I will give you as a light to the nations

Isaiah 49. 1-7; Psalm 40. 1-11; John 1. 29-42

The call of God comes to those who have lost hope, and to those who have wasted their labour for nothing and for vanity.  So says the book of the prophet Isaiah.  In the 49^th chapter Yahweh addresses the prophet, calling him personally to take up the lapsed vocation of the people of Israel as a whole, to be the servant of God and a light for the world.  As is so often the case with such a call, the prophet’s immediate response is to keenly feel his inadequacy for the task.  Like the rest of his people, the prophet languishes in Babylonian exile, beaten, disheartened and despairing.  Despairing not only because Jerusalem is no more, but more profoundly because of a growing conviction that it was Israel’s sin which had led to her downfall, that it was her inattention to the ways of God which finally felled her, like dry rot will fall even the most glorious of trees.  The prophet names the truth for what it is.  ‘All we have ever done,’ he says, ‘is work for vanity and nothingness’. 

Vanity and nothingness.  Now there’s two words which I reckon characterise our own age.  Vanity: a turning in on oneself, a forgetting of the other who is my neighbour, and therefore my responsibility.  Isaiah tells us that the leaders of Judah immediately prior to the Babylonian war were vain people, so focussed on accumulating wealth and prestige for themselves that they turned aside from their covenant responsibilities to care for the orphan, the widow, and the alien.  Our own government is abdicating its responsibilities in a startlingly similar vein.  ‘Do more with less,’ authorities tell our public hospitals, schools and welfare providers, at the same time cutting the tax bill of those who can most afford to share.  Where the God of Isaiah says, ‘This is the fasting I desire . . .  is it not to share your bread with the hungry and to welcome the homeless poor into your house’ (58. 7), our government consistently says: ‘Go away, you needy, you shall find no help or refuge here’. 

And what of the nothingness that characterizes our generation?  Nothingness, nihilism: a fascination with all that is without reality or substance.  One only needs to turn on the television for evidence.  The advertisers tell us that what really matters is style, fashion, texture.  Buy a bigger house, not because you need one, but because it is fashionable.  Buy a flashy car, not because you need one, but because your old one is no longer in style.  Buy the look and texture of a gym or surgically-sculpted body, not the character or struggles of a real person, a real soul, whose experiences are forever etched upon the surface of our bodies.  And what of those of us who cannot afford these constantly changing innovations?  Well, God help us, as they say.  God help us.  Ironically enough, it seems that it is only God who can help those of us consigned to the economic scrap-heaps.  Or those of us who wake up to the fact that that fashion is nothing: semblance without substance, surface without depth, texture without soul.

Only God can help those who come face to face with the nothingness of their lives, because God is one who from time immemorial chooses not the great, or the confident, or the smart or the fashionable, but the small one, the despairing one, the one who knows his or her life is refuse and rubbish.  Listen to what the prophet hears from God at the very moment of his despair, of his nothingness:

The Lord called me from before I was born . . .  he made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me, he made me a polished arrow which he hid away in his quiver.  ‘It is too small a thing that you should be my servant,’ says the Lord, ‘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 ends of the earth’. 

Now, listen to me.  Because there is something really important in this for us all.  Are you a person who feels like most of what you do is vanity and nothingness?  Are you?  Are you one who feels defeated by life, but you go on because you don’t know what else to do?  Are you one who feels that despite the best of intentions in days gone by, intentions to love and serve God and God’s ways with all your heart and soul and strength, that somehow you got lost along the way?  The rot set in and now you don’t know what to do, or which way is up?  Hey!  I know the feeling, I really do know the feeling!  If that’s you, then listen, ‘cause there’s some good news here.  God chose you before you were born to be God’s servant.  Not just within the privacy of your own morality.  And not just in the church, the visible company of God’s people. But in the public world, the world of your labour and your government and your community.  The very world which seems so dark and gloomy these days.  God has called you to be a light for the nations.  You.  Not somebody else.  You.

