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.
2 He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
3 a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
4 He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
5 Thus says God, the Lord,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it
and spirit to those who walk in it:
6 I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations,
7 to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.
With all the concern of late about obesity in this country, it
is not surprising that our grocery shelves and airwaves are
filled with all kinds of lite products that offer pleasure for
the pallet without the guilt of calories. We have lite bread,
lite beer, lite milk, lite syrup, lite ice cream and lite cake
mixes so you really can have your cake and eat it too! And they
are big sellers. Coke Zero alone brings in more than $1 billion
for the soda giant. Watch for runner-up Pepsi Max to out do
their rival with humor in a Super bowl commercial, itself a
multi-million dollar affair for 30 seconds of glory. I feel so
healthy every time I drink one of their products that I have to
eat a Twinkie to compensate!
Well it is high time, I think, for the church to take advantage
of the lite craze and to proclaim a lite Gospel! Think of the
appeal we could have with “God lite” services sponsored by
Starbucks and offered every half-hour on Sunday morning, with a
15 minute coffee break between each morsel of worship! Come to
First Christian Church to hear the low calorie Gospel that will
never fill you up, a Gospel that is fat-free, non-controversial,
trimmed and packaged for a quick sale. A Gospel that is
chopped up into little, bite-size pieces, easy to swallow. A
Gospel for the good times, so bland that it offends no one. A
Gospel that allows millions to become Christians and changes
nothing. A Gospel that is homogenized, pasteurized, positive
thinking fortified, easy to sell.
Some people think the church has already been proclaiming such a
Gospel Lite for many years. René Padilla, a theologian from
Ecuador, sounded this warning over 30 years ago at the
International Congress of World Evangelism. He said that “the
Gospel of culture Christianity is a message that if not accepted
can at least be easily tolerated because it doesn’t disturb
anybody. It is a Gospel that the free consumers of religion
will want to receive because it is cheap and demands nothing of
them.”
Allan Patton, the great novelist from South Africa, warned that
“the greatest danger of Christianity in Africa today is
pseudo-Christianity. The marks of pseudo-Christianity are easy
to recognize. It always prefers stability to change, order to
freedom, law to justice, ... realism to love.” I believe Patton
is right except that his scope was too limited, that is the
danger of Christianity in any time and any place.
Witness the recent Senate hearings which came to a close under
Republican Senator Grassley from Iowa. Grassley launched an
investigation in 2007 into the spending habits of six prominent
televangelists notorious for their luxurious lifestyles, private
jets, posh vacation homes and in one case, a $23,000 marble
toilet. (I wonder if anyone will investigate the $54 I just
spent upgrading our 3 toilets to water-saving dual flush
capabilities?!) Friday’s news article reported that each
preached “some form of the prosperity gospel, which teaches that
God wants to bless the faithful with earthly riches. Ministers
in this tradition,” the AP story reads, “often hold up their own
wealth as evidence that the teaching works.”
I missed that somewhere in my seminary education. Instead I got
things like Danish theologian Søren Kirkegaard who taught that
authentic Christian faith is found in shocking paradoxes. He
said, “Remove from Christian religion its ability to shock and
Christianity is altogether destroyed.” From this perspective,
great weight is placed on the paradoxes of proclaiming a savior
who was crucified among sinners; on the scandal of the cross, an
instrument of humiliation, suffering and oppression, which we
are called to bear; on the teachings of Jesus which frequently
offended the powerful, the rich and political and religious
leaders alike. At least that’s what I learned. Maybe I went to
the wrong seminary.
In contrast to the lite Gospel, this shocking Gospel is very
heavy. Like the cross, it becomes too heavy even for Jesus to
carry. Thus otherwise very good, decent folk feel unworthy to
wear the crown because they cannot bear the cross. It is no
wonder they stay away from the church.
Is there not an alternative between choosing, on the on hand,
this lite Gospel that has as much nutritional value and flavor
as a fat-free, sugarless, cholesterol-free fruit cake, and on
the other hand, a heavy Gospel that is about as appealing as a
winter vacation in Tora Bora searching for Osama bin Laden. I
believe there is something between those two. Not the heavy
Gospel but the whole Gospel which offers joy as well as
sacrifice, hope as well as obligation and duty, grace and
forgiveness alongside judgment. Not the lite Gospel but the
Gospel of Light that illumines the darkness, rather than denies
it; that shares the burden of the cross instead of dropping it;
that confronts sin, rather than ignoring it.
This full-bodied Gospel of light does not shy away from
controversies and the demands of our faith, neither does it seek
to lay heavy burdens and guilt trips on the faithful. It
proclaims that the Good News is neither great tasting nor less
filling but rather is long lasting and fulfilling, leaving
nothing out and holding nothing back. It calls us to be
servants to all and subservient to none, to be bold in our
proclamation and humble in spirit, to depend fully on God and
yet claim human responsibility for our actions, to hate evil and
love the enemy, to know the riches of the inheritance in God and
yet to be poor in spirit, to believe in the full divinity of
Christ and the full humanity of Jesus.
