Roger Ray, pastor
Jan. 16, 2011 Epihany 2
Isaiah 49:1-7
49:1 Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me.
49:2 He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away.
49:3 And he said to me, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified."
49:4 But I said, "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God."
49:5 And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength-
49:6 he says, "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."
49:7 Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, "Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you."
I have often thought that football is the modern replacement of ancient religions. Football, like most primitive religions, is brutal, sexy and involves grass stains and scantily clad young virgins..... or at least that what they are intended to represent.
Football teams represent certain cities or parts of the country and they inspire primitive, animal like enthusiasm from fans who go shirtless and paint their faces and blow horns as if they were Mel Gibson in Brave Heart. Small towns send their teams out to do battle with the teams from neighboring towns accompanied by the cheers and symbols of two armies going to war. When people say that football is like a religion around here, or, in my home state of Kentucky, where basketball is a religion, we come close to the way religions got started.
In their most primitive forms, ancient religions formed around the god who was associated with a particular place. A city's god lived in the heavens directly above that city, or, more specifically, that city's temple.
When city states went to war, it was as if the two gods were going to war and so they carried the symbols of their gods with them..... that's why there's generally an eagle on top of the American flag pole, just as there was an eagle on top of the Roman battle flags.
When you have seen pictures of the Ark of the Covenant made famous in the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, it is portrayed as a box with two angles on the top.
But scholars assume that the actual historical item was more like a throne, a chair for Yahweh to sit upon as God accompanied the Israelites into battle. When you lose a war.... When the ark was destroyed and the Israelites were carried into slavery in Babylon, they asked themselves, what was for them, a serious and reasonable question, why would we sing the songs of Israel in a distant land? That is, Yahweh is up in the clouds above Jerusalem, how could he possibly hear us all of the way over here in Babylon?
God's lived in a particular place and even the evolution of the image of the winged angel is reflective of that fact. The word "angel" means "messenger." Gods had angles that they could send, flying through the air, to deliver messages for them.
I keep referring to this as primitive religion but I have not called it "ancient" because it is sometimes quite current. You can have, after all, a primitive religion in the modern era. You may recall the hot water that General William Boykin got into a few years ago when he publicly described our war on terror as a war between our true God and the false god of the terrorists.
Though the Bush administration made him try to whitewash that speech the truth is that what he said was consistent with things he had said in previous years. He was involved in the failed rescue attempt of Iranian hostages during the Carter administration and even though the mission failed, he attributed the lack of casualties to the fact that they had stood and prayed in the dessert that God would go with them into battle and that God had protected everyone who had prayed with him. General Boykin is a man of very sincere faith but I'm willing to label it as being primitive because it harkens back to these kinds of anthropomorphic images of God moving from one place to another to defend the army of one state against the army of another state..... in a way that makes shouting "Go Bears" a kind of prayer.
Our scripture lesson today comes from that time when the defeated armies of Judah are now living in captivity in Babylon. During their generations as slaves, they had time to try to understand what it meant to be children of Yahweh. With their nation, their city state, destroyed, they began to allow themselves to think of God as being more than a war God who went with them into battle.... A magical amulet to protect them and only them.
They found that they had faith, they had an experience of God, they had a spiritual life, even though most of them had never seen Israel, never saw the temple, never heard the shofar and the call to prayer in Jerusalem. In short, they came to believe that they could have a relationship with God who was no longer tied down to one geographic spot. And if Yahweh could be known in places other than Jerusalem, maybe geography is not relevant at all.
As the slaves were being set free, as they were being allowed to go back to Israel to rebuild their nation, at least some of them began to be aware that they didn't need to go back, build and altar and sacrifice sheep and doves to feed their god, to build their god's strength back up and become the god of their private little piece of real estate again.
And so the prophet begins to shout.... In verse 1:
"Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you people from far away!"
Isaiah is now throwing his arms open to address Jews and Babylonians, Egyptians, Africans, Europeans.... And then he begins to speak in the most intimate way imaginable about God..... God doesn't sit on a throne in heaven.... You don't meet God on the battlefield carrying your God's throne with you into war.
The prophet speaks of the womb.... The Lord spoke to me before I was born.... God called me by name when I was still in my mother's womb...... The prophet says to those slaves who were about to go back and rebuild their nation that God had been inside of their mother's wombs with them, knitting them together, fashioning their bodies, giving them strength and insight and power.... Not to go out and build up the cult of Judah and Judah's god but to become a blessing to every nation of the world.
For God said, "It is too small a thing that you should serve only me.... I give you as a light to the nations that my grace, my mercy, my compassion, my message of wholeness may reach to the end of the earth," in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Iran and North Korea. And if the people of those nations do not think of us as a blessing then it may be that we're not going about this the right way.
You may have noticed the bumper sticker I have recently been displaying on my car. It says: It's hard to convince people that you are killing them for their own good. I understand that we don't live in a world in which we can just hold hands with the people of every nation and sing Kum Ba Ya together. The world can be very dangerous and there is a limited supply of food, water, housing and space which will always make it necessary for nations to arm themselves and defend their borders. However, we will never fight our way into friendship with any nation.
One of my professors at Vanderbilt, the late Dr. Herman Norton, was a retired two star general who had been a chaplain during WWII. Dr. Norton told us that he believed that the reason that Japan was one of America's closest allies just ten years after we had dropped atomic bombs on two of their most populated cities was not because we had simply defeated them in war. Dr. Norton said that the reason our enemies became our friends was because of the way the American occupation forces behaved once they had taken over the island nation.
Japan did not, in any tit for tat sort of way, deserve to be treated well. When the Japanese had invaded and occupied countries, rape and torture had been unconscionably common. Dr. Norton said that the people of Japan had braced themselves to be treated similarly by the American occupation forces. They expected to have their women treated with disrespect and their men with contempt. They expected their holy places to be destroyed and their culture radically changed.
Instead our occupation forces were ordered to show respect to the Japanese people as our government worked to rebuild their factories and retool the country for peaceful industry.
We were so successful in that project that Japan became not just an ally and trading partner but they became a source of concerning economic competition. In many ways, the greatest strength of our military was the strength of restraint which, though certainly not perfect, generally did not seek to take revenge against the civilian population of a nation which had attacked us at Pearl Harbor and who planned to invade our west coast and came perilously close to being able to do it.
You know, we invaded Canada a couple of hundred years ago under the leadership of then General Benedict Arnold. Though sometimes testy, we have the longest most peaceful border in the world between the United States and Canada. Can you imagine a day when we would have the same feelings about Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and North Korea that we now have about Japan, England and Canada? And could we get to that point without having a bloody war first?
Though the survival of the Jewish nation was anything but certain when a band of released slaves prepared to leave bondage in Babylon to return to their ruined homeland to rebuild. They might have had lots of reasons to be uncertain of their own survival. But even in their weak state. Even with no one willing to buy bonds based on their future success.... Isaiah dared to dream that they would do more than just survive.
The prophet wanted the people to believe that just going out into the wilderness to build a temple and a walled city for themselves was too small of a dream.
Isaiah wanted to drop the defensiveness and competition of being a nation which existed to serve itself, with a religion centered around a god who sat atop their highest mountain. Isaiah wanted them to become a blessing to the whole world.... And it's hard to convince people that you want to bless them if you keep threatening to kill them.
I called it primitive religion.... The Red Hot Chili Peppers called it "shallow" in the song Sean sang for us as we began. "We are not the center of this .... Universe, and what is something worse, I will not serve in fear of such a curse.... Shallow be thy game." Because, as they conclude, "if you only serve yourself (then) your religion is irrelevant."
