Partners in Time
March 25, 2007
Texts: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14
Each Saturday at noon on the Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio, you can hear “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” – the NPR news quiz. Yesterday’s show featured as its guest, Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court. It is a very funny show, but the success of its humor is depends on listeners’ familiarity with the news, because it is connected to current events.
The Bible is similarly grounded in the events of its time – while we can certainly derive some value from it without understanding its context, we find our understanding deepened, and sometimes completely changed, as we learn about the historical circumstances and cultural background to which it was originally directed. As we understand the similarities, and dissimilarities between the context of the Bible and our own context, we have a greater sense of discernment about how God might be speaking to us: calling, challenging and comforting us in our time.
Scholars have grown to understand that the Book we know as Isaiah was clearly written by at least 2 and probably 3 different authors at different times. The first 39 chapters were written about 730 years before the birth and ministry of Jesus, during a time when the Hebrew people, living in the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah, were under threat from Assyria. Isaiah was writing in the kingdom of Judah (the southern kingdom), which was successfully resisting the Assyrian empire. Later, after Assyria’s power waned, Babylon became the empire that was able to militarily conquer Judah. Both Assyria and Babylon cover parts of what is now Iraq. In 597 B.C., the royal family and much of the military was deported, exiled, to Babylon. In 587, there was a second, much larger deportation. And there was a third deportation in 582. These three together resulted in the period which is remembered as the exile (or Babylonian captivity), when a significant part of the population had been removed to Babylon.
The exile lasted until Cyrus of Persia (modern Iran), conquered Babylon, and the Jewish people were allowed to return home. This occurred in 539 B.C. so the period of exile was about 50 years. The exile is one of the definitive events in Judeo-Christian history, and it was during the period of exile that observance of the Sabbath became more important for Jews. The temple had been destroyed (it was rebuilt after the return to Judah), and observance of Sabbath while in Babylon was one way to maintain a sense of identity. So the parts of Isaiah known as Second Isaiah, chapters 40-55 which include this morning’s reading, were written late in the exile (almost 200 years after First Isaiah), when it was clear that Cyrus was gaining power and that there was an increasing likelihood that Babylon would be defeated. It was a period of hope. And finally, Third Isaiah, chapters 56-66, was written after Cyrus conquered Babylon.
What does exile mean, and how can we relate to it? Exile for the people of Judah was a time when they could remember their homeland, and the sense of national, cultural and religious identity that went with it, but none of it was in their lives anymore. While in exile, all of these are up for grabs – who are we if we are not the people of God who live in Judah and worship at the temple in Jerusalem?? Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann discusses the sense of “… sadness about what was now is not and never will be again.” He continues, “Exile is an act of being orphaned, and many folk now sense themselves in that status. There is no sure home, no old family place, no recognizable family food. [He suggests] the theme of rootlessness, as though we do not belong anywhere.”
So many circumstances can lead to this sense of exile, even for us in modern day America. On a personal level, it can be any change in what gives us identity: losing a job, having a change in our health, the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship, an experience with mental illness, or even something as simple as moving to a new home. It can be something as subtle as a growing sense of our lives not working as they used to, or the crisis that leads a person to step one of the 12 steps: “we admitted that we were powerless over our addiction—that our lives had become unmanageable.” When we don’t feel at home in our lives, the experience is one of exile.
For many Americans, ours is an era of exile – we were used to thinking of our nation as international good guys, and to have a sense that many people think of America as an unjust or unhelpful power feels strange. For the Church in America, it is a time of exile – there is a consensus that the long period of what was known as Christendom is probably over. Many people mark the beginning of that time as during the fourth century when the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. And certainly for the last 1600 years or so, Christianity has been functionally the dominant religion of the Western World. But sometime between my childhood (when we still said the Lord’s Prayer in public school at the beginning of each day) and now, the world changed: Christianity and the culture separated. Many of us see this as a good thing – understanding our faith and our nation as two dimensions of the same identity was not good for our faith OR our nation.
And so many people in the Church experience this as a time of exile, a time when our former sense of identity no longer fits and we are trying to discern who were are, and how we are who we are. But, like the people who were hearing the prophecy of Second Isaiah for the first time, this is also a time of hope – there is, for many in the church, a sense in which the Church is finally returning to a more energized sense of who we are called to be: salt and light to the world. We’re getting more comfortable with not blending into the rest of the culture, and understanding that perhaps we aren’t supposed to blend in.
One of the powerful dimensions of our faith is that it is profoundly incarnational – it is always calling us to respond faithfully within the context we find ourselves. The Jews in Babylon had different challenges than they had experienced in Judah, and part of the challenge was to figure out what it meant to live faithfully in those circumstances.
