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Scripture: Isaiah 49:1-8

Prayer: We give thanks, O God, for sacred stories. Through your word you nurture our imaginations, increase our awareness, and challenge our assumptions. May the words of my mouth and meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

When the song of the angels is stilled/ When the star in the sky is gone/ When the kings and princes are home/ when the shepherd are back with their flock/ The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost/ To heal the broken/ To feed the hungry/ To release the prisoner/To rebuild the nations/ to bring peace among brothers [and sisters]/ To make music in the heart. (Howard Thurman)

Today, in the middle of January, the weekend we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, we listen to the scriptures about call. Howard Thurman’s poem is about our call. The passage from Isaiah is about an individual or a whole people (we aren’t sure which) who were called to speak the truth that cuts like a sword, to speak it so clearly it hits the mark like an arrow. God said, “You are my dear servant, Israel, through whom I’ll shine.”

No biblical scholar knows for sure who the “servant” in Isaiah is. Isaiah had a way of getting so wrapped up in writing about God that he had all but lost track of who he was. Isaiah jumps from part to part, sometimes speaking in first person (the “I” meaning himself), sometimes speaking for God (the “I” being God). Then he speaks for an unidentified servant, someone who was chosen/ called/ put to work by God, someone who suffered for God.

We, who are Christian, believe that the suffering servant of Isaiah is the prequel to Jesus. We read Isaiah through the eyes of the Gospel. We believe that Isaiah was predicting the coming of Jesus. But Isaiah named the suffering servant Israel without explaining whether he meant one person named Israel or the whole nation of people named Israel.

In this specific passage of Isaiah, the servant is in deep despair. Nothing is working out. Everything he touches breaks. He knows that God called him from his mother’s womb; he knows that he is God’s child, but that only intensifies his grief because he is convinced that he has wasted his gift. God has made his mouth like a sharp sword, but his words do not pierce the hardened hearts of anyone. God has made him like a pointed arrow, but he cannot seem to hit the mark. “I am completely worn out,” he cries. “My time has been wasted. I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” The voice of Isaiah believes he has labored in vain.

I thank God, for scripture such as this. And maybe you do, too. What if we had a Bible full of heroes who never expressed a doubt, who never failed, who not once lost hope, who simply tried and succeeded in everything they did because, of course, God called them and was on their side. It doesn’t really matter whether we can name the person Isaiah describes because this voice speaks to all of us who are God’s servants in this world. It speaks to you and me. We are all children of God and we are all full-fledged deputies of God’s kingdom. Some of us are better at it than others. Some of us do more harm than good. However, none of us are excused. The moment we were baptized as Christ’s own forever, we were set apart as God’s servants in the world, and the very fact that we are still hanging around means that we have not resigned yet.

The servant in Isaiah was confessing his own failure to God, expecting to be fired, or retired, or replaced by someone more equal to the task. He confesses to God that he has accomplished nothing, deserves nothing. But, you know what? God does not accept his resignation. God, whose idea of success and failure is not the same as our, has a better idea. God announces, “I have placed you, yes, you, here as a light to the nations, for you to take my saving power to everyone on earth.”

Now, the only kind of logic I can call that is, “divine logic.” Fail at a large task and you are given an even bigger one. Produce hardly a spark in your neighborhood and you are promoted to light the whole planet. Maybe it is a case of divine irony, instead. Or else, God knows something we servants do not, or if we do, we need reminding again and again. Our success does not depend on us, it depends on the one who chose us, it depends on God, our creator, the author of our life. (Thank God!)

But what a difficult lesson to learn! The only way we can truly fail is if we remove ourselves from God’s hands, if we quit our relationship with the One who chose us, if we disqualify ourselves on the grounds that we are not good enough. And even then, I think God finds a way… God’s grace is so incredible that God works through us despite our failures, our refusals, denials, betrayals. God finds a way. And, oh my gosh, is that good news.

When our own personal ideas of success go wrong, when our own notions of servanthood are exhausted, when we give up, let go, whatever you want to call it—it is at that moment when there is finally room for God to work. It is at that moment when we give God the space to give us a new vision of ourselves. For the servant in Isaiah, that vision was one of light—of epiphany—of being set on fire as God’s beacon for all the nations.

I know this from experience and maybe you do, too. When I finally confess to God, I can’t do this by myself, that’s when things start happening. For years, I kept the struggles I had in my marriage to myself. I certainly didn’t let the congregation in Dallas know. It became heavy burden to bear by myself, too heavy. I finally let a few people know—my covenant group which is a small group of clergy women like myself who meet once a month. And one friend who was not a member of the church whom I met with more regularly. I remember well, the time I shared what was going on—it was like a dam broke, the tears flowed, and even though I felt like a failure—the support I received back was unconditional. They got angry with me, shed tears with me, suffered with me. But we all knew that I was the one who had to find my own resolution.

