Sermon for Sunday, January 26, 2014 Epiphany 3/Holy Baptism Isaiah 9:1-4, Matthew 4:12-23 “God of Possibilities”

Our God is a God of possibilities. That is a fact as true as the sun will rise in the morning, and that the grass will grow in the spring, and that the children who are in the nursery and in Sunday School will be a couple of inches taller by September.

Our God is a God of possibilities.

We forget that on a frequent basis. We somehow get locked into the notion that God went about creating the world, got things rolling by winding it all up like some cosmic watchmaker, and then turned away, letting the tick-tock of the cosmic clock progress.

We think that God is somewhere out there, not here, a distant and disengaged transcendent being who is too big to relate to us, to know us, to care about us.

Alternatively, we might think that God stopped interacting with us when God’s only Son, Jesus Christ, took on human form and lived among us. He lived among us, at least until his message was too threatening to the earthly powers. Two thousand years ago. A long, long time ago.

There’s a certain safety in thinking of God that way. When we do, we can compartmentalize God into that One we deal with on Sunday mornings, and thus not feel the weight of God’s expectations of us as we move about our daily work and play. It isn’t Sunday, so God must not be watching, so what does it matter how we live our lives?

But the downside of such thinking is that we then deny God the opportunity to be the God of possibilities, the God who continues to act in the world in sometimes very surprising ways even now. We think that all that needs to change relies on us and our actions only, without seeing God’s hand at work in very real ways.

Now, I’m not calling for any of you to get up and testify to God’s working your lives, although that might be an interesting exercise. I know that you know the moments when you felt God, or sensed you felt God, close to you and affecting you in some way.

And that is a good thing, because God does continue to work in the world, and to work in you.

I give you as Exhibit A our Old Testament reading this morning. We are continuing to hear from the prophet Isaiah. This is an early piece of his book. He announces the coming of a king to bring light to the God’s people, at that time struggling in the midst of political battles around them and the internal strife and power plays between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. They are a people exhausted, torn, feeling like they have made all the wrong moves, wondering if they will ever have a sense of lightness, of joy, of peace and – dare they dream it? – prosperity..

…and Isaiah gives them God’s word, the word that promises a change in the climate. For those who were mired in darkness, there is light coming. For those who were bowed by the yoke of oppression, that yoke will be broken and they will be able to arise again.

These are not the words of a distant watchmaker God. These are not the words of a divine Creator who sits back and watches and lets us do eternal damage to ourselves…this is the One who promises, who lays out the possibilities of what is to come.  These are the words of a God who sees, who cares, and who acts.

Now what happens when we who are Christians hear this passage? We, not surprisingly, take it as a predictor of Jesus Christ. All our imagery of Christmas and Epiphany, that time of the coming of the light of the world, reminds us of this passage from Isaiah.

And just in case we forget how Christianity has embraced Isaiah’s message as the announcement of the Christ, I give you Exhibit B. Jesus himself, in Matthew’s Gospel, directly quotes from Isaiah, good Jewish rabbi that he is. "Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles-- the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned."

Now his purpose is a little different from Isaiah’s might have been. Isaiah is all about telling an oppressed people that God has heard them and will bring relief.

Jesus is all about telling an oppressed people – those first century Jews who were under incredible strain from the Roman Empire – that God has heard them and will bring relief…but wait! There’s more!

Jesus says it is coming soon, and they had best get themselves ready, get their houses and their hearts in order, because the time is almost here.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The God of possibilities is in action mode, not distant, not just watching, but acting…

…and you say, well, gee whiz, that was 2000 years ago. Yeah, Jesus came and all that, but we killed him and then he went to heaven, and what does that have to do with the broken screen on my iPhone and the fact that my company is downsizing and I might lose my job?

But our God is a God of possibilities. Consider that the broken iPhone that you can’t afford to fix has become a crutch causing you to avoid interacting with your spouse or your parents, and that maybe this is the opportunity to reconnect and discover you really like these people and want to talk to them. Consider that the job might or might not go away, that you might keep your job or find something better, or that there is something else that will unfold, some other possibility that you haven’t imagined yet. Do I think that God broke the screen just to get you to talk to your parents? Probably not, but you never know. Do I think that God is going to take your job away so you might have another possibility? It’s a long shot, but it might be so. God is, after all, a God of possibilities, and all of God’s creativity is invested in seeing those possibilities unfold.

Consider the possibilities…

That’s a particularly apt thing to focus on this morning as we prepare to baptize Julia Rose. She is possibility personified…all babies are, aren’t they? We have hopes and dreams for them. God has hopes and dreams for babies, too, and lays out myriad possible ways that her life might unfold.

If the only possibilities before Julia Rose were the ones we human beings came up with, we might limit her unduly. But God, the God of possibilities, has an infinitely more creative imagination that any of us do. Who knows what lies ahead for her? Only one, her Creator, and God will serve as her guide as the possibilities unfold.

And that is why we come here today to offer her to God, to ask that God enfold her in a divine embrace, to name her as one of God’s own, now and forever.

Because we don’t want to rely on our skills alone in letting Julia Rose discover the possibilities that await her, and the pitfalls along the way. We want to bring a whole community of those who recognize that they are God’s children to share in the journey, and to assist. We want to ask for God’s love and care for her, and for all children whom God has given us.

We want to ask God to show her all the possibilities and to prod her and hug her and whisper in her ear when she goes off-course. We want a God who is not a distant and disinterested creator to aid us in caring for her. We want a God who watches, who cares, who acts.

The God of possibilities awaits her, as is true for all of us. Let us commit ourselves to God, as we commit Julia Rose to God, this day, and let the possibilities unfold!

Amen.

Sermon for Sunday, January 19 2014 (Epiphany 2) Isaiah 49:1-7, I Cor 1:1-9 Give Me Strength!

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 6^th 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.