"Always Farther"--January 16, 2020

Always Farther--January 16, 2020

"And now the LORD says, 

    who formed me in the womb to be his servant,

to bring Jacob back to him,

    and that Israel might be gathered to him,

for I am honored in the sight of the LORD,

    and my God has become my strength--

 he says,

 '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;

 I will give you as a light to the nations,

     that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth'." [Isaiah 49:5-6]

It is not enough to be focused only on "our own."  It is simply not enough--not as far as God is concerned.  God, it turns out, always has a wider view than just looking out for "Me and My Group First."  God has a plan to bring light to ALL the world and life to ALL people... and has been saying so for a very long time.  If we have missed it, it's because our ears didn't want to hear it, not that God hasn't been saying it.

Hearing that shouldn't be a surprise to us, at least not really. The book of Isaiah has been saying it to us for about two and a half millennia, and it's not at all the only book of the Hebrew Scriptures to make the same point.  But maybe nobody puts it quite so clearly as these words from Isaiah 49 in one of the so-called "servant songs" peppered throughout what we call chapters 40-55 of Isaiah.  Other passages might be more ambiguous, or harder to interpret, but these verses from Isaiah 49 blow the doors open.  The prophetic voice just comes out and says, "It's not enough only to care about people-like-us: God is committed to bringing salvation to the end of the earth!"  God is even quoted here, as the prophet's imagination gets rolling, saying that YHWH is raising up this "servant" person (Christians tend to say, excitedly, "It's Jesus! It's Jesus! It's Jesus!" here) not just for returning home the scattered outcasts of Israel and Judah, but to reach out to all the people who don't belong to that family tree as well.  "It is too light a thing that you should... restore the survivors of Israel," God says; "I will give you as a light to the nations," as well.  In other words, just in case we thought that God is only interested in "people who already belong," or "people like us Respectable Religious folk," Isaiah says that's not enough.  That's not going far enough.  

Isaiah dares to say that this is how wide God's view is, when it's all but certain that many of the people around him were shouting, "Our People First! Our Interests First!"  Against that backdrop, it was a radical--and quite frankly dangerous--thing for Isaiah 49 to say that God's chosen servant, God's anointed Messiah, was sent in order to bring rescue and help and life for all peoples, even beyond the margins of the map.  Light to "the nations," not just for those within the boundaries of one.  Salvation "to the end of the earth," not just for the people like me, or those who think like me, or those whose skin has the same amount of melanin as mine.  It is a radical thought because it presumes that God cares as much about people who are unlike me as God cares about me... which also means that God isn't in my back pocket like my own personal lucky charm or rabbit's foot.

And this, dear ones, is what the Bible says.  God's aim is to bring light all around, and to bring life and healing and salvation everywhere.  It is simply "too light a thing," too small a vision, and too narrow a hope, to think that God only cares about "me and my group first," much less "me and my group ALONE." That kind of shrinkage of the Gospel is theological malpractice. And when our theology settles for believing that God wants us only to look out for our own interests (because, we may say, "everybody acts that way"), or pursuing our own little group's comfort at the expense of others' mere survival, we are running counter to the calling God gave to YHWH's chosen servant.  That is to say, we are make ourselves out to be anti-Christ.

The beauty of these words from Isaiah 49 is that they remain, even over all the noise of the Respectable Religious Folk who don't like that vision of God's care for all.  They endure, even when other, lesser, voices try and co-opt God for a "Me-and-My-Group-First" agenda.  They persist, even when our selfishness wants to wish them away.  And they resound, even though we have spent much of the last 2,500 years trying to cover our ears or pretending they are not there speaking from the pages of Scripture.  God has made the divine position clear: it is simply not enough to seek after our own self-interest.  God's chosen servant has come to bring life to every corner of God's green earth. 

No matter how we try and corral or contain it, God's design reaches always farther, wider, bigger than we imagined--big enough to include outsiders, outcasts, and oddballs like you and me.

Lord God, don't let us settle for a vision too small or a mission too light for your big designs to reach all the ends of the earth with your life and light and love.