Isaiah 43:1-7Isaiah 43:1-7
the one who created you, Jacob,
the one who formed you, Israel:
Don’t fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
when through the rivers, they won’t sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire, you won’t be scorched
and flame won’t burn you.
I am the Lord your God,
the holy one of Israel, your savior.
I have given Egypt as your ransom,
Cush and Seba in your place.
Because you are precious in my eyes,
you are honored, and I love you.
I give people in your place,
and nations in exchange for your life.
Don’t fear,
I am with you.
From the east I’ll bring your children;
from the west I’ll gather you.
I’ll say to the north, “Give them back!”
and to the south, “Don’t detain them.”
Bring my sons from far away,
and my daughters from the end of the earth,
everyone who is called by my name
and whom I created for my glory,
whom I have formed and made
THE MODERN LESSON Carl Sandburg’s The Windy City, Section 1 Jim Golec
The lean hands of wagon men
put out pointing fingers here,
picked this crossway, put it on a map,
set up their sawbucks, fixed their shotguns,
found a hitching place for the pony express,
made a hitching place for the iron horse,
the one-eyed horse with the fire-spit head,
found a homelike spot and said, “Make a home,”
saw this corner with a mesh of rails, shuttling
people, shunting cars, shaping the junk of
Out of the payday songs of steam shovels,
Out of the wages of structural iron rivets,
The living lighted skyscrapers tell it now as a name,
Tell it across miles of sea blue water, gray blue land:
I am Chicago, I am a name given out by the breaths of working men,
laughing men, a child, a belonging.
So between the Great Lakes,
The Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie,
The living lighted skyscrapers stand,
Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow,
streamers of smoke and silver,
parallelograms of night-gray watchmen,
Singing a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging.
As you many already know, Camie LaPorte and her three boys are in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the moment, as she continues to battle cancer with her extended family. The good news is that she seems to be withstanding the difficult chemo treatments, and there are some good initial signs that she is going to be OK. The boys, Ben, Will and Sam, seem to be making new friends in Grand Rapids, and like being close to nearby family, but, unsurprisingly, they can’t wait to get back to Chicago, hopefully sooner rather than later – and we certainly want them back. In Camie’s latest posting on Caring Bridge, a website where we can follow her journey into healing, she wrote the following: So the boys and I got home last night after spending 4 days in our beloved hometown of Chicago, seeing friends and family we’ve missed so much! We had the best time. Sam said to me as we turned off our usual exit to go home on our way to another friends house, “Mom, too bad we aren’t just going home right now,” and I ached for that right along with him. Our move was sudden. I’ve lived in Chicago my entire adult life. It is our home, and we miss it terribly. I think she and the boys are a lot like many of us, who have found our home here in Chicago – it feels as if we belong here, that this is our city. I often tell people that I’ve lived in a lot places, small places Coloma, Michigan, and bigger places like Birmingham, Atlanta, Seattle, Spokane, Oklahoma City, Dallas and Houston, but none have felt as right as Chicago. I love so many things about the places I’ve lived, but none felt like Chicago does for me – this place, and even this region, just feels right for both Douglas and I. It’s like we belong to this place, this profoundly imperfect place, and for many of you, I suspect that is true for you, whether you’ve lived here all your life and just showed up a few years ago. I know that’s not true for everyone, I get that, but its truer here than I’ve seen it in another places. Carl Sandburg hints at this truth in his famous poem about Chicago – that the city seems to own its people, that those who are here seem to belong to the place, to its rhythms, its skyscrapers, its Great Lakes, its endless prairies.
That sense of belonging to something, to a place or a people, to a community, a neighborhood, it matters more than we know, I think, especially if we’ve lived transient lives, or been in one place that didn’t ever quite feel like home. Like so many, my adult life has been a transient one, having lived no longer than five years in one place since my family came back to the States from Indonesia in 1982. Until Chicago, that is. And because I can’t ever go back home again – the oil camp in which I lived during my childhood was itself so transient itself – I’ve never quite felt like there was a place I could quite fully claim as home – I suspect the children of military members feel the same way. My hometown is Meridian, MS, but it’s not really home – its just the place where most of my family was, where we visited during the summers of my childhood. There is a sense of homelessness that many people have, until they discover home later in life, people like me, people like Douglas.
