Isaiah 49:1-7
Understanding the Hebrew Bible can be complicated at times. For one thing, it was written over a span of several centuries in very different cultural, technological, and political contexts. To put it in perspective, at the most conservative end, we’d be looking at a text completed today but started when Columbus first reached the Americas. At the far end of the range, it would be a text with its earliest material written when William conquered England. That’s a long time.
It contains legal codes, some self-help, poetry and hymns, polemic and history, and a generous amount of pious fiction, myths and stories designed to help one particular tribe understands its place in the world, a tribe caught on hardscrabble land between two great river valleys that produced more powerful armies. It is the imperfect but mostly well-intentioned human encounter with holy mystery.
Today’s reading comes from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, a text that combines material from that named 8th century prophet with material created two centuries later, during and soon after the Babylonian Captivity. We don’t know who wrote that later material, and can only guess at the process that formed the book as we have it today. We might think of it less as the work of “the” prophet, singular, and more as work in the tradition of the prophet, carrying important themes across contexts and centuries the same way we here at the Park Church carry forward themes from the Abolitionist movement that inspired the founders of our congregation, understanding that Black Lives Matter and “Say Their Names” are in continuity with that great history of resistance and courage.
As the saying goes, the author of today’s text has ninety-nine problems. After years of being caught between Egypt and the various civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, the once great Israelite Kingdom was gone. First it broke in two due to in-fighting, then Assyria crushed and de-populated the Northern Kingdom, the time period of the First Isaiah. As the author we call Second Isaiah is writing two centuries later, there are still some alive who remember Jerusalem as the thriving capital of the Southern Kingdom, Judah, but that too is gone. The Babylonians leveled the walls, destroyed the great Temple of Solomon, and took the elite and skilled as captives, the context of the pious fiction of the Book of Daniel.
They aren’t exactly slaves in Babylon, but they aren’t exactly free either. They want to go home, but home is a smoking ruin. Worst of all, they are having to re-examine everything they believed about their own identity, the story they had told themselves about who they were. They thought they were the special chosen people of the Creator, the god they called Yahweh, who they were coming to believe was the only god. Maybe they weren’t so chosen after all. Or maybe they were chosen, and had screwed up so bad that this was punishment. Maybe this was all their own fault.
So yeah, a lot going on, and the prophet was hard at work trying to construct new theologies that made sense in their current context, to offer hope and inspire action.
This could be all about the Israelites. But it isn’t.
Because our text is lifted from a longer passage, as so often happens on Sunday morning, you are missing some important context. The dialogue here is not between Yahweh and the prophet. It is between Yahweh and Israel. It says it right there. “You’re my servant, Israel…”
Even so, this is not a text focused just on Israel. As our translation puts it, it is “slight,” no big deal, to restore Israel. God, as voiced by the prophet, is dreaming way bigger than that. God is going to make Israel a light to all nations.
Not the conqueror of the nations. Not vengeance on Babylon and various other enemies, though you can find that sort of thing elsewhere in scripture. Second Isaiah says Israel will be a light, a deliverance to the ends of the earth.
At the precise moment when the prophet would have every reason to turn inward… boom. Light. The whole world.
That’s bold. That some serious Martin Luther King Jr. bold right there.
You see, the fight for racial equality wasn’t won, but King had already started thinking about poor people generally, not just poor black people. About war and those senselessly killed overseas in Vietnam. About organized labor and the importance of unions. He was in Memphis to support a strike for safer working conditions when that shot rang out, when he was struck down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He was dreaming bigger than the ballot box and the front of the bus. He was dreaming of justice for workers, for the nations, of deliverance to the ends of the earth.
We can respond to challenges by turning inward. Or we can dare.
And I am inclined to believe that a God who spoke something into nothing, who lit the fire-cracker beauty of chaos complexity, who is the God of soaring sequoias and ants marching across the lawn, I am inclined to believe that that God is a God who dares and dances and delights, that the holy paints on big canvas, that God is very much in support of more cowbell.
I mean, this is a God who looked at the platypus and said “Why not?”
