Think Big!

Isaiah 49:1-7

Emmanuel Baptist Church

January 15, 2023; Rev. Kathy Donley

In high school and college, history was often taught to me with names and dates. On a test, for example, I might have been asked for the starting and ending dates of a certain war.

It is good to know something about the timeline of history, when things started and ended, what big events came before others in human history.

But having lived through a lot of history now, I realize that it is not necessarily easy to say when something starts and stops. A war might technically begin only after several acts of aggression have occurred. Or it might officially end when a peace treaty is signed, but that doesn’t mean that people immediately stop thinking of the other side as enemies.

I used to think that there was an influenza epidemic in 1918. Now I know that it continued in waves through the spring of 1920. And you may have heard about the Covid-19 pandemic. Is it over yet? Depends on who you ask.

The people in the time of Isaiah 49 have a number of parallels with us. They’re living through the end of something and trying to get on with something new or maybe just back to normal. I have never preached on this passage from Isaiah before and I was surprised at how very timely this ancient word seems.

The book of Isaiah is long. In it we find very beautiful poetry. We often hear some of that in Christmas readings and in Handel’s Messiah. In it we also find hard words about God’s anger at corruption and exploitation of the poor, and the coming destruction of Israel and Judah by military powers. It is a complicated book.

The book of Isaiah includes events that span a couple of centuries. The prophet Isaiah, introduced in the opening chapter as the son of Amoz, was active in Jerusalem throughout most of the second half of the eighth century before Jesus. That Isaiah is directly associated with the first 39 chapters. But most scholars believe that the rest of the book was written almost two centuries later, written by people who kept the truth of Isaiah’s message alive. The book of Isaiah spans the long period before, during and just after the exile.

You remember that Babylon was a world power in the early sixth century. During that time, Babylon conquered Judah and took many of its citizens back to Babylon as captives. A generation or two later, Persia became more powerful than Babylon and the ruler of Persian allowed the captives to go home. Our reading, from chapter 49, probably reflects that time when the people had just returned to Judah. Or maybe they are still in Babylon, needing to be convinced to return to their homeland, because living in Babylon has now become normal. Is captivity over yet? It depends on who you ask.

The prophet has been serving God for a long time. He or she believes that they were created for this ministry. But now, they are mightily discouraged. Verse 4 says “I have labored in vain. I have spent my strength for nothing.”

The work no longer brings joy. It feels meaningless. The servant is exhausted and feels defeated. If we could interview the one who is speaking in Isaiah 49 and also interview those who are part of the Great Resignation, those who abandoned their former jobs during the waves of Covid, I suspect we might hear some common themes. One of those themes might be despair.

John Claypool was a Baptist pastor who later became an Episcopal priest. In his early days, as a Baptist, he served in Louisville, Kentucky. There, in 1960, he was involved in the civil-rights movement. One time, he went to a meeting between white and black clergy which was held at a local synagogue. The meeting grew quite tense, and eventually the black clergy stormed out in anger, accusing the white ministers of not having enough courage to face the opposition. What began as a “hopeful endeavor,” John says, “ended in total frustration.”

John turned to his friend, the rabbi who was hosting the meeting, and said, “I think it is hopeless. This problem is so old, so deep, so many-faceted, there is simply no way out of it.”

His friend, at that time in his 70’s and with a lot of experience in pastoral ministry, took his younger colleague into his study where the two of them sat down. The rabbi said, “I need to tell you something, young man. To the [Jewish person], there is only one unforgivable sin, and that is the sin of despair. Humanly speaking, despair is presumptuous. It is saying something about the future that we have no right to say because we have not been there yet and do not know enough. Think of the times you have been surprised in the past as you looked at a certain situation and deemed it hopeless. Then, lo and behold, forces that you did not even realize existed broke in and changed everything. We do not know enough to embrace the absolutism of despair and, theologically speaking, despair is downright heretical. If God can create the things that are from the things that are not, and even make dead things come back to life, who are we to set limits on what that kind of potency may yet do?”[1]

It is OK to be weary. Jesus got weary. It is OK to be uncertain. It is OK not to know what to do. It is OK, even good, to stop and pray, to pause and rest and discern before taking action. It is OK to grieve. In fact, Walter Brueggemann says that grieving is the first step towards hope. Unless we break through the numbness of simply accepting things as they are and see that they not OK, then we can’t imagine an alternative. “Despairing people” Brueggemann says, “do not anticipate or receive newness.” [2]

We can be weary or uncertain or grieving, but, it seems that what we cannot do is to allow ourselves to wallow in despair. As the rabbi said, we have not been to the future, and we do not know enough.

