Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 20, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has written a book with the title The Audacity of Hope. Now, this sermon isn’t about Barack Obama. It certainly isn’t an endorsement of his or anyone else’s Presidential candidacy; and I haven’t even read the book. But I thought of that title when I read our passage from Isaiah this morning. Maybe you were struck as I was by the audacity of that passage. Think about it for a minute. The passage was written during the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people in the 6th century BCE. It was written by a member of an exiled people, a people that had been defeated by a far more powerful neighbor and forced into exile in a foreign place, cut off from its land, its history, and its sacred places, severed from the roots that nourished it. The passage refers to this condition when it has “Israel say “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” Isaiah 49:4 NRSV It was a situation that could easily have led to nothing but despair. All of the empirical evidence said we’ve lost. We were wrong. God was not on our side. We have no future. No one cares what happens to us. All is lost, all hope is gone.

Yet the voice that comes to us across the millennia from that place of defeat and exile is anything but a voice of despair. It is a voice that says two audacious, even brazen things, the second even more audacious and brazen than the first. The first thing the voice says is that God will restore this exiled and defeated people. In the rather odd language of the nation of Israel personified and speaking in the first person the passage says that God will bring Israel (also here called Jacob, which refers to the same people) back to God. It says God will be glorified through Israel, this defeated and exiled people.

That’s audacious enough, but then comes the second thing the voice says. It says that it is not enough that Israel will be restored for its own sake. The speaker has God say “It is too light a thing that you…should raise up the tribe of Jacob and…restore the survivors of Israel” No, god’s promise to Israel is far more audacious than that. God says: “I will give you as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6 NRSV God, the passage says, has chosen Israel, the one the passage calls “deeply despised, abhorred by nations,” as the harbinger of God’s salvation for the whole world.

It’s an amazing claim. It’s an incredible claim, that is, it is quite simply unbelievable; and my first reaction to it was: That never happened. The claim turned out to be wrong. There was a restoration of Israel of sorts, but Israel never became that light to the nations bringing God’s salvation to the end of the world. That was my first reaction to the claim; but then I got to thinking: It never happened quite the way this passage envisioned it happening, but look at what did happen. In the time that this passage was written the Jews in exile in Babylon developed the world’s first truly monotheistic faith. Israel had always worshipped only one god, its God Yahweh; but only in the time of the exile in the 6th century BCE did that monolatry, the worship of only one God, become true monotheism, the belief in the reality of only one God. Yahweh, the one God of Israel, became in the people’s understanding the one universal God of all creation. Israel gave the world monotheism.

Israel never spread monotheism to the end of the world to be sure. It was and remains a small group of people. Judaism today is by several orders of magnitude the smallest of the world’s monotheistic religions. But: Out of Israel, out of Jewish monotheism, grew the two great monotheistic religions that have spread God’s salvation to the end of the earth. Christianity and Islam both are and know themselves to be offspring of Jewish monotheism. Between them they number half of the world’s population, and they could and would never have happened without Judaism. Through them Israel did become and remains a light to the nations bringing God’s salvation to the end of the earth. In them the promise of Isaiah Chapter 49 came true. From meager beginnings God transformed the world.

And it seems that God always transforms the world starting from meager beginnings. It’s hard to imagine a more meager beginning, for example, than the one our faith had. A crucified leader. A small band of nobodies telling a wholly improbably story about that defeated and executed leader being the Son of God and rising from the grave. A tiny movement scorned by society and persecuted by the most powerful state the world had ever known, the Roman Empire. Yet within a mere 300 years that movement had conquered that Roman Empire by the truth of its proclamation. Indeed, the Roman Empire survived and is alive in the world today because of Christianity. We see it in the world today in the institutions of the largest church Christianity has produced, the Roman Catholic Church, which is ruled by an emperor (called a pope), has a Senate (called the curia) and has regional administrators all over the world (called bishops), all on the model of the Roman state.

God transforming the world from meager beginnings continues today. This is Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend. On this weekend we pause to remember Dr. King and the larger civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s of which he was such a prominent and inspired leader. Talk about meager beginnings! A few incredibly brave people stood up to the power of white supremacy and legalized discrimination and said No More! A brave woman refused to move to the back of the bus. A brave Baptist preacher from Atlanta led a march across a bridge into the teeth of the forces of hatred. Those few men and women brave enough to stand up and say No More! were attacked with dogs, tear gas, and fire hoses. They were beaten. They were arrested. Some of them were even killed, not least of all Dr. King himself. But they kept standing up. They kept saying No More! Dr. King declared “I have a dream!” And from those meager beginnings God transformed a nation. The transformation isn’t complete to be sure, but one day it will be. From those meager beginnings God is bringing forth justice.

And, my friends, I dare to believe that we here at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, together with like-minded sisters and brothers around the world, are now engaged in another movement in which God is bringing forth justice from meager beginnings. The Open and Affirming movement is such a beginning. It is one man, the Rev. William R. Johnson, in 1972, brave enough to say I’m gay and God is calling me to ordained ministry in the church and one UCC Conference in California brave enough to say yes. It is a few churches, at first a very few, willing to say we do not consider ancient expressions of ancient understandings and ancient prejudices to be the word and will of God, and we reject them. The movement is still small. Even in the supposedly progressive UCC only slightly over 10% of all congregations are Open and Affirming. Most of Christianity still rejects the movement and even despises and reviles it, considering people who embrace it not even to be Christian. I have experienced that rejection, that hatred, right here in Monroe. I certainly do not equate myself or us with those brave freedom riders and marchers of the civil rights movement. We haven’t faced anything remotely like what they faced. But on a smaller and safer scale we too are standing up for justice. And we dare to hope that from these meager beginnings God can and will bring forth a transformation of the whole world.

God has done it before. God can and will do it again. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I don’t know that small groups of thoughtful, committed people are the only things that have ever changed the world, but I do know that from meager beginnings, with and through such small groups of thoughtful, committed people, God can and does change the world. God has done it before, and God is doing it in our midst today.

So let us audaciously, even brazenly, recommit ourselves to the holy work of transformation. Let us continue audaciously and brazenly to proclaim the Good News of God’s unconditional love for all people to a world and to a larger Christian church that insists on putting conditions on God’s grace. Let us continue to embrace the outcast and welcome the unwelcome. We are part of God’s meager beginnings, meager beginnings from which the Holy Spirit will indeed change the world. Amen.