Love Reveals the Way – Gary Harder – Jan. 7/07

Love Reveals the Way 

January 7th, 2007 

Gary Harder

 

Text:  

Isaiah 43:1-7

Luke 3:15-17; 21-22

 

Introduction

“I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1).

“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22).

I was intrigued this week by the two lectionary texts for today. The one from Isaiah 43 is addressed to exiles. It is addressed to people in despair. The second one, from Luke 3, is addressed to Jesus at his baptism, as he follows his vocational vision; as he prepares for his public ministry. Yet both have essentially the same message. “I have called you by name, you are mine”. You are my son, the Beloved”. Whether to people in despair, or to one following his vision, his calling in life, comes the same message. I have called you by name. You are my beloved.

I remember Rev. J.J. Thiessen with fondness and respect. Rev. Thiessen was the major Mennonite leader for the Conference of Mennonites in Canada during the forties and fifties and early sixties. During the time that I was at Canadian Mennonite Bible College J.J., as he was known, was chair of the Conference and chair of the CMBC Board. I arrived at CMBC, along with some hundred other students, feeling quite alone and anxious, a shy introvert surrounded by mostly total strangers. J.J. came to the school opening services – came to speak at the public gatherings, but also to meet students.

He was a bit on the short and stout side, portly really, but with an amazing twinkle in his eye. I remember meeting him. He asked my name and where I was from and what I hoped to experience at CMBC. – all in German. I shyly responded, intimidated by his aura of power and by his reputation. Chair of the conference. Chair of the CMBC Board. Why did he even bother talking with a timid first year student who was mostly a farmer, and a very inconsequential student who would soon be forgotten?

Some months latter J.J. was on campus again. He saw me in the hall and strode briskly up to me, big smile on his face, and greeted me by name. “Gary, how are you? How are your studies going”? I couldn’t believe it. He had remembered my name. And that felt so good.

I learned that he remembered each student’s name. In fact, he carefully structured the memorization of names. After each introduction he would write down the name of the student, and one or two things he had learned about that student. Then on the train trip back to Saskatoon he would spend the time memorizing the names of all the people he had met. That way he could call us each by name.

I must confess that I don’t have his gift or his discipline, and rue that. Names are always a struggle for me. But I do know how good it feels to have someone I don’t know well call me by name.

And then yet to have God call me by name.

New years reflections

It is new years eve morning. The worship service last Sunday morning invites four people to share reflections on the past year. Where have you seen God at work in your life? Where have you grown? Shirley and Marie and Marlys and Richard fill our hearts with stories and with testimony. Their lives have known struggle and challenge and pain and opportunity in the past year. And their lives have known an awareness of the presence of God with them. There is, in any years worth of living, enough that could tend us to despair. There is also enough, seen through the lense of faith, to tend us toward hope and into thanksgiving.

It is new years eve. A small group of friends gather to quietly release the old year and welcome in the new one. No big party needed, just time for some eating and some sharing and some reflecting. Everyone acknowledges some stress and struggle and challenge. For some enough to lead to despair. But humour also erupts, and laughter, and stories of joy and hope and growth. The year gone has been sort of normal – a few big moments, many very small ones, some particular challenges, some amazing opportunities. And the questions from the morning service run through my mind. Where have we seen God at work in our lives? Where have we grown?

Do you identity at all with this new years retrospective, with this reflective and even introspective journey through time tinged with both pain and joy? Which predominates for you? Where do you think you have grown? Where do you have an awareness of God’s special touch?

And now these two texts from the lectionary roam through my mind all week. Am I, are we, in Isaiah’s context of exile and despair needing a word about God calling us by name. Or are we in Luke’s context of visioning a new hope and preparing to follow a dream, a new ministry, needing to hear again that God is naming us “beloved”. Or are we perhaps in both contexts – both that of exile and despair, and that of hopes and dreams and visions and opportunities, because for most of us that is what life is like. And amazingly, for both contexts, it is the same message. And that message I/we need to hear over and over again. God calls me/us each by name. You are God’s beloved.

Isaiah & Exile

The biggest temptation for exiles is to give in to a profound despair. They have lost everything worth having – their homeland, their financial security, their freedom to live and act out of their own volition. And they knew profoundly the sense of the absence of God. Or the total powerlessness of God to do anything about their desperate situation. Either God was absent from them or God was powerless to do anything about the mess they were in. Despair holds an enormous power over them. Are they fated forever to live in exilic depression?

