The following sermon was preached at saint benedict’s table on Sunday, January 19, 2020. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
With the weather we’ve been having this weekend – and with the photos my friends in Newfoundland have been posting – I am particularly grateful that I have a home. A warm, safe place that I can go to at anytime. I’m grateful that I have family, friends, and this church community – which also feels like home to me and provides me with a sense of security and rootedness. I am grateful to have these things, and troubled that not everyone does.
And I don’t always know what to do when I feel troubled like that. It can be easy just to shut down or avoid feeling overwhelmed by doing whatever I can to pretend that this problem doesn’t exist. It’s at times like this that I need a prophet. Someone who can help me to see that a better way is possible, someone who inspires me to hope, someone who inspires me to act.
Someone who inspires me to act in large ways, and in small ones. It’s a small thing, but putting some socks and warm winter gear in those baskets at the back of the church is one simple way I can resist the temptation to sit back and do nothing. It’s a small way that I can say, there is a better way for all of us.
In tonight’s reading from Isaiah, God’s people are feeling hopeless in large part because they are homeless. All of the safety and security that a home and a homeland can provide have been taken from them.
They “have been defeated, their temple destroyed. They are taken in chains to Babylon, alienated from their land and their God. This exile is a crisis of identity and faith. Are they still God’s people? How can they worship in this foreign land?”[1]
What would you say? What would you write to people experiencing these sorts of circumstances?
Isaiah focuses on hope. He doesn’t try to downplay the severity of the current situation. He doesn’t tell the people their feelings aren’t valid or to “cheer up.” Rather he encourages the people to not lose hope, because better days are coming.
Someone is coming, sent by God, who will make the wrong things right. The things that have been lost – their homeland, their temple, their sense of stability and pride as a people – all of these things will be restored to them.
But not only will these things be restored to them, God has much more than that in mind. The one who is coming will not just restore the status quo, the one who is coming will make all things better than they were before.
The speaker in today’s reading is not identified by name and is often referred to simply as “the servant.” This reading is taken from a section of Isaiah that is sometimes referred to as the “Servant Songs.”
If this passage had been written today, it would probably have been written in all caps. The servant begins with a shout, “Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention you peoples from far away.” (1a) This message is not just for the people of Israel, this is a message for the whole world. And it’s not the servant’s message, this is a message from God. Although he is currently hidden away, the servant is coming and when he comes, God will be glorified.
“The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away. And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” (1b-3)
The servant knows who he is, knows who made him, understands his calling and vocation and even so, he also experiences moments of doubt.
And he shares these struggles with us as well admitting that when God said, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified,” that his first response was not to say, “Cool! I can’t wait.” No, his first response was to doubt, and to question.
The servant says, “ I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity…”. (4)
It’s a pretty gutsy thing to question God, but don’t ever let anyone tell you not to do so. It’s normal, God expects it. I think God might even like it when we question, it shows we’re awake. It shows we’re engaged.
On Friday night, Mike and I went to see the movie Just Mercy. The film is based on the life and work of Bryan Stevenson. If you haven’t seen the movie, perhaps you’ve read the book of the same name or seen Bryan interviewed on television about his work.
Bryan grew up in rural Delaware in the 60’s. Although segregation was no longer legal, practically speaking segregation was still in full force.[2] White kids didn’t play with black kids, when visiting the doctor’s office, white people used the front door, and black people used the back door. They didn’t swim together, hang out together, or worship together.
In an interview, Bryan told the story of how his mother protested the day the black children from town lined up at the back door of the polio vaccination station to receive their shots, waiting hours while the white children went in through the front door and were treated first.
Bryan received a full scholarship and earned his law degree from Harvard University. That’s pretty much the most prestigious law degree a person can get. After he graduated, instead of taking a high paying job at a fancy law firm, he chose to move to Alabama to start the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that, at it’s very beginning, was just Bryan and a single volunteer determined to do whatever they could do to help people who had been wrongly convicted and were waiting to die on death row.
Racism is never compartmentalized. If you think it’s OK to allow a group of people to receive a second class education, inadequate health care, housing and overall poor treatment in general, then you’re probably not going to be overly concerned with whether or not they receive a proper trial either. In the US, as in Canada, the quality of the justice you receive is all too often tied both to your race, and the amount of money in your bank account. Bryan notes that the criminal justice system treats people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent.
I wasn’t able to attend the panel discussion at the Museum for Human Rights on Friday but perhaps some of you did or you followed the news coverage afterwards. The panel consisted of 5 people who had been wrongfully convicted in Canada and had collectively spent 73 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. So this is definitely not just an American problem.
Since beginning this work, Bryan and his colleagues have been harassed. They’ve received death threats, they’ve worked countless hours of overtime for less pay then they would receive if they had chosen to practice a different kind of law, and, as of August 2016 – the last statistic I could find – they had saved 125 men who’d been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.
125 men who were wrongfully convicted and condemned to die had those sentences overturned. But that’s not all, Bryan and his team have also represented people who are poor, defended people on appeal, overturned wrongful convictions, fought to ensure that children are not placed in adult facilities and have worked to help alleviate the significant bias that infects the criminal justice system in the United States.
Stevenson grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and that community has had a profound influence on him. In particular, it was there that he learned the power of “standing up after having fallen down” and where he developed his belief that “each person in our society is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.”
When I thinking about the film this weekend, I couldn’t help but see Bryan as a modern example of the servant Isaiah writes about. Prison is a place of exile. It’s a place filled with hopeless people, especially on death row. And it is in exactly that place, that Bryan chose to go and bring hope.
And not hope like a wish, not hope like “Well your situation is truly awful and this is the way our society has functioned for hundreds of years but I hope things get better for you someday.” No, Bryan brings a hope that says, “Do not give up, things are dark now, but they are going to get better. And here is how I know that is true, and here is what I am going to do to bring that better day about.”
It may be obvious to us now that Bryan is an amazing man doing important work, but that’s only in hindsight. It doesn’t make sense that a man born in Delaware with the intelligence and drive to graduate from Harvard Law School would move to Alabama to fight to overturn death penalty cases. A form of law that by its very nature means his clients will likely never be able to actually pay him for his services. It’s the opposite of obvious.
But God loves to use the most unlikely people. Think of Rahab, or Samuel. Think of Mary and Joseph. Think of yourself.
We are all servants, created and raised up by God. We all have a calling and work to do, even if, like the servant in Isaiah, the nature of that work is currently unclear, or feels hopeless. Even if, especially if, that work is quiet, or behind the scenes, the sort of thing no one will ever make a Hollywood movie about.
There is at least one whole other sermon that I could preach about our gospel text this evening, and I’m not going to do that, but I would encourage you to read back over that passage sometime this week and just note how many times it talks about the importance of seeing.
When John is questioned he will admit that when Jesus first came to be baptized he didn’t know who he was. It was only after seeing and talking to Jesus that he was able to say, “And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” (34)
When the disciples approach Jesus filled with questions about who Jesus is and what he plans to do, Jesus invites them to “Come and see.”
Prophets are people who are able to see what the world could be. They are able to look ahead and say, “Yes, things are hard now, but there is a better way to live, and a better world to come, so let’s get busy bringing it about.”
The world needs prophets, but just as much as we need prophets, we need people who are willing to “come and see.” People who catch the vision of the better way that is possible and then take the time to bring their own unique gifts to the mix.
Bryan Stevenson has done some truly amazing things to make our world a better place and to bring hope to people who have no reason to hope. Funnily enough, that can make it easy for us to dismiss him. Not everyone can be so special. Not everyone can be a prophet like the servant in Isaiah or Bryan and so, we have a tendency to be grateful to them for doing their special, special work and then to think there is nothing left for us to do.
But I don’t believe that is true. Bryan’s story is simply the story of a man who took the gifts he was given seriously. He has a heart for people and a mind for the law and he uses them every single day.
We all have a similar story. We all have a role to play, the trick is to figure out what yours is without comparing yourself to others. Woven into Bryan’s story are countless other stories of people who took their own unique gifts to build into Bryan and the work he was doing. Someone makes sure he is fed. Someone prays for him. Someone answers the phone in his law office. Many, many people make sure the work he is doing is funded. Without all those people using their own gifts, there is no Bryan Stevenson, there is no Equal Justice Initiative and 125 men sentenced to die on death row would not have had those convictions overturned.
Prophets see things that most of us can’t see and they invite us into the vision of a better world. May we all be inspired to see the world in a new way this week, and to act on what we are seeing.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Amy G. Oden.
[2] Taken largely from Wikipedia