Shine On!

 

Text: Isaiah 49:1-7

+++

Music has a special place in our lives.

We probably all can remember certain tunes that we associate with a particular event or time period.

I realized I was getting up in years when the tunes on rotation in the supermarket were the songs that were popular when I was first learning to drive in high school.

Music sets the mood for movies and TV shows.

The right song can get us tapping our feet until we’re motivated to get up and dance.

It helps us to learn and make connections to language in our brains. Think about how we studied our ABCs to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

And I’ve been told…music lives in the part of the brain that is one of the last things to linger in our heads as our bodies begin to die.

Songs were what enslaved Africans used to communicate with each other as they worked under the watchful eyes of their masters.

The spirituals we sing in our churches contain coded messages about the way out of bondage…through the woods and crossing rivers to get to freedom.

In our First Reading today from Isaiah…we’re hearing a song sung to…and for… those who were living in exile and oppression under the Babylonian empire.

These people had been conquered once…and then again.

Their enemies had captured their best and brightest and taken them away to a foreign land.

This reading is a duet….a song between God…and “the servant”…and is the second of four such “servant songs” in Isaiah.

What we hear in this song is a calling…a remembrance…and an encouragement to action on God’s behalf.

The first verses of this duet belong to God….and we can hear God reminding the servant of God’s ways…working quietly in the womb almost like an alchemist or blacksmith…fashioning and preparing the servant to have a mouth “like a sharp sword.”

God is preparing and making one who can speak plainly and directly….a voice to cut through all the noise and the static of the world.

The womb…this safe and warm space pulsing with the sound of a mother’s heartbeat…was symbolic for our Biblical ancestors of the beginning of wisdom.

In here…God has formed and molded the servant to bring God’s glory into the world.

Then we hear the voice of the servant in the next few verses…and—wow—isn’t this a familiar lament.

Even though God has done all this work in the womb…given the servant all the wisdom needed to accomplish great things…the servant hasn’t lived up to the call.

“I have labored in vain.”

“I have spent my strength for nothing and for vanity.”

Put another way:

I am not worthy.

I am tired.

And it doesn’t matter what I do…nothing gets better.

How many of us make these same complaints…do this same self-critique… listen to that nagging commentator in our heads…that voice that reminds us how we have fallen short?

The tragedy isn’t that we don’t always measure up…or haven’t been successful in changing the world around us.

The tragedy is when we stare into that void which gathers all our mistakes…our failures and shortcomings…and allow that internal faultfinder to cause us to lose faith in God’s ability to take those broken parts of ourselves…polish them up…and use them for something even greater than before.

I’m reminded of something that the director of my massage school used to say to us every time we had to take a written exam.

He never used the term “tests.”

He preferred to call them “learning experiences.”

These quizzes on our knowledge of human anatomy were meant as another teaching tool…not a punishment for what we didn’t remember from class.

Our mistakes were an opportunity to reinforce our learning…and keep us improving.

The same thing is happening in this song with the servant.

Despite the ways in which the servant has fallen short…God brings in a harmonic voice…singing with the servant “I am your strength.”

This is a turning point in this passage…where we see the importance of honesty and vulnerability.

The servant is feeling inadequate…trying to maintain faith in a world that doesn’t want to listen or care about things such as love of God…justice for those conquered…mercy for those suffering…and compassion for the needs of the people. 

And it’s into this place of honesty and vulnerability where God has an opening to act.

It’s when we drop our ego…our need to control and determine outcomes and allow ourselves to acknowledge our weaknesses that God moves closer to us.

In this space…God can bolster our spirits…put a new song in our throats…and to take us to the next level.

Because look what follows in this passage.

After the servant has opened up about feeling like a failure…God takes those dry bones and insists on putting them back together…with sinews and ligaments…to be something greater.

It’s not enough for this singing partner to just be a servant.

God is taking all those parts…the servant’s mish mash of joys and sorrows…doubts and all…and now this servant will be given as “a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Not just to the tribes of Jacob and survivors of Israel.

Not just those taken captive by the Babylonians and the ones left behind to mourn their losses.

This servant…who moments ago was kicking the dirt and looking down cast…talking about everything that he wasn’t…is now going to be the standard bearer to all people…the whole earth…that the God of Love has come near to them.

Instead of dumbing down the assignment…God is elevating the mission…and expanding it.

Again…this was a song of liberation…sung to a people who had felt conquered…defeated…and were living under a Babylonian authority they didn’t recognize.

This was a song for the exiles and the ones who had been left behind… a song of promise that they would again become one body…overcoming the adversity of their times…and that they would bring this mission of Love even further…to all.

As Christians…we know this as the same mission of Jesus…whose strength wasn’t in picking up a sword and dominating others.

Jesus came to live and die as one of us and showed us that the hatred and fear of an Empire could not contain the God of Love in a tomb.

As we heard a few weeks ago from the Gospel of John…”the light came into the world and the darkness could not overcome it.”

That mission of the servant…which was the mission of Jesus…is the still needed today.

There are pundits and columnists who remind us we’re living in unprecedented times of turmoil.

But on this Martin Luther King Jr. weekend…we should recall these words from the Book of Ecclesiastes,

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.” (Eccl.1:9)

We have not always been a nation of E Pluribus Unum.

Dr. King lived in a time of violence and repression…in this country…and not that long ago.

Some of you were alive in the days of legal racial segregation.

Doctor King…a Baptist minister from Atlanta…certainly had his moments as a servant…struggling to keep singing that song of the glory of God while up against the unrepentant forces of division and hatred.

In 19-63…as King looked out over the mall in Washington DC…he spoke of a dream.

That dream was the day when all of us…blacks and whites…Jews and Gentiles…Protestants and Catholics…would all sing one song: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty…I’m free at last.

Free from violence.

Free from the economic conditions that kept too many people in poverty.

Free from the powers that sit in the skyboxes of society and have the majority of us trapped in a cage match of “us” vs. “them.”

An assassin’s bullet shortened King’s life…but that dream that he shared in August 19-63…was no less than the dream God has had for this world from the beginning of time….to have a people who shine a light to the nations that all might experience salvation.

We need more of those lights now.

We need to trim the wicks of our internal lamps and keep standing on the side of love…holding onto our faith…in the face of fear.

God is still calling to us…planting a servant song in our heads and our hearts: to see in ourselves that we can be the standard bearers of light…and love.

        Be the light of Christ…take that light out to others…and let it shine…let it shine…let it shine.

In the name of our One Holy and Undivided Trinity.