The Creative Community - Isaiah 43: 14-28

My friend, Catherine, and I are Broadway junkies. We’ll never to get to see as many shows as we would like to, but there is a wonderful organization in New York City that lets students go to shows (and get good seats) for little money. To celebrate the approaching end of our semester, we went to go see American Idiot a few weeks ago. While many would consider it to be crass, all Catherine and I could talk about on the train back to New Jersey after the show was about how the musical brought to light all of the dark areas of our generation that no one wants to talk about.

Catherine and I were both part of a dissertation project last school year about our generation, Generation M, that focused on how girls ages 18 to 27 formed friendships. We are the generation whose formative years were marked by Columbine and September 11^th. Some people in the group grew up as latchkey kids, and most came from homes of divorced parents. The thesis of the project we were a part of asks how these events conditioned us around areas of trust in friendship.

But we never talked about the things American Idiot touched on – how most of us have had friends who experimented with drugs, and we are lucky if we don’t know at least one person close to us who has a serious addiction to drugs or alcohol. Many of us know someone who had an unplanned pregnancy as a teenager that lead to some radical decisions. We have friends who have ran off to cities to find themselves, often coming back to our home towns with broken dreams. We all have at least one friend close to us who was sent to Afghanistan or Iraq over the past few years. And we carry dark secrets of friends who have contemplated suicide, some of whom even carried their contemplations into reality. We are the generation that has so much potential, yet so many obstacles in our way, mostly ourselves. We are the generation that is content waiting, yet we often don’t know what we are waiting for.

This is our last week talking about the Israelites in the portion of the prophetic scriptures known as Second Isaiah. We have been discussing what it means to be in exile and under oppression of a dictator. And what it might have felt like to have hope perched on the horizon. But what we haven’t discussed much is God’s character in these passages. God has a lot of repetition through arguments in this section of scripture. God is exercising one of the oldest and most eloquent rhetorical skills throughout history – the art of persuasion.

How do you go about persuading someone to do or believe something? Do you state your argument once and hope they catch your vision? Or do you repeat it over and over again? Do you talk dispassionately or with vigor and life?

God has a pretty big obstacle in this passage of scripture, throughout the entire book of Isaiah really. God is trying to convince a people to return to a land they had never seen that was over a three-month journey away. And God is trying to coax the people back into the realization that they are loved by the Divine, who they had only been told was a punisher. Maybe even a tyrant. No wonder God is trying to persuade the Israelites.

God starts off today’s scripture with a reminder about just who he is – the redeemer, the Holy One of this given people. The one who is going to bring an end to Babylon down to the point where all of the people in the surrounding regions will cry for the city? God is Israel’s king, the Creator of Israel and the world.

Let’s pause. God has just given the Israelites a pretty amazing depiction of who he is; a description that can evade us in our modern context. God is the redeemer. A redeemer was a close family member who paid off the debt of one they loved in order to save them from going to debtors’ prison. It was expected that family member’s and clans people would extend this grace to a person is need, no questions asked and nothing expected in return. God is talking about redeeming Israel – the family member to the Divine who is deeply loved, no questions asked and nothing expected in return. God is also King. We don’t really understand kingships as they were in ancient times. A King has absolute authority, whatever the King commands, people do. And God is about to make a pretty demanding command. And God is the Creator. All that the Israelites see God has created; now God is about to invite them to be part of Holy re-creation.

God goes on to retell a story, the story of Israel’s creation. The exodus. God only has to speak of the parting of the seas and the Israelites would know the reference. It was described to them from their birth, because it is their story, their inheritance. Lest anyone has become confused and things that Moses did any of the spectacular feats – God reminds the people that he parted the sea, and he destroyed the Egyptian chariots and horses. God is persuading the people by retelling a story, and telling it with the correct agent of action at the center – God’s very self.

But as amazing as that Exodus of old is, God is about to do a new thing – a new Exodus out of Babylon, back to the holy city of Jerusalem. The animals will obey God’s voice, and areas that have never seen water, will be filled with life. And with these springs of water, God is going to lead the Israelites back to Jerusalem by an entirely new path, one that no one ever deemed possible, through the desert.

God wants something more then what the Israelites thought was expected – the same worship week in and week out. Further, they had no idea who this God was that they worshiped or why they gathered. But all the while God wants something fresh, something different, something creative.

When I think about the issues surrounding my generation, I see so many comparisons to the Israelites – we have lost our hope, we have grown content, the center of our world is more about punishment then love, worst of all we have lost our faith in creativity.

Sometimes I wonder if these are just marks of my generation, however. The entire world seems to have lost a bit of its creativity. Sure, we can create a lot of new things and technology is advancing, but what do we hope for? What are we waiting for? And how does all of this engage our creativity and connect us to the wholly creative God?

Maybe the best place this lackluster creativity is seen is the church. How many times have we heard the phrases, “well we do it this way” or “don’t fix what isn’t broken” or my favorite “we’ve never done it that way before”. Is God persuading us to be creative or content? Do we know what we are waiting for? Does what we do express God’s absolute and amazing love? Or are we still waiting for God to show up (and maybe some more people along the way as well)? Does our worship encourage us to be creative and do we embrace creative ideas? Do we come up with creative ideas?

The season of Advent is described as one of waiting, but it can also be summed up in the idea that “love came down at Christmas”. God did a new thing, just as he did with the liberation of the Israelites. God did the most creative and beautiful thing, in coming down to a manger in the person of Jesus. Advent is about waiting to see what creative thing we can partner to do with this babe in the manger. It is about opening our senses to perceive this new thing. We know what we are waiting for, and we are creatively engaging this wonderful gift we were given.

There is another Broadway show that I am eagerly anticipating returning to the stage this summer, Rent. One of the better-known songs from this musical is “Seasons of Love”. “Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes. How do you measure a year in the life? How about love?”

I truly believe that God’s creativity is all about finding ways to reach our hearts and to love us deeply. I also firmly hold to the idea that this is a model for how we should treat each other as well. Maybe this Advent season is a good time to ask each of ourselves what we are doing with the 525,600 minutes we are given each year. And for the Church universal to ask if we are creatively showing God’s love to those who we encounter each day, or if we are our own biggest obstacle.