And so I feel as if I belong to Chicago, and perhaps even the upper Midwest, where Douglas and I plan to retire in the next 15-20 years. Say what you will about the cold in January, but the August heat and humidity in Atlanta is just as bad! It’s been wonderful to feel as if you’ve found a hometown, a place that feels just right, a place where you belong, that, despite not being native, you feel as if you were always meant to be here. Connection, belonging, a sense of place, it’s important, and that truth is no different for our less than city wide connections, a belonging to a community, a people. “Whose your people?” is something Southerners often ask of the strangers in their midst, “whose your kin, whose your family.” We all have “our people,” friends, families of blood and families of choice, co-workers, neighbors, and even those who have experienced similar joys and sorrows that we have – communities, belongings of the moment, or connections forged through similar happiness and pain. In the creation story, in the more patriarchal version of the two creation stories, Eve is created from Adam’s rib, simply because Adam seemed so lonely, so alone. We are made for each other, made for connection, made to belong to one another, bone from bone, story to story, life to life.
This need to belong to something, to someone, to a community is not just a quirk of our creation, an interesting note to the grander story. No, its at the heart of the human story, so embedded is this need to belong to something, to a people, to a community, to fellow travelers, that without it we can fade so quickly and deeply into depression. In his wonderful book Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions, Johann Hari gathers up scientific date that shows that most depression is rooted in our disconnections from things like meaningful work, meaningful values, from status and respect, from the natural world, and even disconnection from the reality of the childhood trauma that many of us have experienced. But Hari puts forth the idea that disconnection from others is one of the foremost reasons for why we may become depressed. He cites the work of John Cacioppo, a neuroscience research at our own University of Chicago that tracked the mental and physical health of 229 older Americans in our own suburbs. What he found was that loneliness preceded the symptoms of depression – “you become lonely and that was followed by feelings of despair and profound sadness and depression.” (Hari 77) The effect was profound – even what seems a small shift in the measurements around loneliness led to something like 8 times the chance you would begin slipping into depression. To belong to a network of friends, a church, a community, bring us a sense of well-being, even if we are not aware of it, and that shows us how we have been created to belong, created to have connections with each other. Adam was unhappy when he was alone, and so Eve came along – and I just want to point out something obvious: God created a companion for Adam not so that they could have babies (that was simply a happy byproduct), but because God saw that Adam was alone and that made him deeply unhappy. We are creations who need connection to one another, in communities, in places, in order to be healthy and to be whole.
In our text from Isaiah in this beautiful and remarkable slice of Scripture, we get a sense of innate, built-in, need to belong, and how, despite the efforts of those who wish disconnection, God asks us to hold fast to connection, to remember our connection to God, and to each other. You see, the supposed best and brightest of Israel—the smart ones, the rich ones, the charismatic ones, and, yes, even the best bureaucrats, had been carted off from Israel to the capital city of Babylon in the late 7th century as part of a strategy by the Babylonians of disconnecting these people from their land and the people left behind. I suspect this strategy goes back to the old adage that it’s best to keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer, because that way you can keep an eye on what’s going on and whether or not there are rumblings of rebellions in the ranks. Decades and decades of living away from their homelands, multiple generations living and dying away from home, had brought the Jewish people to the edge of despair, and the pervasive hopelessness was as thick as the air can be here in Chicago during August.
But here comes Isaiah, or one speaking in Isaiah’s name, and he starts in the previous chapters by reminding them of what had gotten them to them to Babylon in the first place—their disobedience, their unwillingness to do justice with the least of their brethren, their decision not listen and hear what earlier prophets had said, had been the cause that brought them into captivity, according to this prophet. Still, there is hope, and that is where chapter 43 starts, where God speaks, and begins at the beginnings, begins by pointing out the biggest reason why God still gives a damn about them: “He who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel,” so says God in this text, and those are words of possession and creation—“you are mine,” the prophet has God saying here. And so the first connection amidst all the connections we have is connection to God -You are mine, God says to us, and our belonging simply comes from being created by God, by simply being born in this world.
And what does this belonging to God actually mean, this connection that comes to us simply because we have been created, because we have been made by God? Well, according to our texts, it brings us presence; it brings us a God who is with us, through the waters, through the hellish moments of our lives. In Jewish thought, the waters always represent chaos and fear, and by culture, it was rare for Jews to really head out on the high seas, beyond the lakes, because there was a profound and mysterious fear of all the unknown that sea seemed to represent. Here, in this Scripture, God says this: “Don’t fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; when through the rivers, they won’t sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you won’t be scorched and flame won’t burn you. Belonging to God means that we are her people, and he will be beside us, during the good times but also during the bad times. But that is also true when we are connected to each other as well – when the going gets tough, our communities of choice, places like this, this church, they are there for us, they embody God’s presence and love for us in tangible ways. Of course, it doesn’t just happen in religious communities, it can happen anywhere, in moments where we just need to be reminded that we belong, that we are a part of something, a tribe, a band of fellow travelers.
