Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-12; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42
I’d like you to think for a moment about the people who surround you in life; those who are insiders and those who are outsiders. Think about what makes your friends your friends and what makes your enemies your enemies. Think about those you cherish and about those who exist only on the outer edges of your life.
Think about your friends, your good friends… what happened that made them more than just acquaintances in your life? Are they close friends because of common interests – hobbies, sports, religion, political views? Are they close friends because of something they did or do for you – they visited you in the hospital, they watched your kids when you were sick, they lifted you up somehow? Are they close friends because of something you did or do for them – you cried with them through a terrible divorce, you stood with them when no one else did, you raised them up? Or can you even explain why they are such close friends?
Now think about those almost-friendships of the past, the ones that never actually happened. These are the people who you wanted to become more than an acquaintance with, but you could never seem to say the right thing or do the right thing to make it happen. These are the folks who wanted to become more than an acquaintance with you, but for whatever reason you didn’t notice the signs or want to pursue friendship with them.
Then there are those people you could never be friends with and who could never be friends with you. There was something that stopped friendship before it even had a chance. They were a republican-democrat-independent, you were something else. They were the struggling poor, you were the comfortably rich. They had a master’s degree, you had an equivalency diploma. You were an Episcopalian, they a Moslem. You both judged each other’s books by their covers. The cost of friendship was just too high to even consider trying it out with them – too much work, too many social questions, too many compromises, too much risk, too much sacrifice.
And so we have those who live within our circle, inside the orbit of our lives, and we have those who exist somewhere out there, outside the orbit of our day to day lives. We may not even know they exist any longer; they may not even know we’re still their neighbor. We’ve written each other off completely; they pass like ghosts through our day, we pass like a mist through theirs. We could be in the same room, the same class, the same neighborhood, the same office, the same church, the same small town, and still we’d be invisible to each other.
As the Prophet Isaiah reminds us today, this is not what God calls you and me to. We, those who I acknowledge in my life and those I don’t, we can no longer afford to live our lives this way. The stakes are far too high. People around us are starving, they’re freezing, they’re drowning in debt and addiction and hopelessness and despair, they’re dying the victims of violence and injustice that are daily occurrences. The world is teaching them that they are not deserving of hope, that they are just too different, too risky to acknowledge, they require too much sacrifice to love.
As a Christian, God calls me out from the ways of this world. As Christians God calls us out from things that separate and segregate and put into boxes. God speaks to us through the words of Isaiah to offer us encouragement in our journey and to show us what we are called to do and to be.
These words from Isaiah are a foreshadowing of the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ, ‘The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. 2He 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. 3And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”’ As Christians Baptized into the Body of Christ, these words speak of us now as well.
These words from Isaiah speak of us too: ‘And now the Lord says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the Lord, and my God has become my strength— 6he says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”’
This is our charge as Christians, our charge as the children of God, our charge as the Body of Jesus Christ in the world – these words from the lips of God, “I give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” These words speak of each of us, and of our importance to God.
But this call does not come without cost or without sacrifice. Loving those who are the outcasts and the undesirables of the world can come at personal cost – ‘7Thus says the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one’, Jesus and now us, ‘deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers.’
But our sacrifice and personal cost will make way for God’s divine providence, because when we serve God, as Isaiah says, ‘“Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”’
And our sacrifice and personal cost pale in comparison to the One who is foretold to begin the fulfillment of God’s promise in Isaiah. In John’s Gospel today we hear of the One who has come, the One John the Baptist identifies twice to those around him in the river Jordan. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” The next day John again identifies the One who has come fulfilling Isaiah with the same words, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
I hear the phrase “Lamb of God” and I think of another lamb, Mary and her Little Lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and my mind is filled with soft, cuddly, happy images. But this is not what John the Baptist or John the Gospeller wanted hearers to imagine. To Jewish hearers, lambs were those things you sacrificed to God, especially during the Passover celebration. The Lamb of God was not one who came to be soft and cuddly; the Lamb of God is one who is “pure and unblemished”; the One who came to suffer and to die so that others may live; the One whose blood would be used to save; the One whose blood Hebrews smeared their doorposts in Egypt with on the eve of their Exodus; the One whose blood will (sustain) stain each of us at Eucharist today.
This little Lamb of Mary didn’t come to cutely frolic and play, to be part of some petting zoo, or to be memorialized in a children’s poem. This Lamb of Mary came to feed the hungry, to cloth the naked, to heal the sick and the lame, to bring hope to the prisoner, to humble the rich and the powerful by showing them true riches and power. This Lamb of Mary came to pour himself out for those who hated him, to empty himself for his church that had lost its way, to offer his very flesh as food and his very blood as drink. This Lamb of Mary, the true Lamb of God, came to save us from our sins, to destroy the hold of fear and death over our lives, and to set us free to choose Love, to choose God.
Most importantly, this Lamb of Mary, this Lamb of God came to all the world; to my friends and to my enemies, to those I share my days with and to those I avoid, to those whose lives are intertwined with mine and to those whose lives I don’t even acknowledge.
So enjoy the gift of friendship, especially close friends; they are a special gift from God. But we can’t afford to stop there. God calls us to also enjoy the gift of those we don’t consider to be friends. God calls us to enjoy the gift of those we don’t see, those we can’t see, those that for whatever reason we won’t see.
Our Good News today is that God doesn’t wear blinders or filtering glasses; God sees all of us. God calls me to take off my blinders and my filters and to see all, especially those I don’t like to see or don’t want to see. God calls me to transform my heart of stone into a heart of flesh, because only a heart of flesh lets people in, all people.
The Good News today is that we are all children of God, children of the Lamb – Mary’s Lamb. We all have value and are all gifts to the world. It may not be easy or convenient or “feel good”, but God calls us to look into the eyes of even those we see no value in… and to love them, as we are loved by Jesus the Lamb.