"Within You and Among You"

Luke 17:20-37. 

I.

            Apparently, the Pharisees are still talking to Jesus.  They haven’t been totally alienated by their last encounter where Jesus basically accused them of being hopelessly mercenary in thinking they could serve God and still be affluent and even wealthy.

            They ask him about “when” the Kingdom of God is coming.  The “when” question almost always betrays a lack of trust in God.  For when people want to know “when” they are often trying to justify their own procrastination or delay in responding.  Focusing on the “when” is what we do when we don’t want to take up the challenge of discipleship now.  The longer we can delay God’s judgment, the longer we have to continue in our ways of greed, fear, anger, and violence.  Wondering about “when” always distracts us from following Jesus in the present moment.

            Jesus replies that it’s not about “when.”  It’s not about observing the signs or being a spectator or analyst of current events.  And it’s not about “where” either, as if we could travel to some other part of the world where the Kingdom was starting to happen.  As if we could objectively identify and evaluate it and finally certify that this really is it.

            No.  Jesus insists that the Kingdom of God is within and among people already.  He even says it is within and among “you,” the Pharisees who are asking him about it.  So it is not something out there to be observed as much as it is a quality within a person or a community that governs the way they perceive everything.  It has to do with whether we have the “ears to hear,” as Jesus says elsewhere.  It is an inner ability, a new and different way of thinking, which is what repentance literally means: having a new mind. 

            The Kingdom of God is in some sense already here – and it is apparent in Jesus’ work of healing, liberating, empowering, and including people.  But we can’t perceive it from outside.  We can only perceive it from within it, when we access the trust God has placed in every heart, but which only a few appear to be aware of.  Jesus himself becomes the catalyst for people to get in touch with what is already within and among them; in trusting him they trust in this inner Kingdom, and so become transformed and healed.

            We don’t locate the Kingdom of God by empirical experiments or by going on a quest to some far-off place.  We don’t find it in the data or in our memories or even in the Bible… until we have found it within us.  We don’t find it objectively at all.  It is not in what we see; rather, it is in how we see.

            The Kingdom of God is not some other time, some other when; neither is it some other place, some other where.  It is always here and now.  It is something we find within ourselves and among the gathered community.  And when we do find it within ourselves, then we begin to see it out there in different times and places.

II.

            Then Jesus turns and starts talking to his disciples.  “The days are coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it.”  In other words, the disciples, Jesus predicts, will lose their contact with their inner ability to see God’s Presence within and among them.  This will happen because of their experience of his suffering and death.  They will have witnessed his gruesome execution and he will be gone.   That fact will shake their trust and faith so profoundly that they will be tempted to go back to looking for outward signs and evidence. 

            People will say, “Whoever heard of a crucified Messiah?”  People will say, “What difference did Jesus make anyway, isn’t the world just as corrupt and violent now as it was before he came?”  People will say, “Why did God allow this?” – and by “this” they mean any evil, terrible, atrocity, any act of cruelty or injustice, any disease or natural disaster. 

            And the temptation for the disciples will be to try and defend God by looking for the silver linings, thinking positively, and lifting up the good things in the world.  And it will turn into a trivial and ultimately vain exercise, because as long as we’re collecting facts and data and evidence we are looking in the wrong place with the wrong mind. 

            “Do not set off in pursuit!” Jesus urges them.  Don’t get distracted.  Don’t go back to looking for God’s Presence out there in the when and the where, the times and the places, the history and the memories and the circumstances of the world.  Because in the world we tend to find a lot of unadulterated evil.  In the world we find self-serving lies, we find the abuses of the powerful, we find oppression and inequality, and the reign of death.

            And the way to God’s Kingdom is not to escape from all that, but to go through it.  That is the message of the cross.  Disciples of Jesus Christ do not run away from suffering because he did not run away from suffering.  Rather he went through it, accepting and receiving the fullness of the world’s evil, thereby defusing it, rendering it powerless and inert.  Christ defeated death by death.

            His Kingdom is not of this world, Jesus will tell Pilate, and it cannot be found fully realized by collecting evidence in this world… unless we have first received the ears to hear and the eyes to see, that is, unless we have cultivated our own interior trust and vision and perception.  That is, unless we have found within ourselves the faith in Jesus Christ that God has put there.

            Jesus says the Son of Man is like a flash of lightning cutting through the darkness of the world illuminating everything suddenly so that the darkness is banished and what is true and real is revealed.  The encounter with the living Lord Jesus, the Word of God, has this effect on us.  It illuminates the world disclosing its true nature.