You see this call of God is not only for apparently special people called prophets.  The people of faith have only ever decided who the prophets and saints are years and years after they did what they did.  Prophets tend not to think of themselves as prophets at the time when they get the call and do their stuff.  So if you think you’re not prophet material right now, look out, because that’s exactly what all the great prophets thought too.  And the call of God is especially not a call only for the Son of God, the Christ, whom the Gospel of John names as not just a light, but the light of the whole world, the one who has come to take away the sin of the world.  Why?  Because the New Testament makes it clear that when Jesus fills your life with light, then you are at that same moment called to do everything in your power to bring others into the orbit of Christ’s influence.  Just like Andrew, in the gospel reading, who sees the light in Jesus and then invites his brother, Simon, to meet him as well.

Of course, no such thing is possible unless one is first able to accept that great impossibility which all prophets face at the first:  the impossibility of God’s love and grace in choosing those whom the world calls foolish to shame those whom it calls wise.  In other words, becoming a light for the nations is only possible because of what we Christians call grace—the unmerited attention and favour, indeed the love, of God.  The impossible life of peace, joy, and a service centred in the neighbour, only becomes possible because God makes it possible.  The life of vanity and nothingness is left behind only because God says ‘yes’ to the visions God places in our hearts, ‘yes’ to who we are - not in ourselves - but in Christ.  

So there’s no point in making a project of one’s life, imagining that if we were only to become more dedicated, more intensely focussed on getting our acts together, that we would come up to scratch.  It’s never worked for me.  It’s only during those periods when I’ve actually taken my eyes off myself, the obsession with my own subjectivity and ‘success’, that I’ve ever really changed.  That’s why I could never be a Buddhist.  Paul Williams, a Buddhist and teacher of Buddhism at Bristol University for 30 years, recently became a Christian.  Why?  He says that in the end, Buddhism is about the self changing the self.  It is about the power of subjectivity.  But he could finally see no hope in that project, because the self seems condemned to futility, finally and ultimately incapable of reaching its own aspirations.  ‘I need,’ he says, ‘the grace of God in Christ’, that power from the outside, from God, which makes in me what I am unable to make for myself. 

The hope for me, and for us all, is in this gracious call and election by God, a call which comes freely, and at the precise moment of our deepest despair.  Now, it is quite possible that God has been calling to you lately.  Yes, you.  Calling you beyond your self and the anxieties which attend all that, calling you to lift your eyes and see the plans that God has in store for you.  In the gospel story, Jesus says to all who will listen, “Come and see, come and discover the way I live.”  In order to become who you are, in other words, you have to leave yourself behind and learn how to live like Christ.  So, if you have heard the call recently, I encourage you to stop running from God, to turn around, and to start listening to God.  “Come and see,” God says, “come and see how life may be different.” 

Obeying this call is not something you can do within the privacy of your own subjectivity and thinking.  Christianity is an irreducibly communal and material religion, which, in this instance, means that none of us can know Christ’s way of life apart from learning about these things from the church, and especially from its ministers and elders.   The church, you see, is the body of Christ; his Spirit is at work there to call and to baptise, to so immerse us in the life, death and resurrection of Christ so that we can die to ourselves and live for God.  In the end, then, there can be no getting around the church, for all its sin and failure.   So . . .  if the voice of God has seemed faint recently, maybe this is down to one thing:  you’ve been looking for God somewhere other than the church—its teaching, its symbolism, and its practices.  How will you learn to recognise God in all the business of life, unless you learn what God is like from the church?  When Christ says “come and see,” what he means is this:  “come to worship, come to bible-study, come to prayer, come to mission.  It is there that I live, so it is there that you will learn my ways and so become light for the world.”  This is the call.  How will you respond?

This homily was first preached at South Yarra Community Baptist Church in January 2005.

