Breathing In, Breathing Out: God’s Gift of Life
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 16, 2022
Breathing In, Breathing Out: God’s Gift of Life – Isaiah 42: 5-10
Today’s scripture passage comes from Isaiah chapter 42 and is often grouped with other chapters in Isaiah titled the Servant Songs. If we begin with Isaiah 42 verse 1 we read, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.”
In the verses we read today, the servant is called in righteousness to be a covenant or promise between God and the people and to be a “light to the nations.” Readers and hearers may then naturally wonder, who exactly is God talking about? Who is this servant set to do such work? For centuries, some Christians have made the case that these songs are referring to Jesus, as the promised Messiah and a servant-leader who makes a new covenant between God and people.
Today’s passage comes from the portion of Isaiah scholars sometimes call Second Isaiah, because it was likely written in the time period when the conquered ancient Israelite elites living in Babylon were being allowed to go home and rebuild their country and culture. Hearers then, like many Jewish believers today, may have understood the servant to be the people of Israel or the prophet Isaiah himself.
My both/and thinking wonders why those interpretations can’t all have degrees of truth. And, my literary background lifts up one other possibility, because when I was being taught how to read something that gave an ambiguous descriptor or title but no name, I was taught that may mean that the writer is inviting the reader to understand this role as an archetype we may fill in part or in whole. In other words, when there’s a generic name given, we might get a lot out of wondering if the writer is talking about us.
They’re kind of lofty words here in Isaiah 42 that describe the servant. I would love to say I’m one in whom God’s “soul delights” and who will “faithfully bring forth justice.” But I know that I sometimes fail to do all I can in that respect, although God mysteriously delights in me anyway.
Having read some other parts of the Bible, where God calls even faulty people to great service, I’m certainly not willing to rule out that the divine voice in this chapter could be talking about me and about you, though we may like to answer, who me?
If we hearers are at least partially implicated in this call to be one who serves the glory of God and our neighbors’ good, maybe it has less to do with our high and mightiness and more to do with God’s great power to work through us despite our very human faults and foibles.
After all, Isaiah reminds us God is the supremely powerful one who
“created the heavens and stretched them out
[God] spread out the earth and what comes from it,
[God] gives breath to the people upon it
And spirit to those who walk in it” (42: 5).
In my house we have ongoing conversations about how this understanding of God as Creator jibes or doesn’t with what science tells us about the beginnings of the universe. That conversation could be a live one among us here, too. If we were to turn to our neighbors, we may find some of us are very committed to reading the Creation story quite literally. Others will not be at all willing to entertain the idea that the universe was created in any way other than the story science gives us about the Big Bang. Still others of us might find ourselves blending these ideas in ways that honor both the how of science and the what of all it means in Genesis.
However we understand this power that animates the universe, whether it is the flow of ions of energy or the supernatural power of God or all of the above, there is an undeniable flow of energy that shimmers through and beyond us all. Weather flows across the continents. Water runs downstream to the sea. And humans take, eat, and share food that sustains our energy for living. Our human lungs even participate in this energy flow with trees–said to be the lungs of our planet–as we exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. It is all part of the flow, what Isaiah describes as the God-given breath and spirit of living. We breathe in. We breathe out, and we breathe in again God’s gift of life in a never ending flow.
Now when rivers stop flowing, the water stagnates and grows bacteria. When the weather stops moving, the drought comes or the wind ceases to blow the sailboat home. When we humans take ourselves out of the flow of energy, it is detrimental to our health. Eating nothing but the same thing will not keep us as well as we can be. We can’t keep breathing the same air or we’ll use up all the oxygen. Social isolation is found to be more dangerous for our long-term health than smoking a pack of cigarettes. There are times when we may need to do it but permanently taking ourselves out of the flow of nutrients, air, or social connection will not serve our well-being. We humans are made to flow.
The divine voice speaks in this chapter telling us, “I am the Lord, that is my name.” The first time God gives God’s name to someone in the Old Testament, it is to Moses in Exodus chapter 3 at the burning bush. God tells Moses, “I am who I am”, but I have told this church before how I love the interpretation that those same letters, along with I am who I am, could also be translated as I have been who I have been and I will be who I will be, suggesting that God exists, has existed, and will exist as if God is outside of our flow of time all together or exists on a wholly different timetable from our mere human lives.
I used to think of eternal life as something that happened when I died, but now I think about eternal life as a flowing stream upon which I am a mere but precious wave or ripple. That one little ripple isn’t very powerful, but God’s stream of eternal life is an unstoppable force.
What if that’s what it means to be a servant like the one called in today’s scripture? What if it means being a good steward of our one little ripple, so that the power of the holy stream of eternal, God-given life can flow into and through us even in small ways?
It’s tempting sometimes to want to close in and ball ourselves up. We may think what we have to share is not enough to make a difference. We may know that opening ourselves up enough to share makes us in some ways vulnerable. I hear that, and I also believe that when we share our time, energy, and gifts, we can joyfully experience that holy God-given flow of life.
We don’t have to be all powerful. We don’t have to share everything or share everything all at once or share so much it hurts. We can simply share what we have to share and in doing so we can serve the glory of God and our neighbor’s good in powerful ways. We can trust that our sharing will be met by others’ sharing and that God will work through our open hearts and hands.
I know it happens because I have seen what you can do together, church, when you each share simply what you have to share. You can build a community where for more than 100 years people have gathered on a Sunday morning to praise God and hold each other up. You can change here-and-now lives with the power of a listening ear, holy prayer, and loving action. You can feed hundreds of people more than a thousand pounds of food every month for more than 30 years.
This is what can happen when you share what you have to share. This is what flows from your open and generous sharing one household, one person, one year, one month, one day at a time.
One little bucket will not put out a house fire. But before there were high-tech fire trucks and fire hydrants there was something called a bucket brigade. Bucket brigades are still in use the world over where large machines are unavailable or cannot otherwise operate. If you’ve never participated in one, it’s a long line of people who are essentially an assembly line passing buckets to more efficiently move water or objects from one place to another.
A house fire will not have been put out by one bucket alone. But all those buckets poured in succession, may quench the flame. No one person can be a bucket brigade by themself, but a line of people can build a steady, saving stream that works the magic of water to stop fire.
So, too, we join together in sharing our time, our energy, and our gifts, trusting that God will use our faithful, generous service to continue that holy flow of life.
May it be so. Amen.
