Isaiah 9:1-4; Matthew 4:12-23
January 22, 2023
- God in Christ is about gathering and restoring the people of God
[DIsclaimer – the title has nothing to do with the sermon. I compeletely changed my direction after printing.]
In truly male chauvinist fashion, I can say I have never been truly lost. You can imagine that this also says something about my need to stop to ask for directions. While I have a pretty decent sense of direction, this is not to say I have never been lost. Of course, I have been lost from time to time, and GPS is a good friend. When my family was up in the New Jersey/New York area last summer and we were touring Times Square, I had no clue where I was in that sea of people and buildings, and navigating the train station had me all mixed up. I could not have been able to tell the correct corridor from my elbow, but thankfully, we had capable young ladies with us who I am proud to say I had a hand in raising, and we did not really have trouble getting back to our hotel at all.
Thank goodness for good daughters. If I ever get to be old enough, they may leave me at the train station one day or sitting out in Times Square with a sign around my neck saying “Point Me to Hamilton”, but for now I feel valued enough to be around.
In case you did not catch my point just now – not about potential elder abuse but about getting lost – I just said that while I have gotten lost a number of times in my life, it is harder to say that I have ever been truly lost. This is a distinction that I need you to see today. We have all at times suffered from a lack of physical direction, getting turned around, or taking the wrong road to where you do not know. But being deeply and soulfully lost is something else, and while I have flirted with the edges of this kind of lost, I have never quite found myself fully there. No one wants to be there.
This is the kind of lost that grabs people and holds them in complete hopelessness and confusion. This is the kind of lost that paralyzes people with fear and worry and depression. This is the kind of lost that steals your tomorrow and blocks the way forward. The kind of true, deep, and abiding lost that changes your life, that causes you to question everything, and that forces you to go somewhere you would never choose to go is the kind of lost we all want to avoid. But too many of us have been lost to some degree. We can imagine the loss of a loved one, especially a tragic and unexpected loss, might do it. Maybe it was a big illness or other health challenge. Some might end up lost after the loss of a job or the path that they thought was laid out was taken away. Others are predisposed by their brain chemistry to struggle more with feeling lost than the rest. My own worst struggle was a spiritual crisis that held me for years. While I have known loss in more ways than I would like to count, as have you, I am thankful that it was not worse and with the help of others I recovered.
The tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali, Northern Kingdom tribes on the outskirts of Israel, were not so fortunate. The kings of the Northern Kingdom were on the whole worse than the Southern Kingdom, and the prophets came there often to warn, to guide, and to help, but ultimately, those tribes fell to the Assyrian Kingdom who led them away into slavery, and at least some of them in the particularly nasty method of something like fishhooks through their ears. They were never seen, again. The whole Galilee area was suspect being so close to and mingled with “other” people. So the end was that the tribes of the Northern Kingdom were completely lost, and two of the first to be hauled off were Zebulun and Naphtali. Isaiah was prophesying as all of these things were lining up. In today’s reading from Isaiah, he is trying to give the people something to take with them to give them hope. God will not forget about you, even the people of Naphtali and Zebulun. God will provide a future for you. This kind of vital message may be why so many people continue to hold Martin Luther King, Jr in reverence. He had his faults and failings. There were ways that he was not the model of healthy relationships, but he was a prophet to people feeling lost. He brought hope into dark times and promised that love would overcome hate. He will always be remembered as someone who believed we could be a better people together if we were willing to work for it.
It is truly telling that when Jesus began his ministry, when he broke out into his Kingdom work, he went to the Galilee area and Isaiah is remembered. Good Jews did not go there to live and work. It was out in the boonies and less important with all kinds of riffraff eking out as existence.
That’s when Matthew begins calling people by name; Jesus begins calling people by name. Those who were glossed over by history and culture and politics were named. In the shadow of Naphtali and Zebulun, God’s tribe would come. On the shores of pagan Galilee, Jesus would name his first disciples. What was forgotten, what was lost, would be reclaimed and restored. Just like that, Matthew paints this picture of the gospel in such beautiful strokes.
Friends, this is the very heart of Jesus’ ministry. Never forget that we are absolutely resurrection people, and we absolutely look forward to a life with God into eternity, but Jesus came to gather the lost and reclaim them in the living power of God’s love. He did it then, and he still does it now.
This is the gift of today’s passages. Jesus is in the restoration work. He comes for the lost, the broken, the hurting, the outcast, the ones that the world discards. He comes for them with compassion and healing and wholeness. Anyone can find love in Christ because he was lost himself, given to the worst death, burdened with the sin of the entire world, cast out from God’s face, and cut off from life. But the love of God found him and reclaimed him and restored him as the one who was slain but lives. Jesus became the one who was destroyed but made whole. He was the one who was completely lost if anyone in the history of the world was ever lost, but he was also found. He was found and became the one who finds us all.
It is no accident that Luke has an entire chapter devoted to this one theme. Luke 15 is three stories of lost things being found: sheep, coins, and a son. If one sheep is truly lost, the shepherd goes after it with commitment and determination. If a woman truly loses one of her cherished and treasured coins from her life’s savings, she hunts and looks and searches until her security is restored. If a man truly loses his son and the son becomes lost starving in a pagan country without anyone, even family because he called his father dead to him, the father will still run to welcome him home. What was lost was found and heaven rejoices.
This is the work of Jesus that Matthew needs us to know. And this is the gospel that has brought us here today. We are a people who cannot save ourselves. We all have problems and failures and evil lurking in our history. We have brokenness and idolatry and pride directing our lives. We have all experienced being lost in some way or we would not go to the trouble of being here today or any Sunday. This is a lot of work for people who do not need saving. Thanks be to God that we are smarter than that. Thanks be to God that we know that we identify with being lost. At some time, we may find ourselves truly lost, even with the help of Jesus, but he is the one who walks that path with us. And we are the ones who walk with him.
One of the most amazing stories I have seen is the story of Louis Zamperini in the 2014 movie Unbroken which shows his life of trouble beginning on the streets as a child to being an Olympic runner but serving in WW2 in the Pacific theater. He was shot down, adrift for 47 days in a raft, captured by the Japanese army who tortured him cruelly. He is freed at the end of the war and returns home with demons upon demons. Eventually, he finds his friend in Jesus and even forgives the Japanese officers who treated him so poorly. The end of the movie has actual footage of Zamperini running the Olympic torch in Japan at the 1998 Winter Olympic Games.
You cannot imagine someone being so lost as that. It is a testament to his strength of character that he could endure such a tortuous time, but it took Jesus and a Billy Graham crusade to show him the light in his darkness, to bring him hope, and to provide a future. The love of family and friends became the face, the hands, the feet, and the heart of Jesus in his life. He found Jesus’ words true. He was claimed by name and restored. While he never forgot, he did find room in his heart even for the worst of his Japanese captors. No only can we find ourselves reclaimed and restored, but we can share that gift with others.
Your homework this week is to think about some time you have felt lost and how Jesus was able to walk with you through that time. A hint is that at some point when you found you were desperately struggling you were not alone.
Also, we need to be able to connect with those around us who are struggling like this. How can we be spirits of compassion and support? This is the gospel at work. I would love to hear your thoughts. May the Spirit give us room to share and grow as God’s children who needed a future and found one.
To God be the glory. Amen.