St. Martin's Episcopal Church

God’s Call Forward to Sing a New Song

By the Reverend Shirley Smith Graham

St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, January 20, 2008

Isaiah 49:1-7  John 1:29-42

 

In this season of primaries and caucuses, we may hear an old joke.  A candidate for public office is being interviewed by a person who asks, “Mr. Candidate, what do you stand for?”  And the candidate responds, “What would you like me to stand for?”

This joke highlights a tension in our public life.  Those who serve at our pleasure need to be sensitive to our concerns, to listen to us deeply, and represent not just their own interests but the interests of a wide range of people.  When a candidate takes this behavior to its worst extreme, it can seem like pandering.  We get frustrated because we want to know what is at the solid core of this person.  What makes them tick?  What motivates them to live another day?  If there were a tough choice between two good things, how would they make that choice?  What is it, at the core of who they are, that would inform their choice?

At rock-bottom, we wish to know who they are and whose they are.

Perhaps our hunger to know about these political candidates -- who they are and whose they are -- reflects, at a deeper level, our own need to be clear about the same issues.  Don’t we each, every day, seek to live out in integrity our understanding of who we are and whose we are, who we are and to whom we belong?

Such a revelation of identity and vocation occurs in two of our lessons for today, in Isaiah and John.  In the Gospel of John, the fact of identity and vocation is obviously stated.  John the Baptizer sees Jesus coming toward him, and John declares, revealing it to all in listening-range, “Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” 

It doesn’t get any clearer than that.  This Jesus is God, who offers himself.  This Jesus, as God, is the One who can take away sin, erasing the chasm between God and us.  This Jesus is the One who lays his life down, and becomes a bridge upon which we walk into the very presence of God.  This is Jesus. This is God.  He belongs to God because he is God.

In the lesson from Isaiah the issue of identity and vocation may seem a little obscure, if we are not as familiar with the Old Testament as we are with the New.  The prophet is recounting the failure he has encountered as one who has offered God’s instruction to Israel and has been rejected.  The prophet vents this frustration, saying, “’ I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;” (49.x).  In other words, the prophet’s sense of mission, of how to go forward, is dissipated in his sense of failure.  Who he is and what he is to be doing is less than clear … until … until the moment when he remembers to whom he belongs.  And when Isaiah remembers to whom he belongs, then the fog of confusion clears, and he recovers his sense of purpose:

            “yet surely my cause is with the Lord …”

The Lord, “who formed me in the womb to be his servant … for I am honored in the sight of the Lord, and my God has become my strength” (49.x).  When Isaiah remembers that God created him for a purpose and that his very life belongs to God, Isaiah stops dithering, and he recovers his sense of mission.  When Isaiah remembers who he is and whose he is, then he is able to focus on God’s call to go forward and sing a new song.

More than likely, this new song is a tune Isaiah could not have heard unless he had recovered his sense of belonging to the living God.  For it’s a brave song.  It’s a song of outrageously grand vision.  It’s a song of extravagant mercy.  The former, old song was that Isaiah would bring God’s people, Israel, back to covenant with God; that those who had isolated themselves from God would be caused to return by Isaiah’s words; that those who had rejected God because of their harsh treatment of their neighbor, their neglect of the poor, their profit at the expenses of the weak, that they would be coaxed into redemption, into changing their minds and their hearts so that they would again walk in God’s ways.  One would think this old song was ambitious enough.

But apparently, God had a different thing in mind – and isn’t that just like the Lord?!  We frail human beings are too often quick to settle for something that sounds great to us but that falls short of God’s generosity for His children.  In this case, the new song goes far beyond the redemption of Israel.

The old song is not ambitious enough.  Says the Lord to Isaiah, “’It is too light [too easy] a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob [or Israel]; [instead] I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49.x).  The Lord says to Isaiah, because you are a light and because you are mine, because of who you are and whose you are, you will be a light to all the nations, not just Israel – but to Israel and Philistia and Tyre and Sidon and Damascus and Persia and Egypt and beyond.  God is not content to stop with showing mercy to those who know they are God’s children.  God desires to show mercy to those who do not yet know who they are and whose they are.

We see in this passage that Isaiah’s renewed sense of his identity enables him to see a new vision for his vocation.  A rediscovered image of who he is fuels his vision for how he is to be in the world.

