Texts for Preaching: Isaiah 49:1-7 and an excerpt from a speech Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered at St. John the Divine (NYC) on the second anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education. (Also, five promises of the Baptismal Covenant, Book of Common Prayer, page 302).
We start with Isaiah.
Let’s understand the situation
and what he is doing.
By the way, just so you don’t think
I am more clever than I am,
I owe my understanding of this
to the great scholar and prophet,
Walter Brueggemann.
He would explain to us
that over the generations
the community of Israel
that had been in exile in Babylon
had actually become assimilated to their situation
and many even forgot
they were in exile.
Think of it like the old lab experiment
they won’t let kids do any more:
a frog in water
slowly brought to a boil
does not recognize its circumstances
and boils to death.
Likewise, the people of Israel
in exile
began to think of themselves
in the terms that their Babylonian captors
gave to them.
Many, if not most of these captives
became assimilated in exile,
and came to feel “at home” in Babylon.
They got used to their situation
so that the Babylonian empire
began to seem benign
and Judah and Jerusalem
seemed like a distant faded memory –
a foreign land even.
Over time Israel became like a rock
carried by the river of history
from its perch on Mt. Sinai
to the valley of dry bones
where it was rubbed smooth
and began to look like all the other gravel
deposited there.
Israel became shaped
by the assumptions of the Babylonians
and adopted Babylonian values,
Babylonian hopes,
and Babylonian fears.
That is what happens in exile:
the pain of grief for what has been lost
and the discomfort
of constantly being in tension
with those around you,
makes assimilation
seem more and more attractive.
You just want to fit in…until you do.
What Isaiah is asking
from the exiles
is onerous and painful.
What Isaiah wants from them
is to intentionally remain uneasy
with the world view
of those around them,
and to stay in tension
with the very people who held the power
to grant them success, wealth, and status.
Isaiah was calling Israel
to remember who they were
and where they came from –
and it wasn’t Babylon.
”Do not get comfortable.
Do not give into the temptation
to just be one of them.
Do not join them
in doing what they do
and believing what they believe
and living as they do.
Remember who you are
and remember where you came from.”
We can actually step back
and view all of Biblical wisdom
through this lens
of being called to remember.
From Moses at the Jordan all the way to
”On the night he died for us,
Jesus took bread
and blessed it,
and gave it his disciples saying,
’Take eat,
this is my body given for you.
Do this for the remembrance of me.’”
That passage from Martin Luther King, Jr.
is really pleading for the same thing.
”Let us remember
the struggle against Egypt…”
And how does Rev. King
want us to remember that struggle?
By not being like Egypt.
Instead of hating our enemy and captors,
we “love,
have compassion,
(and build) understanding and goodwill
for those against whom we struggle…”
He tells us that evil and exploitation
cannot survive if we remember
who we are
and where we have came from
because then we will
act — not to defeat them —
but to help them change.
To help them change.
To help them change.
The only way that evil and exploitation
is defeated
over the long arch of history,
is if we do not become like our captors
and we instead, change them to become
as God would have us be.
That is the only way.
We do not defeat Egypt
or Babylon
by killing them
or by exiling them
or by suppressing them
or by winning against them.
We defeat empire and evil
by helping their agents to change
even as we seek to be changed.
That is the only way.
There is no other way.
So Isaiah and MLK
are holding out this crucial wisdom
that we sniff at
and peek at
from time to time,
but we are not fully convinced of yet.
Do not assimilate
to the values and life-styles of our captors,
and do not let our anger and resentments
turn our hearts toward violent solutions
when the only solution
is to change ourselves
and change our captors along with us.
Now this message
is not that difficult to unpack
from its Biblical wrapping, is it?
It would feel really good to me right now,
to sing a litany of the bad guys
I think are our captors —
the Pharaoh and Egyptians
I earnestly wish to defeat.
But that would be just the opposite
of the wisdom being offered here.
The tricky part
of Isaiah and MLK’s wisdom
is to recognize that in focusing
anger
and resentment
and vitriol
on the people we blame
for whatever mess we are in,
is the act of our assimilating to their values.
When our focus becomes “them”
then we are assimilating.
Instead of changing ourselves
and in so doing,
working toward finding ways
to change them,
we are actually assimilating
and making the evil worse.
Just to be clear,
I don’t like this either.
I would rather be hostile,
angry,
resentful,
fearful,
and hateful
toward the Pharaoh’s, Egyptians, and Babylonians
I can point to all around us.
That feels better.
That feeds my immature spirit,
the one that would rather
simply defeat
and imprison
the ones I think
have broken the law
the code
the truth.
But then, inconveniently,
Isaiah and Martin Luther King, Jr. —
not to mention Jesus —
tap me on the shoulder
and point out that perhaps
I have assimilated
and become one of them.
Rats.
Clearly, we have absolutely no hope
of changing those who would be our captors
if we become like them.
It is only
in being loved
and feeling cared about
and being understood
that we ever feel safe enough
to be curious
about “the other.”
The goal to change them
not defeat them,
requires that we remember
and keep remembering
who we are
and where we have come from.
So in some sense,
we are always being called
to not feel “at home”
in the place we live
and among the people
with whom we live.
We are always being invited
out of our assimilation
and to come back
to the home we were exiled from.
Now obviously, for all of us,
these are metaphors.
We live in the place
and among the people
with whom we were born.
We are citizens —
we are frogs in the water
that we do not recognize
as the source of what will kill us.
I do not want to oversimplify this
because truly, recognizing
all the ways in which we are assimilated
with the empire that nurtures injustice and exploitation,
as MLK describes it,
is not an easy to do.
It requires us
to get ourselves uneasy
and feeling in tension with
the water we are in.
It requires us
to ask questions we had stopped asking
and to get curious about things
we had stopped being curious about.
It requires us to be uneasy
rather than comfortable.
One way to do this
is to try on a different lens.
To look at the world around us
through a filter
that is not the filter
that everyone else is using.
And not just looking around us
with this different lens
but looking within us too.
The most accessible lens for us,
is those five promises
of our Baptismal Covenant.
They may be so familiar
as to roll off our tongue,
but if we were to really try them on
and look around us
and look within us
using them as filters,
my guess is that the places
in which we have become assimilated
might begin to show.
I am not going to do that right now,
as part of this sermon
because, really, that is your work.
I will urge us, myself included,
to use them this next week
and throughout the entire season of Epiphany,
as a source of reflection.
Take just one, like, “respect the dignity
of every human being.”
My guess is that if we use that
to look at the behaviors of those around us,
of government policies,
of political rhetoric,
and of our own actions and in-actions,
that where we have assimilated
might begin to show through.
Take one-a-day
or one-a-week
and put it on like a new pair of lenses
and look at the world all around.
Look at yourself through it too.
Remember, changing ourselves
is how we ultimately will change others.
Let’s call it our Epiphany lens,
the one that will show us
how we have assimilated
and how we need to change ourselves
as the primary methodology
for changing the Pharaohs
and Babylonians
with whom we have unwittingly
become too cozy.
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