Their hopelessness is deepened by the fact that by now they blame themselves for their defeat at the hands of the Babylonians and for their consequent slavery. Both the prophet Jeremiah and the prophet Isaiah tell them that it is their own fault. Isaiah 42 lays it on the line.

“But this is a people robbed and plundered, all of them are trapped in holes and hidden in prisons… Who gave up Jacob to the spoiler, and Israel to the robbers? Was it
not the Lord, against whom we have sinned, in whose ways they would not walk, and whose law they would not obey? So he poured upon him the heat of his anger and the fury of war…”

And the people know deep down that this is true. They know that they had abandoned their covenant with God. And now they feel totally abandoned in Babylon.

They feel abandoned by God. There is a personal and emotional sense of the absence of God. But there is also a public, institutional lament, a cry of despair that “the glory of the Lord” has departed. God had no holy place in the new land, no temple, no holy shrine, no sacred vestments, no ark of the covenant.

So the public lament cries out, “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’/ How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

Their despair turns to rage. At the end of this lament, as recorded in Psalm 137, they burst out,

“O Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

Walter Brueggemann suggests that exile and despair and emptiness (and rage) are also the hallmarks of our post modern western world, and of many Christian churches. He writes, “In our contemporary circumstance of ministry, I suggest that despair is the defining pathology that robs the church of missional energy and of stewardship generosity.” (“Cadences of Home – Preaching to Exiles, p. 7). A pathology of despair. A sickness which robs the church of energy and enthusiasm and joy and the ability to change and to follow new opportunities and visions, and to challenge societal emptiness and pursuing false gods. An emptiness inside. And then we become self-preoccupied, insular, withdrawn, trying only to survive. We lose all sense of the confident claim and conviction that there is good news breaking out all over the place, that God is at work in our lives, our church, our world. We give up on ourselves. We give up on the world. We give up on the church. Exilic despair.

But in chapter 43, our text for today, Isaiah challenges this despair. Enough of “poor me, poor us”. Enough of self blame. Enough of hopelessness. Enough of laments decrying the loss of the good old days. Enough of wallowing in pity.

“But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine…”

There is in Isaiah here a mixture of both defiance and tenderness. There is defiance of the powers that hold the people captive. “I have redeemed you?” But the people are still in Babylon, aren’t they? It takes a great deal of faith to believe that God has already redeemed them when all the evidence shows that Babylon still has iron control over their lives. But there is, in Isaiah’s words, a defiance and a rejection of Babylon’s ultimate power. There is a claim that Yahweh God has already triumphed over the powers of exile – that is, over the Babylonian gods. There is a defiance of the hold which exilic thinking has had over the Israelites. “Israel is urged to ‘think big’, and to ‘sing big’ about the forces of life at work on its behalf” (p.7). Turn your despair into hope. Act and live in the light of this hope, not of despair.

And then, combined with this defiance, is an exquisite tenderness. “I have called you by name, you are mine.” A word of unbelievable grace and forgiveness and healing.

And maybe that is in the end the only word that is powerful enough to fill exilic emptiness and depression. “I have called you by name, you are mine.”

The baptism of Jesus

Our second text for today, from Luke 3, tells the story of the baptism of Jesus. We could ask why Jesus, of all people, would choose to be baptized, especially since John the Baptist who baptized him, proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. What sins, if any, did Jesus need to repent of? Or did baptism mean something else for Jesus? Did it maybe mean being fully in solidarity with all us humans – all us sinful humans? Or did he see his baptism as his commissioning for ministry, kind of the way the early Anabaptists understood baptism – a commissioning to be involved in God’s work?

The sequence of events are as follows. First comes the baptism of Jesus. Almost immediately after his baptism Jesus is led into the wilderness for forty days to face a series of temptations. I see these temptations not primarily as personal sins to deal with, but as alternate and easier ways to do his ministry. They are temptations to do ministry in ways that are not God’s ways. The first temptation – turning stones into bread and becoming a bread Messiah feeding everyone. That would make him hugely popular. The second temptation – throwing himself off the temple pinnacle and being miraculously saved by angels, wining the applause and devotion of the multitudes. That would inspire an awe of his powers. The third temptation – worshipping the devil, with the promise from the devil of achieving huge wealth and enormous world power. With that wealth and power Jesus could accomplish anything he desired.

I think Jesus was given the inner strength to resist these very real temptations by his baptism – by hearing the voice of God his Father naming him as the beloved.

