Love Never Gives Up

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 65:1-9.

You never know where a good idea will come from. It's one of the reasons that I often refer to pop culture. Plus I am a big geek. But ever so often you will find a big truth embedded in something that was made to be merely entertaining. There is a great line at the end of the Tina Fey film Whiskey Tango Foxtrot that I can never accurately quote in a sermon but which memorably encapsulates the way to confront a major setback and move on. (“Sometimes you just have to embrace the suck and move the #%$& forward.”) There was a very shrewd insight into one of the key problems of our legal system that I found in a Spiderman comic. And not the comic book but the abysmal daily newspaper strip. Spiderman tells a lawyer that we need to stop treating our justice system like a game where rules and technicalities and one side winning count more than finding the truth and doing justice. Doctor Who diagnosed the abiding problem of computers way back in the 1970s. Namely that computers are just “sophisticated idiots.” I love these throwaway insights dropped inconspicuously into media products that never pretended to be great literature.

It's much the same way that kids and drunks will occasionally utter the truth offhandedly, or a supposedly uneducated man will put his finger on a major problem the experts can't see. Sometimes it is a crucial question that comes from a surprising source. Last week I was standing and gathering my cane and clear plastic bag, containing my Bible and communion kit, when an inmate came up and asked me a question. (Some people always wait until I am obviously getting ready to leave for another unit in the jail before approaching me and asking for something, no matter how long I was sitting and talking to and praying with anyone who came over.) Anyway he wanted to ask me about Noah and the ark. Usually I love getting into these Bible discussions but it was less than 10 minutes till lockdown and I had a rosary to deliver in the adjoining unit before the inmates have to go back to their bunks and I have to leave the secure envelope of the jail proper. But his question made me stop: If God was so upset with all the evil in the world, why did he save Noah and his family? They weren't perfect. Why not just wipe everyone out and start over? I stammered out the best answer I could and then said we'd talk about it next week. But the question has stuck with me. And Lo! And Behold! Today's Old Testament passage touches on something similar.

Even without any background information you can see that God is not happy with his people. They are arrogant and “holier than thou” (v.5) despite the fact that they are engaged in idolatry and occult practices and violating God's laws. Earlier in the book of Isaiah, God speaks to the elders and rulers of his people. “'It is you who have plundered my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of poor?' declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty.” (Isaiah 3:14-15) Elsewhere in Isaiah it says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight. Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deny justice to the innocent.” (Isaiah 5:20-23) And later, “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.” (Isaiah 10:1-2) And the problem is not just behavior. It goes deep, right down to their spiritual practices. “The Lord says, 'These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on mere human rules they have been taught.'” (Isaiah 29:13)

This last bit is especially grievous to God. His people seem to think he cares about rituals and symbolic acts above everything else. God's response? “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high. Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for people to humble themselves? Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying in sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:3-10)

God really cares about how we treat one another, especially those without power. Trying to serve him without recognizing that reveals that someone doesn't really know who God is. As Jesus says, “Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'” (Matthew 7:22-23) In his parable about the last judgment it is people who care for the poor and despised and disadvantaged who are commended and rewarded. (Matthew 25:34-40) Nary a word is said about the kind of things folks usually associate with being religious.

Therefore God is right to be angry with his people. So he is letting them be taken into exile by the Babylonians. Yet he promises that a remnant shall return. He will work with them. But why doesn't he just wipe them out and start over? Choose another people. Maybe they will do better.

If humans were a lab experiment, maybe God would. The experiment fails, you flush the cultures, euthanize the lab rats and start over. But we are not germs to God. We are not data points or guinea pigs. He created us in his image. What he is doing, as C.S. Lewis put it, is not an experiment but an enterprise. He is trying to get us to grow into our potential, to become not merely creatures of God but children of God.

There is a theological misconception that we are all born children of God. But in reality we are his creatures. Updating an analogy from Lewis, humans are like action figures made by a toy maker. I remember when you were lucky if the action figures of, say, Captain Kirk or Doctor Who looked even vaguely like the person playing the part. Today they often do 3-D scanning of the actor and the likenesses achieved are remarkable. I have seen pictures made by fans of the Avengers that you have to look at closely to determine that they are not the actors but the action figures posed in a very convincing manner. But they aren't really alive, the Toy Story movies notwithstanding. There is a difference between something made in someone's image and their actual child.

In the movie A.I., Steven Spielberg examines what would happen if you actually could create an android that is self-aware and could act like a real child. Given how close we are getting to making uncannily realistic-looking humanoid robots, the idea strikes us as creepy. On the other hand, the concept of Pinocchio, a wooden puppet come to life, doesn't strike us as creepy, probably because of Disney's beautiful animation. But the premise of that film is that a toy wants to become a real boy. And in the end, he does so by seeking out his father, impelled by love.

