Isaiah 49:1-7
January 16, 2011
Mission Creep
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
“I will give you as a light to the nations” is the great promise given in our reading this morning to the people of Judah.
Light is a theme that runs through the Bible. “Let there be light,” God said in the third verse of the Bible. Just four words—two in Hebrew—and the great story begins. In the very last chapter of Revelation, we are told that those who live in the New Jerusalem will have no need for the sun or a lamp, for there will be no more night and God will be their light.1 From light to light the story goes.
Light is a good thing. Who hasn’t gotten up in the middle of the night and tripped over a toy left on the floor or stumbled into a piece of furniture? In my experience, in any collision between my toes and furniture it’s never my toes that win. Did you know that for forty dollars you can buy a pair of slippers with built-in lights that turn on whenever you put your weight on them?2 It’s true. It’s the most useful ridiculous idea I’ve run across in a long while. A little light in the darkness might can be a good thing.
But light isn’t always a good thing. Too much light can leave us as blind as no light at all. Light casts shadows which means that security lights may leave us less safe than the uniform darkness they replace. Stray waste light dims the night sky and deprives us of the experience of awe. Light in the shorter wavelengths increases our risk of cancer. Concentrated light in a single wavelength can be so powerful that it strips the electrons from an atom, turning solid matter into stray ions. Lasers using this ability can serve as a surgeon’s scalpel, performing delicate operations. Lasers using this ability are being studied and developed as weapons. Light can be lethal.
So we are warned as we take up this text, that light might be good or not. It very much depends on the context.
“I will give you as a light to the nations.” Is there anything more dangerous than someone who is convinced that they know the one thing that everyone needs to know and that it is their mission to make sure that everyone knows it whether they want to or not? Is there anything worse than someone who knows what is good for someone else, especially if they are powerful enough to impose it?
This is the trap into which empires fall, even when they believe that they are doing good things for the peoples whom they encounter. This is one source of my mixed feelings about the deployment of the 322nd Engineering Company.3 We sent them off this week, although I believe that there is still one more parade to go, a little later today. On the one hand I have nothing but respect for the 160 men and women from 19 states who make up this unit. They face their 400 day deployment with dignity and determination that their courage will not fail. They have given up their homes for a time, their families and communities. They are traveling far away where they will face real danger. And they do this because we have asked them to do it. I have been a soldier and I understand from my own experience some of what they are facing. Other things they are facing are outside of my experience. I have nothing but respect for them and for their families.
While deployed in Afghanistan their mission will include building roads and houses. These should be good things, at least that’s what I imagine. But I am also aware of how easily we deceive ourselves into believing that what we intend to do is being done for the benefit of others. I do not know what the historians will say about us. I do know that historians have not been kind to earlier empires.
The Roman governor of Britannia in the early 80s CE was a man named Agricola, a competent general and administrator. The plan was to bring the benefits of Roman rule to the Celtic tribes of Britain. But in the year 82 Agricola faced a rebellion led by a Celt named Calgacus. Agricola may have thought that he represented civilization and peace, but Calgacus saw things differently. Before their two armies clashed somewhere in Scotland, Calgacus observed of the Romans: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”4
These are hard words. Harder still, when we realize that they were recorded by Agricola’s own son, the historian Tacitus. I hope that we fare better in our historians’ hands, but I fear that we may not.
It makes a difference who is reading the the prophet Isaiah. When a powerful empire decides that it is being given “as a light to the nations,” this more often than not comes as very bad news indeed to said nations, who face an adversary out do them good whether they like it or not.
But this is not where the first hearers and readers of this passage were. They were not citizens of the world’s greatest military power. Instead, they were the members of a tiny exiled religious and ethnic community.
They were the children and grandchildren of the elite of what had been the little kingdom of Judah. Their parents and grandparents had been sent into exile when the Babylonian army showed up outside the walls of Jerusalem on a mission to bring civilization to Judah. The Babylonians, too, created a desert and called it peace.