So too for us, as 21st century Christians – we don’t live in the same culture we used to, where businesses were closed and community activities didn’t happen on Sunday, and Wednesday night was church night in many towns. Now we have to figure out what it means to be faithful in these circumstances, and some of the squabbles among Christians are arising as people develop different answers.
See how understanding the circumstances helps us to understand the scriptures differently? When we didn’t know the background, the words from Isaiah could sound pretty challenging and scary: “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing….” – sounds like God is yanking people through an unwanted change. But when we realize that the people are in a place where the old ways of being a people aren’t available, it is a powerful word of hope to hear from God that there will be new ways of being a people, that even when it feels like they are lost in the wilderness, this God is caring for them, and creating safe space. God is reassuring them that even as he brought them safely out of Egypt to freedom, he will bring them safely through this transition as well. Listen again to the whole passage now: Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.
It is indeed Good News. God who formed Israel before is able to re-form us even now. Paul also, in his letter to the Philippians, talks about how what used to be meaningful in terms of his identity is no longer the way he identifies himself. He could check off all the formal identifications he bears: circumcised, part of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, and indeed beyond those formalities, zealous enough that he had persecuted the early church. But Paul had come to faith in Jesus Christ, and that changed how he understood himself, and so now, he looks at those ways that he used to define himself, and he sees it all as rubbish. Lucky Paul – and it is true, some people come to transformation without a crisis. But as Richard Rohr said in a talk at the Shalem Institute, where I study spiritual direction, “Sooner or later, most people find that life leads them to a dark place where they do not have control. And it is there that transformation happens.” Something about being pulled out of equilibrium, being in a place where the old habits don’t work or can’t happen anymore – this puts many of us in a place where we are more open to God. And when we are able to allow God to work in us instead of doing it on our own – that is where God can really do something.
I have occasionally shared with you from The Message translation of the Bible – The Message is the work of Presbyterian minister and Bible scholar Eugene Peterson. Some folks call it a paraphrase, but that’s not really accurate –Peterson translated the text freshly from the original languages. But instead of translating word-for-word, he did an idiomatic translation, sometimes called a “dynamic equivalence translation” in which he tried to find phrasing in the modern vernacular that would have the same power and forcefulness of the original language in its context. Many find The Message to give them a greater sense of meaning than they find in the word-for-word translations.
The Message translation of the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount describes how when we find ourselves in a place where we can, or have to, fully rely on God, then God’s power and love can really change us. Listen: You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You're blessed when you're content with just who you are - no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought. You're blessed when you've worked up a good appetite for God. He's food and drink in the best meal you'll ever eat. You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being 'care-full,' you find yourselves cared-for. You're blessed when you get your inside world - your mind and heart - put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. Jesus is describing what happens during what folks experience as exile.
And yet, although God doesn’t necessarily change the circumstances, by changing us, by being in it with us, God changes our experience, and thus we are changed. By allowing ourselves to be partners with God, in our particular time, we are changed, and God can change the world through us. Whether our exile is personal, because of the events in our individual life, or whether our exile is part of a larger community experience, God is able to work through our pain in a way that many people don’t seek or permit when we are comfortable. The transformation that God brings may require some work or cost on our part – as USC philosophy professor Dallas Willard writes: grace is opposed to earning, not to effort. That is, what God accomplishes in us comes to us because of God’s love for us, not because it’s something we’ve worked to earn. Nonetheless, God’s work in us may require some work from us as well, work such as giving up old assumptions, or taking up new habits. Because God doesn’t take us back from exile to the life we lived before. We are different, circumstances are different. God doesn’t take us back; God takes us forward. But we learn that in God, through God, with God, the hardest circumstances can resolve into a new sense of who we are, not the same as before, but often with a new joy, even though what we have lost remains lost.
God’s world is one where transformation is the way life works – God is able to take the hardest circumstances and transform us through them. A lump of coal under pressure becomes a diamond. An oyster turns an irritating grain of sand into a pearl. How is God transforming us through the dimensions of life we find most challenging? And are we open to God’s work in us?
Listen again to Psalm 126, this time in The Message version – a psalm celebrating the return from exile: It seemed like a dream, too good to be true, when God returned Zion's exiles. We laughed, we sang, we couldn't believe our good fortune. We were the talk of the nations – “God was wonderful to them!” God was wonderful to us; we are one happy people.
And now, God, do it again - bring rains to our drought-stricken lives so those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest, So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing. May it be so for all of us. Amen.
