Word…for the week of January 7, 2006

The Baptism of the Lord
Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Isaiah’s prophesy forms the basis for a beautiful American hymn, “How Firm A Foundation.” The first time I encountered this hymn was when it was embedded in a choral version of Amy Grant’s “Thy Word” that my youth choir was singing. The hymn sings of God’s power and authority which does not leave or fail us, even in the middle of the worst experiences of our lives.

But the hymn doesn’t touch on the most interesting part of what Isaiah is talking about: the fact that God’s chosen people are the children of Israel. In what theologians call “the scandal of particularity,” God is willing to choose one (small) group of people over all the others. The Old Testament story is the story of that group, and the ways in which they struggle with God to discover what that means.

Is it important that God is willing to give up the Egyptians and Ethiopians for the Israelites? I’m sure that it is—and it makes me more than uncomfortable. I’m not sure I like the idea that God “exchanges” one nation for another.

And yet, we often measure the worth that which is most precious to us by what we had to give up. Perhaps that is what God is communicating to us in this passage. Was the people of Israel worth sacrificing all those other folks? Or was God planning on recovering the rest of those nations in the end as well?

I can only venture my own understanding: God gives up on no one. The scandalous, particular focus on Israel and the Church is meant to have a redemptive, ransoming, redeeming effect on the entire creation, including those nations which before have been seen as rejected. And in Christ Jesus, God's project of reconciliation extends to the entire world, through the particular agents of Israel and the Church.

In the end, God goes looking for everyone, and says the same thing which was said through Isaiah: "Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth--everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

Originally posted 1/9/07