The film also shows us what happens even to real boys when they simply follow their selfish desires: they become jackasses. Like the witch in Snow White scared me as a child, the scene in which the boys on Pleasure Island were turning into donkeys filled me with horror. Pinocchio, who wanted to be more than a puppet, realized that the process could go the other way. People could become less than human. Indulging indiscriminately in every craving reduces people to their basest animal nature, driven by fear, desire and need. The spiritual part of such a person withers. As someone once said, a person wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.

I saw this in nursing homes. Among those who retained their mental faculties, there were two types of people: those who continued to grow and those who shriveled up. Some people could not reconcile themselves to the present nor see any kind of future and so they lived in the past, rehashing bygone dreams and old grievances. They shrank into miserable balls of bitterness and regrets. They collapsed in on themselves, like black holes, which suck in everything, including light and give nothing back.

Others made friends, took interest in the activities, got out of their rooms and out of themselves. When I was in college, I was part of a nursing home ministry. We went on Sundays to provide a worship service and visit the residents. We saw much human suffering, such as a young woman with severe MS, who lived for visits from her husband and young children and cried when they left, and it affected us young idealistic people greatly. Eventually we began to end our times there by all visiting this one old lady. She was a brittle diabetic who had lost her vision and one leg to complications of the disease. While I was there they had to amputate the other leg. Yet she tooled around in her wheelchair, radiating a contagious joy and faith. She had a lot of loss to live with. But she didn't slink away and brood over what she no longer had. She rejoiced in what she did have and in doing so, bolstered our spirits. If through her faith she could rise above her very real disabilities, how could we let our mundane, much less serious problems stop us from living boldly for God?

As it says in the Good News Translation of 1 Corinthians 13:7, “Love never gives up.” And God is love. God does not give up on us. He doesn't want us to devolve into being less than human but grow into being more. He wants us to go from being mere images of him into being his children, who love and take after him.

That's what we see in Jesus. As the exact image of God (Hebrews 1:3), Jesus reveals what God is like. And as the perfect human being, Jesus reveals what we can become. To paraphrase Lewis, the Son of God became a human to enable humans to become children of God.

God did not give up on humanity and so he saved Noah and his family. He did not give up on his people Israel and so saved a remnant from the Babylonians. Jesus did not give up on Peter, even when he denied Jesus 3 times. After his resurrection, Jesus gives Peter 3 chances to affirm that he loves him and restores their relationship. (John 21:15-17)

It is human beings who tend to give up on others and write off whole races and classes of people and say, “They are no good.” But, as it says of the nation of Judah in our passage from Isaiah, “Don't destroy it, for there is a blessing in it.” Or as the NIV translates it, “There is yet some good in it.” To deny that there is any good in people is to ignore the fact that since we are created in the image of God, there has to be some good in everyone, however hard it is to see, however much it is obscured or distorted by our sinful use of his good gifts. And that means there is hope. As God says to Ezekiel, the prophet he called to speak to his people while they were in exile in Babylon, “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather than they turn from their ways and live.” (Ezekiel 33:11)

The same cannot be said for human beings. We do like watching the death of the wicked. And so our entertainments usually end with the deaths of the bad guys, the more awful the better. Our solution to the problem of people we don't want is to get rid of them: lock em up in jails and prisons and camps or else kill them. You know how the God who is love likes to get rid of bad guys? Turn them into good guys. So Jesus calls Matthew, the tax collector. He dines with Zacchaeus, the corrupt tax collector. He saves the life of the woman taken in adultery. He frees the man living in the tombs from the legion of demons who haunt him. He promises the thief on the cross that he will be with him in paradise. Even after his ascension, he appears to Saul, the persecutor of the church. And in each case he changes their life. He heals their spiritual sickness. He makes them better.

God doesn't give up on us. What happens is we give up on God. We give up on ourselves. In the end, we become our own judge, jury and executioner. As C.S. Lewis said, the gates of hell are locked from the inside. There are people who say to God, “Your will be done,” and those to whom God, respecting their choice, will one day say, “Very well, your will be done. You don't want any part of me? So be it.” But if we reject him, we reject the source of all goodness. We choose not to grow but to shrivel up into black holes of rage and bitterness and despair.

The choice is ours. As God says in Isaiah, “I held out my hands all day long.” As the Jewish Study Bible notes, “Normally, humans pray to God by spreading out their hands (Exod. 9.29, 33; 1 Kings 8.22, 38; Isa. 1.15), but here, in an extraordinary gesture, the Lord stretches hands out to human beings.” He expects us to reach out to him in return. As it says elsewhere in Isaiah, “Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!” (Isaiah 30:18) If his arms are open to us, what is this talk about waiting? This is not speaking of God's acceptance, which is there waiting for us and is ours as soon as we come to him. Rather as it says in 2 Peter, “The Lord is not slow, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) God will not ring down the curtain until everyone who will turn to him does. And only he knows when that will be.

We do not need to wait until our world is ending to turn to God. As Paul wrote, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation.” (2 Corinthians 6:2) Every second of our life is a second chance. No one's past needs to determine their future. Our God is a God of life and love and resurrection. He never gives up.