January 7, 2007
I Have Called You By Name
by Rev. Dr. Jim Carlson
Isaiah 43:1-7
Associated Press Report - Man in Oak Park MI awoke in the back of a garbage truck and called police to alert the driver just before he was squashed.
Guy fell asleep in dumpster looking for recyclables.
Used cell phone to call police. Told them which dumpster he had been in.
Called for help. Cell phone went dead. Police found truck in parking lot.
Now, I found the police officer’s comments very interesting. He said, "If I was him I would go to church and play the lottery because today was his lucky day." I guess I was a little unclear about the association between the church and the lottery. Maybe in Oak Park the church has a lottery. Who knows?
But beneath the surface of the officer’s comments is an interesting idea. The officer apparently saw this man’s escape from the clutches of a dump truck as an act of salvation on God’s part.
And for that to be true, we would have to assume that God saw the situation, knew the catastrophe which was about to happen, and facilitated the process of getting this guy out of the truck before he was compacted into half the man he used to be.
The question I want to raise this morning as we look at this passage from Isaiah is, “Does God really take that kind of interest in each of us?” Isaiah has some very important answers that we all should pay attention to as we begin this New Year.
This passage comes from the section of the book of Isaiah known as Second Isaiah. It’s widely believed by scholars that this section is the second of three sections in Isaiah. When we read passages from this section, they make the most sense if we hear them as oracles by a prophet for Jewish people who are in exile.
(Slide) As many of you know, the Jewish people were attacked and defeated in 586 B.C. by the Babylonians. The leadership was taken captive and marched back to Babylon to live in exile for about 50 years. During this time, a number of prophets began writing or speaking oracles on God’s behalf. Some oracles were considered to be genuine words of God, others were not.
This passage was spoken by a prophet who still spoke in the tradition of Isaiah. Isaiah had prophesied to the king of Judah almost 200 years earlier. His oracles were so greatly valued that people were still attributing their words to Isaiah even 200 years later.
It’s hard for us to imagine what the experience of exile must have been like for the Jewish people. We have no idea what it’s like to have a foreign army come in and destroy everything we hold dear, and then tear us away from our loved ones, forcing us to live in another country.
The closest thing to it that any of us has experienced is maybe having our home foreclosed on or losing a job we loved. But none of those really compare to the trauma of being forcibly taken to live in some place we don’t know where they speak another language and follow a different religion.
But in addition to that, you have the religious questions that exile forces you to ask yourself. People couldn’t help but asking, “Hey, if we’re God’s people and Israel is our land given by God, and if our God is all powerful, then why was all this allowed to happen?” The people of Judah felt like the guy in the back of the garbage truck trying to figure out what happened to them.
These are legitimate questions. Especially if you understand yourself to be a people created, formed and valued by God. Where did God go when the Babylonians were raping and pillaging?
Beyond that question, they were asking about their future as a people. Was God going to bring the Jewish people back to the land of Israel? Were they still God’s chosen people? What was the relationship between the Jews and God after this tragedy?
You can guess that there were lots of answers floating around to those kinds of questions. One of the answers that people considered to be a genuine word from God is this poem we find in Isaiah 43. Actually, the passage we read this morning is the second half of a poem which begins in the middle of the previous chapter.
In the first half of the poem, which we didn’t read, the prophet tries to answer the question about why God allowed this invasion and exile to take place. The answer, in a nutshell, is that the Jews as a people did not live up to the agreement they had made with God. They did not follow the law God had given them through Moses.
God tried to let them know that they were in violation of the law, but the prophet compared the people to blind or deaf people who paid no attention to what God was saying. In response, God allowed the Babylonians to come in and destroy Jerusalem. Even the temple, where God was thought to live, was destroyed.
So the long and short of it was that they were stuck in exile because they hadn’t paid any attention to God’s laws. That was the bad news. The good news was in the second half, and that’s what we read for today.
The good news was that they were still as much God’s people as they ever had been. The prophet reminds the people that God created them and formed their nation. God named them Israel. That kind of relationship would never change.
God also promised to bring the people back from all the places they had been scattered. What he really manes by this statement is that God would bring back not only the Jewish people exiled in Babylon, but even the folks who were part of the kingdom of Israel, their brothers and sisters, who were scattered 130 year before they were when the Assyrians invaded.
God was promising this massive family reunion with people of Israel coming back from all over the place and living in Israel again. They would come from the ends of the earth if that’s what it took to gather everyone back together.
Secondly, the prophet said God would protect the people. If calamities ever came up again for them as a nation, God would save them like people saved from a flood or rescued from a fire.
The other thing the prophet talks about is the sacrifice God makes in order to put Israel back together as a people. Now you would think that if God created the world and owns everything that God would not have to sacrifice anything. God could just reach into any problem and solve it.
But the prophet describes the situation differently. The prophet talks about God ransoming Israel from someone, probably the Persians who conquered the Babylonians and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem.
