Epiphany II
Isaiah 49:1-7 and John 1:29-42
January 15, 2017
Rev. Amy P. McCullough
On Friday morning I listened to the day’s installment of StoryCorps, National Public Radio’s program to document segments of life across our country. StoryCorps has been a favorite of mine since I read its published collection, Listening is an Act of Love, which included a woman finding comfort from a drugstore clerk in the midst of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and a child hounding a father to speak truth about what life had been like in Auschwitz. I always learn something when I listen in on someone else’s life, as I suspect you do also, because our stories reveal truth about our life together.
Friday’s story was picked, I imagine, in recognition of tomorrow’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and told a painful piece of the Civil Rights struggles of this country. Vernon Dahmer was a successful black farmer in Hattiesburg, MS in the 1960’s. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the state of Mississippi created a poll tax, essentially barring many would-be-voters from the polls. In January 1966, Dahmer publically announced he would pay the poll tax of any African-American who wanted to register to vote but could not afford to do so. That very night, the Klu Klux Klan firebombed his home, while he, his wife, and their three children were inside. His widow said, “We didn’t think anyone would bother the children, but we were wrong.” As the house burned to the ground, Vernon handed a child out of the window, and helped the family to flee for safety in a nearby barn. Later Vernon died of his injuries. His daughter said, “In Daddy’s world, everybody had a job to do. Black people couldn’t vote, so I do understand why he did what he did.” His wife, having now lived fifty years without him, said simply, “I miss him so much.”[1] An act of generosity and resistance cost a man his life, a family a husband and father.
Listening to the story as I drove up Calvert Street, my eyes filled with tears, because although the story is from fifty years ago, it speaks across the decades to the wounds that still a part of our country. Hatred, fear and racism are very much alive. I share it with you this morning on Human Relations Sunday, a day in which the United Methodist Church affirms the right of all God’s children to realize their potential as human beings, simultaneously affirming that we find our greatest potential by being in right relationship with one another. This Sunday comes in this season of light, where the truth that Jesus is the Word made flesh means Jesus can be revealed in the face of another. An alternate translation for the Word, Logos, is story. What better way to learn the grace and truth brought to us in Jesus than through learning someone else’s story?
“Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away!” cries the servant in Isaiah, hoping to restart the story of those who are living in exile. The servant’s words speak into a demoralized nation, people cast from home, suffering from past sins, and waiting, as all of us always are, for God’s way forward. “The Lord called me before I was born,” says the servant. “God gave me words to speak, hid me in the shelter of divine arms until the right time, assured me that I could testify to you of your restoration.” Spoken to those who have lost everything - home, land, livelihood – the servant says not everything is lost. Listen to my story. God is still working here.
The servant who speaks these truths is known as the suffering servant. In four separate passages throughout the section section of Isaiah, the suffering servant flickers in and out of the larger witness. We don’t know exactly who this servant is – one person or multiple people, a present figure or a future hope, but the voice is a clear one. It speaks of hope as well as pain and holds a gritty grasp on God. “My cause is with the Lord,” servant says. I believe that God is faithful. The servant is compellingly honest about his own defeats. “I have labored in vain,” speaks the voice. “I have spent my strength for nothing…I am despised by the nations.” Here is a voice of truth: I feel the call of God. I have stayed faithful in the strife. For that I have suffered. At times it appears I have failed.
Now exile is a place where one must confront truth. With everything familiar is stripped away and every frivolous distraction also gone, life shrinks down to survival. Who am I? What am I made of? What truly do I need? If you preparing to trek across a remote wilderness you whittle down your needs to 12 tools that create food and shelter; hopefully fitting into one backpack. If you have to flee from your home in an instant, you grab only the essentials: coat, shoes, keys, shoes, and cellphone. The suffering servant, who, let’s imagine, has been stripped of home, and faces the added pain of others’ disapproval, learns he needs only one thing: the courage of his convictions. I believe God’s claim in on me. God’s hand is in my formation. God’s words are in my speech. What matters is not whether I am successful. What matters is whether I am faithful. One of the leaders of the protests within East Germany in the 1980’s, speaking about the decades of nonviolent meetings and marches that eventually led to their freedom summarized their struggle with this basic idea. “We didn’t persevere because we were confident we would win. We were not sure what the future held. We kept at it because we knew we were right. We knew we were on the side of justice.”
The servant of Isaiah isn’t known just as the servant but the suffering servant, because suffering can be a part of faithfulness. Truth can hurt. Others refuse the message. Justice can be met with firebombs. Suffering, alone, isn’t necessarily holy, or even necessary. In a world as angry and unequal as ours, we know there is too much innocent suffering. But when a servant of God willingly suffers, believing their actions are faithful to God’s call, the suffering can be transformative. Through such sacrifice God can work. In his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote of how we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality”…and praised those in the movement who “acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
In the beginning the servant views his mission as directed to his own exiled people. God created me, he says, to bring the tribes of Jacob back to God. The restoration of Israel is to be my story. But God’s story is always bigger than ours. God responses in scripture, saying to go only to one people is too light a thing to do. As another scholar puts it, God says “it is too small a task for you to speak only to those you know, love, recognize as people like yourself, helping you create the community you had before. You are to be light to the ends of the earth.”[2]
Our sufferings, faithfully held, can help us see another’s suffering, You lose someone you love, and when you hear about someone else in grief you feel compelled to reach out. You help one child learn to read and start to think about the kids who don’t have books in their homes. You deliver a set of 20 backpacks to school and that night as you stir the soup for dinner you think of those around the world who would eagerly sit down at your table. If you experience discrimination, find yourself cut off from a seat at the table you realize in your bones how exclusion hurts everyone. The widow of Vernon Dahmer spent the decade after his husband’s murder working for voter registration in Mississippi, learning while the threat was real, the mission was greater. To learn someone else’s story is to share in their suffering, and story-by story-by-story relationships are forged, truth becomes clearer, God appears in the faces of our brothers and sisters, and the world is recreated.
Centuries after the prophet Isaiah, the prophet John will identify Jesus as the Lamb of God, linking the redemptive suffering of servant to Jesus’ willingness to carry the brokenness of all. When the Word made flesh meets his first disciples, the disciples ask him, “where are you staying?” It’s such an odd question. Coming face to face with the Messiah they seem to inquire, “Are you staying at the hotel down the road?” We might understand the question as one of social location, since where we live shapes who we are. Staying, though, in the Greek means dwelling or abiding. Where do you abide? Since this is the gospel in which Jesus will say abide in me and I will abide in you, it’s likely that the question held a deeper meaning. Are you the one who dwells with God? Where have you decided to stand? Jesus says, come and see.
In this beginning of a new year, on a weekend when we remember a piece of our nation’s hope born of struggle history, and prepare to for a new administration, this dialogue is a good one into which to insert ourselves. Jesus, the one who sees all kinds of life and holds every struggle, where are you abiding right now? Where do you dwell? And where would we find ourselves when Jesus beckons, come and see?
[1] Ellie Dahmer and Bettie Dahmer, StoryCorps on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, January 13, 2017.
[2] John C. Holbert, “The Bible’s Lynchpin: Lectionary Reflections on Isaiah 49:1-7,” Patheos, January 14, 2014. http://www.patheos.com/Progressive-Christian/Bibles-Lynchpin-John-Holbert-01-15-2014. Accessed January 13, 2017.