I was not the easiest of children.
I know this comes as no surprise to you. I was a
challenge to my mother on a regular basis. Whenever I did something outside the
realm of the ordinary, like turning a perfectly good pillowcase into a dress by
cutting holes in it and dotting it with mercurochrome (because I had read a
story about a girl doing that), or like arguing with her about having to eat
something I disliked, or like hiding chocolate under the chair in the den where
the television was because I wanted to have it handy for Saturday morning
cartoons, she would shake her head and repeat the phrase that was both mantra
and prayer, both hope and despair. She would roll her eyes heavenward and
mutter “Give me strength!”
Give me strength!
Don’t we all say that aloud or in our hearts when we are
faced with a child who does things that make no sense, or with a hard task or
hard people to deal with, or with a troubling person who makes our life
difficult?
Give me strength! Give me what I need to get through
this! Give me the energy to overcome, or just to survive. Give me what I need
to do what is in front of me.
And the implied preface to the prayer is this: you gave
me this, Lord. Give me the strength to deal with it.
More often than we care to admit, we are in a position
where we feel overwhelmed and incapable of responding to our situation, and we
call upon God to help us through it.
Typical intercessory prayer, as we would term it in the
religion business. Give me strength. Help, God, lend me a hand.
If you, like my mother, have ever uttered that prayer,
then Isaiah’s words will hit home for you.
Here’s the scene: The people of Israel aren’t having too
good a time of it either: they are a defeated nation, crushed by the Babylonian
empire. Most of them are scattered from Mesopotamia to Egypt, but some are left
behind. Their temple, the beating heart of their worship life, is a pile of
rubble. Isaiah is, we know, a prophet, but the prophecy business is not going
too well.
God has told Isaiah that there is a job to do here: to
tell the people that things are going to be better, that they will once again
be gathered together, that they will no longer be in captivity, that there will
be a resurgence of good fortune after the dark days of Babylon. So Isaiah gets
to work shouting out his message: “Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from
far away!” If it were an email, it would be in all caps. Isaiah, chosen as a
prophet by God, given words by God when the angel pressed a burning coal to his
lips – words that were beautiful once he got past “ouch!” – sent to proclaim
God’s plans to God’s people...
Isaiah, the
bearer of God’s message.
But now he
seems to be having a moment of self-doubt: he says “I have labored in vain, I
have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.”
Give me
strength. Give me strength.
Something
strange happens.
God, instead
of saying, “you’re just tired. Get a good night’s sleep, have a bowl of chicken
soup, you’ll be fine,” instead ups the ante.
God says, “It is too light a thing – too trivial 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, that my salvation may reach to the end
of the earth."
In other
words, Isaiah, it’s not only your job to gather back together the dispersed and
depressed peoples of Israel and restore the nation by the words I have given
you, you now also are responsible for shining a light that will transform all
the nations, to the end of the earth. There is a larger opportunity here…to
save all nations. Go for it!
Can you
imagine Isaiah hearing that and saying, “You’ve got to be kidding! Give me
strength!”
One might say
that God is a cruel God, hitting Isaiah when he’s down, and yet there is more
to the story. God knows that Isaiah is in tough shape – the prophet describes
himself as “one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers.”
But God promises something: God is and will remain faithful, both to Isaiah and
to the people of Israel. And implicit in that promise is that God’s fidelity –
not human fidelity, but God’s fidelity – means that God is standing beside the
prophet. God will give Isaiah and the people strength.
Strength to
endure the completion of the term of exile, strength to get back home, strength
to rebuild the nation…and now, with the additional command from God, strength
to reach beyond the limits of Israel to be a light to the whole world.
Now when we
talk about strength, what do we mean? When Isaiah laments how his strength has
been depleted, he uses one word – koah
– which has the sense of physical strength, vigor. It’s used to talk about a
man’s strength. Isaiah feels like he has lost his mojo. But in the very next
verse, when Isaiah says that God will be his strength, he uses an entirely
different word for strength – oz –
which is about might, power, God’s strength. It’s not just that God gives
Isaiah back his own energy, he supplants it with something entirely different –
God energy. If Isaiah’s strength is 83 octane gas at the pump, God energy is 100
octane aviation fuel…
God’s energy,
God’s strength, that’s what we hear about in the Epistle as well. God’s
strength has fortified Paul through all the ups and downs of his missionary
journeys. Now he is writing to one of the faith communities he founded, in
Corinth. It is a community where people place a lot of emphasis on who has what
kind of spiritual gift or talent and where that has led to something of a
pecking order. If you’ve got this spiritual gift, you’re more prestigious than
someone who has that spiritual gift.
