Inspired by Isaiah 42: 1-9
Something unthinkable happened.
A people favored by God and blessed with victory, land, and offspring are exiled and enslaved by a foreign power. The Babylonians had defeated Israel.
The temple, their treasures, their homes, their way of life, all destroyed.
A level of devastation that can be communicated no clearer than in the words of the Psalmist who wrote, “By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.”
How could this happen?
An external force causes an internal collapse as a nation understandably questions their identity as God’s chosen. Israel not only questions why this is happening but also who they are as a collective because God permitted such tragedy to happen.
In response, Isaiah clarifies not who the people of God are but who God is to the whole of Creation and how this Divine Presence continues to work all around them.
God, the Lifegiver says –
the one who created the heavens,
the one who stretched them out,
the one who spread out the earth and its offspring,
the one who gave breath to its people
and life to those who walk on it-
…I am the Creator;
that is my name.
Traumatized, the people have lost perspective. They have forgotten who they are and, consequently, have forgotten the nature of who God is in the world.
Isaiah reorients the people to their purpose by reminding them of God’s care and creative work happening in all of Creation. Yes, the people of Israel continue to hold their place in the story but the purpose for their specific placement in this story is re-engaged according to the vastness of God’s presence and participation on this planet. God is the energy giving life to all things, the advocate for balance and harmony, the reason the people are to hold out hope. And it is through claiming this hope as their own in the midst of an unthinkable tragedy that the People of Israel will be empowered to open the eyes of the blind, lead prisoners from prison, and become a light for all those who sit in darkness.
The people, bound together as one body before God, are to rise as the servant through their suffering so that the world can be made whole as God intended it to be.
This is the Good News.
The servant is neither a Messiah yet to arrive nor a worthy remnant of a disgraced religious sect. The servant present and upheld, bringing delight to the Divine, is the collective. Commentary of the 11th century Rashi and the 20th century Christian Oxford New English Bible both identify the “suffering servant” as the nation of Israel. The suffering servant was God’s call to unify around a common purpose regardless of individual circumstances. This was a reminder that they were One before God.
Their call is not to discern the worthy among them. Neither is their call to name the individual born to save them. Together, the people of Israel are the One who will bring justice by aligning their values with the vision of a God who created gives life to a planet ordered for relationality and reciprocity.
This message is extended to each of us buried under the weight of a damaged world in despair. Today, it is the whole of creation that God calls to fulfill the promise of justice on this planet. To fulfill our purpose we must become the exact vision of who God created us to be; a unified source of healing in a world fluent in harmony and steeped in hope.
We believe in a God who never leaves us alone while existing in a society that tells us that we should be able to fix our problems and find solutions by ourselves.
We should be able to financially support ourselves, to be independent of needing support from the state, to never place ourselves in a position where we would need to depend on others to succeed. We are placed in a culture where we are conditioned to believe that if we are suffering, the cause must be on us and us alone.
Isaiah infuses light into this sadistic worldview with a new vision of servitude. None of us are alone because God created all of life as the One to establish justice with the lands we know our homes.
Our individual lives now depend on our ability to remember who we are together.
We are witnessing the unimaginable as the rising temperatures on our planet transform the world as we know it with rising sea levels, unpredictable weather patterns, and relentless natural disasters. The actions we take as individuals will not save the world but the changes we can make as a collective could save our home.
Solutions are not viable if they are individualized because the problems were not things we created on our own.
Approximately 70 percent of the world’s historical GHG emissions are from 100 investor and state-owned fossil fuel companies. Individual actions have minute effects relative to these emissions. The average American household produces only 8.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide. This is out of a total of over 33 billion tons produced globally.
The solution is only evident when we identify the problem as our disconnection from one another. This is a disconnection from creation. A disconnection from our Creator. The most dangerous thing we can do right now is to identify as the sole servant or believe that someday a superhero will come to save us from ourselves. The servant God calls is not one person, or one community, or one nation but one planet. It is all of creation, aligning their existence to the order with which life was designed; an order of reciprocity and relationality.
Yes, the unimaginable is happening but the unthinkable doesn’t have to be the future. We can establish justice with the lands, bring delight to God, and offer hope to Creation. It is as simple as remembering who we are and being reminded of the purpose for which we are here. It is as easy as listening for the echoes of a prophecy resurrected and repurposed for today.
…here is my servant, the one I uphold;
my chosen, who brings me delight.
I’ve put my Spirit upon them
…they won’t be extinguished or broken
until they have established justice in the land.
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