A Blessing in the Midst
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OPENING SONGS
Cold Little Heart (Live)
Michael Kiwanuka
As the Deer
Matt Gilman // Letras
READINGS
Isaiah 19:23-25
On that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians. On that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, "Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage."
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A blessing in the midst
By rev. dr. george dole
What does our world have to be grateful for today? There seems to be much more bad news than good in the headlines. If we lay this text over the present situation in the Middle East, the contrast between Isaiah's vision and the present reality could hardly be more stark. Geographically, the Holy Land is little more than a bridge between Africa and Asia, and at present it is not a link but a bone of contention. The Lord's intent, Isaiah says, is that the temple in Jerusalem become "a house of prayer for all nations" (Isaiah 56:7), but at present no one seems to be listening, and the consequences of that deafness are tragic.
What do we have to be grateful for in these troubled times? To begin with, we have the vision. If we lose that, we are truly lost. We will spend all our energies on preventing the worst, motivated by fear, and little or none on reaching toward the best, motivated by faith, by hope, and by charity (1 Corinthians 13:13).
There is a fundamental principle involved that is applicable to all communities regardless of scale, and that is applicable to the inner dynamics of each one of us. It is quite beautifully exemplified in a statement in Swedenborg's The Last Judgment 12, describing the ideal community: ". . . in the most perfect form, the more constituents there are, the more people are involved in attention and agreement and the more intimate and unanimous is the union. The agreement and consequent union increase with numbers because each individual there comes in as a congenial intermediary between two or more others, and whatever comes in strengthens and unites."
There is no simple, geometrical way to diagram this, because one of the most obvious and significant facts about the social fabric in which we live and move and have our being is the fact that each one of us is a center. There are of course other relationships, many of them hierarchical. As children, we were in many ways subject to our parents, but that changes with time. In the nine-to-five segment of their lives, some people are employees and some are employers. Other relationships are truly reciprocal. I recall a case where one woman was giving another piano lessons and was being taught Hebrew in return—particularly memorable because the pianist was in her late eighties and the Hebraist was in her early nineties. We are able to move with relative ease from one kind of relationship to another if they seem appropriate. Nicodemus, an eminent elder in Israel, willingly assumed the temporary role of student when he came to Jesus (John 3).
We can be quite sure, all the same, that Nicodemus experienced himself as a center around which there were the concentric circles, so to speak of a far larger world. Just try for a moment imagining what this room looks like when seen through the eyes of someone sitting somewhere else, even if it’s a person sitting closest to you. It is most unnatural. Basically, the views of others, are just as accurate as yours, and they are all different.
If we put this fact together with the picture we are given in Last Judgment, the picture of every new individual serving to strengthen and unite, we come to the conclusion that the more witnesses we have of this particular scene, the more complete and accurate a picture could be drawn. Every witness could add something unique.
This is a challenging parable of our situations in the fabric of human thought and feeling. We affect each other by the way we treat each other, and the way we treat each other is affected by the way we see each other. To others, each of us is a representative of the rest of the world, a kind of agent—only one representative, to be sure, but when we are in conversation with someone else, we are the primary or even the only representative on the scene. Each of us is then a link with the "outside world," a kind of conduit, and each one of us is a selective conduit.
This brings us back to our text, to the image of Israel as a highway between those longtime rivals, Egypt and Assyria. What kind of traffic do we encourage? Do we try to keep channels of communication open between the best in both lands, or do we rather highlight the rivalry and channel it toward active enmity? Do we strengthen the fabric, or do we weaken it?
In any number of places and ways, our theology advises that "the good in the neighbor" is the neighbor whom we are to love (see, for example, Secrets of Heaven 8123). We are assured that good is there within absolutely everyone. We are also assured that some of us turn away from it, at first partially and ultimately decisively. We cannot destroy it, because it is the Lord's life flowing into the very core of our being. We can close ourselves off from it. All of us do so from time to time, when we are at our worst, and if we are honest with ourselves, we can understand how some of us can come to prefer hell to heaven.
When we get in touch with the best in others, we form a little link between that best in them and the best in us, and through us, with the best in others. When we arouse the worst, we do just the opposite. We strengthen the conviction that the world is essentially hostile and that survival is a matter of defeating it. There is enough evidence for both views to make them both quite plausible.
Something else is happening, too. By the way we look at and treat others, we are associating ourselves with those of like attitudes. We cannot avoid being centers, but in ultimate terms, in terms of heaven and hell, we are choosing where that center will be, what our own center will be. If we choose Isaiah's course, if we choose to be "a blessing in the midst of the earth," we are centering ourselves in that community; and on the principle that we are accepted into heaven when we accept heaven into ourselves, that is becoming our own internal center.
With that in mind, then, let us take a fresh look at our New Testament reading. His disciples were embarrassed because they had been arguing about which of them was the greatest. Jesus did not settle the argument or scold them. The first thing he did was to present them with a paradox: "If you want to be first, you need to be last." Then, Mark tells us, he placed a child in their midst. (Mark 9:36)
Put that "midst" together with the "midst" of Isaiah's vision, the one the midst of a small group of disciples and the other, Isaiah says, "the midst of the earth." Geometrically, it is the same midst. Wherever we are centered, that is, we can envision ourselves as surrounded by one concentric circle after another. For the Israelite of Isaiah's day who was looking for the best in some local environment, those concentric circles would reach out to include like-minded individuals in Egypt and Assyria. For the Jew in modern Israel, they would reach out to include like-minded Palestinians, Egyptians, and Iraqis. That is the point of contemporary efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian young people together in small numbers, so that each can experience the humanity of the "other." You may have seen in a recent newspaper the photograph of a "Friends Forever" group, teens from Catholic and Protestant families in Ireland spending two weeks here, lifted out of the atmosphere of blind hostility that has had such tragic consequences for so long.
It is, I think, a true instinct that led to the focus of these efforts on the young. It reflects a longing to protect their innocence by forming ties with the innocent, strengthening the fabric of those who want to seek out the best in others rather than to be "the greatest" at the expense of others.
In that sense, each one of us are asked to find the little child within and center ourselves there. This brings us to our third reading, which tells us how to identify that child within. "Real innocence, which is called 'infancy' in the Word, never exists or dwells anywhere but in wisdom, so much so that the wiser we are the more innocent we are. The Lord, therefore, is innocence itself because he is wisdom itself."
If innocence "never exists or dwells anywhere but in wisdom," though, how can we equate it with infancy? Babies certainly are not wise. They have everything yet to learn. The key lies as much in what they do not have as in what they have. They do not have any sense that they know anything. They are sponges for learning. In doctrinal terms, they are "willing to be led by the Lord." If the boundaries of innocence are also the boundaries of wisdom, they are squarely within those boundaries—not covering much territory, but rightly centered.
That is where we all started. That is the true center of each one of us now and forever, because the center of our being is that "inmost" where the love-and-wisdom, the life of the Lord is constantly flowing in. When our third reading tells us that the basic quality of intelligence and wisdom "leads us to recognize that our life comes from the Lord alone," it is not just straightening out our theology. It is pointing us straight into the unsearchable depths of our own being. It is giving those depths a name—"the blessing, the little child in our midst."
What do we have to be grateful for?
Everything that we are. Absolutely everything.
Amen.
CLOSING SONGS
Open My Heart
Yolanda Adams
Unholy War
Jacob Banks
Cold Little Heart
Michael Kiwanuka
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