Isaiah 61:1-4. and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn;

Transcription

1 Isaiah 61:1-4 The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; 2 to proclaim the year of the LORD s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; 3 to provide for those who mourn in Zion to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, to display his glory. 4 They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. 1

2 Special Deliverance One of the most amazing things about living in Seoul and maybe this holds true for all of Korea, not just Seoul is the delivery system for packages. You can order something online or through the phone and have it delivered to your door the very next day, and without having to pay for a delivery charge, let alone special delivery! I wouldn t even be surprised if you could order something in the morning and have it delivered before dinner. I may try that, just to see if it s possible. Because of the amazing delivery system here, these days Sandy and I rarely go to the store. Who needs to go to a physical store when you can have the item you re looking for delivered at the press of a few buttons? The suit I m wearing was delivered. The clothes our dogs are wearing yes, our dogs wear clothes [SLIDE] were delivered. We have had clothes delivered, food delivered, household items delivered. You name it, it s been delivered to our apartment, and all within a day or two. It s simply amazing! Fast delivery is one advantage of living in a small country. After all, it s possible to drive from Seoul to Busan in about six hours, five if you re willing to risk receiving a speeding ticket or two. America being a much larger country than Korea, next-day delivery, or even two-day delivery, requires a significant extra charge, and same-day delivery is almost unheard of. So package delivery is much faster and much less expensive in Korea than it is in America. Of course, this fast delivery applies only to domestic items. Anything ordered from overseas not only takes longer but is tremendously expensive. The other day we tried to order toothpaste for the dogs yes, we brush their teeth. The toothpaste cost $6.49 per tube. Pretty reasonable, actually, for dog toothpaste (which comes in chicken liver flavor). While the price of the toothpaste was reasonable, delivery from America cost $65. Now, I love my dogs, but I m not about to spend $70 on toothpaste 2

3 for them. They will keep getting the domestic children s toothpaste (strawberry flavor, which they like) that we ve been using. It s simply not worth paying a special delivery charge that is ten times the price of the item I m buying. Special delivery is great, if you can afford it, but it s the domain of those with more than enough money but not enough time. In today s passage from Isaiah we read not about special delivery, but special deliverance the special deliverance that God shows to those in need. It s special because it is particular to a group of people the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the prisoners, the mourners all those who are in desperate situations. It s deliverance because they are being delivered from what oppresses them a broken heart, a prison cell, and a loss that leads to mourning. Unlike special delivery, which can be ordered at will if you have the means to afford it, special deliverance comes freely to those who are most in need of it, regardless of their means. The first verse of Isaiah 61 may sound familiar. That s for a couple of reasons. First, we heard a similar message earlier in Isaiah. I am referring to the famous suffering servant passage in Isaiah 42. Let s look at that passage side by side with today s passage [SLIDE]. Before we look at their similarities, we should note one obvious difference. Isaiah 42 is written in the third person, i.e., it is written about the servant. Isaiah 61 is written in the first person, i.e., from the point of view of the servant. As for the similarities between the passages, in Isaiah 42:1 the suffering servant is presented by God as my chosen. He is chosen by God for a specific task. Another word for being chosen is to be anointed. To be anointed by God is to be chosen for a specific task. As we see in Isaiah 61:1, the servant there says that the Lord has anointed him. Second, in Isaiah 42:1 God says, I have put my spirit upon him. The suffering servant is filled with the Holy Spirit, for this is how he will fulfill his task, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, the opening words of Isaiah 61 feature the 3

4 servant saying, The spirit of the Lord God is upon me. In both passages the servant is chosen by God and is filled with the Holy Spirit. Third, in Isaiah 42 the task that the Lord has chosen the servant to fulfill is to bring forth justice to the nations. His mission is not limited to Israel but extends to the nations, meaning literally everywhere beyond Israel. In Isaiah 61 we see that the mission of the servant is to bring good news to the oppressed. This, too, is a mission of justice, of bringing good news to the oppressed and liberty to the captives. So in Isaiah 42 the prophet offers us a vision of the servant. He is chosen by God, who has placed the Spirit of the Lord upon him, and chosen him to enact God s mission of justice. Then in Isaiah 61 the prophet gives us a vision of the servant who has embraced his calling, who recognizes that God s spirit is upon him and the fact that he has been anointed to bring good news to the oppressed. But the prophecy does not end with chapter 61. I said that this first verse of Isaiah 61 may sound familiar to us for two reasons. The first we ve just covered. The second is that Jesus himself quotes this passage. As recorded in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus cites this passage in his local synagogue in Nazareth near the beginning of his public ministry [SLIDE]: 16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord s favor. 4

5 20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. You may have noted that there are slight differences in translation: good news to the poor, in Luke versus to the oppressed in Isaiah, and recovery of sight to the blind, which has no equivalent in Isaiah. That s mostly a matter of the Greek of Luke verses the Hebrew of Isaiah. But the larger point remains: Jesus saw himself as the fulfillment of this scripture. The suffering servant, the Lord s anointed, who was filled with the Holy Spirit, who was commissioned to bring forth justice and good news to the oppressed, had come. In Luke s Gospel, these words are the first recorded words of Jesus public ministry. They set the tone for all that he will say and do throughout his ministry. They show us that the Gospel, the Good News, is good news for all, but it is particularly directed toward the poor, the oppressed, the vulnerable, the overlooked, the forgotten of society. Does this mean that God loves them with a greater love? Is God s love unequal, like a parent with several children but who nevertheless favors one over the others? Some people may argue that. I would not be one of them. Rather, what I think it means is that there is a desperation born of poverty and oppression that makes one more receptive to the Gospel. Simply put, those who are desperate are more ready to receive the Good News. They are more prepared to see the Gospel as good news and not as their more-well-off neighbors often see it, which is as an imposition that intrudes upon their comfortable life, or as a burden that demands too much from them, or worst of all, as tamed and domesticated so that it becomes just another aspect of their identity, like which sports team they root for or which brand of laundry detergent they use. 5

6 When I read this passage I can t help but think of North Korea. When I think of people who are desperate, when I think of oppression real oppression when I think of what it means to be brokenhearted and hopeless, when I think of what it means to be a prisoner, whether behind iron bars in a labor camp or a prisoner of one s own thoughts, without the freedom to speak one s mind without fear of punishment, I think of North Korea. And yet it s too easy to think of the people of North Korea I m speaking of the millions of victims of the state, not the ruling elite who have their boots pressed on the necks of the people it s too easy to think of them as just a faceless mass of oppressed humanity, as though they had no individuality. That is how I thought of them until recently. This past May we began a relationship with Heavenly Dream School, which is a high school for North Korean refugees in Garak-dong [SLIDE]. As the name suggests, it s a Christian school. All of the teachers and students are Christians. Every other Friday a small group of volunteers from the EM visit the school, ostensibly to help the students practice English conversation, because at school they mostly learn grammar and vocabulary but don t have much chance to actually speak English, especially with people who are fluent English speakers. So we go there and we mostly just talk. Sometimes I will focus the conversation around a particular topic. Two weeks ago I shared with the students an article from The New York Times. It was a profile of a Korean-American woman, Suki Kim, who spent six months in North Korea working as an English teacher. She wrote about her experience in her recently published book, Without You, There Is No Us [SLIDE]. The title comes from a line from a patriotic song that the students are required to sing every day and refers to Kim Jong-Il, who was still living when Ms. Kim was teaching. Ms. Kim taught at a special university in Pyongyang for the sons of North Korea s elite. The school s name is Pyongyang University of Science and Technology [SLIDE]. That s an ironic name, because she says that the flow of information to 6

7 students is so regulated that they were not even aware of the existence of the Internet. They are kept ignorant of the outside world and are taught that North Korea is the center of civilization and the envy of all nations. Such a claim seems laughable to us; we know that it is patently false, a ridiculous lie, but their lives are based on an endless construction of lies, one stacked upon another. Yet despite all this deception, despite the ignorance of her students and the constant sense of fear, distrust, and outright paranoia that characterizes life in North Korea, even among the well off, Ms. Kim still thinks fondly of her boys, as she calls them. Having had the chance to teach them, eat with them, and live with them for six months, she grew to know them personally. They ceased to be a faceless mass and became individual human beings. And yet despite having come to know the students personally, despite teaching them English and exposing them, however carefully, to democratic values, she did not wish them to become agents of change in North Korea. Shockingly, to me at least, she actually hopes that they forget everything that she taught them, that they not question anything they are taught by the regime. Rather, she wishes that they would continue on the path prescribed for them, becoming good soldiers who support the regime. Actually, it is because of her love for them that she does not want them to come to any harm by speaking out or questioning the regime. During our discussion with the students from Heavenly Dream School, I asked them what they thought about that, of Ms. Kim s desire that the students not resist the government that was oppressing them. I expected them to disagree, thinking that the taste of freedom they have received here would cause them to support any form of resistance against the evil that is the North Korean regime. Much to my surprise, they did not. They, too, feared for what would become of anyone who dared to defy the authorities, in however small a fashion. At first I was surprised. How did they ever expect freedom to come to their country if the people didn t begin to resist the government? But now that I ve had some time to think about it, it makes sense. To these students, North Koreans are not simply millions of victims of an oppressive 7

8 regime. That s how we see them, which makes it easy for us to wonder why no one rises up in protest when they are so many. But the students they no doubt see the faces of those they left behind family members, friends, classmates, and neighbors, and of course they don t want to think of any harm coming to them. It s easy for us, in the comfort of our homes and in the relative freedom that is life in South Korea, to think of our neighbors to the north as a monolithic block of humanity as simply the oppressed. We don t see their individual humanity. They don t have faces. They don t have names. But the students of Heavenly Dream School: Ron, Abigail, Jay, Ellice, Su Ryun, Yoon Kyung, and Hyo Jin teach us otherwise. It is especially for them and for people like them all the people they left behind and the millions more like them in North Korea and around the world who live under oppression that the Servant of the Lord came to liberate. The Servant of the Lord the one who is anointed by God, upon whom the spirit of the Lord rests, and whose mission it is to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, and to proclaim liberty to the captives this servant, Jesus Christ is his name, came to earth 2000 years ago and did just that. His life, death, and resurrection are the Good News. And eleven days from now we will celebrate that his coming turned the world upside down. The King of Kings would be born into poverty among an oppressed people, and it was especially for such people that he came. Under the system by which they were ruled the system of the oppressor they were considered last, the least of humanity. Many today live with that same designation, none more so than our brothers and sisters in North Korea. But Christ s coming announced, and continues to announce, a reversal of that oppressive order. Under the reign of Christ, the last will be first and the first last. That was, is, and ever will be the Good News. 8