The rest of the text, well, the rest reminds us what God is willing to do for us, to barter and trade, to push and pull for us, to make the nations give us up, release us, like Babylon one day would give up its Jewish captives, after so many years of enslavement. And if we’ve spent a lifetime wondering to whom do we really belong, about where we belong in this world, the answer to that wonderment is actually here in this text, rooted in our reality as created beings. I know we Christians spend too much time arguing about whose in and whose out—I think it’s one of the earliest Christian sins, these endless arguments about what the Gospel is and who it includes, and it is an argument that has turned off too many of my friends because it so often seemed to exclude them, either by saying you are included if you do this, or love this way, or they simply were turned off by some versions of Christianity because they didn’t want to live in our world that seemed to be divided by insiders and outsiders, the saved and unsaved, the faithful and non-faithful. If religion was all about that, they were pretty sure that it wasn’t about them. And I can’t blame them. I mean, who could, really, if you wanted to actually live within the world that God created, rather than trying live above it, which Jesus never did, and which he decried the Pharisee’s attempt to do so.
No, this God includes my skeptical friends whether or not they even know it, like it includes all of us, and this God is for them simply because they have been birthed into this world by the Living God, and this God pull us up and pushes us through, in this messy world and life we live, the real world, even during time when its difficult, even when we would rather succumb to the waters, to the chaos, to the fear, to the loneliness. Some years ago, on a hot summer day in South Florida, a little boy decided to go to the old swimming hole behind his house. In a hurry to dive into the cool water, he ran out the back door, leaving behind shoes, socks and shirt as he went. He flew into the water, not realizing that as he swam toward the middle of the lake, an alligator was swimming toward the shore. The boy’s father, working in the yard, saw the two get closer and closer together. In utter fear, he ran toward the water, yelling to his son as loudly as he could.
Hearing his dad’s voice, the little boy became alarmed and made a U-turn to swim to his father. It was too late. Just as he reached his father, the alligator reached him. From the dock, the father grabbed his little boy by the arms just as the alligator snatched his legs. That began an incredible tug-of-war between the two. The alligator was much stronger than the father, but the father was much too passionate to let go.
A farmer happened to drive by, heard screams, raced from his truck, took aim and shot the alligator. Remarkably, after weeks in the hospital, the little boy survived. His legs were extremely scarred by the vicious attack. And on his arms were deep scratches where his father’s fingernails dug into his flesh in an effort to hang on to the son he loved.
A newspaper reporter who interviewed the boy after the trauma asked if he would show him his scars. The boy lifted his pant legs. And then, with obvious pride, he said to the reporter, “But look at my arms. I have great scars on my arms, too. I have them because my dad wouldn’t let go.” (Homiletics Online website)
The God who holds onto us because we are one of his children, that we belong to her, that holding fast to us is just part of belonging to God. And places like this, intentional communities formed around faith in God and the belief that we might need each other as fellow travelers in life and faith, these kinds of belonging places are really important, places where we can show each other’s the scars from the God who would not let us go. Other places can include and help us to remember our birthright, the belonging that is simply part of our birthright as created beings, but the church, the church, at its best, is unlike those other communities. The difference is found in its intentionality, in the fact we don’t just forgive and struggle and laugh and know joy together as a side bonus that comes out a project or a work we are doing – raising money for the PTA, or something like that. The laughing the struggling, the joy, the forgiveness, is why we gather, because those lessons are best learned when we’re conscious and aware that this place of belonging is the one where those lessons should be learned with intentionality. God has given a special purpose to places like the church, we who are called to embrace the lovely and the ugly, the strong and the broken, the easy ones to love and the hard ones to love. But we must, we must be very, very intentional about extending that sense of belonging to everyone and, honestly, we sometimes don’t and we’ve simply got to get better at it. Part of the purpose of creating these Mission and Ministries teams was to help us re-learn that lesson, that we are a place of belonging, of welcome, another place one could call home in this beautiful city and this world, but doing that work consciously and with intention. We belong to God and we belong to each other, and so much of our spiritual work is reminding ourselves and each other of that real truth. We are better when we know we belong and we know that belongin in our bones. You are mine, says God to the world, you are part of me, of my love, of my purpose, of my heart – may we never forgot that truth and may we never forget to practice that truth with others. Amen.