The Wind Blows Where It Will

Texts:  Isaiah 6.1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17

When we choose to give ourselves to God in baptism, thus calling on Christ to come and live with us by the companionship of the Holy Spirit, we also choose to cede, or put aside, our right to do whatever we would like.  When we choose to live God’s way, we also choose to die to our own way.  In the language of John’s gospel, at baptism we are re-born ‘from above’.  We cease to live according to the many wills associated with our first birth, whether those of self or society.  We start to live according to the unfathomable will of the Spirit, who has mid-wived us into a broad new land, a land in which the only thing that matters is the utterly extravagant love between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—a love so broad and deep that it spills out into the world of human beings, inviting them to love and be loved as the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father.  At baptism, according to John, we are caught up in the wild and excessive love that is the divine will of the Spirit, a will and a way that cannot be domesticated.  ‘Like a wind that comes and goes according to a hidden purpose, so it is with everyone born of the Spirit’, says John.  When we are baptised, we vow ourselves to a God who might take us in directions entirely opposite to the ones we had planned ourselves. 

Take Isaiah, for example.  It is likely that Isaiah was originally a priest or a Levite, a male member of that tribe of Hebrews who were given no land in Israel but set aside, instead, to serve Yahweh in the worship of the temple.  The Levite, even more than other Israelites, could expect that life would unfold according to a particular plan or pattern.  In early childhood he would begin to learn his father’s trade.  At his father’s workplace, the temple in Jerusalem, he would learn how to keep the altar fires burning, how to slaughter beasts for religious sacrifice, how to lead the temple rituals and shepherd the people in their religious observances.   He would also learn the law of Moses by heart, and take his turn preparing meals for the other temple servants.  At the moment he was born, this was the life prepared for Isaiah, a life of service in the temple of Yahweh.

But one day, while he is going about his duties (perhaps he is polishing the silverware or some other rather humble task), Isaiah is suddenly caught up in an extraordinary vision.  He sees Yahweh himself, awesome and kingly, a presence which fills the whole temple.  Isaiah immediately falls into a fearful panic, for he knows the stories of Moses very well.  He knows that Yahweh does not show himself to sinful mortals, for they cannot bear the purity and truth of his holy gaze.  ‘Woe is me!’ he calls out. ‘I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people of unclean lips’.  This is another way of saying, ‘I honour the Lord with what I say, but not with what I do.  My people and I are liars.’  Isaiah was right, of course, for if one reads the rest of the book that bears this story, you will discover that the Jewish nation was in pretty bad shape at the time.  On the one hand, the Jewish people made quite a show of going to the temple to worship, and of keeping the many feast days and festivals that marked the history of their liberation by God from Egypt.  But the moment worship was over, the nobles, the politicians and the landowners would go back to what they did with most of the time, that is, increase their wealth by stealing small farms on the edge of their existing lands, squeezing their workers for more production at less cost, and bribing the bureaucracy so that their plans and schemes could go ahead with a minimum of interference from the law.  As a Levite, it is more than likely that Isaiah himself was caught up in all this bribery and corruption.  For the Levites doubled as a kind of civil service for the aristocracy.  They handled the affairs of state, as well as the apparatus of the temple.

So at the moment he has the vision, Isaiah knows that he is done for.  For in the searing light of God’s glorious presence, the shadows hidden in darkness come to light as well.  Isaiah knows that there is little point in hiding what he is, or what his people are.  Covenant-breakers.  Liars.  Cheats.  Exploiters of the weak.  Yet, God has not come to do away with Isaiah, or even to chastise him.  Why chastise a person who is already aware of their darkness?  No, God has come to change the course of Isaiah’s life.  Taking a burning coal from the altar where sacrifices for sin would have been made day after day, a seraph, one of God’s servants, touches it to Isaiah’s lips and says:  ‘Your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out’.  In other words, 'I know jolly well that you are a liar and a hypocrite.  But you are forgiven.  From now on your lies have been burned away.  From now on, your lips will speak only the truth.’  For what happens then is this:  that Isaiah the Levite, whose life had been pretty cosy and predictable up until now, is suddenly called to become a prophet, a man whose speaks the truth to kings and priests and businessmen, and cops a fair bit of flack for his trouble.  ‘Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?’ says the Lord.  And Isaiah, who can hardly believe that he is still alive, responds in the classical manner of prophets from time immemorial: ‘Here I am; send me!’

