Too Small a World/God

Isaiah 49:5-6

We all live in different-sized worlds: some in relatively small, restricted worlds, and others in much larger contexts, with a much wider range of connections. In fact, our worlds change in size over time. When we’re born, we ourselves are the extent of our own worlds. In our minds, nothing exists except what our own senses perceive, and it doesn’t occur to us that there might be others living lives like ours, unconnected to us. Eventually we recognize the existence of a second person: say, Mommy. But at first, even Mommy only exists in connection to us; only later do we dimly grasp that Mommy exists when she is not with us. Then a third person appears, Not-Mommy, and as time passes, Not-Mommy begins to differentiate into many other people, each one with their own name (although they are still, sadly, Not-Mommy). Jump ahead to the years of childhood. Our world has grown. It now includes home and school, immediate family and extended family, friends and even acquaintances. It’s still not a large world, mind you. While we acknowledge the existence of other towns and countries, they don’t seem real. They exist in pictures and books and on screens. Then, in our teen years, our world expands further. In fact, it fractures a bit. Now we live in multiple worlds. Our peer world and our family world may be very different and (if all goes well) our family world will never know what goes on in our peer world. Finally, we reach adulthood, and through our adult years our world may continue to expand as we travel and experience new things and meet new people and understand more, but then, as we reach our senior years, the world of our direct experience may contract again as our circles of relationships and daily experience grow smaller. To summarize, the world of our own awareness and concern is always expanding and contracting, depending on the breadth of our current experience. The tiny world of the infant may one day encompass continents and may one day again be limited. This is not right or wrong; it just is. 

What is true of us as individuals may also be true of groups and cultures. Take the nation of Israel. From its founding around 1200 BCE to its destruction in 586 BCE, it existed in a fairly tiny world. The Israelites knew they were God’s Chosen People, whom God had delivered from slavery in Egypt, and they pretty much felt that was all they needed. Oh, they knew that other nations existed, but those other nations, well, they were all bad. They were the Not-Chosen. They worshiped Not-God. Israel’s approach to those nations was to ignore them if possible, fight them if necessary, and above all keep them separate. The Israelites liked their small world. It was safe. Now, every now and then some prophet from God would challenge the smallness of their imagination. For instance, the prophet Amos once said, “So what if God brought you to Israel? God also brought the Ammonites and Moabites and Philistines to their lands!” But this sort of talk – this notion that God existed beyond Israel’s own experience – was not encouraged. Amos was banished, and the people went back to their comfortable, manageable small world.

But then Israel was destroyed by the nation of Babylon in 586, and the surviving Israelites were carted off as exiles to Babylon, the center of Ancient Near Eastern civilization. Holy cow! People from dozens of nations, speaking dozens of languages, milling about in streets and cities and palaces that were bigger and grander than anything those Israelites had ever imagined. And in that new place, something happened. They’d known that Babylon existed, but now it was real, and the reality was stunning. The people of Israel were forced to recognize how tiny their little world had actually been. And now their faith in their God was a minority faith, surrounded by lots of other temples, and people worshiping in different ways. When you’re a minority, you can no longer ignore everyone else. The Israelites became aware of those foreign religions and realized that some of the things they taught were similar to what God had revealed to them. Not all, but some. 

In short, exiled Israelites were faced with an expanded world. Some, surely, refused to acknowledge that fact and clung to what was familiar, but some began to ask new questions: If our God created all the earth, as we say, and if our God is a god of justice and love, as we say, then does it really make sense to say that God only loves us? We’re actually a pretty tiny percentage of the world. And did you know that those Persians also teach about a great creator god of love and light? Did they come up with that themselves? Or is it – just thinking aloud here – is it possible that maybe our God has also been speaking to them? What if – hear me out – what if God loves them, too? At least some of the Israelites began to struggle with hard questions like this. At any rate, once they’d been pitchforked into this new and disconcertingly large world, it was hard to go back to the old provincial, exclusive faith of their fathers. It used to make sense, but it did so no longer. One who wondered some of these things aloud was the prophet we know as the Prophet of the Exile, whose words are found in the second half of the book of Isaiah. We read Isaiah chapter 49, verses 5 and 6.

5 And now the Lord says,
   who formed me in the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him,
   and that Israel might be gathered to him,
for I am honored in the sight of the Lord,
   and my God has become my strength—
6 he says,
‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
   to raise up the tribes of Jacob
   and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
   that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’   

To the Prophet of the Exile, God only made sense if God loved all people. 

Well, if the 6th century Jews in exile struggled with culture shock as they encountered a larger world . . . what about us? Oh my, have you looked around lately? Whether we like or not, whether we accept it or not, our worlds have become huge today. As much as some people might want to, we can’t pretend that we Americans exist in isolation. Our jobs depend on decisions made in Brussels and Beijing. And the rest of the world is no longer far away. I get phone calls from people in Mumbai saying that they’re going to be in my neighborhood next week, and would I like a free estimate on a roof? I get computer support from bright young people in the Philippines whose English is more grammatically correct than mine. I have friends in Australia and New Zealand, and I converse with them by text, the same way I do with my spouse when she’s in another room. These are just some of the ways that my own world has become larger. Now, multiply that by ten and you get my children.

Like the exiled Israelites, we have been dragged into a world larger than any of us were prepared for, and like the Israelites, we can either hide from it or adapt. We can go into a dark room, close our eyes, put our fingers in our ears, and say “Lalalala” or we can rethink our faith and our understanding of God. A century ago it was possible to believe that we Christians were the sole beneficiaries of God’s grace, and that God’s only interest in non-Christians was in assimilating them, like the Borg. But that rings false today. Now that we have daily experience with the rest of God’s world, it seems unlike God to say that God’s love and forgiveness begins when people join our group. That doesn’t just seem like a remnant of a smaller world; that sounds like a smaller God. And if our world grows, but our understanding of God doesn’t, that God soon becomes irrelevant. One of the reasons young adults are leaving the church today is because their world has grown too large for the little God that their church teaches.

Our imagination needs to grow. It is no longer enough for Christians to live in their separate ghetto. Some of us here may remember a time in Eau Claire when one could go for days or weeks and have no contact with anyone but other Christians. Now, the only way to live in such a world is to intentionally quarantine yourself and your family (“Lalalala!”). And some do that. There are Christians and churches all around us who have mistaken the edge of their rut for the horizon. But we must see farther. We have to expand our self-understanding and recognize that in our expanded world, the church should be judged not by how it benefits its own members but on its significance to others. As Isaiah put it, we are here to be a light to the rest of the world. Our God is bigger than we used to believe.  

Isaiah’s words still echo, or echo again. Given the larger world that we’ve been shoved into, it is too small a thing to say that God loves the church. God does love the church, but God has also sent us to love all those people outside the church – whom God also loves, with whom God is already at work. It’ll take some rethinking, some stretching, and a whole lot of faith. But it will be worth it. God is always bigger than we imagine, and his grace wider.