Open to Surprise--August 21, 2023

 

Open to Surprise—August 21, 2023

“And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant—these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord GOD, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them, besides those already gathered.” [Isaiah 56:6-8]

Imagine being told all your life, “This is the way things are. Don’t question it.” and then somehow you become convinced that God is telling you, “I’m doing a new thing—it will shake up everything you thought you knew.”

Imagine having been taught, “God’s Word decrees that People-Like-Us are acceptable, but People-Like-Them are not,” and then hearing a voice you were sure was from God saying, “I am welcoming the People-Like-Them, on my own authority.”

Imagine growing up with your family, your teachers, your leaders, and your whole culture telling you that no less than God almighty hated some whole groups of people, and then getting a message from that very same God saying, “I have invited those very folks to my house.”

Now you’re getting close to what a scandalous thing the prophet is doing here in what we call Isaiah 56. The prophet is telling people who have heard all their lives—and then taught the same to their children—that they weren’t supposed to have anything to do with people from other nations. Gentiles (foreigners) were not to mix with them, worship with them, associate with them, or intermarry with them—and they had a stack of Bible verses to back up those claims. And on top of that, there were folks who were so convinced that foreigners were a danger to the people of Israel and Judah that they drove out all the foreigners they found living among them and tried to split up or cancel marriages where Israelites had married foreign spouses (see Nehemiah 13 if you want to check that I’m not making that part up).

So you had people convinced they had the backing of Bible verses telling them that foreigners were all bad, that they could never belong to God’s people, and that marriages with them had to be stopped. They were certain they were just following the commandments of God, and that was the end of the discussion—sort of an ancient equivalent of the “The Bible said it. I believe it. That settles it.” kind of mentality. And then along comes Isaiah 56—these words many of us heard on this past Sunday—who says, “God is doing a new thing, and the people who had previously been excluded will now be welcomed.” That’s not just about the gutsiest thing I can imagine—it’s also a leap of faith.

The prophet speaking in Isaiah 56 is convinced that he’s not just making stuff up; he dares to believe that the voice prompting him to say that God is now welcoming “foreigners” and “outcasts” is the very Spirit of God. He’s not looking to stir the pot, become famous as a provocateur, or advance his own personal agenda. He would probably rather have lived a quiet life keeping his head down and not upsetting people’s assumptions—he would have gotten in less trouble. And for that matter, Isaiah knows his Bible; he knew the commandments from Deuteronomy about foreigners, and he knew that it was Respectable Religious Leaders who were now trying to split up marriages and kick out foreigners from Judah. The prophet in Isaiah 56 knew he would be accused of “rejecting the Bible” or “disobeying the authorities” by announcing that God was now welcoming foreigners, but he did it anyway—because he was convinced that it was exactly what the living God was directing him to say. It was an act of faith, not an attack on faith, to say that God was doing a new thing.

And yet he did it anyway. That’s exactly what we mean when we talk about faith making love possible. Isaiah didn’t reject his faith in God in order to say that foreigners and outcasts were now to be welcomed—he was sure down to his bones that it was exactly what his faith in God was leading him to say. We Lutherans sometimes talk about having a “Here I stand—I can do no other” kind of moment: those times when you are convinced that God is leading you in a certain direction, even if everybody else in the Respectable Religious community thinks it’s wrong and is threatening you over it. Luther faced excommunication and threats on his life for his moment of conviction; and tradition holds that Isaiah met with even harsher resistance (the Talmud records a tradition that the king had Isaiah sawn in half for his message!). But Isaiah found the courage to speak a word of love to those deemed unacceptable, not by giving up on his faith in God, but exactly because he dared to trust that it was God who had spoken to him with a new word, in spite of what everybody else was sure “the Bible said.” That can’t have been easy; it never is.

Sometimes I think it’s helpful in our own day to re-discover these kinds of passages in the Bible, and to realize that they were all over the place. The prophets were constantly taking what conventional wisdom said about God, even when it was backed up by Bible verses, slogans of the day, or the official decrees of the powerful, and they were always saying some variation on, “But now God is doing a new thing.” That had to be difficult, not just because of the fear of what others might do to them, but because it often meant breaking with what they had always been told was “God’s decree.” The prophets were never looking to start their own religion, reject God, or make themselves leaders of some new cult. They were striving to listen for the voice of God—and maybe that’s exactly what set them apart. Rather than just assuming they already knew what God was going to say and reciting those assumptions (like the way the auto-text function on your phone or computer will sometimes make wildly incorrect assumptions about what you are trying to write!), the prophets listened… and they trusted. They were willing to let God surprise them, and that openness to God doing a new thing is exactly what faith really looks like. Once God can’t surprise you any more, it’s a sure sign you’ve replaced the real God with a lifeless idol, whether made out of gold, carbon-steel, or ideology. Isaiah allowed his faith in God to let him listen when God was speaking a new thing, and that new thing meant a loving welcome to foreigners who used to be deemed not-good-enough and unworthy.

If we are going to be people of faith on this day, it’s going to mean following the lead of Isaiah 56—that is, we’re going to have to dare to listen and let God speak on God’s terms, rather than assuming we already know what God is allowed to say. It’s going to mean asking God for the courage, not just to be surprised, but to speak what God tells us, even if it points in a wider direction than we expected, and even if other folks swear up and down they’ve got a stack of Bible verses why God isn’t “allowed” to do what God says God is going to do. And for us who are followers of Jesus, it’s going to mean we keep going back to Jesus to let him redefine our understanding of God and our pre-conceptions about God’s ways, rather than forcing Jesus to fit into what we have already decided.

That’s a big ask of any of us, but prophets like Isaiah tell us it’s worth it. When we actually trust God enough to let God surprise us, we often find that the new thing God is doing is an even more expansive love than we dared to imagine. And for those of us, like myself, who would have been counted among the “foreigners” and “outcasts” in Isaiah’s day (since, at the very least, I’m not of Jewish ancestry), I realize that my own belonging is only possible because at some point a brave prophet started listening when God said, “I’m up to something new—the excluded ones are now welcomed in.”

How might God surprise us today… if we listen?

Lord God, give us the faith to let you surprise us, and then the courage to speak what you tell us when you do.