Right after the 40 days of wilderness temptations Jesus beings his public ministry – his three years of living out and teaching about the Kingdom of God.

“When Jesus had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’”.

The story has a visual and an oral impact. Visual. The heavens being torn open. There is something very dramatic going on. God’s Kingdom is coming to earth in a very special way. The impact intensifies with the Holy Spirit coming “in bodily form like a dove”. You can see something. Looks like a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit. It descends upon Jesus.

And then comes the voice. A voice form Heaven. “You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.” I think Jesus needed to hear this blessing, this affirmation from God, his Father. I think Jesus needed to know that he was truly, deeply, profoundly loved by God. He needed to hear this voice and this word so that he would be strong enough inside to deal with the temptations in the wilderness. He needed to hear this blessing before he was ready to begin his public ministry.

Our deepest need as humans is to be loved – and to be told that we are loved. We need to know, need to hear, that we have infinite value, that we are loved, that we are named in blessing. “You are my beloved, my son, my daughter, with you I am well pleased”.

Our self-concept, our self-worth, is so dependant on knowing that we are loved. Otherwise we will try so desperately to earn that love, usually in destructive, aimless, driven ways. Our motivation for doing any service, any volunteering, any ministry at all, needs to come from a sense of being called and a sense of being loved. If our motivation is to try to fill up the emptiness inside, or to finally earn the approval and applause of the people around us, or to try to earn God’s notice and love, we will be driven in ways out of our control. We will try to please everyone. We will need to be liked by everyone. We will then eventually but surely burn out. We will despair because we can’t trade for self-worth or for love.

We long to hear – we need to hear – just like Jesus did, that voice saying, – even before we do anything, even before we accomplish anything, even before we try to impress the people around us with our skills and gifts and dedication and hard work – “You are my beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

Conclusion

Two texts for today. One from Isaiah speaking to a people in exile, in despair, carrying enormous guilt, feeling hopeless about their situation. A second text from Luke telling the story of the baptism of Jesus as preparation for entering his special calling to ministry. For both it is essentially the same message. God calls you by name. You are God’s beloved.

I have a bit of a confession to make. I have preached similar sermons with similar messages many times here at TUMC. No, not the same one as today, but many similar ones reminding us that our self-worth, our value, our specialness , comes not from earning it, not from accomplishments, not from special gifted-ness – but comes instead from knowing that we are loved. But I suppose that when a preacher rides a theme rather hard it probably means that the preacher too is struggling with the issue.

The temptation is always there, especially when we, when I, am a bit discouraged, when something has gone wrong, when I really don’t feel very good about myself, to try to boost my self-worth by working harder, by accomplishing more, by trying to preach a better sermon, by trying to prove to others and myself that I really am pretty good after all. Especially as I age it does give a momentary boost to my self-esteem when I score a goal in the hockey I still play. I suppose even writing a book has something of the motivation of proving my worth behind it. I suspect that one of the struggles and temptation of retiring will be the question of where I will feel my sense of value and worth and identity when I am no longer doing pastoral work – when I am no longer accomplishing what I feel are important things.

Every summer when I supervise our summer student minister, at some point in the summer we are sure to explore issues of self-worth and of motivation for ministry. And then I will warn the student, especially students with many gifts and much potential – don’t even think about entering pastoral ministry if your motivation is to try to earn brownie points with God, if that is your way of winning God’s applause, God’s love. Don’t enter ministry if you have a low self-worth and high needs and you think serving God this way will magically make you feel really good about yourself.

Enter ministry, any kind of ministry, only if you feel called by God, only if you already know deep within that God loves you and will continue to love you even if you choose not to go into ministry, and even if you really fail or mess up once you are in ministry. You can’t in the long run earn your self-worth. Trying to do so sets you up for workaholism, perfectionism, unbelievable stress, burn out, and in the end, failure anyway.

Even Jesus needed to enter into his time of ministry with the voice of God ringing in his ears, “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

So, whether you are more in the context of Isaiah and exile and despair, or of Jesus with both temptations and ministry looming, pay attention to our texts.

Let go of despair and depression and feeling sorry for yourself. Let go of feelings of guilt and failure. Embrace new opportunities and new visions and new dreams. Let the word of the Lord recorded by Isaiah and Luke put a smile on your face, a dance to your step, a vitality in your living, a joy in your service to God and each other.

“I have called you by name”. “You are my beloved”