Isn’t that what we all find when we become clear about what our mission is?  When we become clear about our mission, we become clear about our vision, what our actions should be in the world.

The clarity of mission and vision is what stands out to many people about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday anniversary we commemorate this weekend.  I suppose I was about eight years old before I realized there was such as person as Martin Luther King.   Like many children, however, the first thing I learned about Dr. King was that he was a leader for the civil rights of all Americans.  The second thing that I learned, quickly upon the heels of the first, was that he was killed for that leadership.  And it didn’t take me very long, even at the age of eight, to do the math and realize that Dr. King went out of this mortal life the same year I entered it.  And this accident of timing made a great impression on me, as if he were a more relevant historical figure to me because of sharing the planet in the same year, 1968.

It was years later, perhaps in high school, that I heard his ringing words, words which communicated clarity of vision to me.  This was a man who could see.  This was a man who could see with Jesus-eyes, seeing not just the world as it appeared before him, but the Kingdom-of-God-reality that God was eager to reveal if just He could get our cooperation.  Dr. King’s vision sounded like the Kingdom of God, where “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”  It sounded good to me.  It still sounds good to me.

What a dream, “that all men are created equal.”

What a dream, that “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

What a dream, that one’s “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

What a dream, what a vision … what a vision that arises from Dr. King’s knowledge of who he is and whose he is … that he is a child of God and that he, and his life’s vocation, belong to God.

When a person embraces his identity as Dr. King did, powerful dreams, powerful visions, result.  God reveals His future to ones such as these, who can see beyond the veil; who can see to the Kingdom-of-God reality that God has prepared; who can lift the veil and open to people an experience of God’s gracious mercy.

That’s what happened for your vestry a week ago today.

At our retreat, we started out by revisiting this church’s mission statement, the same one printed on the inside cover of your bulletin.  We are called to serve our Lord Jesus Christ … continuing his ministry to the needy, the broken, the unloved, the spiritually battered as well as to others, thereby proclaiming God’s love for all people; and in changing times, to extend Christ’s unchanging ministry to the community, our nation and the world.

We re-read this statement and concluded together that it still sums up the identity of St. Martin’s Church, our identity as one body.  Perhaps no one of us individually feels called to claim this mission, but together this is who we are, rooted in God, whose we are.  So then, being clear about who and whose we are, we are able to begin to vision what we might do.  Our commitment as a vestry to you as a congregation is to chart a direction for where we are going.  In what direction forward is God calling us?  We know that our long-term, strategic plans must be rooted in such a vision; otherwise they are nice-sounding plans for doing stuff without knowing where we are going.

The vestry’s visioning is not yet complete.  The vestry has this visioning as its work through March.  And, I certainly don’t want to pre-empt that work by prematurely announcing any vision points.  Yet, I do want to share some themes and highlights with you because I see in them evidence that God has a future for us, a unique ministry to do, in this place, at this time.

The way in which God is calling our congregation forward seems to have three pillars: 1) the vocation to take Christ’s ministry outward -- to reach people beyond the walls of St. Martin’s Church; 2) the vocation to practice Christ’s ministry inward -- providing us, the disciples within the church, with the equipping and spiritual growth needed to go from strength to strength in God’s service; 3) the deep, deep, heart-desire to see Jesus.  This desire was important enough to go on our pulpit, and today it accurately reflects that we seek the One to whom we belong.

As you can imagine, with such strong, clear points of going outward, going inward, and seeking Jesus, the specific ideas for how to do this were downright exciting.  Enabling access to St. Martin’s by people who cannot easily get here; being extravagantly hospitable to people, whether we know them or not; communicating the gospel and our fellowship to people virtually, through technology; providing real food as well as spiritual food; getting the resources – the people and tools -- we need to do outreach and in-reach; being together intergenerationally – making fellowship with our three generations; enabling personal connections between parishioners that retain our small-church-family feeling while making that experience possible for a large number of people.  The vision points were more specific than this, but we’ll save the detail for this Spring, when we have seen more fully what God has for us.

While we were doing this vision work, there was a fair amount of laughter in the room – not the frivolous laughter of silliness but the giddy laughter of the joy of the Lord, the heart-felt laughter of knowing oneself perfectly loved and therefore eager to share in the loving of the world.  Knowing who we are, and whose we are, we are eager to envision our ministry, and together to see Jesus.  What a dream.

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