Hopes and Fears: Strength First Baptist Richmond, January 13, 2019 The Baptism of the Lord Isaiah 43:1-7

Transcription

1 Hopes and Fears: Strength First Baptist Richmond, January 13, 2019 The Baptism of the Lord Isaiah 43:1-7 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. Welcome to worship on this wintry Sunday morning and welcome back to a series called Hopes and Fears, based on that line from O Little Town of Bethlehem, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. When I was dreaming up this series back in August I was looking at the hopeful words the Prophet Isaiah spoke to God s people in exile in Babylon, but I was thinking about the deep division between Republicans and Democrats in this country and what that division has done to us. I wrote: We are not one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We are two armies, engaged in fierce battle. We will not rest until the other side has been eliminated. And then I wrote: In a time like this, we need Jesus. In last week s sermon I talked about the fractured state of our union and how different it is from the way things were just after World War II. I drew parallels between what has happened to us in America and what happened to ancient Israel, which was founded on such promise: delivered from slavery through the Exodus, constituted at Mount Sinai through the Covenant, brought into the land of Canaan by God s grace, guided through its early years by capable kings, but then ending up in exile in Babylon. At one point I said, Suppose that s where we are as a nation: that we are experiencing some kind of exile. Not from the Promised Land, but from the promise of those days just 1

2 after World War II when we were united as a nation and believed that anything was possible. And then the next day the very next day I read a commentary that said we should never compare where we are as a nation to where Israel was in exile. Patricia Tull, a former professor of Old Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, wrote: I used to caution myself and others not to adopt the language of exile and promise too glibly for ourselves. We were America, after all, the most privileged nation ever known, more Babylonian than Judean. Americans who call themselves exiles are like the tenured professors I once heard about who spent a faculty meeting fighting over who among them was the most marginalized. To equate our own problems to those of exiled Judeans trivializes the carnage, the displacement, the multiple layers of loss loss of homeland, loss of temple, loss of neighbors and family members, loss of identity, loss of trust in God. No, if we want to learn about exile, she wrote, we should study the Lachish frieze [the commemorative plaques the Assyrians made after they destroyed the Judean city of Lachish in the late eighth century BC], depicting soldiers impaled on enemy spears and children guided out of the burning city by parents in chains, carrying all that refugees can carry in their two hands. This is a scene some people know today, she writes, but not Americans. i And that made me think about those people we called New Americans. Do you remember them? Back in 2008 I would see Ralph Starling coming down the hall on Wednesday nights with dozens of refugees from Bhutan. I would greet them by pressing my palms together and saying, Namaste, and they would do the same, the little children holding their hands up to their foreheads out of respect. They were gentle people, and they seemed so grateful to be here, but only after I heard their story did I understand why 2

3 they were so grateful. They had been victims of ethnic cleansing, driven from their homes with whatever they could carry in their hands by people who didn t want these descendants of Nepalese immigrants living in their country. They chased them across the southern border where they ended up living in refugee camps that were horribly overcrowded and rife with disease, where there was never enough to eat and women and children were often victims of violence. ii They lived there for 13 years. Some of their children were born in those camps. No wonder they were glad to return greetings of peace in the hallways of Richmond s First Baptist Church. We shouldn t compare ourselves with Israel in exile, Patricia Tull warns. We haven t been through anything like those people went through. And yet she adds: If we keep in mind the differences in scale, exile may nevertheless be an increasingly apt metaphor for contemporary experience. Americans still want to be exceptional, but jobs have left us, educational systems have failed us, we are no longer first in technology, or ideas, or health, or well-being. And what we may become is yet to be seen. iii Patricia Tull wrote those words in Some would say that things have only gotten worse since then. Whether or not you agree I think you can say without fear of contradiction that we aren t where we used to be. And I will say this: I feel helpless to change things. I admit, I have more power than some. I can stand in this pulpit and tell you what I think is wrong with America. I can tell you what I think we ought to do to change it. But that doesn t mean that it s going to happen. If people who listen to me preach did everything I said it would break a tradition going all the way back to Isaiah. Do you remember him? Just after God said, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? And just after Isaiah answered, Here am I; send me. God said, Go and say to 3

4 this people: Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand. In other words, Preach till you re blue in the face, Isaiah. They re not going to listen anyway. They didn t, and that s how they ended up in exile. For years and years the prophet had preached himself blue in the face. He had told them that if they didn t change their ways God was going to punish them. And then, according to the author of 2 Chronicles, God did. In Chapter 36 he writes: The Lord, the God of their ancestors, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place; but they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words, and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord against his people became so great that there was no remedy. Therefore he brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who killed their youths with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion on young man or young woman, the aged or the feeble; he gave them all into his hand. iv When I was telling that story to some of our homeless neighbors last Wednesday I illustrated it by talking about how my mother punished me when I was a boy. I said, My mother believed in corporal punishment. She believed that if you spared the rod you would spoil the child. Only she didn t use a rod: she used a flyswatter. They laughed at that but I said, This wasn t one of those plastic flyswatters; it was made of screen wire and my mother used it with a lot of enthusiasm. When she whacked my backside it hurt! I didn t tell them about the time I slipped a Sunday school quarterly down the back of my pants before a spanking and pretended that it hurt. I didn t tell my mother about that until just a few years ago, when I thought she would have been over it, but 4

