Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, on the 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany, January 18, 2026: Isaiah 49:1-7
So here we have Isaiah
telling us the same thing he told us last week:
I will give you as a light to the nations, that my
salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
Looking at the Isaiah
passage for this morning, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before in this
text. It begins with the servant’s understanding of his or her calling. But, the servant admits that she is exhausted:
I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for
nothing and vanity.
I don’t know about you,
but those words resonate in my soul right now.
Part of the problem of being called to be light in the world is that it
is fairly dark out there, and the darkness seems to be on the rise. And what can my little light do in the face
of all the craziness of the world?
Yet I feel called to do
something. We’ve been through plenty of
times when we disagreed with the powers that be, whatever their political
stripe. This feels much more urgent.
If I—If we—are going to
shine our light, I think first we must get clear about its source, and its
source is not us. The servant makes this
clear after his confession of exhaustion. And yet, he says
Surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with
my God.
So what is the source of
the light? Or, perhaps more bluntly, What is the light?
One of my teachers,
Elizabeth Johnson, writes something very helpful to assist us in answering this
question.
Woven through the saving history recounted in the
Scriptures, one startling theme emerges.
This the peculiar way the God of Israel has of siding with vulnerable
persons considered of no account.
Freeing slaves from Egypt; protecting the widow and orphan; making known
through the prophets that divine glory is revealed only when justice is done;
making known through Jesus that the last will be first in the kingdom of God;
raising that crucified victim of state violence from the dead; this is not the
way the powerful Creator of the world might be expected to act. But to ignore
this is to be ill-informed about the God of the Bible.
As servants of God, we
have a biblical mandate to show compassion and loving kindness to those being
trampled on in our world. This is not a
call to tell about the light, this is a call to be the light. This is the call from the prophet Micah that
we will hear in a couple weeks: “Do
justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.”
I’m struck by the word
“kindness” there. I think the darkness
all around us these days is due to a commitment not to be kind. Kindness is thought to be a sign of
weakness. Only strength will lead to
greatness, and there is only room in this world for one country of strength,
us.
That flies in the face
of that great thread of loving kindness and mercy in the Bible. What we need is a revolution of kindness.
There is the phrase,
popular some years ago, “Practice random acts of kindness.” I don’t agree, but my trouble is not with the
word “kindness,” it is with the word “random.”
“Be kind” should be the air we breathe and the goal of our every act.
That feels like an
impossible task. And it is impossible,
at least on our own. We need God, and we need each other for any of us to
achieve this commitment to kindness. We have to also say, with the servant,
“yet my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.”
Our only hope in this
time of darkness is God. That can be
confusing since all around us people are citing God as the course of their
worldview. And because of this confusion,
people are turning away from any faith in God.
Less than half of the country are now regular church goers and the
number is plummeting.
But we cannot pay much attention
to that. The numbers game is a
distraction. As soon as our energy gets
taken by anxiety over how to get more bodies in the pews, we are lost. Does Jesus want more followers? Yes, he does.
But the secret of Jesus is that you only get more followers by
following.
So let us be about
that. Let us be the light of God’s
loving kindness. Let us join Jesus in his revolution of kindness.
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