God’s Dream
11 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
Who does Isaiah think he is? Can you imagine walking through town or standing on a street corner saying “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me?” And yet, after all the doom and gloom we’ve been hearing from the prophets the past few weeks, all the doom and gloom that we have been hearing in our own world, we could use a little good news, and Isaiah has it in abundance. I hope that if we have good news to share about God’s promises, we will proclaim it.
If you’ve ever read my office door really thoroughly, past the New Yorker cartoons, you’ll remember that there’s something posted right on the window glass that comes from a friend’s blog post last year. It starts with someone asking him: “What do you understand to be God’s Dream?” He replied: “Well, I don’t think it gets any better than this!” and proceeded to quote the first three verses of Isaiah 61, which we heard this morning.
Just to review, the prophet understands his mission to be
To bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;To provide for those who mourn…
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
God’s dream, then, is a dream of reversal—reversal of our expectations, faint spirits (ours included) lifted up by praise, and the transformation of the world’s economy into God’s economy.
About five hundred years after these words were written, St. Luke attributes to Mary the remarkable song that has come down to us as the Magnificat. And in the Magnificat, Mary the mother of God’s promises says pretty much the same thing that Isaiah said centuries earlier.
God has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
The God whom Mary knows is the God who promises to turn the world’s economy into God’s economy. When I was in England I came across a small book called “Mary the Mother of Socialism.” It’s a collection of essays by a bunch of Anglo-Catholic Socialists—my very favorite kind of Anglo-Catholics, and my favorite kind of socialists—essays on the Magnificat as a manifesto from God about very real redistribution of wealth.
A friend recently said: “using words ‘redistribution of wealth’ together in a sermon can be a career-changing sermon.” We are so afraid to talk about this stuff, and yet this is what Jesus talks about more than anything else! If it occasionally makes us squirm, it may be that we are, in today’s world, the mighty and the rich. But Jesus is not making this up. He gets it from Isaiah and from his own reading of his scriptures, of the world, and of God’s dream.
In the 4th chapter of Luke, Jesus gets up and reads aloud in the synagogue—right there an act of audacious reversal—Jesus reads this passage from Isaiah 61 and says: This is what I’m about. And people responded to him then in the same way they probably responded to Isaiah and would respond to you or me: who the heck does he think he is? Getting up here and saying God has anointed him to bring good news to the poor?
Do you have a favorite passage of scripture that you can point to and say: That’s what I’m talking about?
What does God’s turning the world upside down look like? The deaf hear, the blind receive their sight, the hungry become full. Last week God surprised and overwhelmed us through the Voices Unlimited Choir, a choir made up mostly of people with autism and other disabilities, singing carols and reading lessons with a passion and a clarity that humbled our hearts and made our hearts sing.
Today’s words from Isaiah and from the Song of Mary are our proof-text for what God promises to do in the world, but so is our own life’s experience. We have to look for it, and proclaim it. Last week’s lessons and Carols was one of those experiences. The image of a recently homeless family of five children, whose mother wants only winter coats and a Fred Meyer gift card, receiving the extravagance of response through our giving tree is one of those experiences. The unlikely people who gather in this building week in and week out is a proclamation of God’s reign.
What is your life experience of God turning the world upside down? As we prepare for the great Good News of the angel’s message to Mary, which we’ll hear next Sunday, and of the angels’ announcement to the shepherds, which we’ll hear the week after that, think about what your great good news is. God is coming, God is here.
God’s dream starts with the words of Isaiah, the words of Luke, the words of all the prophets before and since, and with story after story about God’s confounding our expectations and turning the world upside down. The dream continues with us, with our stories and our words. In this season of Good News, can we have the same audacity of Isaiah? Let’s try.
Repeat after me:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
Because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
To bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And release to the prisoners.
You get the idea. God’s dream is our dream, God’s story is our story, God’s words are our words. God is coming, God is here.
