Here I Am
THE SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Isaiah 65:1-9 • Galatians 3:23-29 • Luke 8:26-39
Have your ever been part of an unhealthy relationship pattern? I’m thinking of relationships that fall into patterns—or scripts that keep repeating themselves, dynamics you just can’t break out of.
One of my first serious romantic relationship had one unhealthy pattern. I’d tell my boyfriend something trivial about my day. My boyfriend then would point out how what I said reflected my limited view of the world and perhaps my selfishness. He’d enlighten me about the truth and enlarge my sphere of concern, and I’d be so grateful, to realize how very small I was.
One day I mentioned hearing about how Hewlett-Packard had grown from a start-up into a multinational corporation. My boyfriend explained to me that multinational corporations were evil. I mentioned how a transit worker strike had disrupted my commute; he pointed out that I was thinking only of my personal inconvenience, not the needs of working people. When I read and said I’d liked his favorite book—The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand—he explained that there was a difference between the book’s philosophy, which he despised, and the book’s main character, who he liked and identified with. I should have read the book with more discernment.
Violence wasn’t part of this relationship. Hurtful words were, though, and those lived with me for many years after the relationship was over. The pattern also used to make me fear how my innocent comments could be used as evidence of my ethical shortcomings.
Our first reading today reflects a recurring, unhealthy relationship pattern between God and human beings—a pattern that’s difficult for human beings to unlearn.
In this pattern, human beings allegedly do something that provokes God’s anger. Often through a prophet, God lists what the people have done wrong and informs them of their punishment. God also agrees to save maybe a handful of people, because God’s not that much of a tyrant. Then God starts with the wild promises—that God will never do this again, or that everything will be alright from now on.
This relationship dynamic actually can help humans make sense of historical events and natural disasters. In a chaotic and unpredictable world, this relationship dynamic can feel comforting, familiar, and safe: God gets angry, God punishes, God relents, and God makes new and better promises.
Some Israelites relied on this pattern to explain things like floods, food shortages, invasions, deportations, and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. God was angry with people for worshipping other gods, for injustice, or for unspecified evils.
Medieval European Christians also relied on this pattern to explain the on-again, off-again plague that reduced their population by one third. They speculated that God must be angry with them, whether because people weren’t thinking about the crucifixion often enough, or because the rich defrauded the poor, or because the clergy were undisciplined, or because some men wore fabrics that were too soft and shoes that were too pointy. (I’m not making these up.)
Even today, Christians rely on this comfortable relationship pattern, some more consciously than others. We identify the wrong people have done in God’s eyes. We explain current disasters as our fitting punishment. We believe that God will save the righteous few. And for that, we must owe God our undying gratitude and unswerving loyalty.
On the surface, our reading from the prophet Isaiah entrenches this pattern. Speaking on behalf of God, Isaiah tells the people that they’ve rebelled against God, walking in their own ways instead of God’s ways. They’ve performed sacrifices and offered incense in open-air spaces, not in the Temple. They’ve eaten pork and other foods forbidden to them by God. So, God will repay them—probably with an invasion by Babylonian armies and forced removal from their homeland. But, God will pluck out a select few of them, like a small cluster of grapes on an otherwise rotten vine. And God promises to restore their nation to its height of power and territory.
But in this passage, the prophet Isaiah also strives to break his people out of their unhealthy patterns of relating to God. Isaiah actually begins disrupting this pattern in the two chapters before today’s reading. Throughout the Bible, God’s side of the story often appears to be that people are the ones who misbehave first and that’s what makes God angry. But Isaiah claims that the opposite is true. Isaiah places the blame for the world’s flaws not on the people’s shoulders, but on God’s own issues with anger and withdrawal (63:17; 64:5).
So in today’s passage, Isaiah gives us a glimpse of a God who is present, stable, consistent, and loving. This God is willing to flip the usual script between himself and human beings, addressing humans with humble words usually spoken by humans to God. God claims that all this time he’s been saying to his people, “Here I am, here I am.” The prophet Samuel famously said “here I am” over and over again when he heard God calling him (1 Sam 3). (You may also be familiar with the song, “Here I am, Lord”).
God also says, through the prophet Isaiah, “I held out my hands”—or, “I stretched out my hands” to the people. This is more typically the language of prayer from human beings to God, as in this line from a psalm: “I stretch out my hands to you” (Ps 143:6).
So what God does here, though the prophet Isaiah, is adopt typical human lines for himself. Instead of a prophet saying “here I am,” and instead of a human person praying, “I stretched out my hands to you,” God speaks these words to us. God positions himself as ready to serve us when we call. God positions himself as the one who reaches out and even prays to us.
The passage also includes a script for people who want to talk back to God with greater force. These people are like advocates for a cluster of grapes that just might yield good wine. “They” say to God, “Do not destroy it, for there is a blessing in it.” This voice echoes Abraham, negotiating with God to spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. This voice echoes Moses, opposing God’s plan to destroy all the recently enslaved Israelites just for worshipping a golden calf. According to some early rabbis, this voice is how Noah should have responded to God’s whole Flood idea. Noah should have asked God to spare people and to include them in all creation.
Sometimes, biblical texts fall into a pattern of explaining to us what we’ve done wrong, why we’re being punished, and how we might be spared. But sometimes, biblical texts also reveal to us a God willing to serve us and stretch out divine arms to us. Sometimes, biblical texts give us scripts for disrupting the pattern of judgment, retribution, and limited salvation.
It can be frightening and full of pitfalls to flip the script on God in this way. But these are risks worth taking for the kind of relationship with God that is rich, intimate, challenging, freeing, and more wildly loving than any other we have known. God and we might come to know each other as we really are, not as the fronts we project to the world, or as the image that the world mistakes for us.
In my experience, knowing that we’re beloved by this kind of God is also what helps us recognize and disrupt some of the harmful relationship patterns in our lives. This God and God’s prophets teach us new scripts for our partnerships, families, neighborhoods, and even politics
With the words “here I am,” and with outstretched hands, God invites us into the type of relationship that makes each of us—we human beings and “God” as well—better than we ever could be all on our own.
© 2022 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas