To the Nations

Isaiah 49:1-7, I Corinthians 1:1-17

January 20, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

The nation of Israel had a lot of work to do. The people were streaming back into Jerusalem and the surrounding towns after decades in exile in Babylon. Houses needed building and rebuilding; the system of government needed to be re-established. The religious institutions of the people needed to be re-formed and reformed so that the people would remember to lead faithful lives so as not to be lost to exile ever again.

In that atmosphere, there was a lot for a prophet to do! So imagine Isaiah’s consternation when God calls him, and perhaps all of Israel, to reshuffle priorities. “Don’t just look inward,” God says to them, “but reach out to those whom you have just called enemies, and to those who might be your enemies in the future, and to those you look down on as idol-worshippers and pagans, and to those you know nothing about but live in lands far from you. Take my words to them,” says God,” that they might learn of my ways so that you all can live together in peace and prosperity.”

It is too light a thing to be concerned only with building up your own nation, your own religious institutions. I will give you as a light to the nations.

Now I can imagine the response of many of those returning exiles to this message. It would not be a positive one. First of all, there was too much work to do right there at home. Second of all, why would I want to reach out to share God’s love with these people who did the ruining of our country, of our families, of our religious traditions, to begin with? Why would I want to reach out to people who think their gods are superior to our God?

Both of those points are valid ones. First, there are just times when you need to be focused inward, aren’t there? Sometimes it is on family, or work. Sometimes people will say to me that they really have a significant building job to be doing on their own faith. There’s so much about the Bible or theology or the church or discipleship that they don’t understand or have trouble living out. Sometimes it is that there is so much trouble in their own lives that they need to be focused in prayer on their situations and on building up a relationship with God that can see them through this difficulty.

And God says, “Yes, but…”

It is too light a thing that you should be working only on building up your own faith, your own life, your own family, your own understanding. I will give you as a light to others.

Even if our faith is not as strong as we think it should be, even if we don’t understand all about theology, even if we don’t know the Bible very well, even if our life is surrounded by the kind of brokenness that met Israel on its return from Babylon, still God calls us out, out from focusing solely on our own building projects. Now God does NOT say, don’t keep working on yourselves. God just says that it is too light a thing to pay attention solely to ourselves. “Yes,” says God, “you are precious to me and wonderful in my sight, and we must keep building our relationship. But our relationship does not consist in a mutual admiration society. Because you know me, even imperfectly, because you have seen light, I need you to reflect that light to those who have not seen and live in shadows.”

Then there is that vexatious second point. The fact that the folk God wants to send Israel out to are, well, not their kind of people. The “nations,” the goyim, the Gentiles, the ones who have ridiculed and persecuted and conquered, the ones the people of Israel would like to see God smite with a great smiting. These are the ones God wants the people to go to and shine God’s light on, to love, to bring into a way of living that fosters peace and prosperity.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached a wonderful Christmas sermon that I re-read last month. In it, he sheds some light on this particular call of God. He writes,

“When you rise to love on [God’s] level, you love all [people] not because you like them, not because their ways appeal to you, but you love them because God loves them. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Love your enemies.” And I’m happy that he didn’t say, “Like your enemies,” because there are some people that I find it pretty difficult to like…I can’t like anybody who would exploit me. I can’t like anybody who would trample over me with injustices. I can’t like them. I can’t like anybody who threatens to kill me day in and day out. But Jesus reminds us that love is greater than liking. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all [people].” (“A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” A Testament of Hope, p. 256)

Love is the light God is calling us to be. And here’s the really tricky part of this. We’re called to love beyond ourselves, to love those it’s easy to love and also those we think we should not love or cannot love, and to do it while we are still working on loving ourselves and learning what it means to love God. This is the ultimate in multi-tasking, and the essential nature of discipleship. Before Jesus had even had a year to teach his closest followers, he sent them out to heal and to teach. While the early churches which Paul founded were still trying to build their own communities up, Paul went to each of them to ask them to contribute money to help the struggling and persecuted church in Jerusalem and to send people with him to bring good news to others on his missionary journeys.

This reaching out in the middle of re-building has happened on the world stage with people of vision and imagination. While the nation of South Africa was trying to form a new post-apartheid government and help build the lives of the majority black population which had suffered for so long, it also instituted a Truth and Reconciliation commission to try to heal divisions between old enemies peacefully rather than with the violent vengeance that had played out elsewhere in Africa. Although the churches of Mozambique are largely poor and trying to build sanctuaries and schools for their growing membership, they sent a significant gift to UCC relief efforts in the Gulf Coast following hurricane Katrina. And much has been made in a book published last year of the great faith struggles of Mother Teresa, how she doubted and suffered an inability to pray. And people speak as though that somehow diminishes her legacy. Quite the contrary, in my view. Although her own faith was sometimes broken and she sought to re-build it, although she may have said, with Isaiah, “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing,” yet she continued to work to bring light to so many caught in the shadows of disease and poverty and discrimination, for somewhere deep inside her, though she did not always see or understand it, she also said with Isaiah, “yet surely my cause is with the Lord.”

All these folk believed, even if they didn’t always understand it, that, as Martin Luther King once said, people of faith could help a divided world “find common ground by moving to higher ground.”

So when we want to say to God, “it’s a heavy thing to work out my own faith, to figure out how to love you in my own little world, to understand everything you are trying to say in scripture. I can barely carry that load up my little hill.” When we want to say to God, “Look, we have a lot of work to do here at Redeemer: the walls need painting and the shut-ins need visiting and leaders need recruiting; we have a lot to do right here. We can barely carry our load at Whitney and Cold Spring!”

Then Jesus says, “You that labor and are heavy laden, come to me. Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Then God says, “See, it is too light a thing to attend only to your own spiritual growth, only to your own understanding, only to your own family or church or work. I will send you as a light to the nations, to those you like and those you don’t like, to those you understand and to those you can’t figure out at all, to those you respect and to those you hate, to those you think belong and to those you see as outsiders. Because, you see, ultimately you cannot grow spiritually or come into a closer relationship with me or understand all knowledge or have faith that can move mountains or build the kind of church that will give me delight until you learn how to love them.”

One of my clergy colleagues, upon reading this passage in Isaiah this week, asked, “Isn’t it true that when we sign on with God we always sign on for more than we bargained for?” Certainly that has been true of the prophets, from Isaiah to King. But the follow up question has to be, “Is it worth it? For me, for us, for the world?” Well, I have my days when, like Isaiah, I consider I might be spending my strength in vain, trying to heal local wounds let alone the wounds of the nations. But there are other days, when I see walls fall down and I feel the words of the great hymn with which we will end our service today,

“Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on till victory is won.”