III.

            Then Jesus goes on to depict in rather graphic terms how this works.  And I do not believe his tone is angry or vindictive here.  I think Jesus is positively brokenhearted about what he has to say.  God takes no pleasure in the death of anyone, Ezekiel tells us.  And anyone who gloats self-righteously about events like these simply doesn’t get it.

            For to be caught in the darkness, not to have discovered the light that God has placed within us, but to be caught in the rat-race so profoundly that we reject the light, that is the soul of tragedy.

            In the time of Noah, Jesus says, almost everyone was so consumed with the outward daily life, so obsessed with the where and the when, so dedicated to the pursuit of whatever pathetic goals their egos dictated, that they cut themselves off from their own possible future.  They rejected Noah as a crazy person building a pointless giant boat, and so rejected their own salvation.

            Jesus talks about the things we think are so important and to which we devote all our energy: eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, buying and selling, planting and building.  These are the items of busy-ness that distract us and drown out the truth in our hearts.  Our accomplishments, our careers, our families, our economic life… these are not unimportant.  In fact they are very important.  But we can become so consumed by them that we lose sight of what is of primary and ultimate importance. 

            For it may be that all this activity is only building a world so out of synch with the truth that eventually it collapses because it has no substance.  Eventually the creation snaps back into balance, and when that happens all the superstructure of human regimes of violence and injustice get swept away.  And that is what happened quite comprehensively in Noah’s flood.  And that’s what happened more locally in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

            And that is what has happened to every empire in history.  We can only sustain living and building and working in the illusion of our economic and political regimes for so long.  God’s truth always wins in the end.  Reality always triumphs.

            The coming of the Son of Man is always bad news for those who are benefiting and thriving and profiting from the current empire.  The book of Revelation describes all this in compelling detail.  Nature itself just shrugs off the products of human sinfulness, leaving it all in a smoking ruin.

IV.

            Jesus then continues, insisting that “those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.”  And he gives images of different people responding to this challenge, where some frantically grasp at the world dissolving around them, trying vainly to keep and hold some trinket or memento, and others willingly let it all go.  One person is taken into the whirlwind of death and destruction, and as the empire crumbles into dust they are consumed with it.  While another person is left behind to inherit the purified and restored earth.

            The disciples can’t contain themselves any longer, and they ask, “Where, Lord?”  That sounds to me like an expression of a lack of trust on their part.  They are admitting that they can’t see what Jesus is talking about.  I mean, he has just told them that the answer lies within, yet once again they are looking outside of themselves, asking “where?”  They want some kind of proof or verification.  The “where?” question is a challenge, even.    

            And Jesus responds to them somewhat enigmatically, “Where the corpse is, there the eagles will gather.”  (I know that some modern translations say “vultures,” because they are trying to make Jesus make sense to them; but the Greek says “eagles.”) 

            The corpse to which Jesus refers is his own.  He has just talked about his suffering and death; now he places before them  his own dead body, after his crucifixion.  That is the only answer to their, or our, “where?” questions.  It is the mystery of Jesus death, his giving up of his life for us, his willingly taking on this final, greatest power in human existence.  He is saying, “When you see my dead body, maybe that will shake you out of your blindness.” 

            Because, gathered around his dead body, are eagles.  One early church commentator identifies the eagles as the women who came to Jesus’ tomb.  Finding it empty, they began proclaiming the good news of his resurrection.  They have this realization that in Jesus’ death the possibility of transcendence and eternal life is opened up.  That is what eagles symbolize in the Scriptures.  Eagles and eagles’ wings have to do with the ascent, the rising up of the soul.  “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.  They shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

            The sign will be that where we expect to find corruption, death, odor, and decay, what we actually discover is life, renewal, transcendence, and resurrection.

V.

            The disciples probably didn’t get it at the time.  Maybe they thought, like Modern translators, that he must have meant vultures, even though that is a fairly nihilistic reading.  But they don’t ask him for a clarification.  They might not even have remembered this at all were it not for the fact that they later experience directly what Jesus is talking about.  His death at first shakes them.  But after three days they begin to realize his renewed, transformed, powerful Presence among them, and eventually, by the Spirit, within them.

            And it is that vision, that awakening to resurrection, when it occurs to them that Psalm 68 is being fulfilled, God is rising up, and God’s enemies are scattered, that opens them up to seeing and knowing their world in a new way.  This gives them clarity to perceive the truth all around them.  And it inspires them to go to all the world with the good news of God’s love… like eagles.