But the speaker in verse 4 is kind of wallowing. We can imagine that first wave of Judeans returning from exile. It was the dream of their parents and grandparents to go home again, a dream passed down to them. A chance to be free, for life to be as it should be, for things to be normal.

We can imagine that they arrive in Judah to find the temple and the city still mostly in ruins, with no real infrastructure, looking nothing like the stories their ancestors had told. This is not what they expected, not what they wanted. Captivity should be over, but it seems like they’ve just exchanged one bad situation for another. They are exhausted. They are uncertain. They are grieving and very close to despair.

It is not clear whether we should understand verse 4 as being spoken by one leader or expressing the voice of the nation. It is not clear because in verse 3 we read God saying, “You are my servant, Israel”. Some manuscripts include the word “Israel” there and some do not. The question of who is speaking is one which the scholars spend a lot of time debating. I appreciate those who say it is both the faithful individual and the obedient community.[3]

The crucial thing is God’s response. When the individual or the community throws up their hands, saying that all their efforts were for nothing, we might expect words of comfort and encouragement. We might think that God would understand that the human beings are overwhelmed and adjust expectations accordingly. Maybe by sending more help. Maybe by reducing the size of the task, giving them a smaller piece of the work. But that is not what happens.

Instead, God says “What you’ve been about is too light a thing,” What God says is “It is too tiny a thing (merely) to be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, to restore the remnant of Israel. I make you a light to the nations that that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”[4]

God does not diminish the demands on her tired servants, but renews the original calling and also adds to it. God does not say, “You poor things, you’ve been through so much. Let me take some of the load off of you.” Instead, God doubles-down. Now it is not enough to focus on only on themselves, God “shakes [them] out of their lethargy by giving them the largest task they could ever conceive, nothing less than divine responsibility for the entire world.”[5]

They think that their job is to return from exile, to get back to the way things were before. That would be no small feat, but what God has in mind is so much bigger. It is a new path, a new way. And it is also the return of an even older idea. Centuries earlier, God had blessed Abraham’s faithfulness and had said that through Abraham’s descendants the whole world would be blessed.

Friends, this is the text I was wrestling with this week. At the same time this week, I was part of a team conversation with our consultant Joy Skjegstad. We were anticipating her visit her on January 29 and the discernment we are engaging about what God is calling us to do.

We always read scripture from within a particular context and that was my context this week. So, it makes me wonder whether our focus has been too small, or whether, at least, my focus has been too small. This is one of those times when the individual voice and the community voice may need to be clarified.

I wonder if just getting back to the ways things used to be is too light a thing for us?

I wonder if God has a larger task for us, perhaps as large a being a light to the nations?

I wonder if, in light of present circumstances, we are being summoned to a recommissioning, a new calling to an ancient vision?

I wonder.

I cannot say with confidence that this is the word of God for us that we should directly apply. There are other texts that we might choose – like the parables about the value of small things like mustard seeds and single sheep, like the saying that where two or three are gathered, Jesus is among them. I don’t know yet, whether our calling is to something large or small, but I wonder.

What I do know is that God still has work to do with us. It is not too little a thing in which we are engaged here, and we must not despair. As Brian McLaren says, “Despair is boring and uncreative, and to succumb to it is to empower it.” [6] Or as Lutheran scholar Paul Hanson says, “Despair is precisely the enemy that can destroy the future.” [7]

God’s task of saving the world is invested not in superhumans but in normal, faltering flesh and blood, people like you and me. We stand in a long line of faltering flesh and blood prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints, faithful servants who have brought glory to God. God is still beckoning us to follow, to play our part in building up the kingdom. May we attend to the whisper of God’s Spirit which enlivens our hope. Amen.

[1] John R. Claypool, The Hopeful Heart, (New York: Church Publishing, 2017), p 19

[2] Walter Bruggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd Edition, (Minneapolis: Augbsurg Fortress Press, 2001), p. 60.

[3] Paul Hanson, Isaiah 40-66 Interpretation Series, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), p. 128

[4] Translation by John C. Holbert in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 1 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp, Editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2019), p.180

[5] John C. Holbert in Connections, p. 180

[6] Brian D. McLaren, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007), p. 168.

[7] Paul Hanson, Isaiah 40-66, p. 104.