A question I get asked a lot is if I had planned to move to Michigan. With you all I’d like to settle the question once and for all. No. No, I never intended to move to Michigan. In fact, prior to coming here to interview and subsequently moving here, I had been in the state of Michigan four times. Once when my brother started law school, once for his graduation. One trip to the UP last summer. And once, on a road trip across the Ohio turnpike in 2007, my roommate and I took a 20-minute detour for lunch at a Subway, so I could check Michigan off the “list of states I’d visited.” I liked Michigan; don’t get me wrong. The UP especially was lovely, and Ann Arbor is a great city. But until Bishop Satterlee called to ask me to consider interviewing with a little congregation in a city I’d never heard of, Michigan, lovely as it was, was just not really on my radar.
I shouldn’t I suppose, have been surprised to end up in a place I hadn’t expected. The story of my faith has always sort of felt like this, with my merrily making plans as to how my life would unfold, and God merrily coming along behind and messing those plans all up. The result of this messing always turning out to be more than I imagined, more than I maybe would have dreamed for myself. I have jokingly referred to this as God’s cosmic sense of humor, but I think it’s something more than that; more like God’s vast ability and desire to dream more for me than I think I deserve or am capable of.
God’s cosmic messing in our lives are always life-giving. But there are other times, when our stories are knocked aside in ways and by forces that do not seem life-giving. Ways in which the bad does not seem to be giving way to something better. Times in which we wonder where God is in the midst of such tragic calamity. The Israelites in Isaiah find themselves in the middle of just such a shift.
In our Isaiah reading for this morning, the Israelites are reeling from a cosmic messing up of their story that doesn’t feel life-giving or very much like God. I talked a little bit last week about how the book of Isaiah tells of the experience of exile. Last week we heard one of those in-breaking stories, promising hope in the midst of judgment. This morning our reading is from the middle of the book of Isaiah, smack in the middle of persecution under Babylon. The story had been going along fine for Israel, or so it felt. They were a wealthy and prosperous nation. Trade was booming, commerce was flourishing; God truly blessed them. On the surface, the story was great, but hovering just below another story was taking root. Corruption, greed, persecution, inequality, those were the true forces at work. Sin and brokenness had slipped into the system. And sin, as it has a way of doing, does not confine itself to those whom welcomed it in. The headlines of wealth and prosperity were just that, headlines. Below them the foundation of justice was weak. And so, when the Babylonians came calling, the system crumbled, taking with it the guilty and the innocent alike.
That’s the thing about sin. It is not bound to those who created it. When sin comes to collect, it has no sense of equity, no restriction to those from whom it is owed. Sin takes its piece from the middle, demanding more and bigger interest on its debt. And the Isarelites, those who benefitted from the inequality and those who suffered, all found their stories washed away in the wake of the exile in Babylon. Guilty or not, all were held by the bronze doors and iron bars of captivity.
And then, unexpectedly, the story changed. Out of the midst of a future that seemed to hold nothing but exile and destruction, a savior broke through. “Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped…I will go before you and level the mountains, I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron, I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name.”
God is always messing up our stories in order to bring us to life. No matter how clearly the path we think we have drawn, or how stuck in sin we seem to be, God is always moving and driving and bringing life in darkness, hope when all seems hopeless.
And here’s the really crazy part of this story. Those promises, that hope, can come from the most unexpected of sources. God promised the people of Israel “treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places.” And that salvation would come to Israel from such an unlikely source as Cyrus was certainly such a treasure. Because here’s the thing about Cyrus. He wasn’t an Israelite. He wasn’t seeking to bring justice or promote harmony. Cyrus was the king of Persia. He was the pagan leader of a heathen nation. And yet, it was through him the God would deliver God’s people from exile. God said to Cyrus, “for the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me. [Because] I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god.”
It seems wildly unlikely that salvation would come through Cyrus. But if we look back, the whole of our salvation history is the story of a God who always breaks through in the most wildly unlikely ways. The son of a Hebrew slave, left in a basket and raised as a foster child in the court of Pharaoh, raised his rod and the Red Sea broke in two so the Israelites could march to freedom. The heathen king of Persia conquered the Babylonians in his own quest for power, and freed the Israelites from their exile. And of course, that most unexpected of indwellings, that began when the birthing wail of an infant in a stable cut through a cold winter night, reached it’s height on a Friday afternoon when the dying gasp of a political prisoner caused the curtain of the temple to be torn in two, and finally came to completion when an earthquake revealed an empty tomb, breaking open the barrier of sin and death that kept us apart from God. A breaking we remember when we gather at the font or around the table and experience for ourselves a God who breaks through each and every day in the most common elements of bread and wine and water.
God breaks into our lives in unexpected places, God breaks into our lives in unexpected ways, God breaks into our lives in unexpected people. Sometimes those unexpected people are even us…
That is the possibly the most unexpected twist in this text. This text is addressed not to the oppressed Israelites, but to the King of Persia. God chose Cyrus, of all people, to bring hope to the Israelites. Cyrus, who never even knew it, never even knew God, was God’s instrument in bringing salvation. And if God chose Cyrus, then God can and does choose us. Not only does God break into the captive places in our lives, but God also uses us to break into the captive places in others' lives. God told Cyrus, “I call you by your name. I surname you, though you do not know me.” And God calls us by our names too. Surnames us, in ways we do not even know. We are the ones God uses to break into this world. God uses us, though we do not know what we are doing, or where we are going, though we may not even know it is God who is acting, but uses us to be God’s hands and feet creating light and life in this world.
Our unexpected God breaks in. This is the history of our salvation; this is the promise of our future. God, who loved us so much that slavery under Pharaoh, that exile in a foreign land, that even death itself could not keep God apart from us, is still working in our lives and communities to break down everything that holds us captive. This unexpected God is even working through us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment