For lots of us, even on our different journeys of faith, there are similar kinds of places on our faith maps. Like places where we feel really high and successful, and we give thanks; or when something big or bad suddenly happens, and we yelp for help.
But what about the place where a really important truth about our lives, something we’ve relied on for a long time, has dissolved. It might be a truth we believed in about a relationship, our job or our vocation, maybe a truth about what we really wanted our lives to look like to everybody around us – what about when a really big truth like that becomes … not true anymore. And to make matters worse, we realize, maybe it never was true.
How does faith survive it when a belief we’ve had about our lives has been shattered? How does faith survive disillusionment?
That’s a place on the faith map that gets a little less airplay - it’s less sexy. Times when something we believed in has slowly eroded – there’s no one particular moment when it all happened, we just don’t feel like ourselves anymore. We’re just whatever we are at that exact moment – a couple of hands, a couple of feet, and our thoughts and feelings are just sitting around inside us like so many boxes in an empty room. We’re not greater than the sum of our parts; we’re just … the sum of our parts. Nothing more, nothing less.
What’s interesting about this kind of place of loss is that even though it’s quiet and small, it’s not like some zen, peaceful place. I know we talk a lot about that, but I, for one, don’t get there very easily so I’m not going to tell you that you should either. Instead, the kind of place I’m talking about is sort of a quiet way of being in crisis, and it usually comes after a long struggle of some sort. We fought hard for a long time, and there might have been a lot of noise and big moments along the way. But now we’ve lost more than we knew we had to lose, everything is kind of quiet, and all we can be is what we are at that moment. We might even wonder if we’ll ever be anything else.
Kind of like a small nation of people called the Israelites, in the land of Judah, around the 6th century BC. Which is, after all, who this guy Isaiah is talking to, in the Old Testament reading we just heard.
Isaiah – well, not really. We don’t know the name of the person who wrote this part of the book of Isaiah. But we do know that he wrote it for a people – almost think of it as a person – who were at what seemed like the end of a long struggle where they’d lost too much of what they believed to be true about God. Which means that they’d lost too much of what they thought was true about themselves. And all that was left was exactly who they were at that moment.
Meaning, exiles: people driven from their own land by another nation, away from the things and places that sustained them, from the things they believed in, and carried in chains into nearby Babylon by the conquering army. That’s what this part of Isaiah is about.
But the thing is, it’s not like that was just one big bad thing that happened, a shock from out of the blue. It was the end of a long series, for generations, of things seeming to fall more and more apart, from the time of King David, around 1000 BC. Centuries of dealing with their own internal problems, political and religious, and then dealing with the major powers around them, like Egypt, and Assyria, and then Babylonia taking over the whole region.
And finally, everything that little Judah had been fighting for seemed lost – the land, the culture, the temple, the God.
The end of a long struggle, when hope after hope, truth after truth that they had believed in with everything they were, had dissolved and become what seemed to be illusion.
That’s what this middle part of Isaiah is about. It’s about encouragement to a people who are in exile and at the end of a long struggle – or, who feel that way. Which has everything to do with what God is saying here – to them, and to us. Because while lots of the prophetic passages are about getting people to shape up, here it’s about reminding all of us – and this is equally prophetic – about God’s intense love that’s behind everything.
And here’s what I hope you’ll really hang onto. Because this section of Isaiah has some of the best one-liners in the Bible. Just a few chapters earlier [Is 43] is one of the few places in the Bible where we get God saying simply, “I love you.” Not that God doesn’t do it on every page of Scripture, but here it’s in those nice three words that mean so much to us humans.
And then we in today’s passage, too. It’s God actually pleading God’s own case with them, with us, not to give up on who God is – because that’s what we can want to do in those kinds of moments. There’s a lot of courtroom imagery in the Old Testament, and if it helps, that’s what you can envision here.
God is saying, in effect, I made you to be full and effective and powerful and beautiful. And the response of Zion is, But I really don’t feel that way, God.
But I’ll find you even in that feeling, God says, and I will remind you of who you are, as I know you. Isaiah even evokes the very powerful female imagery of a mother and child. And yet, God says, I’ll go you one more, I’ll go beyond the human, not to forget you and to have you not just in my hands but on them. I’ll write your name there. It’s the last line: “I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.”
