The Third Seawall

The wind is straight off the water and everybody is standing in it anyway, coats buttoned to the throat, because the whole town said it would come and the whole town has come.

There is a length of new wall behind the speakers. Gray concrete, rock armor stacked along the foot of it, the fresh joints still a shade lighter than the rest. A school choir is lined up on the slope in matching sweaters, waiting, hands in their sleeves.

Owen is near the back with his hands in his pockets.

He knows the history because everyone here does. The first wall went in before he was born, and a storm took the middle out of it when he was four. The second one stood for a long while and did well, and then a night came that the town still refers to only by its month, and in the morning there was a hundred feet of it in the road.

This is the third.

The man at the microphone is not a good speaker and it does not matter. He says the names of the crews. He says the years. He says that they built it and the water took it and they built it and the water took it, and here they are, and the wind takes about half his sentence away over the parking lot.

Then the choir sings, and it is thin in the wind and completely lovely, and the town claps with their coats on.

Owen claps too.

And underneath the clapping he is running a list he did not ask for. A business that went down twice. A room in his house he framed out and roofed and never finished, that has been a room full of stacked lumber for six years now. A phone number he has not called since the second time it went badly.

He stopped rebuilding. Not with a decision. He just did not start again, and then not starting became the way he lives, and he has been fine with it for long enough to call it wisdom.

He is looking at a wall that has gone down twice and been built three times and he cannot work out how anybody stands there and does that.

That is your question too.

You have watched something fail more than once. Maybe something in you, maybe something you were part of, maybe a church that broke your trust in a way you have never fully said out loud. And after the second time you stopped putting anything back up, quietly, and told yourself it was maturity.

You are inside a covenant that has never once depended on the wall standing. That is not a comforting thought, it is what the written word says God swore over His own people, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old promise about mountains land on a man standing in the wind with his hands in his pockets.

What God swears, and what He does not

Isaiah is talking to a city that has been through the worst of what a city goes through. Not to a soul in a quiet room. To a people with a wrecked history and a name for the year it happened.

For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.Isaiah 54:10

Read what He is willing to put on the line. The mountains. He picks the least likely thing in the landscape to move, and He says it can go first.

And read what He does not say. He does not say the walls will hold. He does not promise that nothing will come down. Everything in that chapter is spoken to a people who already know exactly what comes down, and He does not insult them by pretending otherwise. What He puts beyond reach is His kindness and the covenant of His peace, and those are on His side of the line, not theirs.

This is the plain sense of the bride language too, and it is worth saying flatly: in Scripture the bride is the church, a whole people, corporate, the way a nation is called God's own. It is never a private arrangement between Christ and a reader and it is never a romance. The covenant is sworn over a people.

You are held by something God put beyond removal, and He never made the holding conditional on the wall. The word says His kindness does not depart and His covenant of peace is not removed, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact rather than an old sentence about somebody else.

The wall has gone down. Say it plainly.

Now let me say the hard part, because a message that will not say it is not worth reading.

The church has come down. In places, in eras, in particular rooms with particular people in them, it has failed badly and it has hurt people, and if that happened near you then you are not exaggerating and you did not misread it. I am not going to explain it away, and I am not going to name a tradition or a denomination and hang it there, because that is a different kind of dishonesty and it does nothing for you.

Here is what the honesty is for.

If your hope had been in the wall's record, you would be right to have stopped. A wall with that record does not deserve your confidence. But your hope was never in the wall's record, and the covenant Isaiah names was not sworn by the wall.

You are not standing on the church's performance, and you never were. Scripture puts the keeping of this on the Lord who has mercy, and the same Spirit who joined you to that people is not asking you to defend anything indefensible in order to stay.

He has not left, and He is not leaving

Notice the two tenses in what God says. My kindness shall not depart. The covenant of my peace shall not be removed. Both of them are about what happens next and both of them are already settled.

That is the difference between the town and the water. The water has no intention. It comes because it comes. But there is a Person in this covenant, and He has said what He is going to do, and He said it to a people whose city was already down.

You have not been left, and Christ is not leaving the company He bound Himself to. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the standing evidence of it in a person who has stopped expecting anything.