Isaiah 49:1-7
January 19 MMXX
I.
This is the second of the “servant songs” of the prophet Isaiah. He starts out with a sense of deep frustration that perhaps we can relate to. He feels an acute discontinuity between the spiritual gifts he has been given by God, and his ability to express them in a productive and effective way.
He knows that God has made his mouth “like a sharp sword.” That is, that his words are incisive and powerful, cutting through confusion and muddleheadedness, sharply expressive and precise, deeply convincing. He feels like he can make the most powerful and airtight arguments, and draw people into the joy of trusting in the living God.
He feels like a “polished arrow” that gets right to the point, smacks deep into the bullseye of the target, touches directly the heart of his hearers. He has been given the words of eternal life! How can anyone not get it? How can anyone not fall in love with the God who creates all this beauty and abundance, who delivers the people from slavery, and guides them with the Law?
And yet, the prophet is frustrated. “I have labored in vain,” he says, shaking his head. “I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” His beautiful and powerful words have not worked. The language that God gives him has remained obscure and hidden to others. The straight arrows of his arguments stayed hidden secure in their quiver, the case where arrows are stored, undeployed.
I can relate both personally and professionally to the prophet’s complaint. I was raised in the church, of course, but I became a conscious and intentional Christian when I was about 18 or so. Christ touched my heart and placed in there words and ideas and hopes and dreams and ambitions. I imagined all kinds of things I was going to do and accomplish.
But I found over the ensuing years that the institutional quiver, the church, sometimes made it very hard to extract arrows from it. There were the rules, of course, which at least in our Presbyterian corner of the Christian family, have historically tended to be very regulatory and constricting.
We would for centuries make a new rule every time something bad happened, so that we were governed by our fear of worst-case-scenarios. It meant a thicket of ecclesiastical legislation tied us down and hindered what was in our hearts getting expressed and having an effect on people. I eventually became a Stated Clerk to help people navigate through or around this jungle so that mission could happen.
Then we frankly have to talk about ourselves and what in us is keeping the sword of the Word safely and ineffectively sheathed, and the arrows of the gospel locked in a dark quiver. I have served in church after church where people wished it was 1956 again. I’ve seen people squash good, effective ministries because they didn’t live up to some nostalgic fantasy. I’ve seen ministers get fired over some sentimental trivia. I’ve seen sessions cower from changing anything that might offend somebody. I’ve sat in on presbytery Committee on Ministry meetings for 17 years! I’ve seen some screwy stuff.
II.
Worse, is the fact that our larger culture grew estranged from the church and increasingly came to see us as intolerant, nasty, judgmental, hypocritical, self-righteous, loveless, joyless jerks. With good reason, unfortunately. Indeed, the Christian leaders who get the most attention in the media today are the ones most filled with hate, anger, and fear. They want the right not to make cakes for people they don’t like. They want to cut off people’s health care. They want to exclude immigrants and persecute Gays and Muslims. They carry guns. The only people they profess to care about haven’t been born yet, and whom, when born, they are happy to abandon to abject poverty. Not to mention the horrible child sex abuse scandals in some churches.
How does any of that win people for Christ? “No cake for you!” That’s evangelism? That’s following Jesus whose whole ministry is about, in effect, free cake? Free bread, free health care, free forgiveness? Seriously?
It is really hard to get Christ’s message of love and compassion across when as soon as you mention Jesus people’s guard goes up because they think you’re going to start yelling at them like their uncle did last Thanksgiving. Who has that much eloquence to cut through all this baggage with the good news? Who can extract arrows of love out of a quiver of hardened concrete, and then try to shoot them into hearts defended by high, stone walls?
So, in the face of the failure of his mission, the prophet is driven to reflect on and reaffirm his own faith. “Surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God,” he admits. In spite of how hard it is to get our message across, we still believe. We still trust in God because of what we know that God has poured into our own hearts, and which we share in our life together.
That’s what the prophet says that Jacob and Israel, the people of God, have to come back to. The church has to clear away all the distractions and auxiliary motivations, all the baggage, and the superstructure; all the junk we have collected over the years. It all has to go. Because for too many of us, the extraneous stuff has become the point.
We are obsessed with the decorations we have accrued that mainly point to and refer to us: our allegiances, our desires, our tastes, our hopes and dreams, our schemes and strategies, our pecking orders. And we have too often forgotten about the only reason we are supposed to be here, which is to worship, serve, and receive the Word of the living God.
Church is not supposed to be a comfortable cave reflecting our faces on every wall. It is not a warm bath in sentimental memories where we are reassured that everything is going to be alright. It is a crucible of transformation, like the tomb of Jesus, a chrysalis where our old ego-centric selves are broken down, and our true, original selves in God’s Image are allowed to emerge. It is a refiner’s fire, says another prophet, burning off impurities so the real you can shine. Only then do we discover that everything really is alright.
III.
The Lord finally says to Isaiah, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel.” In other words, God says that just providing for yourselves is not enough. Your mission, your calling, your life is not about you. I have not called you to self-indulgence, but to bring my truth and goodness to the whole world. “I will give you as a light to the nations,” says the Lord, “that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
Get the focus off yourselves! Indeed, God says we are called not to fame, wealth, and power, not to comfort, convenience, and privilege. But God says we will be “deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, and the slave of rulers.” Just as the Lord Jesus reveals God’s love through his own suffering, so it is with God’s people. As Jesus says explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount, following him is about humility, suffering, being unpopular, and rejecting all normal ideas about success. The church is not about status but service, as is the Lord.
It is only because of this witness of compassionate service to the least of these, it is only when we identify with and even share in the marginalization and liabilities of those at the bottom of society, that we begin to relate to the God who self-empties to share our mortal life in Jesus. The more we lose, the more we give up and renounce, the more we sacrifice, the more we offer of ourselves in humble service, even at our own risk… the more of a hearing we earn with people. The more respect we receive. The more people will realize that we are with them in their brokenness and pain.
That is when the sword of God’s Word begins to slice through our defenses to open up space for love in people’s hearts. That is when the arrows of God’s love start penetrating through skin thick with scar tissue. That is when people begin to see in us the living Presence of God.
It is completely counterintuitive. But it is true. Christianity has often grown the most where it made the greatest sacrifices. Whether it was through the witness of martyrdom in the face of persecution, or the witness of solidarity with the sick, the poor, and the incarcerated, the people of God seem uncannily to emerge through suffering into peace and joy.
When we become infatuated with our own power and importance, sucking up to governments, forcing our values on people by law, defending and excusing the atrocities of the State or business interests, we fall away from Jesus and into apostasy. We become anti-Christian parasites, living on scraps thrown from Empire’s table, until we go down into destruction.
Or we can jump off the gravy train to hell, and find ways of serving others. These are, after all, Isaiah’s “servant songs,” and they look ahead to the One who came “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many,” Jesus Christ, the true Servant of God, the Messiah of Israel.
IV.
God calls us to be “a light to the nations.” We are to help people to see the truth of God’s love for the whole world. We are to bring God’s salvation, God’s healing, God’s forgiveness, God’s abundance… to the whole world. This never happens easily, given the depths of ego-centricity that afflicts most humans and societies. But it doesn’t happen at all if we do not go and follow Jesus by sharing people’s pain and showing how, in Jesus Christ, not even death can stop the love of God which is always pouring into the world.
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