(Slide) God talks about giving Egypt and Sheba and Ethiopia, all lands in Africa, as an exchange for Israel. It’s like God had to allow the Persians to conquer these places (which the Persians actually did) in order to get Israel back from the Persians. You wouldn’t think an all-powerful God would have to make a deal with someone, but that’s the image we have in this oracle.
Now you might look at this passage and say to yourself, “Well this is great for Israel. But I’m not in exile anywhere. What value does this passage hold for me?” Well, I think it tells us a couple of very important things that we should keep in mind during this New Year.
While none of us are being forced to live in Waukesha against our will as these folks were, in the same way we sometimes feel scattered and out of control in our own lives. When we think about a tragedy that has taken place in our lives or in the lives of people we know, I will guarantee you that these same kinds of questions will run through our minds.
I bet there’s not a person in this room who, when something terrible has happened, has asked themselves, “Has God abandoned me? Does God still love me? What did I do that made God so mad that God allowed this to happen to me?”
And just like the situation we talked about his morning, there are all kinds of answers out there, some good, some bad, some claiming to be an answer straight from the mouth of God. We all have to decide for ourselves if that’s true or not. But this passage tells us a couple of things that help us re-center our lives when we feel like we’re living in exile.
First, I don’t care what happens to you, no matter how guilty you may feel for something, regardless of how poorly you or others might think of yourself; one truth never changes: you will never, ever stop being God’s chosen child.
We as Christians interpret this same passage through the person of Jesus and realize that this kind of love and compassion and sacrifice in Isaiah 43 is extended to the whole world in the death and resurrection of Jesus. So every day when you wake up and are given the gift of another day of life, remember that you are God’s child. God formed you, God redeemed you, God sacrificed God’s own self for you.
You are precious in God’s eyes; you are honored and loved by God. And that alone makes your life worth living. We live in a world where life is not valued equally by everyone. We live in a world where the perception on many peoples’ part is a division between good people and bad people.
We have this perception that good people should live and bad people should not. And it’s honorable – even godly – for good people to incarcerate or kill bad people indiscriminately in order to get rid of all the bad people.
This passage says the exact opposite. Israel was so full of bad people that God allowed their nation to be destroyed by gentiles, if you believe this prophet. And yet God calls them “precious” and “honored” and “loved”. Whereas many people believe in revenge and death, God believes in redemption and forgiveness.
There isn’t any place in the church for us talking about good people getting rid of bad people. Those bad people are created and formed and loved by God. And sometimes they are us.
You can’t see yourself as good and see someone else as inherently bad. We’re either all good, or none of us is good. And this passage would lead us to believe that even the most sinful of us are still precious in God’s sight.
The other thing this passage reminds us of is God’s presence and mysterious protection throughout our life, and all of history. Now this may take a little explaining, but it’s very important to understand what we mean here.
For instance, someone will look at a passage like this and say, “How can the Jewish people still read and believe a passage like this? God says that when they walk through fire, they will not be burned. But where was God when 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust? They certainly got burned on that one.”
I hate to put it so blatantly, but this is a fair question. And honestly, while none of us went through the holocaust ourselves, we tend to ask ourselves the same kind of question sometimes when we go through a personal crisis.
When you lose your job, do you find yourself saying, “What it is this all about not getting burned? I got singed on that one pretty good. Why didn’t God keep this promise to me?” Of course, you could say, as some people do, “Well, that job loss must be God’s punishment for something really bad I did.”
You can spend your whole life trying to read the tea leaves and decipher the divine basis for all the good and bad things that happen. But if you want to have a serviceable, plausible, workable way of understanding the relationship between yourself and God and the world, then none of those answers I just mentioned are going to be much good to you
Why? Because you really can’t know for sure, and there’s no reason why you ought to just take on faith, that any of those things are true. You don’t know if the car accident is God’s retribution for some moral indiscretion. You’ll never be able to tell if that illness you suffered from is God’s way of chastising you for something you stole or someone you mistreated or something you did wrong. You just can’t know for sure. No one does.
Neither can you say that when you lost your job or had the car accident or suffered some illness that God wasn’t in some mysterious way working for your salvation. In fact, you usually don’t realize it until long after it’s taken place. You might have wanted something to go differently in your life from the way it went, but you can’t say God didn’t save you because you just don’t know.
So what do we know for sure? I’ll tell you what we know. We know that wherever we go, in 2007, we do not go alone. We go with the presence of God. We go, knowing that we are loved by the God who created us, who gave Jesus for us, and who goes through the fire next to us whenever we suffer.
Beyond that, we just can’t say. But the good news is that that is enough. We don’t need a God who saves us from every calamity. Such a God doesn’t exist, and that kind of God might not even be the best thing for us. We also don’t need a God who forces us to live every day of our lives in fear of divine punishment.
Such a God does not exist, even though people have understood God in that way before. And for those of us who know people who continue to see God in those terms, it’s clear that such a view of God is more of a burden than a blessing. And our God is always a blessing, never a burden.
So go through 2007 with the God who called you by name, who created you, who redeemed you, who honors and loves you. And remember that God looks at the people around you in the very same way.