Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. And let us pray.
O Lord, send forth your word into our ears, that it may bear fruit in our lives. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Israel was special. I’m not talking about the geopolitical nation of Israel today. Oh, they’re no more special than any of the other kingdoms of the earth.
Germans, Koreans, Australians, whatever. I’m talking about THE Israel. The people of God.
The people delivered from slavery in Egypt by miraculous intervention, when the Almighty struck their captors with plagues and parted the sea for His people’s safe passage. I’m talking about THE Israel. The people of God.
The people whom the Lord Himself met at Mount Sinai, and who received from Him there not merely the Ten Commandments, but the tabernacle, the sacrificial system, the means by which God would sanctify them, and more importantly, dwell among them as Immanuel. God with us. God on earth.
Something no other people could claim. So yes, Israel was special. They were called to be different.
The God of heaven dwelled in their midst. And so, they were called to be a glimpse of heaven on earth. A people who lived the life God had designed for all creation.
The merciful and the righteous God dwelled among them. And so they were to be people of mercy and justice. To treat each other justly and to live in mercy toward one another.
They were called to put the word of the Lord and the promises of God before everything else. And they were called to proclaim that word and that promise to the nations around them. To bring the good news of God’s promise to anyone they met.
They were called to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth with the presence of the Lord. Yes, Israel was special. And Israel was a failure.
God set Israel apart to be his servant. To be different. To be the people through whom he would bring his cleansing into the entire world.
And Israel failed repeatedly and miserably. Rather than being a place of mercy, Israel was filled with just as many starving people. Just as many oppressed people as their pagan neighbors.
They did not care for their widows or their orphans. Their leaders took bribes and kickbacks. They caved into special interest groups.
Their priests would offer sacrifices on the altar of the Lord before turning around and worshipping the idols of the region. Their kings were corrupt in their dealings. Caring more about political alliances with pagan nations than about remaining faithful to the charge they had been given to lead God’s people.
Israel failed. They failed to live as the servant that God called them to be. They could not fulfill the requirements of the task set before them.
They were unfit. And as several NFL coaches and GMs could tell you after last week, if you don’t get the job done, you get fired. Israel, they didn’t get the job done.
So Israel got fired, in a manner of speaking. They were exiled from the holy city. They were cast away from the temple.
They were dragged out of the promised land in chains. Taken to Babylon. Their capital city left in ruins behind them.
The palace destroyed. The temple destroyed. Their status as the special ones of God seemingly revoked.
Israel found itself back in slavery. Back where they had started when God first visited them in Egypt all those years ago. And so Israel was ashamed.
They were embarrassed. They knew their failure. Because even though it might not be obvious simply by looking at the way they lived, they did take special pride in being called and set aside as God’s servant.
It gave them purpose. It gave them identity. And for all their failures to actually live as the servant God intended, it still filled his people with great sadness to lose that distinction.
It filled them with great sadness to lose their home. To lose their temple. Which is why the words of the prophet Isaiah we heard just a few moments ago would have been so comforting for them.
It’s why they offer hope. Behold my servant, says the Lord, my chosen one, my Messiah, the one in whom my soul delights. Don’t look at yourself, O Israel.
Don’t look at your failings. Don’t look at your chains. Don’t look at the Babylonian landscape that surrounds you.
Behold my servant. He is the one who will fulfill what you could not. I will put my spirit upon him, and he will be the one who brings forth my justice to the nations where you could not.
And he will not cry aloud. He will not lift up his voice in the street. He won’t need to draw attention to himself.
He won’t pander to the crowds. He won’t grow intoxicated with the approval of the masses. No, he will simply set out and do the work that I have given him to do.
He will accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I send him. And he will be a man of mercy. He will not break a bruised reed.
He will not quench a faintly burning wick. Even though the world tells you those things are as useless as a broken pen or flashlight with a cracked bulb, even when the wisdom of the world says throw it out, my servant will be merciful. He will not discard those whom the world declares unworthy.
No, he will faithfully bring forth my justice, and my justice is mercy. And he will not grow too tired to complete his task. He won’t give up halfway through.
He won’t get discouraged, even if success does not show itself right away. My servant will be obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. Where you have failed, O Israel, my servant will not.
So don’t look at yourselves or your shortcomings. Behold my servant. The Lord is telling Israel, I’m not done with you yet.