To proclaim the whole Gospel of Light is to leave out neither
the disturbing parts, as does the lite Gospel, nor to disregard
all else save the paradoxes as does the heavy Gospel, but rather
to affirm the vivid contrasts and multi-faceted perspectives of
the whole Gospel. A Gospel of love that is limited as Paul says
by “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation.”
We see the boldness in this Gospel of Light in the text this
morning from Isaiah with it’s threefold call for justice. God’s
servant, the prophet says,
will bring forth justice
to the nations (v. 1); … he will faithfully bring forth
justice (v. 3); … He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth. (v. 4)
That that justice is social justice, Glen Beck please take note,
is made clear in vs. 6-7:
I have given you as a
covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the
eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the
dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.
We also see the humility of the servant in this text who does
not lift his voice or break a bruised reed or quench a dimly lit
wick. We see that same humility in Jesus when he insists that
John, despite John’s protest, baptize him. And then we see this
same Jesus, as Peter says in Acts, boldly commanding the
disciples to preach that he is the one ordained by God to judge
the living and the dead.
To accept and affirm the whole Gospel of Light, as opposed to
the Lite Gospel or the heavy Gospel, is to accept the
contrasting claims on us that call for a proclamation of that
whole Gospel, not just part of it, for the whole world, not just
to those we like. That means at times we must be bold, at other
times humble. (Tomorrow night is a time to be bold, Duck fans
can be humble after the victory!) At times we must shout from
the rooftops, at other times whisper our prayers in the closet.
At times we must challenge injustice in our world and other
times seek forgiveness for injustice we cause. We must be
willing to speak a word of judgment and yet also speak a word of
grace. To address the needs of the individual as well as those
of all humanity. To speak to the heart and also to the mind.
The Gospel of Light is the proclamation of the whole Gospel for
the whole person to the whole world. We have been entrusted
with this Gospel to bring to sight those who are blind
physically as well as those who are blind spiritually. To bring
to light those imprisoned for criminal activity as well as those
imprisoned by their own fears.
I was struck by the statement several years ago of Wesley Dodd
before he was hung in the state of Washington for the murder of
three young boys. He said that he had thought that nothing
could be done to stop pedophiles like himself from sexually
abusing children, but that he was wrong. For in prison he
discovered Jesus Christ and, he claimed, was healed of his
sexual addiction.
Perhaps that was just the confession of a dying man, someone
desperate to save his soul or in some way to bring some good in
a small way out of all the evil that he had done and therefore
easy to dismiss. Certainly my own experience of working with
pedophiles as well as knowledge of sexual addictions suggest
that such miraculous cures are very rare.
Yet did not Dodd sit in the darkness of prison spiritually as
well as physically? Was not the Gospel of light intended for
him too? Could not Christ free him from the darkness that
surrounded him most of his life?
Most people were glad that he got his just due. I would like to
think that his just due was not the gallows but the cross. That
Dodd may have discovered, as did those criminals on Golgotha
2,000 years ago, that this cruel instrument of death is also the
means to and the symbol of new life.
Do you see the incredible contrast here? The juxtaposition of
criminals with Jesus on Golgotha? Or a Wesley Dodd with a
Mother Theresa, possibly both included in the realm of God? It
provides us precisely with the kind of contrast illuminated by
the Gospel of Light that shows the wideness of God’s love and
the depth of God’s mercy. Whereas the lite Gospel either would
dismiss the seriousness of Dodd’s sin or would not entertain the
possibility of his forgiveness altogether, the Gospel of Light
acknowledges that there are those like Dodd who sit in deep
darkness, but that there is no darkness so deep that the light
of God cannot reach it. Whereas the heavy Gospel would
emphasize the paradox of the innocent Christ dying for a
convicted child killer and would conclude that, even as unworthy
and guilty as we are, that we also will receive this
forgiveness, the Gospel of light instead emphasizes the light
of the nations that will establish justice on the earth, and
that we, no matter how badly bruised or how dim our wick, that
we are still part of God’s creation. Therefore, we are worthy
of God’s love, not unworthy.
Every time I hear someone say they are unworthy of God’s love, I
want to shout out in the good tradition of Congressman Joe
Wilson, “You lie!”. But then I realize that will only make them
feel more unworthy. We are worthy as human beings created in
God’s image, which is why Christ gave us his life for us. Don’t
let anyone tell you are unworthy or anyone else. You are God’s
child, don’t ever forget that.
To all those who are lost in darkness, hear then the Good News:
there is one bold enough to enter into our darkness and gentle
enough to lead us out of it. His light shines in the night and
leads us forward. May we be humble enough follow, and bold
enough to lead others in that light. This is the full Gospel
for all God’s people.