            The resurrection unlocks the Kingdom of God within them.  Now, instead of seeing all around them the kingdom of death, ruled by violence and cruelty, governed by injustice and theft, they see through all that.  They see that this is just the disturbances on the surface of the world.  The true world lies beneath, where God’s love is creating, and redeeming, and sustaining a world of peace, healing, and justice. 

            Because the Kingdom of God is within and among them, they start to see the Kingdom of God all around them too.

            Gandhi encouraged people to be the change they want to see in the world.  Jesus empowers those who trust in him to be the Kingdom he has placed in their hearts.  While the sin and death of this broken world is being swept away, Jesus would have us remain, holding tight to the truth of his Kingdom, his true, good, and beautiful order, which is the actual foundation of all that is.  He would have us live, by the power of his Spirit, in the reality of love expressed in everything God has made.

+++++++                 

              

             

                

Forgiveness and Gratitude.

Luke 17:1-19

I.

            Jesus teaches his disciples to adopt a circumspect, humble, gentle, and grateful trust in God.  One thing for which Jesus has no tolerance is a self-righteous, superior attitude towards our sisters and brothers in the gathering of disciples.  Rather, he preaches and exemplifies repentance, forgiveness, acceptance, gratitude and love.

            When Jesus says we should not cause another to “stumble,” he is later echoed by the Apostle Paul, who does not want the freedom of strong Christians to undermine the faith of weaker Christians.  Paul says it is better not to use your freedom at all, if using it offends another Christian.

            Jesus says it is better to die by drowning than to weaken the faith of another believer.  One way we weaken others’ faith is by our hypocrisy.  For instance, if we come to church each Sunday and learn about forgiveness, non-violence, generosity, gentleness, integrity, and fairness, but then we are observed during the week doing exactly the opposite, a person might feel themselves justified in holding that this Christian thing is a lot of nonsense, just a smoke-screen or window-dressing or pretense. 

            One of the big reasons the church is in such trouble today is that people who might be inclined to love and follow Jesus, are turned off by the contradictory witness of Christians.  Many Christians are good at talking about God’s love, but their actions are full of fear, anger, violence, exclusion, judgment, and condemnation.

            Jesus tells his disciples, “Be on your guard!”  He means that we need to guard against the self-righteousness and hypocrisy, carelessness and superiority, in ourselves.  Even to the point of continually forgiving, that is, releasing, a sister or brother from the consequences of their own bad behavior.  As long as a person is still authentically on the journey of faith, we must not hold it against them when they fall short.  As long as they keep repenting with sincerity, that is, as long as they show their mind and actions changing, we are to work with them and love them through it.  We are to realize that we too are on the same journey and we do the same backsliding and regressing.  We fail at faithfulness and rely upon God’s forgiveness all the time, and we have to extend that forgiveness to others.

            So both of these commandments from the Lord have to do with attentiveness and care for the faith of our sisters and brothers in the gathering.  We are to see things, even ourselves, from their perspective.  We are to consider how our words and actions might strengthen or undermine their discipleship.  Because we are all in this together, and we need to support and encourage each other and hold each other up, keep each other safe, and always be ready to welcome each other.  We are to give people second, third, fourth, and even more, chances.  We are to leave no one behind, and give no one an excuse to leave our communion.

II.

            This is a tall order for human beings, and the disciples are right to ask for Jesus’ assistance.  “Increase our faith!” they say.  “Help us better to trust in God; enable us to turn our lives over to God so we can live the way you teach us to live.”

            To which Jesus says that to trust in God is to share in God’s will and power, even to the point of willing a mulberry tree to be uprooted and planted in the sea.  I don’t think he means something like what Yoda can do with The Force, but that to trust God is to be dissolved into God’s will.  And if we will that a mulberry tree be planted in the ocean, it will happen only because and when our will is completely at the service of God’s will.  If we trust in God even a little – Jesus uses the image of a mustard seed, which is famously tiny – then God’s power is allowed to flow through us and into the world.

            Jesus is not concerned about the replanting of any mulberry trees.  He is saying that even though we might need an electron microscope to see it, the disciples do already have enough faith, enough trust in God, to be forgiving and gentle to each other in their life together.

            Then Jesus introduces an illustration drawn from household life in his time.  He says that his disciples ought to have the same attitude towards God as slaves to their master.