Now that’s another humdinger to hold onto: I won’t forget you. And I have your name on the palms of my hands.
Let’s stick with that for a minute. God’s hands. Powerful images. We hear about this throughout the Old Testament, including the whole idea of God building and making and creating. Then in Deuteronomy, we hear we’re supposed to be inscribing God’s name, God’s instruction, on our doorposts, on our own hands. Because those are key ways of keeping front and center, of internalizing, who it is that orients you in all the stuff of life. It’s really physical and visceral, which I like about it. “Inscribe” – the verb there really does mean ‘to cut.’ The Old Testament knows how hard it is to hold onto the relationship with God, and we humans need to feel a doorpost as we walk across the threshold, or to look down at our sweaty, dried-up skin and see a name there.
But here’s what’s so powerful about this last line, and I don’t want you to forget it. In Deuteronomy, and other places, it’s we humans who write God’s name on our hands.
But here in Isaiah, as God is pleading for us to remember who God is and what God is like – here, God turns the tables. God puts the divine self in the human position. And writes our names on the divine palm.
Our names. The divine palm.
And we’re right smack-dab at Good Friday. When those palms took a hit for every name written on them.
And then the resurrection, then those palms were witness, were evidence, that God remained that close to us, with those same names still there in a whole new way.
That’s the one-liner you can take away from today: that your name is on God’s palm. And when you’re so far under the stuff of life that raising your head is too much – then that’s ok. Claim that before God. And remember that God will meet you even there, as inelegant and unpowerful and broken as it may feel. When everyone else has forgotten you, God will not. And the palms of God’s hands will seek you out, knowing exactly who you are.
Maybe that’s the most graceful moment in all this. Because it’s the idea of that love that lets us face the inevitable question that this all brings us up to the brink of, like for the Israelites in Babylon, in chains, away from the temple that had been destroyed anyway. And that question was, If what we had hoped was the truth wasn’t the truth – then what is?
That’s it. Right there. That’s the question. It may sound for all the world like it’s the wrong question, like asking it means you did the wrong thing. It may seem like that question is reached only at the end, and you’d never want to get to the end.
But that’s not it. I think most of us know that that question is the question that gives truth a chance. That question is what turns everything around to crack it open in a new way. That question, which we all hate to ask because asking it means we’ve just come through some kind of personal hell, that question then becomes the first step to getting a better answer than the one we used to have.
And that’s when we get God pleading God’s own case and saying, It may look one way on the outside, but remember who I am, and believe that the inner workings of things don’t have to do with worldly power and control, and losers and winners, but with compassion and with the things that save you inside of yourself.
Don’t give up, don’t take things at face value, God says. There’s stuff already happening inside and underneath, and don’t give up on the fact that that is me working to free you.
Your name is cut into my hands.
And when we think of that, then maybe we can look in the mirror again, so to speak, and say, Ok God, who am I now, what is the truth? After all of this, in my mistakes and brokenness, in my strength and grace – who am I now?
And I promise you, whatever answer begins to emerge, as you ask, “Who am I” – it will be a you that is more healed and more “you” than before. It will be more of a truth that you can trust.
Which tells you something about a God you can trust. The God that works like that is a God you can trust.
That’s the edge of transformation. A quiet moment, in what can feel like a quiet crisis. But there you have it, and it’s a good thing.
In closing, it’s kind of the space of the psalm for today, Psalm 131. It’s a short psalm, maybe the shortest in the psaltery. But it carves out and names a place that we must not forget. A place of simplicity, of not trying to say to God, See how powerful I am, or confident, or what high aspirations I have. This psalm gives us permission to set that down, rest our arms, and just be. To just be us, without all those other things that can be a high but that also can take a lot of effort and seduce us into thinking that God is measuring all that effort the same way we are.
This psalm reminds us that being simple, as we are, is just fine with God. No fancy theological or liturgical tricks, no sophisticated spiritual practices. Just squatting down in the soil of the moment.
And what’s so impressive about that? Everything. It’s where God meets us, after all. There may be past things to remember and future things to hope for. But right now is the only place where we can actually ever meet God. And that’s where we’ll find more truth we can believe in than anywhere else.