Each Saturday at noon on the Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio, you can hear “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” – the NPR news quiz. Yesterday’s show featured as its guest, Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court. It is a very funny show, but the success of its humor is depends on listeners’ familiarity with the news, because it is connected to current events.
The Bible is similarly grounded in the events of its time – while we can certainly derive some value from it without understanding its context, we find our understanding deepened, and sometimes completely changed, as we learn about the historical circumstances and cultural background to which it was originally directed. As we understand the similarities, and dissimilarities between the context of the Bible and our own context, we have a greater sense of discernment about how God might be speaking to us: calling, challenging and comforting us in our time.
Scholars have grown to understand that the Book we know as Isaiah was clearly written by at least 2 and probably 3 different authors at different times. The first 39 chapters were written about 730 years before the birth and ministry of Jesus, during a time when the Hebrew people, living in the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah, were under threat from Assyria. Isaiah was writing in the kingdom of Judah (the southern kingdom), which was successfully resisting the Assyrian empire. Later, after Assyria’s power waned, Babylon became the empire that was able to militarily conquer Judah. Both Assyria and Babylon cover parts of what is now Iraq. In 597 B.C., the royal family and much of the military was deported, exiled, to Babylon. In 587, there was a second, much larger deportation. And there was a third deportation in 582. These three together resulted in the period which is remembered as the exile (or Babylonian captivity), when a significant part of the population had been removed to Babylon.
The exile lasted until Cyrus of Persia (modern Iran), conquered Babylon, and the Jewish people were allowed to return home. This occurred in 539 B.C. so the period of exile was about 50 years. The exile is one of the definitive events in Judeo-Christian history, and it was during the period of exile that observance of the Sabbath became more important for Jews. The temple had been destroyed (it was rebuilt after the return to Judah), and observance of Sabbath while in Babylon was one way to maintain a sense of identity. So the parts of Isaiah known as Second Isaiah, chapters 40-55 which include this morning’s reading, were written late in the exile (almost 200 years after First Isaiah), when it was clear that Cyrus was gaining power and that there was an increasing likelihood that Babylon would be defeated. It was a period of hope. And finally, Third Isaiah, chapters 56-66, was written after Cyrus conquered Babylon.
What does exile mean, and how can we relate to it? Exile for the people of Judah was a time when they could remember their homeland, and the sense of national, cultural and religious identity that went with it, but none of it was in their lives anymore. While in exile, all of these are up for grabs – who are we if we are not the people of God who live in Judah and worship at the temple in Jerusalem?? Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann discusses the sense of “… sadness about what was now is not and never will be again.” He continues, “Exile is an act of being orphaned, and many folk now sense themselves in that status. There is no sure home, no old family place, no recognizable family food. [He suggests] the theme of rootlessness, as though we do not belong anywhere.”
So many circumstances can lead to this sense of exile, even for us in modern day America. On a personal level, it can be any change in what gives us identity: losing a job, having a change in our health, the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship, an experience with mental illness, or even something as simple as moving to a new home. It can be something as subtle as a growing sense of our lives not working as they used to, or the crisis that leads a person to step one of the 12 steps: “we admitted that we were powerless over our addiction—that our lives had become unmanageable.” When we don’t feel at home in our lives, the experience is one of exile.
For many Americans, ours is an era of exile – we were used to thinking of our nation as international good guys, and to have a sense that many people think of America as an unjust or unhelpful power feels strange. For the Church in America, it is a time of exile – there is a consensus that the long period of what was known as Christendom is probably over. Many people mark the beginning of that time as during the fourth century when the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. And certainly for the last 1600 years or so, Christianity has been functionally the dominant religion of the Western World. But sometime between my childhood (when we still said the Lord’s Prayer in public school at the beginning of each day) and now, the world changed: Christianity and the culture separated. Many of us see this as a good thing – understanding our faith and our nation as two dimensions of the same identity was not good for our faith OR our nation.
And so many people in the Church experience this as a time of exile, a time when our former sense of identity no longer fits and we are trying to discern who were are, and how we are who we are. But, like the people who were hearing the prophecy of Second Isaiah for the first time, this is also a time of hope – there is, for many in the church, a sense in which the Church is finally returning to a more energized sense of who we are called to be: salt and light to the world. We’re getting more comfortable with not blending into the rest of the culture, and understanding that perhaps we aren’t supposed to blend in.
One of the powerful dimensions of our faith is that it is profoundly incarnational – it is always calling us to respond faithfully within the context we find ourselves. The Jews in Babylon had different challenges than they had experienced in Judah, and part of the challenge was to figure out what it meant to live faithfully in those circumstances.
