“Be Grateful, and Get Used to It”
Isaiah 49:1-7
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
1/19/14
During my ordination
service, back in June of 1996, I had (on good advice) arranged to have an elder
named Thomas Vinson offer the all-important ordination prayer.
Thomas Vinson served as
the perennial clerk of the only African-American congregation in town, and he
had been raised and steeped in a cultural tradition in which public prayer is a
kind of sustained, straight-line wind.
The one praying opens his or her mouth and allows the Spirit to gust, to
sweep through a room and through everyone inside. Anyone with a shred of spiritual willingness
cannot simply listen to such a prayer.
By irresistible design, one becomes a part of it. And when a gifted pray-er offers a prayer
with such passion and energy, the prayer doesn't really end. When the one who prays falls silent, those
who have entered it get sent forth from it, like Isaiah’s polished arrow. And isn't that the very point of an
ordination prayer?
When called, Thomas
Vinson came up to the front of the sanctuary with all the other elders and
ministers. He was slender and of average
height, but possessed the kind of a deep, rich voice which makes even a throat-clearing
'ahem' sound like the utterance of ancient wisdom.
As I kneeled on the
mandatory-maroon of the sanctuary carpet, Thomas moved in close, but he did
not, as all the other good Presbyterians did, lay his fingertips politely on my
shoulder. No, Elder Vinson grabbed a thick
handful of robe at my right shoulder.
Then he grabbed again to be sure he had a good grip.
“Let us pray,” he said
seriously. And for the next several
minutes a mighty wind swirled through that high-ceilinged old sanctuary. It eddied around us like wood smoke through
the branches of a tree. When Thomas
wanted to be sure that I heard what he was about to say, he would tighten his
fist and give that lump of black robe an especially vigorous shake.
I am grateful for the
entire experience, and I have been particularly grateful for that moment when
Brother Vinson gave me his strongest pay-attention-to-me shake, a shake
which actually caused me to sway a little and to need all those supportive
hands lying on me.
“And Lord,” intoned
Thomas, his voice filling with new strength and urgency, “on those times when
Allen comes out of a committee meeting, or out of a presbytery meeting, or
(then, shake-shake-shake) a session meeting, and when he says,
'Lord, where were you? Where were you
when the jackals were nipping at my heels?
WHERE WERE YOU, LORD?'”
Thomas’ voiced softened
a little as he said, “Tell him, Lord, tell him, 'Allen, look back behind you,
my son. Allen, those are my footprints
on the beach. That’s when I had you on
my back. I was carrying you, Allen. Yes, I was!'”
On and on when Thomas
Vinson's homiletical prayer, celebrating God's faithfulness to the Church,
imploring me in particular never to lose heart, and challenging all of us to be
acutely aware of our capacity to get lost in a destructive, pack-of-jackals
mentality.
Now, remember Isaiah’s
own ordination memory: “And [the
Lord] said to me, 'You are my servant,
Israel, in whom I will be glorified.'”
In his own way, Thomas
Vinson spoke these sharp words to an eager young pastor on the day of his
ordination. He spoke them as a reminder
of the compelling grace that had led to that particular day, and to all such
days of commitment and commissioning.
And remember Isaiah’s
later response to his holy calling: “I
have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.”
Again, in his own way,
Thomas Vinson spoke those even sharper words.
And I think he spoke them to let a naïve young pastor know that in the
course of his ministry, seldom would a day would go by when he would not feel
frustrated and spent, and think that all his efforts were for naught. Brother Vinson spoke those prophetic words in
that moment of celebration as a way of saying that sufferings are part of the
deal, and through them God and God's redeeming love will be present and real to
us in ways that we simply cannot experience in any other way. So, even in suffering, give thanks, and
get used to it.
I doubt that many of us
want to hear this message. Most of us
would rather have things all happy, homogenous and Kum Bah Yah.
Isaiah hears Yahweh's
call, and he feels Yahweh's tug on his sleeve. Soon enough, though, he also
feels that oh, so human sense of loneliness, uselessness, and ragged exhaustion
– the weariness of trying to live a spiritual life with and for a people who
have found it so much easier to live according to the clear-cut ways of win and
lose, of black-and-white, us-and-them – the frightened and desperate ways of
competition and control.
And who can blame
them? The people of Israel are a
vanquished people. They live in exile,
wrenched from home, from familiar sights and smells, languages and food, games
and traditions. The hopeful promises
which the priests continue to preach must ring hollow against the
backdrop of defeat and disillusionment, of sadness and rage.
Remember the fierce
grieving in the words of Psalm 137:
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?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand
wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if
I do not remember you,
if
I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.