The elite of the defeated Jerusalemites were permitted to live in exile in Babylon, along with the elites of various other defeated peoples. The Babylonian strategy was to make Babylonians out of them and it almost worked. Babylon was rich and cultured. Babylonians were sophisticated and compared to them even the elite of Jerusalem felt like country bumpkins. If the power of a nation was the measure of the power of its gods, then the gods of the Babylonians were powerful indeed. The covenant with Yahweh seemed unreal and the promises of the covenant broken.
It was in that context that the prophet we call deutero-Isaiah worked. We call him that because we don’t know his name and it seems unlikely that he was the same person as the prophet known as Isaiah of Jerusalem who seems to have been responsible for the first part of the book of Isaiah. Deutero-Isaiah had his work cut out for him, trying to keep up the morale of the exiled community. Even keeping them together seemed impossible, let alone gathering them up and taking them home to Jerusalem. Deutero-Isaiah was tired-out, worn-out, and burned-out.
I picture the conversation that he had with God. “All my work has been for nothing,” he said, “but that’s okay. It’s just you and me, God. All I need is you.”
God has little respect for that sort of self-pity. “You have a notion of your mission that is entirely too small,” God answered. “It isn’t just about Judah. Your mission is a world-wide one.”
There is, it seems, something in Judah—or maybe it’s just in deutero-Isaiah. There is something that the world needs. There is a light there, a good light, one that illuminates the darkness—like slippers with headlights. The world that despises exiled Judah will see that light and respond to it with joy and gladness. Judah—or maybe it’s just deutero-Isaiah—bears the burdensome delight of chosenness. Its existence is not in doubt. But it does not exist for its own sake, but for the sake of the nations.
What then is that light? What is the gift for the world that God’s people bear? It’s not mentioned directly in this passage, but it runs like the center stripe of the highway that leads toward home through the whole book of Isaiah. Judah itself has not always taken this gift very seriously. In fact, it has been a bone of contention between Judah and God:
Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.5
Religiously, there is nothing to complain about. The churches are full. Worship is beautiful. The people pray. But there is something that God desires more than worship: justice for the oppressed, the orphan and the widow, for those in other words who have no access to justice because they can’t afford it.
Those who are able to afford it have bought up all the land, prompting a real estate boom that leaves no room for those who cannot afford it. But the boom is a bubble:
Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land! The LORD of hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.6
Those who can buy access to the legislative process have arranged things for their own profit at the expense of those who cannot afford this access:
Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!7
Judah neglected the gift that made it unique. It did this to its own devastation. Justice, not thick walls of stone, was the fence that protected Jerusalem. Having forsaken justice Judah was wide open to the predations of Babylon. Destruction and exile were the inevitable result.
But they were not the end of the story. The God who appeared to be powerless before the gods of Babylon is in fact the author, not the victim, of exile. Exile is not the end. The justice which eluded Judah before the exile will be enthroned in its midst, embodied in the figure of Yahweh’s servant:
Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.8
The delightful burden of God’s people is justice. This is not the justice that puts criminals in prisons. God knows we have too many of those already and they are filled to overflowing. This is not the justice of a set of rules by which the game must be played. The rules of “the game” were written to further expose the vulnerable and to protect the powerful. This is the justice that lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, protects the stranger, and speaks on behalf of the voiceless. This is the justice that makes life human and humane. This is the justice that is neighborliness written in capital letters, the justice that renders us neighbors to our family and friends, neighbors to the stranger among us, neighbors to the life that shares the planet with us, and neighbors even to our enemies. This is the justice for the sake of which God says to us, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
©2010, 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.
1Rev. 22:6.
2BrightFeet lighted slippers, http://www.comforthouse.com/slippers.html.
3“Ask Mr. Answer Person: ‘Where are the members of the 322nd Engineering Battalion from?’” Decorahnews.com, http://www.decorahnews.com/news-stories/2011/01/8752.html (January 14, 2011).
4Tacitus De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae, 30: Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
5Isaiah 1:14-17.
6Isaiah 5:8-9.
7Isaiah 10:1-2.
8Isaiah 42:1-4.
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