So too for us, as 21st century Christians – we don’t live in the same culture we used to, where businesses were closed and community activities didn’t happen on Sunday, and Wednesday night was church night in many towns. Now we have to figure out what it means to be faithful in these circumstances, and some of the squabbles among Christians are arising as people develop different answers.
See how understanding the circumstances helps us to understand the scriptures differently? When we didn’t know the background, the words from Isaiah could sound pretty challenging and scary: “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing….” – sounds like God is yanking people through an unwanted change. But when we realize that the people are in a place where the old ways of being a people aren’t available, it is a powerful word of hope to hear from God that there will be new ways of being a people, that even when it feels like they are lost in the wilderness, this God is caring for them, and creating safe space. God is reassuring them that even as he brought them safely out of Egypt to freedom, he will bring them safely through this transition as well. Listen again to the whole passage now: Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.
It is indeed Good News. God who formed Israel before is able to re-form us even now. Paul also, in his letter to the Philippians, talks about how what used to be meaningful in terms of his identity is no longer the way he identifies himself. He could check off all the formal identifications he bears: circumcised, part of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, and indeed beyond those formalities, zealous enough that he had persecuted the early church. But Paul had come to faith in Jesus Christ, and that changed how he understood himself, and so now, he looks at those ways that he used to define himself, and he sees it all as rubbish. Lucky Paul – and it is true, some people come to transformation without a crisis. But as Richard Rohr said in a talk at the Shalem Institute, where I study spiritual direction, “Sooner or later, most people find that life leads them to a dark place where they do not have control. And it is there that transformation happens.” Something about being pulled out of equilibrium, being in a place where the old habits don’t work or can’t happen anymore – this puts many of us in a place where we are more open to God. And when we are able to allow God to work in us instead of doing it on our own – that is where God can really do something.
I have occasionally shared with you from The Message translation of the Bible – The Message is the work of Presbyterian minister and Bible scholar Eugene Peterson. Some folks call it a paraphrase, but that’s not really accurate –Peterson translated the text freshly from the original languages. But instead of translating word-for-word, he did an idiomatic translation, sometimes called a “dynamic equivalence translation” in which he tried to find phrasing in the modern vernacular that would have the same power and forcefulness of the original language in its context. Many find The Message to give them a greater sense of meaning than they find in the word-for-word translations.
The Message translation of the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount describes how when we find ourselves in a place where we can, or have to, fully rely on God, then God’s power and love can really change us. Listen: You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You're blessed when you're content with just who you are - no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought. You're blessed when you've worked up a good appetite for God. He's food and drink in the best meal you'll ever eat. You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being 'care-full,' you find yourselves cared-for. You're blessed when you get your inside world - your mind and heart - put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. Jesus is describing what happens during what folks experience as exile.
And yet, although God doesn’t necessarily change the circumstances, by changing us, by being in it with us, God changes our experience, and thus we are changed. By allowing ourselves to be partners with God, in our particular time, we are changed, and God can change the world through us. Whether our exile is personal, because of the events in our individual life, or whether our exile is part of a larger community experience, God is able to work through our pain in a way that many people don’t seek or permit when we are comfortable. The transformation that God brings may require some work or cost on our part – as USC philosophy professor Dallas Willard writes: grace is opposed to earning, not to effort. That is, what God accomplishes in us comes to us because of God’s love for us, not because it’s something we’ve worked to earn. Nonetheless, God’s work in us may require some work from us as well, work such as giving up old assumptions, or taking up new habits. Because God doesn’t take us back from exile to the life we lived before. We are different, circumstances are different. God doesn’t take us back; God takes us forward. But we learn that in God, through God, with God, the hardest circumstances can resolve into a new sense of who we are, not the same as before, but often with a new joy, even though what we have lost remains lost.
God’s world is one where transformation is the way life works – God is able to take the hardest circumstances and transform us through them. A lump of coal under pressure becomes a diamond. An oyster turns an irritating grain of sand into a pearl. How is God transforming us through the dimensions of life we find most challenging? And are we open to God’s work in us?
Listen again to Psalm 126, this time in The Message version – a psalm celebrating the return from exile: It seemed like a dream, too good to be true, when God returned Zion's exiles. We laughed, we sang, we couldn't believe our good fortune. We were the talk of the nations – “God was wonderful to them!” God was wonderful to us; we are one happy people.
And now, God, do it again - bring rains to our drought-stricken lives so those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest, So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing. May it be so for all of us. Amen.