            Now, Jesus nowhere endorses or approves of slavery.  At the same time, the institution of slavery was extremely common in the world for thousands of years, up to merely 200 years ago.  It was simply a fact of Jesus’ economic existence.  He doesn’t answer the questions he puts in the mouth of the slave owner.  His hearers would have been bitterly aware of the fact that no master would be so kind and graceful as to invite his slaves to his dinner table. 

            But the slave owner is not the example Jesus lifts up here.  It is of course the slave.  He says we are to be as transparent in our obedience to God as a slave is to a master.

            Now to us Americans that is either non-sensical or offensive.  From our historical standpoint, slaves have every right to try to escape from or rebel against their masters.  It is not Jesus’ purpose to comment on this institution here.  He simply makes the point that our obedience to God should be implicit and automatic.  We are entitled to take no credit for our trust in God, for it is by God’s grace alone that we do have this trust. 

            It’s like when someone helps us in some professional capacity, and when we thank them they say, “No need to thank me; I’m just doing my job.”  Or when someone commits an act of heroism and they say, “I only did what anyone would have done in my place.”     

            The attitude that Jesus is looking for here is for us to say: “We are nobodies; give God all the glory!  We do what we do only in obedience to God, through the Lord Jesus, by the Holy Spirit.”

III.

            Then comes this incident where ten lepers approach Jesus.  Luke tells us they are in a kind of “no-man’s-land” between Samaria and Galilee.  Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem, and he enters a village with his entourage, and these lepers yell from a distance up the street, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  They couldn’t get any closer to Jesus because leprosy is highly infectious.  There are ten of them.

            Jesus calls out in answer to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” which is what the Bible says that lepers were supposed to do to certify that they were healed.  So, they are supposed to show this implicit trust in Jesus by turning around and seeking a priest, even though they were not yet healed.

            As soon as they make this decision and begin to show that they do trust Jesus, that is, as soon as they start making their way to the priests, they are all healed.  Nine of them continue following Jesus’ instructions.  They keep going on their way to find priests who can certify the cure according to Scripture.

            But one of them disobeys Jesus.  He turns back around, praises God in a loud voice, and throws himself down at Jesus’ feet in gratitude.  This man is not a Jew like Jesus, or a Galilean; he is a Samaritan.  Jews and Samaritans, of course, famously do not get along.

            Jesus does not rebuke the man for his disobedience.  His leprosy does not come back because he didn’t carry out Jesus’ instructions.  On the contrary, Jesus commends him.  Then he mildly criticizes the other nine lepers who do obey him.  “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” he asks. 

            The Lord is always making the point of including the outcast and undermining the self-righteousness of his own people.  He is also saying that it is more important to thank God than to obey even his own instructions overly strictly.

            Then Jesus says to the man, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”  It moves me when Jesus says this, as he does repeatedly when he heals someone.  When he says, “Your faith has made you well,” he is saying that we already have within us the ability to trust in God and be open to God’s saving, healing activity.  So just as he told his disciples that they already had enough faith to do as he instructs them, here he tells the leper that he too already has enough faith within him for him to be healed. 

IV.

            Somewhere Jesus teaches that whenever we pray to God for something, we should act as if we have already received it.  Because we have!  God’s grace and gifts and power and blessing are all out there, all around us.  We live in a field charged with God’s goodness.  And the only thing keeping us from accessing this truth is our own ignorance and the blockages it creates.  For one thing, we don’t ask.  We prefer to deal with an illusory world of our own making than with God’s true world of beauty and goodness.

            We have to rest assured in the truth of God’s love, blessing, and goodness.  We have to trust and believe in that reality so profoundly that we celebrate and give thanks even before we experience and perceive it ourselves.  For it is only when we trust in it that we begin to perceive it.  This is the way it was for those lepers; only when they trusted Jesus enough to obey did the healing come to them.    

            This deep knowledge and awareness is the basis for everything else.  With this knowledge in our hearts, we gain the humility and sensitivity necessary not to cause a sister or brother in the faith to stumble.  We know how fragile faith is, and how difficult it is to remain open to God’s truth all the time.  All we can do is forgive and keep forgiving, and hope that eventually the message gets through. 

            With this knowledge in our hearts, we have the patience and strength to forgive another, over and over.  We can see the unconscious schemes people use to block God’s life coming to them.  And we know that no amount of human duplicity or violence has the power to change what is ultimately true.  So we become by God’s Spirit agents of forgiveness, agents of freedom and release, representatives and witnesses to God’s saving love at work in the world.