For I have called you according to my righteousness, not yours. I will take you by the hand, and I will keep you, and I will use you to be my light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind to the reality of their sin and death, to bring prisoners out from the dungeon of futility and vanity that encages this creation, to bring those who sit in darkness out of that prison and into the light of God’s love. Behold my servant, O Israel.
I will accomplish these things through him. So yes, there was much comfort for Israel in the prophet’s words. But the comfort is not limited to the descendants of Abraham who were stuck in Babylon 500 years before Christmas.
There’s comfort for us, too. For like Israel of old, we are called to be the servants of God today. The Christian church on earth is the continuation of Israel of old.
We are the ones who are the sons and daughters of Abraham by faith. But as the failures of Israel of old were hauntingly similar to the ones we face today. For we are all too quickly, all too easily swayed by the accolades and the so-called wisdom of the world.
We’re willing to break that bruised reed of a person, especially if their views on ice raids and tariffs don’t align with ours. We’re all too willing to quench the faintly burning wick, the one who has repeatedly struggled with addiction, the one who doesn’t come to church as regularly as we would like them to, the one whose presence makes us just a little uncomfortable. Because the sad truth about our sinful flesh is that it actually finds joy in self-righteousness.
The sinful flesh likes condemning others. We like pointing out the sins in others that we think we have mastered in ourselves. We do not bring forth justice faithfully.
We revel in punishment. We like retribution for our enemies. We’re like the disciples who would have our Lord send down fire from heaven, but only to consume those evil people over there.
We want him to get rid of the politicians we don’t like, or the celebrity who uses her influence to popularize sin, the media who undermines God’s Word at every turn. We always want God to punish the sins of others, but ask him to turn a blind eye to the sin in our own lives, as we turn a blind eye to the sin in our own lives. So rather than using the water of God’s Word to bring gentle cleansing to the world around us, we would rather dump the bucket out and walk away.
And when our thirst for vengeance is not satisfied quickly enough, well then we are tempted to grow weary, to grow discouraged, to give up. And so according to the description in Isaiah 42, we, like Israel of old, have failed to be the servant God intended. We have failed because we are unfit for the task.
We are underqualified. But like Israel of old, our Lord has raised up a servant to fulfill what we have failed to do. He may not have been impressive by worldly standards, but God chose what is weak and foolish in the eyes of the world to shame the strong.
God chose what is low and despised in the world to bring to nothing the things that are. So let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. The Lord is your boast, for you are His servant.
But like Israel, we bring nothing but failure to the agreement. Yet our Lord remains faithful. He is faithful to you as you live as His servant in your daily life, the tasks He has given you in your vocation.
He is faithful to all of us as His people in this place, because He has claimed us as His own in the water of baptism. So we belong to Him. And because we belong to Him, we now walk in newness of life.
He has cleansed us. He has set us aside for His use. And He will work through us, not because we’re so deserving, not because we’re so good at it, but because He is faithful to His promises.
And through His gifts of word and sacrament, He enlivens us to live as His people, to be a light to the nations around us, a light to the people of our world, our community, our own families, a light to our children and spouses, even a light to our own sinful flesh that’s blinded by the empty philosophies of a dying world. Through the word He has placed in our hands, He opens our eyes that are blinded by sin. He brings us out of the prison of darkness to bask in the sunshine of His love.
Yes, Israel was special, set aside by God to be His servant. And you are too, set aside by God through your baptism to be His servant today. But our identity as His servant is not found in ourselves.
It is found in Jesus. He is the true servant, the one that we have been united to in baptism, the one who acted in humility and mercy, the one upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests, the one who has given us that very same spirit in our baptism. He forgives our sins.
He enlivens us with the gifts of this altar for the life we live as His servant because Emmanuel, who dwells in our midst, has made us worthy to live as His body on earth today, speaking His word, proclaiming the excellencies of Him who called us out of darkness and into His marvelous light. So we do not look to ourselves for hope or confidence. We behold the Lord’s servant.
We look at His chosen one, the one in whom God’s soul delights. We rejoice that in the water of our baptism, our Lord delights in us too. For in Christ we are His chosen one.
In Christ we are the Lord’s servant. For in Christ each of us is a beloved child of the Lord, one with whom He is well pleased. May God grant us to live this way in Jesus’ name.
Amen.