8th Sunday after Epiphany - A
Isaiah 49:8-16
February 27, 2011
God’s Tattoos
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
In the big scheme of things maybe it wasn’t so long to wait. But for the people who were doing the waiting, it had been a lifetime, their lifetime. They had been born in exile, in the capital city of the empire that had beaten their parents and led them away in chains. They were a generation that belonged nowhere. They had never seen the home that their parents had described for them in the gathering dark of the evenings in whispers lest there be agents of the empire listening at the windows, informants of the Stasi or CIA or whatever Babylon called its intelligence service. They had been raised on these tales, their parents’ memories and the stuff of dreams.
“Zion!” The name alone conjured images of almost unearthly splendor. The crowds on the holy days paraded through the streets waiving palm branches and singing psalms of praise to the God who watched over them. The smells of roast lamb wafted through the city as the people remembered their slavery in and rescue from the hands of another and older empire. Passersby called greetings to those who were leaning out from the windows of their houses as the Friday sun sank lower in the sky. “Shabbat shalôm!” they cried to each other. “Sabbath peace!”
But, as I say, these were their parents’ memories, not theirs. For them it was a dream. It was the stuff of hope. It was, in Walter Brueggemann’s memorable phrase, “a subversive memory of the future.” The empire did not look favorably on the memories and dreams of this captive people. This vision of the future that found them free, restored to the land of promise, was not nurtured by their captors. These were unauthorized hopes.
That didn’t stop the captives. They told the stories anyway. They dreamed the dream. They held the hope of homecoming. And they waited.
For some that was a problem. How long would they have to wait? How long were they supposed to wait? How long could they bear to wait? It had been fifty years already. Their parents were dying and the ones who were alive would never make the return trip. They themselves were not getting any younger. Their children were grown into adulthood and to them the old stories seemed like the idle chatter of the ancients, magical tales, but tales only with no substance to them.
And, truth to tell, some of them had decided that it wasn’t really worth it, the struggle to remember a place they had never been, to continue to live as exiles in the place they had lived all their lives, even if their parents never let them call it home. Some of them simply quit living as exiles. They wore their hair according to the fashions of Babylon. They wore the clothing of Babylon. They celebrated the festivals of Babylon. They worshiped its gods. They spoke its language, even at home. They were Babylonians. But of them this text knows nothing. Theirs is not a part of this story.
No, we are concerned this morning with the others, those who tucked their children into bed, heard their Hebrew prayers, and lulled them to sleep with words that began, “Let me sing you a song of Zion.”
These others keep the hope alive, but they were frightened. They were afraid to own their dream in public. They saw a vision, but it was a secret one, too precious to risk revealing. It was to them that the words of this morning’s text from Isaiah was written.
Because the day of deliverance was at hand. It was time. “Say to the prisoners, ‘Come out!’ and to those who live in darkness, ‘Show yourselves!’” The tide had turned, the weather broken, the seasons had changed. It was time. It was time to go home, home to the land of their parents and grandparents, home—as John Denver once sang—“to a place they’d never been before.”
It was time to set fear aside. It was time to claim their birthright. It was time to trust that the universe had aligned with their own deepest longings.
In the last several weeks we have been watching this drama playing out among the peoples of the Arab-speaking world. In Tunisia and Egypt, in Libya and Bahrain, even in Jordan and Iraq people have decided that now is the time to realize the dreams that they have kept alive for generations. They tell different stories than the exiles of Judah. They pray in a different language. They have known different captors and different oppressors. But they, too, are dreamers who refuse any longer to shield their dream from the light of day.
Friends, I am the first to admit that not a foreign policy wonk. I know no more of the history of these people than most of you. From the little I know it seems clear that the next few years will be unsettled and unsettling. It is difficult to tell the outcome of the unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other places. Repressive regimes may succeed in defending their power and privilege. Revolutions may be hijacked. People may throw out one set of bullies only to find themselves bullied by another set in turn. It has happened before and there is little to guarantee that it will not happen again.
I do not know what would be the prudent thing for my country to do, the wise way for it to act to protect what it calls its “vital interests.” I am not a foreign policy wonk. But to paraphrase Bishop Gregory Palmer, let me be clear: I may not be a foreign policy wonk, but I am a Jesus wonk. I am a Bible wonk. I am a God wonk. And the God whom I have met in the person of Jesus as he is found in this book sponsors dreams like the dreams of those who have risen up across the north of Africa and the Middle East. Their visions spring from God’s vision for human life. Their hopes for lives of dignity and freedom for themselves and their children are grounded in the character of God. Anyone—and that includes my country that I have loved so deeply for so long—anyone who stifles that dream, anyone who frustrates that hope, anyone who forecloses that vision is on the losing side of history.
It will certainly be a hard journey for these people who, like the ancient Jews of our text, have harbored a subversive memory of the future. It will be especially hard for those who have sung their secret song in the very public light of the midday sun. It may be that the hardest journey of all will be for those who have succeeded in throwing off the yoke of oppression. But these people who journey home to a place they’ve never been before will have unexpected help. At least this is my hope and my prayer. My earnest prayer is that in years to come when they look back on these days they will be able to tell their children that they found unexpected springs of water along the way so that they never thirsted, that they found shelter from the scorching heat, that the mountains became highways.
But my sermon is not just about the nations who have been summoned in our time to come out of captivity. And it’s not just about ancient Jews who were summoned in ancient times to stop hiding in the Babylonian dark and show themselves. It’s also about us. For we, too live in captivity. In an age that values the quantifiable above all else, that judges everything by the “bottom line,” that hails the ruthless and the cruel as its heroes, we may believe that our ancient dream—the one about a way that Jesus showed us, the one we whisper to our own children—we may believe that our ancient dream is useless today. We may believe that dreams of justice and visions of peace are simply unrealistic and that it’s time to be realists. We may believe that it is time to give up and give in, time to stop calling it exile and to start calling it home.
But it is to us, too, that God speaks through the words of the ancient prophet, overriding our doubts and objections. “We are forgotten, we are forsaken,” we complain. God no longer dreams these dreams and we must shift for ourselves. It’s easy enough to believe that now, just as it was easy enough to believe it then.
But God is not done speaking to us. “Can the nursing mother forget her child?” God asks. Listen, I have spent the last week with a nursing mother and I can tell you that the answer to that question is No. God can no more forget us than Beth can forget Diana.
God even has us written on the palm of God’s hand. I’ve used this little trick when there was something I wanted to remember but I didn’t have any paper. Then I had to remember to transfer it to some more permanent medium. And I also had to hope I didn’t sweat. God has us written on the palm of God’s own hand. This is on God’s part a commitment to remember. But if I read this right, we’ve not only been written, we’ve been tattooed. God has behaved impetuously and in an unguarded moment God has gotten a tattoo of our names. Even if God wanted to, God cannot deny us. God has committed to us in public and we are now undeniably God’s. Not only does God love us and there’s nothing we can do about it. God loves us and there’s nothing God can do about it.
So it’s time. It’s time to hear God’s call. It’s time to be set free from whatever has made us captive. It’s time to step out of whatever darkness overshadows us. It’s time to show ourselves in the light. It’s time for unauthorized hopes to be realized. It’s time for subversive memories of the future to take shape in our world. It’s time trust that the world in which we live is one in which God’s will can be done and is being done. It’s time to come home. It’s time.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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