Now, in the Christian grammar of baptism, it is not only special people like prophets who are called to live and speak the truth.  It is all of us, all who are born by water and the Spirit into the realm of God’s love.  For at our baptism, we encounter a God who knows jolly well who we are—sinners who betray God, others and self every day of the year.  Yet God is not particularly worried about who we are at that moment.  In baptism, certainly, we are forgiven our sins; they are washed away just like dirt from a grubby child.  Yet God has more in mind than the miracle of forgiveness.  God also wants to change our lives, from the inside out, to give us a new vocation in life, a new purpose.  Like Isaiah the prophet, who was called to speak the truth whether it is fashionable to do so or not, every baptised Christian is also called to live a new life, a life determined not by what we want, but by what God wants.

The difference between life with God, and life without God, is simply this, you see:  that life without God leads to death; but life with God leads to yet more life.  That is why the apostle Paul calls Christians people of the Spirit.  ‘Spirit’ can also mean ‘breath’, the very breath that animates our bodies and make us alive.  In that sense, all who live are spiritual beings.  Yet, in Christian perspective, one can be alive and breathing, and yet destined to run out of breath because one is not plugged in to the true source of life and breathing, the Spirit of God, the very Spirit who not only animated the daily doings of Jesus of Nazareth, and also raised his dead body into the radically new life of resurrection.  What God wants to do for us, then, is exactly what God did for Jesus.  God wants to fill us so full of the life of his Spirit, that there is little left in us of all that is dying or dead.  God wants to catch our lives up into the life and energy that is the extraordinary love between the Father and the Son.  God wants us to let go of everything that holds us back from the giving and receiving of divine love.  God wants us to receive this love, the love that is the Spirit, and make it real in the world through what we do and what we say.

You will remember that I spoke, a couple of weeks ago, about what the love of God looks like in practise.  I spoke about God’s love as a three-fold movement of solidarity with the weak, hospitality toward the stranger, and the costly giving away of one’s life that another soul may grow and flourish.  What I also implied at that time, I will say more explicitly this morning.  That the one who loves others in this manner, is also loved in this manner by God.  The power that makes it possible for us to love others in this way is the very power that loves us in this way.  This means that, for Christians, there can be no fear that we shall somehow be depleted or used up by our loving.  Not if we are also believe that we are loved by God, and especially by God as he is embodied in both the rituals and relationships of the Christian community.  For the Spirit who comes to dwell with us is the Spirit of life itself, life that is always enough and never runs out.  That means that no matter where this Spirit take us, or whom the Spirit puts in our path, there shall always be life and love enough to go around.  As long, that is, as we are willing to live the life of the Spirit, and not simply the lives that we might choose for ourselves.

I conclude with this. If you are baptised, you belong to God, and the Spirit of God has come to dwell with you.  You have given yourself into the hands of God, and God is absorbing you into the life and love that circulates, like the energies of a dance, between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  But God is not a bully.  The power of love is a power that can be refused.  If you resist God, he with plead with you, and argue, and remonstrate forever.  But God will never make you do what you do not want to do.  That is why the promises of baptism need to be renewed day after day.  Each day, when you get out of bed, God promises Godself to you once more: to love and to cherish you, to lead you into the freedom of the children of God.  But that cannot happen without your say-so.  The humility of God is such that God requires our agreement to move forward, a promising that responds to God’s own promising with faith and trust and obedience.  My prayer on this Trinity Sunday is that God may give us grace to so surrender our lives, that the life of God may come to flourish in our hearts and in our world.

Garry Deverell