Isaiah 42:5-12 | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

The Feast of St. Barnabas | 11 June 2023 | A Sermon on Isaiah 42:5-12 | Samuel D. Zumwalt, STS |

Thus says God, the Lord,

who created the heavens and stretched them out,

who spread out the earth and what comes from it,

who gives breath to the people on it

and spirit to those who walk in it:

6 “I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness;

I will take you by the hand and keep you;

I will give you as a covenant for the people,

a light for the nations,

7 to open the eyes that are blind,

to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,

from the prison those who sit in darkness.

8 I am the Lord; that is my name;

my glory I give to no other,

nor my praise to carved idols.

9 Behold, the former things have come to pass,

and new things I now declare;

before they spring forth

I tell you of them.”

10 Sing to the Lord a new song,

his praise from the end of the earth,

you who go down to the sea, and all that fills it,

the coastlands and their inhabitants.

11 Let the desert and its cities lift up their voice,

the villages that Kedar inhabits;

let the habitants of Sela sing for joy,

let them shout from the top of the mountains.

12 Let them give glory to the Lord,

and declare his praise in the coastlands.

HOLY COMMUNION: I AM THE LORD

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

How Christ’s Church Reads

This text gives us opportunity to consider how the Church reads differently what it calls the Old Testament from those who do not have a New Testament (not to mention how nominal Christians read the Hebrew Bible or Septuagint). The Church across space and time had no New Testament in the first generations although St. Paul’s oldest letters predate the four gospels in their final form. The Didache, from the late 1^st century AD, describes the particular Jewish Christian community or communities from which it emerges assembling on the Lord’s Day, the day of His resurrection, and hearing a reading from the memoirs of the apostles (the Gospels). Historical scholars note the Didache’s affinity with Matthew’s gospel. The Didache describes communing apart from a supper (the problems with potluck already having been described in 1^st Corinthians).

While better study of the text will never ignore how the earliest hearers and readers may have understood God’s Word within their particular context, in this case the 8^th century BC and later poignantly the Babylonian exile of Judah’s leadership class, nevertheless, the Church reads the Old Testament through the Father’s Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, who has taught His Church to do so (Luke 24:27). We can certainly appreciate and respect those who do not read the text as the Church does. We can even understand the more recent cries of cultural appropriation by those who do not believe Jesus is the Father’s Incarnate Son and Christ (yes, even by nominal Christians). We can and must see in every person not only the image of God (as last Sunday’s Genesis 1 reading declared on the Feast of the Holy Trinity) but also as one for whom the Father’s Incarnate Son Jesus Christ has died and as one whom the Holy Spirit longs to draw to Holy Baptism.

Now, Lutheran is not simply the name on a denomination, organizational sign, diploma, or an ordination certificate. It is a way of reading a text through the lens of the crucifixion of the Father’s Incarnate Son Jesus Christ, Who is risen from the dead, ascended to the seat of power at the Father’s right hand, and through Whom the Father has poured out the Holy Spirit upon the Church. While the very name “hermeneutics” is derived from Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods, and, thus, a dubious term for Christian use, nevertheless, from a self-consciously Lutheran perspective, it follows that the Triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) must have two words, Law and Promise, in order to give an account for the crucifixion and death of the Father’s Beloved Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. Martin Luther asked the theological question “was treibt Christum” (what compels Christ to suffer and die), the very assertion made by St. Paul, the rabbi trained by Gamaliel, to the Corinthians: “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23).

A minority scholarly reading of St. John’s gospel regards its first unedited version as the earliest of the four gospels. It is, as the Biblical Archaeology Review has argued, the most accurate of the four gospels regarding both geography and first century AD Jewish culture. Even if the prologue (John 1:1-18) is St. John’s subsequent addition in a later edit, nevertheless, the opening verses declare Who it is Who became flesh in the Virgin Mary’s womb. Jesus Christ is the eternal Word of God, who was in the beginning with the Father and is Himself (eternally) God the Son, through Whom the Father brought all His very good creation into being including men and women. That the early Gnostics (who despise God’s very good creation) were attracted to some of the language and verses in St. John’s gospel does not make it a Gnostic gospel any more than that present day heretics read the Scriptures and find their opinions there as selectively asthose in my childhood used the Magic Eight Ball toy to find answers to their liking. But I digress.

The early Church reads texts from its only Bible, the Old Testament, even as the Holy Spirit is creating a midrash that comes to be known as the New Testament. The canon we have in the New is commentary on the Old, again, through Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh. It is precisely the Church’s belief that He is eternally the Word of God, the Living Torah, that is the basis for finding the Triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) throughout the Old Testament. While there can be discerned, as John Henry Cardinal Newman, described a development of doctrine (perhaps better described as an unfolding or revealing) of the Triune God’s plan and identity throughout the Old and New Testaments, nevertheless, that is more about our limited capabilities than about the Triune God. Finally, because the Lutherans in its Bekenntnisschriften or Book of Concord of 1580 never named the books of the Old Testament canon, we can use the books of the Septuagint (Koine Greek Old Testament) as the Church across the ages has done.

