechariah's vision into reality for also our city, or at least our part of the city.

Six years ago last month at an evening service I preached on this same passage. It was a Mission Emphasis Sunday, and so I chose to highlight this local aspect of mission work for the sake of the gospel. I said then that one way we could answer the challenge of Zechariah 8 was to heed the then-new report of our Long Range Planning Committee. A key recommendation of that 1995 report was that Calvin Church remain at Franklin and Ethel and that by the year 2000 we pursue a major upgrade of our building so as to better minister to this part of the city. I noted then that it would take time, energy, and a lot of money to do this. After that service, about a dozen people suggested that I preach that sermon again sometime but at a morning service when more people could hear it. Well, it took six years but I didn't forget!

Because now we have fulfilled that first part of our challenge: the design part, the fund-raising part, the actual construction part. We're not finished with the need for money, of course, but it is time to look ahead and come up with a vision for the future--a vision that, like Zechariah's word pictures, is meant to energize the present moment. It is a challenge. In the last eight years, I've heard comments and questions about who Calvin CRC is or is supposed to be. Some of us have heard the suggestion that maybe what we should have done was re-locate the whole congregation to the suburbs. Some have expressed the fear that this area is maybe not a safe place to be after dark. And let's be honest about the glaring racial fact that we are not a very mixed congregation ethnically and this seems unlikely to change significantly any time soon. So can we do any good in this part of the city?

We can if we want to. We can be a place where children may play safely and where old people have a place of honor. We can be a place of shalom that becomes known for being willing to provide the lunch a child needs, the game of hoops a group of kids might enjoy, the clothing people need in the winter, and the good news of the gospel we all need all the time. We can provide tutoring for school children and support for teenaged mothers who otherwise would be left on their own, which is precisely where they most certainly should not be left. And we can do it all in the name of Jesus the Savior of the world.

It's always a little dangerous to predict what Jesus would do or where Jesus would go if he were to come in person to Grand Rapids this very afternoon. In his own day, Jesus proved to be anything but predictible, which is exactly what unsettled the always-predictible Pharisees. Still, I cannot resist the idea that were Jesus to come looking for lost sheep and prodigal sons, for the modern day equivalents of Samaritan women at a well and of tax collectors, the places he'd go to be with and love those folks would not be at the Grand Plaza but Degage, not Jacobson's in Gaslight Village but God's Kitchen in the Heartside.

My prayer is that we will join Jesus in this work. It is so easy to look at our new facility and see it as what we did or as the fruit of how much money we shelled out. To be honest, we have done much and given much, and especially those of us who have made sacrifices for the project need to know how special and wonderful that service to God is. But let's not forget that Calvin Church, past, present, and future, is not about what we give but first of all about what we have been given by the grace of God. The church is always about what God does through his Holy Spirit. Our privilege as disciples is to be able to go along with where the Spirit leads.

Perhaps this sounds too hard, too fanciful, too pie-in-the-sky. But surely in the midst of Jerusalem's ruined moonscape, Zechariah's words sounded no less overly optimistic. Maybe that's why God states the obvious in verse 6 in asking, "Does this sound too marvelous to you? Is this just too difficult to do?" It was a rhetorical question. You're not supposed to answer because the answer is clear and obvious: it is not too difficult. God can and will establish his justice, his peace, his holy shalom. But he will use us to do it.

God wants us to tell the people of Grand Rapids "I have remembered you. I am with you." Because God's kingdom is like a city park. God's kingdom is like a city park free of racial tension, violence, and danger. God's kingdom is like a city park in which all people, young and old alike, find their places of honor, delight, and holy playfulness. Calvin Church's challenge is to take the enormous gifts we have been given by God's grace so as to channel that same grace into meaningful ministry.

It will take all of us pulling together to do it. But it will finally take something more--something Zechariah already talked about earlier in this book in chapter 4:6. When talking about how Jerusalem of old will be re-built and how God's shalom will one day flood finally the whole world, Zechariah reminded the people then, and now today also us, "Not by might nor by power but by my Spirit, says the LORD almighty." In that Spirit, let us move forward. Amen.