Sermon Ideas For Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Part 2
As Nazi troops close in on her family, a Jewish woman laces dough with
jewelry. She rolls the cakes, and each family member dutifully swallows them
raw. Soon soldiers will tear the family away from portraits, furniture, old letters,
fragrances, foods, each other, and all other things that blended into the rhythm
of daily life and gathered memories and meanings. This bleeding of souls started
the long bloodshed called the Holocaust.
This scene from Stephen Speilberg's film, Schindler's List, offers
a glimpse of the initial shock of exile to those of us who have never experienced
it and who can therefore never fully comprehend it. Yet, if we take scripture
seriously, we must try to understand because much of the conclusive editing of
the Hebrew Bible took place in the context of exile and recovery from exile.
The Hebrew Bible is like the jewelry rolled in dough for desperate consumption.
Ancient Hebrew scholars compiled and edited the sacred works to preserve something
holy after the temple crumbled, something precious after so much loss.
"Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against
the rock!" (Ps 137:9) the exiled psalmist cried to Babylonian captors who
treated their sacred songs as amusement, their tradition as a side show. In the
humiliation of the present, the psalmist angrily swore never to forget Jerusalem,
never to call any other place home. Yet, many resigned to their captors and blended
in, rooting themselves in Babylon. Memories of God's liberation and love for
their ancestors took on a fresh urgency in the face of such drift.
God ultimately guided back to Jerusalem those who let the memories nurture
their faith, but the psychology of exile continued. Jerusalem was not yet home.
The relics, refuse, and wasteland reminded them of their loss and how far they
had to go to regain their dignity. The neighbors resented their return. With
their arrival, the shock and numbness of loss must have resumed, and after that,
long, dry days mixed with agitation and lethargy.
If most of us cannot truly understand exile, we can at least understand
homesickness, that nauseated sadness of feeling rootless and faceless in an indifferent
world. One searches for something familiar, someone who shares the same memories,
some task to carry on that once gave life meaning. In the long run, one forges
a new identity in the eyes of others and oneself.
In Isaiah 61, the prophet offers healing for the homesickness that still
plagued the remnant who returned. He is "anointed," chosen like a priest
to reveal God to a people homesick for their Father. He portrays their future
hope by displaying the jewels preserved in the exile: themes from scripture stories.
God will deliver them. God will give them a new home in Zion, and they will build
in joy. God will make a covenant with the chosen nation. God will give them the
task of highest purpose: to reveal God even through their sufferings. The world
will wake up to the truth that God set them apart, made them holy.
In the end, Zion will be their home, but not their only home. The world
will be their home, even that world in which they once lived as aliens. The world
will honor them as devout people honor their priests. As the anointed prophet
is to Israel, Israel will be to the world: a priest, a light, a messenger of
wild hope.
It seems too good to be true, and in a sense this promise never came true.
Things got better, but never again like the old days. The remade temple never
inspired awe like the old one. Israel never came to good terms with the neighbors,
and certainly no nation ever honored them as a priestly people. Nations just
don't do that.
But nations honor those jewels they swallowed, those holy scriptures that
helped them remember who and whose they were even in exile. Those scriptures
became jewels to the world's other two major monotheistic religions later born,
Islam and our Christian faith. Virtually everyone who believes in the one God
holds up those jewels in the light of day and admires their fire. We do not claim
them like looters; rather, they reveal God's claim on us.
By honoring Israel's God as our own, we honor Israel whose sojourning and
suffering reveal God. Israel never had such honor in mind. Nobody wants such
honor. We too would swallow our jewels in fear of losing our home, our identity,
our dignity in a hostile or indifferent world.
Yet, for the returned exiles in their homesickness and for us in ours,
God offers the terribly beautiful jewel the exiles almost left behind: the biblical
truth that through the very suffering that bewilders us, God's chosen ones will
reveal true righteousness and holiness. God will fulfill the vocation of the
chosen not despite the shame of exile, but through it. By calling the people "the
planting of the Lord" (v. 3) and likening their righteousness to the sprouting
of God's garden (v. 11), the prophet reveals the long, dry days of homesickness
as days of germination and new growth. If they wait, they will flower.
We wait for Jesus, who opened his ministry by reading this prophecy in
worship and declaring himself the one sent to declare God's liberation and healing
(Lk 4:14-21). He then called disciples, healed strangers, opened eyes to the
kingdom, overturned tables, and suffered a death that revealed God. Yet, in the
spirit of the prophet, he did not claim this calling only for himself. He bid
all who call on his name to participate in God's work of healing and liberation.
He also bid us wait for God to reveal righteousness through our suffering. It
is the honor we do not want. Yet, it is the ultimate consolation for our homesickness.
J. Marshall Jenkins