            With this knowledge in our hearts, we are empowered to obey God’s Word automatically and naturally, letting God’s energy flow into us and through us into the world, without fanfare, without seeking credit, without much effort.  Because the obedience of God is more a matter of letting go of our resistance and clearing out our blockages, than of making a supreme effort with all our might.  We turn our will over to Jesus, our Lord and Savior.

            Finally, it comes down to forgiveness and gratitude.  We let go of the hurts, the resentments, the impatience, the desire for retribution.  We forgive, we release the judgment and the evil we harbor against another.  It is when we let go of that, that we are able to receive the grace of God and give thanks for it.          

V.

            In fact we give thanks for what we have been given by releasing it.  God does not give us things to collect or hoard, but to give away.  When the Samaritan leper is healed, he doesn’t just go about his business.  He returns to Jesus and praises God with great thanksgiving.  In other words, the orientation of his life has shifted dramatically.  He goes from being part of a circle of afflicted lepers, whose whole life is defined by their disease, to praising God and entering into the circle of those who trust and follow the Lord Jesus.  Now his life is defined by the miracle of healing, his release from sickness, his gratitude, and his discipleship.

            We too have to look up from our introverted dwelling on our own afflictions, misfortunes, failures, and disease, and see that our healing and wholeness comes in trusting and obeying Jesus, and giving thanks to him in new lives of generosity and gentleness.

                   

           

Wounded Healers.

Isaiah 42:1–9.

I.

            Here in New Jersey we have no experience of thousands of organized and heavily armed young men from somewhere else coming here and exerting absolute, lawless power over us, killing, stealing, torturing, and raping practically at will.  We have never experienced mass murder, and we have never had the best and the brightest of us forcibly taken away to live as servants of our conquerors.  And we cannot imagine what it would be like, after watching the violent deaths of thousands of our own people, to be force-marched across a thousand miles of desert and settled in the ghetto of a strange city.  Human language has no words to evoke anything close to what this must be like.

            The exile of God’s people in Babylon was probably the most horrible catastrophe in the history of God’s people.  It was designed to eradicate all hope and poison every memory, the two things that make a nation a nation.  It was designed to assassinate a culture and destroy the identity and faith of a people.  It has happened to many nations, most of which are only remembered now by historians and archaeologists if they are remembered at all.  It happened to the other eleven tribes of Israel a century before.  And now, in the eighth century BC, it was happening to the last tribe, Judah.  It was for all intents and purposes the death of the nation and the end of God’s people.

            Over the next several decades, the Jews in Babylon would try to keep it together.  But it must have been easy to give up on their traditions and their religion.  It must have been very attractive and profitable to simply shrug and join the victorious Babylonians and become part of their bright world, their order, their future.  What was the point of maintaining faithfulness to a God who obviously abandoned and did not remain faithful to them?  Joining the winners had every up-side and few serious down-sides.

            Those who remained faithful had to listen to their own preachers tell them this was all their own fault, that they brought this catastrophe down on themselves, that this was all part of God’s plan.  And they had to learn on the fly how to live as God’s people in a strange land with no Temple, almost no institutions, and few rights.

            And they managed.  They served the Babylonian Empire and at the same time developed practices and traditions that enabled them to keep their faith, although in new and different ways than they were used to.  They were able, under huge stresses, to move from being a religion based on sacrifices, to being one based on Scripture and law, embodied in specific practices.

            They practically had to give up all reasonable hope of ever going home.  They had to be thoroughly settled in Babylon, with families and jobs and institutions.  Seventy years go by.  Only a few old people even remembered the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been demolished.  That life was over.  History.  I am simplifying here, but you get the idea.

II.

            Then, something happens that seems unbelievable, but is really the preordained destiny of all Empires: the Babylonian Empire falls.  The Babylonian armies are defeated and a new Emperor comes to power.  He is not a Babylonian, but from a nation to the east called Persia.  His name is Cyrus.  And he is not a pagan, but a Zoroastrian who, like the Jews, worships one God.  And Cyrus decrees that the Jews could go home.

            It is an astounding surprise, and the Jews understand it to be an act of God, a miracle, a stunning, breathtaking reversal.  The great prophet of this period is the one who wrote these chapters in Isaiah.  He is the one who proclaims what is happening.  And then he interprets for the people the meaning of it all.  He is the one who calls on the people to realize this new beginning.