I don’t know
about you, but that doesn’t sound particularly Godly to me. And I can imagine
that Paul’s reaction, when he heard about all this, was to raise his eyes
heavenward and mutter “I thought I had these people focused on the message, but
now they’ve done something stupid with it. Give me strength!”
But what kind
of strength do these people claim in their silly “mine is better than yours”
tiffs? Is it oz –the Godly strength
that has the power to transform not just one community in one city, but to
shine a light that can transform the world? Or is it koah – the strength that we frail humans have, a strength that is
about pride or proving oneself or worldly measures of success? A strength that,
by the way, is all too easily depleted.
Paul says
something interesting in this beginning of the letter to the Corinthians. He
masks it in a compliment – that they have developed in their spiritual gifts –
but the real key here is that they have achieved that not through anything they
themselves have done, but because God has given them grace. In the words of
another rather infamous phrase, Paul tells the Corinthians, “you didn’t build
this. God did. You didn’t make yourselves spiritual. God gave you the grace and
strength to have these spiritual gifts.”
God gave you
God’s oz, God’s strength, because
your koah, your human strength, was
not going to be the source of it. To do God’s work, you get God’s strength
through God’s grace.
In a funny
way, that message, echoing from the 6th century before Christ
through Paul in the first century after the birth of Christ to today, should be
a comfort to us.
And the key is
that muttered “Give me strength.”
If we remember
that what will help us is not something we can manufacture ourselves, that it
is not human strength that is the starting point, if we remember that God can
and does give us God’s own strength as a free gift of grace, if we remember
that God’s strength is limitless and an offering of love from the One who
created us, then we know something marvelous: it is not all on us.
We are not
solely responsible for pulling together the energy to fix everything. We are
not the ones who have to manufacture every idea to solve a problem. We are not
the only ones who have to tackle awful situations. Because we are not the only
ones, each of us individuals, who have access to the fuel pump of God’s
strength.
We do not have
to struggle alone. The people of Israel, dispersed across the Babylonian
empire, did not have to pull together one by one. Each far-flung Israelite did
not have to put the whole of God’s people together again. All they had to do was for each of them to
feel God’s strength drawing them together. Isaiah, God’s prophet, frustrated
and wondering if he was equal to the task, remembered that he didn’t have to
rebuild Israel all by himself. He had a pipeline to God’s strength, and so did
every other faithful follower of God who had access to the same pipeline. Paul
didn’t have to convert every Gentile in the known world personally, despite the
strength he received from God to do it. He could rely on his missionary partner
Sosthenes and even those wayward Corinthians, and Romans, and Hebrews to do the
same, because they, too, had access to the same pipeline. John didn’t have to be the only one spreading
around the news that Jesus was the Lamb of God, as we heard in today’s Gospel,
even though he wrote a whole book about Jesus and his story. He had the gift of
God’s strength in him, and then he suggested that others – Andrew, Simon Peter
– feel God’s strength within them, so that they, too, could share the word.
The same thing
is true for us.
I suspect that
many of us feel like we have no way of being a light to the nations, of sharing
the good news, of bringing together those who don’t know God’s love or who have
forgotten it. We wonder if we have the strength to do anything like this.
If we’re
talking about that human koah
strength, that’s probably an accurate assessment. We’ll run out of that
low-octane fuel pretty quickly – do we get about 9 miles to the gallon? – and
we’ll feel depleted. And in that moment, we might say “Give me strength.” Give
me strength to do whatever you have set before me, God. Give me strength. And
the high octane avgas will fill us, and it will fill up others who also are
meant to do the work. We will feel that oz
strength, that power that does not deplete, that takes us through the whole
journey in partnership with God the source and with our friends and partners in
the work God expects of us, those other recipients of strength.
So let your
prayer be this: Give me strength. Give me strength for the work you have called
me to do. Give me partners in the work. Give me your strength, O God, in your
faithful encouragement and love and occasional kick in the pants and challenge
to do more. Give me strength, O God, give me strength.
Amen.
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