Isaiah 43:1-7
Epiphany 1 "Baptism of Jesus" - Year C
1) You are beloved: it is elemental to your being, no matter your length of life.
2) You were formed and the former can reject you or redeem you: it’s about the former, not the formed, based on claimed eternity.
Are you going to go with statement 1) or 2)? This choice isn’t just semantics or an illusion based on foreground/background alternation.
Problem: How did I get to be so blessed that a claim of first-cause would lead a creator to give equally created others or whole nations in return for me? This locks me into a relationship of shame that I would need redemption and a great contortion to swear fealty to my big brother manipulating things from afar.
Problem: To claim that we are made for someone else’s glory evidences a great lack of “we”ness or revelation of “our” image. This grand beginning of community extended and welcoming folks to a party becomes a patronizing patriarchy. Reduced from being a responsible party to having no authority breaks whatever potential relationship of growing together there might have been.
When between a rock and a hard place, there is more contentment in belovedness than there is comfort in being an object subject to the timing and whim of another. This suggests a theology of belovedness lives deeper than one of redemption. If so, atonement is constituent of creation, not subsequent to it.
The above seems a bit much. It might easily fit into a charge of over-reaction except that the season of Epiphany is all about over-reaction. We might call it the Magi Syndrome — taking one piece of information in one country or arena of life and extrapolating it for another country or all of time. Hopefully you still have a bit of the Magi in you that will carry a sense of connection past usual boundaries.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2013/01/isaiah-431-7.html
Love is fearsome. It will throw itself in front of a speeding truck. It will reverse its otherwise hard-held values for the sake of a beloved. It will excuse everything and nothing. There is a wildness about love that cannot be restrained, constrained, or any other way captured.
No wonder the issue of love causes disturbance in systems committed to safety, security, and stability. With the same ease that we conflate Matthew's nativity scene with Luke's, we connect love and sex. If only we can regulate sex we think we can regulate love, and vice versa. So the church might be expected to have its most trouble with gender, race, and sexual expression - all matters of the fearsomeness of love.
So Israel has become an idol for G*D who is willing to whatever it takes to draw such a love to itself. So a variety of things become idols for us, including G*D, that we try to draw unto ourselves.
This is a tough passage that sidesteps a straightforward presentation. What won't you give up for your idol, your love?
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/january2004.html
Formed incarnate, redemption already secure, we pass through waters dark and deep, water standing against water.
Called from chaotic exile, already created for glory, we rise through waters light and lively, water living within water.
Isaiah envisions glorious redemption as an integral part of our incarnation, our formation. He remembers an exodus initially protected by parted water and all the desert and parting of more water to come. He anticipates those who had been buried far away to come surfing back.
Reading Isaiah emboldens us as we pass through our next water of redemption to find a glory not fully dreamed. Can you imagine living already redeemed, already glorious?
- - -
that which you create
is imbued with a goodness
never lost
we learn this creation gift
reflecting on our own
ever found
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html
What a revelation it is when we hear our name called by creation. Our fears - relieved, our context - widened, and our participation - precious. We see ourselves through a telescope backward, changing our perspective from the up-close to a larger context tying us to past and future in such a way that our present is honored as a connection spot, a place to connect the dots of all the scattered people.
We open our eyes and dive in to enjoy swimming in a river that is never the same.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html