            And speaking of the people, he writes: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
 my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
 I have put my Spirit upon him;
 he will bring forth justice to the nations. 
 He will not cry or lift up his voice,
 or make it heard in the street; 
a bruised reed he will not break,
 and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
 he will faithfully bring forth justice.  He will not grow faint or be crushed
 until he has established justice in the earth;
 and the coastlands wait for his teaching.”

            This suffering people remains loved and valued by God.  Indeed, their suffering has refined and purified them.  They have paid their dues, as we say.  They have learned in the crucible of horror and loss and by being systematic victims of violence and injustice the meaning of true justice.  And they are now equipped and trained and validated and ordained to preach and do justice. 

            They have had their arrogance and self-righteousness burned off of them, so that they are not just about talk, and they are certainly not about violence.  But they have become a steadfast yet gentle people, who cherish peace and deeply appreciate weak and vulnerable and fragile and broken things.  For they know what it is like to be weak, vulnerable, fragile, and broken themselves.

            And they have learned the hard way what “justice” is in God’s eyes.  Justice has to do not with the strong punishing wrongdoers, as we suppose.  Rather, it is about lifting up the weak and restoring those who have been brought down by the strong.  God’s justice is revealed in this kind of stupendous reversal in which the powerful come crashing down and the lowly get raised up.  Those who have been there and experienced the horror and pain and terror of oppression, conquest, and utter and comprehensive loss and defeat, are best equipped to have the integrity and authenticity to witness to this reality.  God sees things from the perspective of the losers.

III.

            And yet God is the supreme Creator, who made “the heavens and stretched them out,
 who spread out the earth and what comes from it, 
who gives breath to the people upon it
 and spirit to those who walk in it.”  How do we think of this powerful God as a loser?  But God’s creative activity is precisely that.  He does not hammer, and force, and will the divine shape upon things like a blacksmith beating and twisting metal.  God creates by the gentle outward movement of the Word, epitomized in the coming of the Son of God into the world, which Paul describes as a self-emptying of God.  Creation is the work of the overflowing love of the Trinity, as God’s Word and breath are poured into what God is making.  God doesn’t force things into being.  God calls them into being and they become what God calls them.

            The whole creation was called into life: “Let there be..!” light, and a dome, and land, and life forms, and humans.  The whole universe crystallizes around this Word, this call: “Let there be!”

            So it is as well with God’s people.  And after the horrors of their being conquered and deported, God reminds them of this.  “
I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
 I have taken you by the hand and kept you; 
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
 a light to the nations.”  And then, based on their very suffering, based on the way their lives and blood were poured out, based on the way they can now identify with the broken and the needy and the
 captive, the prophet gives them the commission that goes with their calling.  They are “to open the eyes that are blind,
 to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
 from the prison those who sit in darkness.”

            In other places this prophet goes into more detail but the point is clear that the wounded are now to be the healers, the broken are now to be the restorers, the exiles are now to be coming home, the dead are now coming back to life.

            And there is a certain practical truth in this.  Can we really be healed by people who have never been sick?  Can we be truly set free by people who have never experienced slavery?  Can we even so much as learn a language, or a skill, or a musical instrument if not from someone who has already sacrificed to master it themselves?

            So when Jesus Christ comes into the world, the fulfillment of Israel, the true Servant of God that the people merely anticipated, he also flows out from God and emerges, called into human form, emptied into the form of a slave, obedient to the point of death.

IV.

            So the original Servant was the Jewish nation in exile, and that image was fulfilled in the Servant who is the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom God’s love and Word and Spirit is poured out for the life of the world.  Now by the Spirit the Servant finally is his holy community, his Body on the earth, gathered and called together from the world and sent out into the world with good news.  That is: us.  We are called to continue Christ’s mission in which God’s love is poured into the world in and through us, in which we empty ourselves as God’s healing, restoring, liberating power flows into the lives of others.

            Now we are the ones with the message: “
See, the former things have come to pass,
 and new things I now declare;
 before they spring forth,
 I tell you of them.”  We are the new people doing these new things.

            Have our former things come to pass?  That is, are the habits of our old lives over?  Have we paid our dues?  That is, have we accepted, lifted up, and realized our loser side?  Have we admitted failure, wrongdoing, messing up, and responsibility for ourselves and our world?  Have we recognized that the consequences we suffer were brought upon ourselves, by blocking the flow of God’s grace?

            And are we ready for the new things God is now declaring, calling into being in and through us?  I mean really ready for really new things that are about justice and righteousness, opening our eyes and liberating captives? 

            I hope we are, because God is, and Jesus Christ calls us to new things, and empowers us to accomplish new things by his Spirit.

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