5 when I did her hand flew up involuntarily, as if she were ready to grab that flyswatter and finish the job. Christy and I usually just put our children in time out. Do you know what that is? Have you ever been there? Instead of spanking a child you just tell them to go and sit in time out for a few minutes and think about what they ve done until they learn their lesson. As I told our homeless neighbors on Wednesday the Exile was like a really, really, really long time out for Israel. They had years to think about what they had done, and how, if they ever got another chance, they might do better. But in their exiled state they felt helpless, powerless, just like those refugees in Nepal. If things were going to change God would have to change them. And then, one day, the word of the Lord came to Isaiah. Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord s hand double for all her sins. v In today s reading God says, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. Those people needed a savior; they needed someone who could bring them out of exile, who could lead them across the burning sands of the Arabian Desert and through the floodwaters of the Jordan River; they needed someone who could bring them home again to Jerusalem. But what about us? Who s going to bring us home? Who s going to heal the deep division in our land? 5

6 You remember that when I was dreaming up this sermon series I wrote, In a time like this we need Jesus? I stand by that; we do. When my friend David Von Drehle, a Washington Post columnist, spoke to the Richmond Woman s Club last week he talked about politics in this country, about where we ve been and where we might be headed. Near the end of his talk he said, People say we ve never been more divided than we are today. [But remember] we were pretty divided in the sixties and seventies. It was pretty emotional. It was pretty tough. And that road that we were walking, that choice between inclusion and exclusion, between trust and suspicion, between love and hate. That s an endless road. There is no end to that walk. It s been with us since Cain and Abel and I think it will be with us on the last day. I agree. But I would argue that the reason we can walk that road, the reason we can make a choice between things like inclusion and exclusion, between trust and suspicion, between love and hate, is that Jesus has shown us the way: he has shown us what inclusion and trust and love look like, so that we can choose them over exclusion and suspicion and hate. In today s Gospel lesson he comes to the Jordan River to be baptized. He didn t need to. If there was ever anybody who didn t need a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins it was Jesus. But he came anyway. He came in humility. He came in obedience. He came to show us another way. And when he came up out of the Jordan the sky opened up, and a dove fluttered down, and a voice from heaven said, You are my Son, the Beloved; in you I am well pleased. It s one of the reasons our reading from Isaiah 43 was selected for today, because in that passage, too, God speaks to his beloved. But here s the surprise: the ones he loves are the same ones he sent into exile. I was looking at the Hebrew text of Isaiah 43 in one of those interlinear Bibles, where it has a 6

7 line in Hebrew and then, down below it, the translation in English. And when I traced my finger along those Hebrew words and came to verse 4 I was almost shocked to see that one of those words was translated I love you. Yes! Here was God talking to his disobedient people, the same ones who had gone chasing after every pagan deity they could find, the ones who had thumbed their noses at him again and again so that he had no choice but to give them up to their enemies, who conquered them and carried them into exile this God says to those people, I love you. It shocked me. It surprised me. But maybe it shouldn t. When my girls were little and I sent them to time out it wasn t because I didn t love them: it was because I did. I wanted them to grow up well. I wanted them to learn things like love, and trust, and inclusion. And whenever I saw those other things in them, things like hate, and suspicion, and exclusion, I tried to discipline it out of them. I sent them to time out. I wanted them to think about what they had done, and see the error of their ways, and learn another way the way of Jesus. Is it too late for us to do that? Is it too late for America? David Von Drehle says we ve made it through times of deep division before. He says we did it by choosing one way over another. He didn t say it exactly this way, but I will: we did it by choosing the way Jesus taught us. And if there is a way out of the mess that we ve gotten ourselves into, I believe it will be his way. But remember that Jesus didn t walk that way alone. His Father was with him every step of the way, strengthening him and encouraging him, telling him, You can do this! and reminding him, I love you. By this time of year some of us have already given up on our New Year s resolutions; the spirit was willing but the flesh is weak. If we choose the way of Jesus 7

8 the way of love, and trust, and inclusion we will need the strength to keep walking in that way, not only for the first few weeks of 2019, but every day of the year. That strength will not come from our feeble will power, but from the Lord God Almighty, who has plenty of strength to share. As we are reminded in the words of Psalm 29: his is the voice that thunders across the waters, the voice that smashes cedars, shakes the wilderness, and sets the oak trees dancing. There is plenty of power there. But his is also the voice that says to us when we feel weak and helpless, You can do this! and reminding us: I love you. Jim Somerville 2019 i Patricia Tull, Commentary on Isaiah 43:1-7, Working Preacher, January 13, 2013 ii Bhutanese Refugees, Wikipedia. iii Tull, Commentary on Isaiah 43:1-7. iv 2 Chronicles 36: v Isaiah 40:1-2. 8