Isaiah 42: 1-9 (links validated 12/27/23)

In the “Harry Potter” books and movies, J.K. Rowling had a lot of fun inventing clever features of the magic wielded by the wizards in the stories. One such clever device involved playing around with proportions and space. Thus in one part of the story while the characters of Harry, Ron, and Hermione are on the run and camping out in the woods to hide, they would pitch what from the outside looked like a small one- or at most two-person little pup tent. Except that when the three of them went inside the tent, it was huge, containing multiple rooms, furniture, lamps, food stuffs, and enough room to sleep a dozen people. Appearances can be deceiving when magic is involved! This reminds me of how all through history—in art, literature, cinema, poetry—people have tried to capture the paradox of the incarnate Christ in ways that also dealt with space, proportions, and appearances...

Some of us may remember the movie Weapons of the Spirit. We watched it together one Sunday in Lent a couple of years ago. It told the story of the people of Le Chambon, France who sheltered and protected 3500 Jewish people and 1500 other refugees during the occupation of France in the Holocaust. Many of those who were saved were children. One of the children who survived was Renée Kann. She was just a young child during the war. Her experience had been so traumatic that she put most of it out of her mind. The story of the courage and resistance of the people of Le Chambon was not well known, but then in 1989, Renée Kann came across an article in the New York Times about the Weapons of the Spirit movie. She said to her husband, “There is a film being made about a town where I think I might have spent some time.” So they went to see it together. A woman named Madeline Dreyfus was responsible for getting about 100 of those children to safety...

One of the longest running shows on TV is the beloved “Law and Order.” Apparently there is no end to people’s fascination with seeing the “law” catching the law breakers and the courts making sure that “order” is restored. What a testimony to our inbred need to see justice done in this world. I always tell myself that it is precisely my thirst for justice that drives my addiction to movies in which the bad guys get it in the end. But, if I’m honest, there’s also a bit of vengeance roiling around in me, mixed with a drop or two of blood lust. What a contrast to Jesus, the Servant who seeks justice not by beating people up, but by tenderly caring for the beaten up and then by being beaten up himself. It doesn’t fit our contemporary culture, but it is glorious proof of how much God loves us. The baptism of Jesus gave us a glimpse of God’s glory in the Servant, but the death of Jesus was the full revelation of God’s glorious love even for sinners with closed eyes and deaf ears.

The Servant, the one who delights God's soul, works to support rather than destroy. The servant will not break a bruised reed or snuff out a wick that is only dimly burning.(Isaiah 42:1-9) The Servant might be compared to the tie rod found in Early Renaissance architecture. In architecture, the Renaissance appeared as a look back to Classical architecture - the buildings and styles of ancient Greece and Rome.

A few years ago Bart Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote a book entitled, God’s Problem. In it he says God’s big problem is human suffering and why, though God promises to do something about suffering, God does nothing. God’s problem, claims Ehrman, is that when it comes to alleviating human suffering and anguish, God just doesn’t meet expectations.

In his book A Grief Observed, C S Lewis talks powerfully about the experience of being forced into the position of onlooker in a situation involving the suffering of another; of what it feels like to be relegated to the sidelines while a tragedy unfolds. And in particular, he describes the particular, impotent rage which the observer in these situation experiences: the desperate desire to be somehow empowered or equipped to intervene, to be able to change the course of events so that the suffering ceases or the tragedy doesn’t occur. And Lewis also describes the terrible sense of isolation and loneliness which this situation engenders: of how one desperately cries out to God for answers and solutions; and of how, instead, in the midst of our terrible pain, it only feels as though God has slammed the door shut in our faces, and all we can hear are the bolts being driven home on the other side.

("In his book The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson wrote about how he used to bristle whenever some high-powered business exec would shake hands with the pastor at the church door but then say, 'Nice sermon, pastor, but now it's back to the real world, isn't it?'...")

In James K.A. Smith’s book, Discipleship in the Present Tense he relates this scenario to the movie Speed Racer—that Speed and his family are destined to race, in fact compelled to race, but the World Racing League is corrupt and he “despairs that winning within the system will not change the system…” The question, therefore is how to operate within the system that so easily influences and corrupts the participants. Racer X reminds speed that it doesn’t matter so much weather or not racing changes but, “what matters is if racing changes us.”...

written after the tsunami of 2005

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("What does the voice of God sound like? What do you think? In film or T.V. drama it is usually a deep, booming, echoing sound - much like the 'It could be you!' voice on the National Lottery adverts. It's a voice that sounds like it should be written in capital letters...")

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There is a moment in the movie Freedom Writers, where Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank for months in her attic, is addressing the students of Woodrow Wilson High. She rejects the idea that she was any kind of hero, saying, “I did what I had to do, because it was the right thing to do…We are all ordinary people… but even an ordinary [person], can in their own small way, turn on a small light in a dark room.” That resonates with the call of Isaiah 42...