Dimly Burning

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

01.12.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 42: 1-9

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

That thought has been echoing through my brain a whole bunch over the last week, as my doctoral studies have taken a trip to the wayback machine.   It was five straight days of stepping back through time into the first century, to understand what it meant to lead and follow in Rome and Greece the world of the first century.  Unfortunately, no TARDIS was involved.  In the absence of any Time Lords on the seminary staff...at least no Time Lords that are willing to admit it...we were stuck with getting back there with books.  Using contemporary scholarship and ancient texts, we spent an entire week reading and examining and thinking about what it was like to live and think back in the time when the New Testament was written.  

In many ways, the ancient world inhabited by those first primal Christians was completely different from our own.  It’s preindustrial, and the internet connections back in the first century were really surprisingly slow and expensive.  Just writing and sending a letter could cost you the equivalent of an entire month’s worth of wages.  Expectations of what it meant to be a person in the ancient world were different, too.  Like, say, that little section that caught my eye in the writings of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who informed his readers that a sign of a virtuous man was that he was bearded and hairy, just like .  I’d be set in the first century, evidently.

But there were other things, deeper understandings of personhood that were completely different than the way we imagine our culture to exist.  Roman culture was what they call an honor/shame culture.  What was most important in that culture was not how much money you had but how much honor you had.  That meant how well-known you were, and how connected you were, and how able you were to connect others to one another.

It was social power, the relationship between a powerful patron and a client, between a teacher and a student, between one whose influence is all about the network of relationships that they can bring to bear to maintain their status in their society.  In that system, what was expected of those lower down in the hierarchy was loyalty, period.  You existed to be loyal, and your value as a human being was completely defined by who you knew.  As far as the society was concerned, you weren’t an individual.  You were just a node in a complicated web of relationships.

Or you were nothing.  If you had no status, no honor, no power, and nothing to offer, you were little more than a hunk of meat.  Those who were poor or powerless, those who did not have a place in the pecking order?  They were viewed as little more than livestock, and could be owned and disposed of however the more powerful saw fit.

That ugly and difficult reality meant that most of the human beings in the ancient world were powerless or property, with some estimates being that up to 30% of the inhabitants of ancient Rome were slaves.  That form of power was really hard on those who found themselves on the bottom of the cultural hierarchy, and it was just the way Roman culture...and most of the cultures of the ancient world...worked.

And when this passage from Isaiah was written, that was exactly where the people of ancient Israel found themselves.   They were slaves, an owned people, powerless and broken and vulnerable.

The dynamic laid out by Isaiah presents us with a completely different way of viewing the world and the people around us. Power dynamics were everything, absolutely everything, but they take on a really very different feeling when you have no power at all, or when all of your power has been taken from you.   In this chapter of Isaiah, the prophet is describing to his people the nature of the leader who’s going to change everything. 

This portion of Isaiah is found in what is often called “Second Isaiah,” meaning that the majority of scholarship suggests it was most likely not written by the same individual who composed chapters 1 through 39 of the Book of Isaiah.  It was, most likely, written by a disciple of the Jerusalem prophet, one who fully understood the essence of his teachings, and was equally connected to the One who spoke through them both.

That first section describes and relates to the kingdom of Judah in the eighth century before Christ.  It is full of challenge, challenge directed particularly against the wealthy and powerful in Jerusalem.  This section, on the other hand, speaks to a completely different context.  Running from chapter 40 through to chapter 55, it is primarily about reconciliation, grace, and restoration, and appears to be speaking to an Israelite audience living in Babylonian exile nearly two hundred years later.

This was a people who had been utterly shattered.   Unlike the proud and the powerful who lived in Jerusalem and gathered in the wealth of the nation, this was a people who had been torn from their land and forced into slavery.  They had watched as their holy city had been destroyed.  They had watched as their temple, the holiest of holies, the place where they communed with God on earth, they had watched as it had been razed and looted.  Everything they were as a people had been taken.  They were nothing.  They had nothing.  They were nothing but property.  They were a fragile and barely standing thing, a broken reed, a flickering candle.

At this point, the One who spoke through the prophet no longer spoke words of judgment.  Where the first thirty nine chapters speak in some pretty harsh language, what we hear throughout this section of Isaiah is God’s commitment to healing and rebuilding those who are broken.  In the face of the suffering experienced by the people, the words that the prophet had to share with them were not rebuke, not condemnation, not mocking and rejection.  It did not tell them: you are powerless, get out of my way. It did not tell them: you are worthless.

The reminder to this shattered people was that their powerlessness did not make them worthless to God.

Isaiah is here promising the arrival of a leader...a messiah...whose power does not bear any resemblance to the power of human societies as they existed in the ancient world.  We who walk the Christian way see that promise fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, whose entire life flew in the face of that way of wielding power. His power was that of a suffering, healing servant, not the trampling, destroying power of emperors and their armies.  It had nothing to do with the hierarchies of social power that had always defined humanity. 

It still doesn’t.

Because though we might not be an honor/shame culture any more, at least not on the surface, power and influence still work the same way.  Human beings are still human beings, and as much as we might like to pretend that we’re all equal and our worth is defined by our individuality, that’s not the reality we live in.

Power is still all about relationships and influence, about who you know and who knows you.  Yesterday on the other side of the Potomac, we just installed a new governor.  He might do a great job.  Who knows?  But he is where he is because he knows how to play the system of social power.  It’s still how the world works.

What we have to ask ourselves, frankly, is how deeply we allow that system to work its way into our own lives here as followers of Jesus, who taught a different kind of power.  When we encounter people who have power and the ability to get things done, do we see them as a means to an end?  Do we approach them seeing not a brother or a sister, but instead as someone who can do something for us?

That was a danger in the ancient world, but here in the age of new media, when everyone is promoting themselves as a brand and clamoring for attention, that human hunger for power is particularly strong.

More importantly, when we see people who have nothing, who are struggling and broken and have no advantage to offer us, do we dismiss them or ignore them?  It’s easy to do this, as we rush hungrily from one business relationship to another.  We can trample on or dismiss the struggling and the fainthearted.  We can ignore the broken soul, or the person who seems not to have anything.  We can put out that faint light of hope that glows in them.  We can crush them underfoot.

Jesus challenges us to step outside of that way of viewing the world, to make sure that we are taking time for the struggling, and the prisoner, and the lost, and the powerless.  It’s why his message was so radical and so subversive, then and now.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.  Know Jesus, and know what that means.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.