What I didn’t know was that my oldest daughter, Abbe, was also carrying that burden. One morning Andy and I had a huge fight where we ended up yelling at each other. (It is very rare, traumatic and devasting for me to get to a point of yelling.) My yelling stopped the fight instantly and then we heard a door close. Abbe was home. Emma was staying with friends. We went downstairs and discovered that Abbe, who had just had all of her wisdom teeth out a couple days before had left the house. She left a note. I still have that note to this day. She wrote, “Mommy, it’s not your fault. I’m okay. Stop yelling.” Andy’s first reaction was tell me when he read that note was to tell me—this is your fault. And then he left and didn’t come back until very late that night. My concern was with Abbe… I had a good idea where she was and I was right and she was in a loving and caring home with friends. The moment I read that note, however, I realized that I wasn’t the only one in this marriage who was being affected by the tension. I also realized, through my daughter, I wasn’t the only one to blame. Any of you who have been through a divorce or any kind of break up realize how complicated it is. But something changed in me that day. Abbe, who has always been wise beyond her years, told me, in her own way, that I was much more worthy and important and valued than I thought I was. I had been laboring in vain and laboring alone to make my marriage work. It wasn’t just me who needed to change; we both needed to change if the marriage was going to work. And I suddenly felt called, through my children, to figure that out, to figure out what I needed to go on. I felt called to find a way to value myself. I still feel called to do that. But the miracle is that the call came through the voice of my first born, the most unexpected of all places. She opened a door that had been closed a long time. It didn’t save the marriage. Andy threatened to move out a day later, changed his mind, and a month later moved out, and a month and half after that I was making an appointment with a lawyer to file for divorce because he was in another relationship.

I don’t have any wisdom to share about marriage and divorce, just my story. But I do have something to say about “laboring in vain.” I don’t believe we ever “labor in vain.” We only feel like we are. But when we admit that to ourselves, to God, to others, with brutal honesty something happens. I think the only thing I know to call it, is grace. Whenever we tell the truth about how it is with our souls, grace happens. John Wesley knew this because the question he would ask people most often and instructed others to ask was “how is it with your soul.”

I’m reading a book that Barbara Schultz gave me called Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia. I have just finished the middle part of the book when Liz, the author, was in India, staying at an Ashram. Liz was seeking God through the spiritual practices there. There was one particular meditation practice that was very difficult for her. It involved a chant with 182 verses and it lasted an hour and a half. She resented every minute of it. “So,” she wrote, “after a particularly yucky session of chanting, I decided to seek advice from my favorite teacher around here…” She explained to him that it was torture for her. And he told her, “Look, the Gurugita isn’t supposed to be a fun song to sing. It has a different function. It’s a text of unimaginable power. It is a mighty purifying practice. It burns away all your junk, all your negative emotions. And I think it’s probably having a positive effect on you, if you’re experiencing such strong emotions and physical reactions while you’re chanting it. This stuff is painful, but it’s awfully beneficial.” So, Liz labored in vain, she believed, through this hour and a half every morning, until one morning she decided to focus on something, somebody to whom she could devote the song, the Gurugita that was meant to be a hymn of pure love. She wanted to find a place of pure love within her. By verse 20, she had it, her nephew Nick. Her nephew was 8 years old, skinny, scarily smart, frightenly astute, sensitive, complex and had trouble sleeping at night. Liz devoted the next 162 verses of the hymn of pure love to her nephew, to help him sleep, putting her focus on everything she wanted to teach him about life. She sang that he was a gift from God to everyone he knew. She wrote, “Before I could wipe the tears away the Gurugita was over. The hour and a half was finished. It felt like ten minutes had passed. I realized what had happened—that Nicky had carried me through it. The little soul I’d wanted to help had actually been helping me.” (p. 168-169)

I believe in many different paths to God, not just one. And we all need to find our own. We all need to labor to find our own. It is not something that is easy, far from it. But, while we are laboring there comes a point when we feel as though we are laboring in vain. That’s what the suffering servant of Isaiah felt, that’s what I felt in my marriage, that’s what Liz felt in India. It’s at that point of confession, of truth telling, of laying open our souls before God, that something happens to bring us closer to God, to ourselves, to others. For the servant of Isaiah it was a new vision of being a light to the nations. For me, it was the a very simple yet powerful note from Abbe. For Liz it was her nephew. There’s a common denominator in all three. It’s pure love. We all heard a message from a source of pure love in our lives. The servant of Isaiah loved the people he spoke to. I love my daughters more than life itself. And Liz loved her nephew with nothing less than pure love. And through this love, grace unfolds in a powerful, miraculous way. It doesn’t take away the labor. But it transforms the labor, gives it purpose, gives it meaning. It is no longer “laboring in vain” but rather it’s doing what God is calling us to do.

Amen.