We have ninety-nine problems. I could sit here and catalog them, but we talk about them most weeks, and those are just the shared problems. We’ve got our own very personal problems as well, body parts that are most certainly not under warranty any longer, bad investments or really just any investment in this corrupt economy, addictions, maybe ours or maybe a loved one. We can choose to turn inward, to let the challenges make us small. Or we can listen to that holy cowbell, and dare to dream, dare to dream big.
Yes, we have work to do. It is going to take a full on revolution to save the planet, never mind our own particular species of primate. Tweaks are not going to do it.
We are going to have to confront the coalition of billionaires and bigots, our modern day Babylon.
There are dangerous curves ahead, and some of us may end up in the ditch at times. Are we going to let that stop us? Or are we going to help each other out of the ditch and get back on the road?
Democracy is hard, but is a core value in our faith tradition, a priesthood of all believers.
Open society is hard, especially for people and cultures with fragility, that have low self-esteem, for diversity can threaten your belief when you don’t believe in yourself. If we honor and celebrate the queer, the indigenous, the Sub-Saharan and the anti-fascist, someone is going to get uncomfortable, someone is going to be angry. Are we going to let that stop us?
Some people love the emperor’s new clothes, but we know he is buck naked and besides, we don’t do emperors, though we have some perverse desire to slow down and look at the bodies as the British monarchy crashes and burns.
We have an addiction to truth, are willing to discuss white privilege and the legacy of racism and genocide, are not ashamed to name the evil of colonialism past and present, and to contemplate reparations, even if we don’t know how that would work. There are people who are going to object, who seem to believe they called themselves into being, give lip-service to God while acting like they are their own gods. That can’t see grace even though they are swimming in an ocean of it. When they squawk and preen and lie, are we going to let that stop us?
And the answer, of course, is no. Heck no, or stronger words if you’re so inclined.
A biblical faith, a Second Isaiah faith, a gospel of Jesus faith, an Elmira Independent Congregationalist faith, a faith in keeping with the traditions of The Park Church, faces outward and forward, dreams big, speaks truth. It cares about the stranger of another race in the ditch on that dangerous curve. It cares about those slaves picking cotton down in Mississippi. It cares about sanitation workers being crushed in garbage trucks in Memphis in 1968. It cares about the mom I spoke with this week who struggles to get her kid appropriate mental health care despite having racial and economic privilege.
And an un-credentialed rabbi from a backwater town says listen. I have some good news for you. God is love. God calls you to extraordinary love, sacrificial love, kingdom changing love. And even after they have broken this body, I will still be with you as we live that love into the world.
He knew he was probably going to be killed. Others had been killed before him, men like John the Baptizer. Anyone who challenged the violent and wealthy was at risk. His would not be the first body dead on a cross. And yet he dared to dream of a world where God’s love was the norm, that man from Nazareth.
And yet he dared to dream of a world were all of God’s children were loved, were judged not by the color of their skin, but by the quality of their character, that Jesus-following man from Atlanta. He would not be the first person murdered in the struggle for equality, nor would he be the last.
Are we daring? Can we dream of a world where wealth is based on your work and your talent, not on a lucky birth or the legacy of past greed and crime? Where our economy isn’t a con game, grifters and their marks, extortionists and their victims, but is instead based on shared success? ‘Cause let me tell you sister, this ain’t it.
Can we dream of an actual democracy where everyone has a voice at the table, where listening and compromise are required and honored?
Can we dream of a society where honesty and integrity matter, where we stop celebrating thieves and liars? I never thought I would say it, but we could use a little more shame these days.
Can we dream of a Christianity that is not duct tape and binding wire on the deformed hulk of imperial patriarchy, but is instead a living expression of the God who is with us? For God is with us, as real today on the banks of the Chemung River as 2500 years ago beside the Euphrates as a prophet dared to dream.
Dare we dream that we are not yet the best version of ourselves, that even if we are in our final years in these beautiful fragile husks, that we might yet experience renewal, a golden age, a burst of holy song?
Why not? This planet is big enough and holy imagination is wild enough to create a duck-billed beaver-tailed egg-laying mammal with venom, and we’re weird enough to think it is cute, so pretty much anything is possible.
Amen.