Second Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A - Lutheran Service Book readings)
Sunday, January 16, 2011
It’s too small a thing for you to be my servant to bring back Israel.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles.
With that, the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, and the Lord was saying that the Servant, the Messiah not just coming for Israel—the people in the know. The Messiah would also be sent to the Gentiles—the outsiders, the ones with different gods. It’s a bigger mission that they might have first envisioned. It’s a bigger mission, it involves salvation for more people, it involves God doing something much bigger than they might have imagined.
It’s too small a thing for you to be my servant to bring back Israel.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles.
It’s too small a thing just to go and get Christians to join our church. God is sending us to get people who don’t have a background with the Church. That’s the epiphany in evangelism today: we’ve got to reach out beyond the churchy people. We’ve got a bigger mission. It’s not just getting people to switch from one congregation to ours. It’s about finding people who don’t know Jesus.
It’s too small a thing for you to be my servant to bring back Israel.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles.
It’s a mission that sends us to people like Jenna. Jenna was a seventh grader I met while I was a pastor in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. I volunteered every other week to be a lunch monitor at Washington Junior High as a way to get to know the youth of our community, as a way to give something back to our community. I couldn’t get up and preach in the lunch room, but if the kids asked me questions about religion, it was ok for me to answer their questions.
Well, Jenna, she often was sitting by herself at lunch, and over time she started talking to me more. What I remember most about her was that she loved to draw, mainly pictures like you’d see in a good comic book. She especially would draw herself as a great warrior where she got to become strong and mighty.
Jenna wasn’t looking for the Messiah, hadn’t been reading Isaiah wondering if Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament. Jenna probably didn’t even know what most of that meant.
But Jenna was looking for meaning in her life, something beyond what she felt. She was lonely and confused. She was hurt in many ways by her family. She was searching for something in her life that would give her more hope than pictures of herself as a warrior.
So one day Jenna asked me if she could get baptized. It wasn’t that she knew what getting baptized really meant, but she had heard about it. She had heard people talking about Christians being baptized. She wanted what she had seen in other people’s lives. I could sense that she just deeply wanted to be connected to something bigger than her little world. I could sense that she just wanted to know if there was a God who cared for her.
I never got the chance to baptize Jenna or even tell her that much about it. I asked her if her dad would let her come to church, but she made it sound like that would never happen. I tried calling her dad once, and he had no interest in talking to me about it. And it was long after that that we left Manitowoc to go to Milwaukee, so I didn’t get to keep up with Jenna. I can only pray that our conversations led her towards God, led her towards finding a way to be baptized and be God’s child.
But those conversations with Jenna taught me so much about God’s bigger mission. This wasn’t a conversation with someone who already knew a lot about the Christian faith and was just looking for a new congregation. These were conversations with someone who was at the very beginning, was just starting to understand who God is, let alone who Jesus Christ, the Messiah, is. I was an Israelite, and she was a Gentile. I was an insider with insider knowledge about the faith, and she was an outsider with a completely different set of beliefs about spiritual things.
But gosh, it was tempting to go find easier conversations, find youth who already knew about the church, find kids who were disappointed with their church experience and encourage them to join my church. That seemed a lot easier than trying to tell someone the very basics of the faith, teach somebody about Jesus who doesn’t know anything about the Bible, that seemed too difficult. It seemed easier just to go to a different table in the cafeteria and find Christian kids.
It’s too small a thing for you to be my servant to bring back Israel.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles.
Lord, forgive us for keeping this light to ourselves. Lord, forgive us for keeping our sights set low and small and contained. Lord, forgive us for chickening out and going for the easier conversations. Lord, forgive us for focusing on swapping Christians back and forth between congregations instead of focusing on telling people about You that don’t know You already.
It’s too small a thing for you to be my servant to bring back Israel.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles.
Lord, give us wisdom to know how to reach out to others. Lord, give us Your Holy Spirit to lead us in telling others about You. Lord, help us to shine with Your light, shine in the dark places, shine among the Gentiles of our world.
It’s too small a thing for you to be my servant to bring back Israel.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles.
Lord, make this to be true among us. Lord, help us to have your heart for this bigger mission. Lord, help us to have Your heart for people like Jenna, people who are desperate to know You. Lord, use us to point people towards You.
Practically speaking, what does this look like? What does this bigger mission look like?
First of all, it looks different than what we see in today’s Gospel reading. Today’s Gospel reading is a great mission text as Andrew goes to find his brother, Simon Peter, goes to tell Peter that they had found the Messiah. That’s mission, an impulse to go and tell your family and friends that you’ve found the answer, found the answer spiritually. That impulse, that’s mission, that’s evangelism, that’s what it means to go and share your faith.
So, in that way, today’s Gospel reading is a great mission text, but practically speaking, today, in God’s bigger mission, in His mission to people who are outside of the Church, well, we’re not going to start the conversation by saying, “We have found the Messiah.” People today aren’t necessarily looking for the Messiah; Jenna wasn’t looking for the Messiah. They don’t even know what that means.
Practically speaking, we have to reframe the question in their terms, their context. We’re not going to people who are wondering whether Jesus is the Savior. We’re going to people who are wondering whether there’s a God. We need to reframe the question in their terms, in their context.
Notice how it had to be reframed for Jenna. She wanted to be baptized, but really she was asking to belong, to belong a God, to belong to something that would give her hope. The question wasn’t about Jesus being the Messiah; the question was about whether Jesus could give her hope when she was lonely and confused and hurt. She wanted to be a warrior to fight off the world; what could God offer her in response to that?
So practically speaking, it’s about reframing the questions, putting it in the context of the Gentiles, putting it in the context of the people around us. And practically speaking, this happens because you shine with the light of Christ. The Holy Spirit will help you listen and reframe. Reach out to the Gentiles of our world. Reach out to the people outside of the church
Practically speaking, this evangelism series is about having insights into what it means to share your faith, but we also want to give you simple tools. Beginning today, you can pick up a business card for the church that has all the basic information about the congregation, including worship times, so that as people in your life like Jenna get curious about church, you can give them a card with our basic info. It’s a simple tool that you can carry with you. It’s a conversation starter with people who are outside of the church
I want you to shine with the light of Christ—telling people that you’ve found hope in what you hear at church. I want you to reach out to people by pointing them in the direction of hope. When you tell people about your experience at church, your experience in the faith, people outside the church begin to realize you have found hope.
It’s too small a thing for you to be my servant to bring back Israel.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles.
God is going to use you to shine with His light, to shine for people outside of the church.