Remember, O Lord,
against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down
to its foundations!”
O daughter 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! (Psalm 137)
The Word of the Lord…
It is to people singing this song that Isaiah has been sent to
speak a new word of resurrecting hope.
There is no wonder at all that he feels that he has “labored in vain”
and that he has “spent [his] strength for nothing and vanity.” In the same way that it would be unfair to
judge the people for hard-heartedness, it would be unfair to judge Isaiah for
feeling just as beaten down, just as exiled from the great hope and promise of
his calling.
“Yet!” says Isaiah in
both self-consolation and determined faith, “Yet surely my cause is with the
Lord.”
That all-important Yet is the difference between one who is captured and defeated, and
the one who is captured but still feels and claims the power of resurrection
stirring as he remembers who he is and what God has called and given him the
strength him to do.
“Yet surely my cause is with the Lord.”
That can be a dangerous
thing to say, can’t it? It’s dangerous
on at least two levels. For one, in
making that claim we run the risk of mistaking our own causes and agendas for
God’s call. Countless have been the
times and inestimable has been the damage done by religious folks of all
stripes when they have claimed their god’s blessing on selfish violence and
excess. And I imagine that most of us,
even if we have not wed ourselves to, we have at least flirted with, maybe even
had affairs with these endlessly seductive gods.
On the positive side, a
faithful claim of co-operation with God is also dangerous because it leads us
into ever-deeper and ever-deepening relationship with God – a relationship that
does not pamper us, a relationship that calls us to give thanks for our
identity and our calling, and to get used to the fact that the sufferings of
opposition, of failure, and plain old human hurt are unavoidable.
Our seductive gods tell
us that we are entitled to pain-free lives.
Pain may be okay for others, for people who are wrong, for sinners and
losers, but not for us. It seems to me,
though, that the God who inspires scripture, the God who calls Hebrew slaves
into forty years of wandering, the God whose heart is revealed in the person
and work of Jesus, a humble man who never gets moment’s rest from those whose
comfort and power he calls into question, this
God is found and engaged most fully and personally in the suffering of the
world.
So says this God to
Isaiah:
“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…”
Thus says the Lord…
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.”
Despised, abhorred,
enslaved. The one overwrought with
suffering, this is the one through
whom God is known. And so, by the third
and last of the servant songs in Isaiah we are not surprised to hear: He was despised and rejected…; a man of
suffering and acquainted with infirmity;…and we held him of no account. (Isaiah
53:3)
Now, I must reiterate
something I’ve said on several occasions.
I do not believe that God causes suffering – neither as a means of
punishment nor as a means of grace. That
we often cause our own suffering and that of others through our own selfish
decisions is punishment enough. But I
cannot preach a god who wills and purposes pain for the creation.
That said, I do believe
God enters suffering with particular intention.
Many of our efforts to live as ones removed from suffering in fact cause more suffering in this world. So, like Isaiah, our calling is to be
individuals and a church who enter suffering with bold intent to be a bright
light in deep darkness. That is the very
point of the season of epiphany: To hear again the call us to live as “a light
to the nations.”
Again, none of us really
want to hear this, but over and over the biblical story reveals that when God’s
people feel the wearied vanity and nothingness of ministry, that’s precisely
when we know that we are in the place of faithfulness to God’s call. There is a very real sense in which exile is
a kind of home for us, because it is
there that we find ourselves utterly dependent on God. It is there that worldly wealth, power and
status – things that lesser gods call the real blessings – they lose
their luster and their command over us.
It is there that we begin to see ourselves and others through the eyes
of Jesus, the same Jesus who names as blessed,
those who are poor, hungry, thirsty, and persecuted.
It’s a true paradox: God
does not create or employ suffering to punish or redeem us, but it is in
suffering that we most fully encounter God.
We are not the church because we have a nice building and “right”
theology, because we are in any way morally superior to others, or because
there's enough in our bank accounts to keep up from feeling ashamed to be here
on Sunday mornings. We are the church
because, with JAMA, we, face-to-face, help feed hungry people in our community. We are the church because, with Family
Promise and Appalachian Service Project, we, face-to-face, help to house and
love families who are homeless and impoverished. We are the church because, face-to-face, try
to be physically and emotionally present to one another in times of grief,
illness, and dislocating change.
We are the church
because we embrace our “cause with God.”
By entering darkness with light, we remind ourselves and bear witness to
others that we are not alone, that we need one another, that in spiritual and
servant community we find renewing strength, and that even in exile, we are at
home in the welcoming, the faithful, and the relentlessly loving heart of God.
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