Jul 14 | “Because God wants you,” (Sermon, July 14th, 2019)

On Tuesday, I told my husband, “I’m probably going to have to write two sermons.”

He looked at me and his mouth twisted sympathetically. “Have you thought about saying that? Like, to the congregation?”

“I don’t know,” I said, surprised. “I guess I could.”

“You should,” he said, and speared another forkful of stirfry.

This is how a lot of my bigger theological decisions begin, believe it or not. My husband, who identifies as atheist, hears me say something like, “I’m thinking about wearing my collar to that protest.” “I’m thinking of speaking up the next time I hear that kind of garbage theology.”

And he responds, “You should.” Sometimes it’s even, “You have to.”

I wonder if God ever sounds like that to a prophet.

We are so accustomed to seeing prophets as fiery types who warn of bizarre natural spectacles like bloody moons and trembling mountains, wild-eyed locust eaters who froth about the indolent rich and axes at the roots of trees.

But here, well into Isaiah, we see something different. We see compassion, patience, and love. We see gentle words, reassurance, and hope.

The chapter from which we read is a part of the collected work called Isaiah that many scholars attribute to an anonymous author often called ‘Deutero-Isaiah,’ or ‘Second Isaiah.’ Unlike the author of ‘First Isaiah,’ which runs from Chapters 1 to 39, Second Isaiah wrote during the time of the Judean exile. Many of the surviving people of God had been torn from their homelands and brought in captivity to Babylon around the time of the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. These forcibly deported people would have felt not only fear and humiliation, but confusion. Jerusalem was believed to be the holy city, God’s protected place. How could it have fallen?

And in the days of old, when wars were seen not only as conflicts between nations but between gods, it would have seemed to many that their God had been defeated.

What was the point of remaining on God’s side? God was, for lack of a better word, dead.

Second Isaiah needed his readers to understand that God was not so weak, and God’s favour was not so fickle. God’s presence was unending, everlasting. God was preparing a servant to liberate the people, just as she had with Moses. God would do this, because God was loving. God had called Israel by name from the beginning. Verse 1 reminds the people of their roots: Jacob whom God loved and with whom God struggled at Peniel, imparting a blessing earned through struggle and hardship and broken bones.

Perhaps, Second Isaiah thought, the people needed a reminder that they had been in exile before, and God had safely steered them home then. But rather than showing annoyance with their forgetfulness, as God sometimes did in other parts of scripture, God here is patient and loving, as a parent might be with a child who’s been told a million times that there’s nothing under the bed or in the closet.

God understands the depth of our fear, our despair, our rage, our helplessness.

Christians, who sobbed through the death of their Messiah on Good Friday only to, like Mary Magdalene, be confronted with the awesome foolishness of his resurrection on Sunday, were so heavily influenced by the Book of Isaiah that some scholars refer to it as the Fifth Gospel. Advent is the time when we hear it the most. It’s woven through Handel’s Messiah. It’s woven into our very language, from “swords into ploughshares” to “a voice in the wilderness.”

The sense of kinship Christians had with these writings is totally understandable for a number of reasons. While some endured persecution and took comfort in the more general notion that God was with them in times of trial, those who read it following the destruction of the Temple in the first Jewish-Roman war resonated deeply with those who had been ripped from their divine homeland. The destruction of the Second Temple was another watershed moment in Judaism, one that again threw their conception of God into question. Was God really with us, no longer having a house to live in?

The rabbis said, “Yes, of course. There was no house in the wilderness. God is so much bigger than that.” And out of their devotion to their scripture and scholarship, they and their people saved the Jewish faith.

Centuries later, Christians agreed.

So what about us?

After hard and mean years of exile, queer Christians have been shut outside again. We have been told that there is no place for us in the palace of the righteous. We have been told that we must bend ourselves into a hundred shuddering shapes to be made ready for the kingdom.

This is nothing new. It’s awful. It’s wearisome. It’s the worst sort of foolishness.

But it’s nothing new.

Not to us, and not to the church.

We are so, so tired.

We’re tired of being told to be patient when we’ve been walking through desolation for thousands of years.

We’re tired of manna in the desert, morning foam on grass, when our bodies want meat.

We’re tired of having to smash stones for water, when we just want to drink from a spring flowing from a generous heart.

We’re tired of asking for fish and being given snakes.

We’re starting to wonder what the hell the point of all this is.

Why spend hours trying to muscle in on a seat at the table when you’re clearly not wanted?

Why?

Because you are wanted.

Because God wants you.

God wants all of us.

No matter what any of the proverbial haters say, even our church knew that on Friday. The change passed in two out of three houses.

We already have a seat at the table. Just because it’s been blocked off by a couple of heavies doesn’t mean it’s not there.

God put it there.

The Church has been wrong before, and it will be again.

And God is with us then, and God will be with us the next time, and the next, and the next.

And all the time she is calling, calling us from the margins, from the wilderness, calling out that we must remember that we are known by name.

Like the exiles, ripped from the arms of our homeland to a faraway place, we are called to remember our roots, to remember who we are: children of God, named and claimed as beloved, because God is where love is.

Like Paul, architect of death and terroristic persecution who suddenly found himself forged into a new creation, thrown from his horse in the blazing light of a new master who would lead him into a love so strong he was happy to exchange his life for it.

Like Mary Magdalene, fumbling through pre-dawn uncertainty, turning to look on the gardener who was not a gardener and yet was, a new Adam come to save us from what we were before: a creature that sought to execute the source of all life and found all attempts thwarted with the gentle question, “Whom are you looking for?”

Like the church itself, a ragtag group of brown men and women living in an occupied land, who would never have associated with each other outside of the Spirit’s mischievous will, who went from persecuted to glorified to feared to ignored and perhaps in the end back again, always carrying within it the most frustrating paradox and the most important news: that death and fear are not the end, that slavery is never a closed chapter, that joy comes in the morning, that struggles are seen and known and felt in the bleeding heart of one who was pierced and returned to us still pierced and speaking peace.

So let us continue our work of love, here and in our own relationships. Let us continue to be loud and proud. Let us continue to show God’s love in everything we do.

For the best way to shame those who would shame us is to live our lives as though we are blessed, because we are.

We are.