Jesus Christ the Servant Son of God

We do well to think of our Lord Jesus’ reading the scroll of Isaiah 61 in Capernaum, which resulted in a poorer reception than any preacher has ever received in a so-called religious setting (Luke 4). In the comfortable, decadent West, thus far, no preachers have been crucified literally, but that cannot be said of Christian proclaimers and witnesses martyred in the East and South, where radicalized Muslims and Marxists despise the Word of God and His children. Pay attention to the nominal Christians and secularists in the West: Cancelling may yet lead to a cross!

We do well to think of the Ethiopian eunuch, the treasurer of his queen Candace, who when reading a scroll of Isaiah asks St. Philip about Whom the prophet is speaking in Isaiah 53 (Acts 8:34). The Holy Spirit creates this brief encounter and Philip’s proclamation of the Good News of the crucified Son of God, Jesus Christ, that leads to the eunuch’s request to be baptized. Yes, Israel in the 8^th century BC and later wrestled with its identity as a servant people just as the Church today likewise wrestles with what it means to give her life away in humble service following the Beloved Incarnate Servant Son of the Most High God. Nevertheless, the Church reads today’s early Servant Song through her Lord Jesus Christ, through Whom all things were made. He will never share His glory with the carved idols not only of Israel’s enemies but with the Church’s enemies for whom our Lord Jesus Christ compels us to pray as He did from His cross.

Even as He opened the eyes of the blind and brought out the prisoners from the realm of death, so today our Lord Jesus Christ compels His Church to proclaim His Word (Law and Promise) to those blinded by lies of the old evil foe and the ideological necrophiliacs of this culture of death. Like the Ethiopian eunuch and all the baptized from every culture, the servants of God, marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, are no longer captives to this world’s various identities and ideologies and must proclaim that Jesus Christ is the Truth, which means He is reality itself. There is no freedom in His Church for the devil’s works and ways.

The Church’s new song is not warmed over liberationist, Marxist, feminist, Alinsky and Marcuse lies from the pit of hell. Those who would seduce Christians, particularly the young or foolish, are not liberated Lutherans or what you will. They are owned by the powers and principalities, and we can discern this precisely by what they do and do not say about the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ, His Father, and the Holy Spirit. By their fruits, they are known. By their yearning after worldly power and glory, they show by which spirit they are led. God, please help them. As Luther’s young associate Philip Melanchthon wrote in his Apology of the Augsburg Confession, the old Adam or Eve, the old sinner in us, always seeks to make him- or herself righteous.

My old systematic theology professor, Robert Bertram, once wrote that when contending for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ one must never forget that one is a poor, miserable sinner in need of the grace and mercy of God in Jesus Christ. We are, as Sri Lankan pastor Daniel Niles famously wrote, “one beggar showing another beggar where to get food.”

To the unbaptized, we witness to the Father’s Incarnate Son Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and ascended, as St. Philip did to the Ethiopian eunuch on the road. The Good News is not affirmation of one’s sorry, sinful state. Glorying in the prideful, sinful self is the story of the denizens of the culture of death, who will not be raised to eternal life with the Triune God. The Good News is of salvation from sin, death, and Satan that can only be found in Jesus Christ. The cross of Jesus Christ is not a metaphor for embracing the sociopolitical, liberationist aims and causes of 21^st century nominal Christians whether clergy or lay, bishop, pastor, or deacon. The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church exists across space and time, militant and triumphant, as the servant people of God. It is not the emerging unholy, protestant, and heretical church, a sectarian entity known by how it worships the narcissistic self and reads the Scriptures apart from the Church of every time and place.

As one liturgical scholar has said, we cannot go back but we can go forward as the servants of God. The ancient formula lex orandi lex credendi (how we worship says what we believe) is a helpful way of discerning whether the Church has assembled or the people of the lie. In this case, what is said and done gives witness to what one actually believes and, more importantly, Whom or whom is worshiped. The narcissism of the old Adam or Eve, the old sinner, just cannot be disguised behind occasional doffs of the hat to the Church and her Lord. Even liturgies beautifully performed with the traditional language of the Triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) cannot disguise the narcissism of the celebrants and musicians or the heresies of the preachers.

The Church in this life never forgets that, from generation to generation, she declares to every land, echoing the words of the Blessed Virgin Mary, “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). And the Church continues to sing the new song of the model disciple, the Mother of God, including, and especially in the present darkness of this age, “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts” (Luke 1:51) … which can be as chilling as our Lord Jesus’ word to certain religious detractors: “But now that you say, ‘we see,’ your sin remains” (John 9:41).

Oh, we baptized servants of God, beggars, come empty-handed to the table to receive the true Body and most precious Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word who says I Am the LORD. There, our Crucified Lord Jesus Christ takes our sin and our death upon Himself and gives us His righteousness and eternal life that He has always shared in love with His Father and the Holy Spirit. Whoever would be saved must believe this firmly, which is not his or her doing (there is no individual their or other made-up pronoun). Faith, which is trust, comes by hearing (even to the physically but not spiritually deaf who, in either case, hear differently). Blessed Martin Luther says that receiving our Lord’s forgiveness, life, and salvation at the altar depends on hearing and believing. Come, Holy Spirit, open the eyes and ears, yes, even raise from the culture of death, us poor, miserable sinners. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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szumwalt@bellsouth.net

St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church – Wilmington, North Carolina USA