When God Says 'I Love You'--September 22, 2023
"But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, 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 will 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. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you..." [Isaiah 43:1-4a]
It's beautiful to me how often God pauses the motion of history to stop and tell us, "You don't have to be afraid." And even more beautifully, God will stoop down and say, "You can have hope... you don't have to fear, because I love you."
Sometimes the message comes certified mail by angelic messenger, like Gabriel visiting Mary to announce God's intention with her role in the birth of the Messiah, or the white-robed figures waiting at the tomb to tell the weeping women that the same Messiah was no longer dead but risen. Sometimes it comes in a dream with startling, fantastical visions that require a pre-emptive "Be not afraid" to calm down the dreamer. And sometimes it comes through the very human voice of a poet like the prophet's words here in what we call Isaiah 43. It's a promise from God, coming through an ordinary person to other ordinary people, "You don't have to be afraid, because God says 'I love you'."
This is another one of those times when the shadow of exile lingers over the people. Our best guess is that the words of Isaiah 43 speak to folks who had actually been carried away from their homes, captive by the invading Babylonians who were intent on indoctrinating and dominating them into their empire. The party line from the Babylonians was, "There is no hope of going back home. There is no hope from your god, because we destroyed your god's temple, and we defeated your god's power." There was no reason to dare to dream that anybody would ever go home again back to the land of Judah, and there was every reason to give in to the power of fear--fear of the empire and its armies, fear of abandonment by an absent god, fear of the unavoidable grip of death.
And so, what do people in that situation need to hear, but the defiant assurance that God is neither dead nor an absentee parent? What do those folks in exile need to keep them from succumbing to the persuasion of Babylon that the Empire has won, hope is extinguished, and they had all just better get used to it? Well, they need a voice to say on behalf of God, "I love you, and I will move heaven and earth to bring you home"? And so that's what God raises up this voice in Isaiah 43 to say. It's all the sheer power of words--this is a poet speaking to brokenhearted people with nothing more to back up his claims but the insistence that they have come from God. But they are the words the people need at this moment, and as we are discovering this month, they are the sort of words that move people from love to hope.
What the exiles in Babylon need is the capacity to imagine a new future--which is really what hope is, after all--and a reason to be able to hope. Before, all the things they had built their lives on had failed them: the temple, the monarchy, their whole system of government, and their capital city, Jerusalem, were all reduced to ashes. And to lose all of those things and find themselves in a whole new situation without any of the familiar sources of comfort and security was utterly terrifying. I keep hearing the words of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" in the back of my mind thinking of this time in Israel's history: "I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I built my life around you." And that's just it--all the things the people had built their lives on seemed to have vanished overnight, and that made the present moment seem hopeless. After all, the last time the people had put their hope in something (say, for example, "The king will save us from the enemy," or "Our city walls will keep the Babylonians at bay,"), they had been let down. It is hard to hope again when you have been let down, and it is hard to risk believing in someone again when the last ones you trusted before have since vanished into thin air.
So the prophet starts with the assurance of God's love. "The same God who created us promises still to be with us!" he says. "The same God who called us by name will now lead us through the waters and across the rivers out of Babylon and will bring us back home!" "The God we have known all our lives will bring us home, because that same God says, 'I love you!'" In other words, this was a different kind of grounding for hope. It wasn't based on the height of city walls or the number of soldiers in the Israelite army. It wasn't dependent on which ruler happened to be on the throne at the moment. It wasn't even dependent on how well-behaved, holy, or pious the people themselves were. It was a hope grounded in God's love, which had not abandoned them after all.
Those are words we keep needing, it turns out. The details will change over the course of a lifetime, to be sure. Maybe we're not dealing with invading Babylonians or the destruction of a Temple, but we do know what it is to be afraid of violence and war, and we often know the sorrow of seeing churches close, or go through change, or feel like they are in decline. We know what it is to grieve people we love, and we know what it is like to be without the ones who had been strong for us in the past. We know what it's like to sing with Stevie Nicks, "I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I built my life around you." And we know what it is like to be let down by the things we used to assume would be fixed and immovable in our lives.
And so we keep finding our hearts in need of a God who can stop us in our tracks, tap us on the shoulder, or speak through ancient words waiting for us on the pages of our Bibles, and who says to us again, "You don't have to be afraid. You can hope again--because I love you." There is reason for us to hold onto hope, and it's not a flighty or fickle foundation like sand. There's a reason to believe that we will get through whatever it is we are going through, from change in our families to a difficult diagnosis to grief and loss to fears about the kind of world we are leaving to our children. And the thing that gives us hope is the assurance that none other than God says, "You don't have to be afraid--because I love you."
It really is something, if you think about it, to hear and read the words "I love you" on God's lips here in the Bible, isn't it? I mean, we talk a good deal about God's love, sure. And there are surely places that talk about God loving "the world" as a big collective entity, like everyone's favorite verse John 3:16. But to hear God say to "you," as in a direct address, not a third-person proposition, "I love YOU," well, that has some power to it. It's not a theoretical claim or a generic truth about "humanity in general," but it hits home. It meets us where we are. It's God pointing a finger directly at YOU, in all of your you-ness, looking you in the eyes and saying, "It's you. I love and choose you. YOU are precious to me. Of course you can have hope--I. Love. You."
There's a reason that Mister Rogers sang to a generation of children,
"It's you I like,It's not the way you do your hair
But it's you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys
They're just beside you...."
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