Weekly Devotional for August 2, 2015

Scripture text: Isaiah 55:1-9 (Appointed for August 5, 2015)

I first became really familiar with this passage from Isaiah at the Blackwater Falls Chapel Service in West Virginia. When I became pastor in Davis, the town in which the Blackwater Falls State Park resides, I inherited a number of things from my predecessors. One of which was a chapel liturgy that used the words of Isaiah 55 in much the same way we use the Psalm text each Sunday in our worship, a little vignette between the lessons that offers a song of praise for the Word of God.

Isaiah’s prophecy is full of visions of the world as it is meant to be. Here, we see how God envisions the peoples of the covenant to be a beacon to all the nations, showing them where they can come to receive the bounty of God’s goodness. But then, as now, this is a vision that is radically contrary to human nature. We are people of division and we like it that way. There’s our people and there are those people over there who are not our people. And those “others” are rarely folks we want knocking on our doorstep. They are, at worst, an enemy to be destroyed and, at best, simply not to be trusted.

This dynamic, it seems to me, has been much more pronounced over the past two decades or so. Americans have grown increasingly suspicious of just about anyone who practices the religion of Islam, due to its association with Al Qaida, ISIS, and other terrorist organizations. Many politicians and pundits are not even trying to hide their disdain of immigrants coming into our country, using language that is ugly in its naked racism. And each time there’s a police involved shooting in the media, there’s an immediate jump-to-conclusions that the victim (usually a black male) in some way deserved to die for crimes (or innocent behavior) that none of our legal codes prescribe the death penalty for.

The other scares us and if we had our druthers, we would find a way to get them out of our country and out of our lives.

But that’s not God’s way and he loves to remind us of that. As he says in the words of Isaiah, “his ways are not our ways.”

I had a rather dramatic reminder of this myself while visiting Detroit during the Youth Gathering. We arrived a day earlier than the main events, so we spent much of that first day exploring the city. Lunchtime found us at a mall in Dearborn, one of the suburbs of Detroit, along with probably at least one hundred other youth from various ELCA groups across the country. All of us were already wearing our brightly colored T-shirts, so it was obvious to any observers we were part of some “big thing” that was going on.

Now, Dearborn, MI is well-known as having one of the largest populations of Muslims in the United States. So many of the other folk at the mall, shoppers or workers, were of the Islamic faith. Many were Arab or Middle Eastern, others were black. The differences between us and our hosts during that hour or so were obvious.

At one point, I stopped at a Teavana shop to sample a bit of iced tea. The shop clerk immediately asked me about what was going on, curious about our shirts and who we were. I gave him a quick explanation that we were church youth groups from all over the country who had come to Detroit for a gathering and that part of our purpose there would be to help out the city in any way we could. Upon hearing that, the man gave a slight bow and made a gesture with his hands.

Now, I’m not as well versed in the Islamic faith as I’d like to be, but I recognized immediately that the man’s gestures were an act of blessing. My impression was confirmed when he said openly that he wanted to bless us for the work we were doing for his city.

God had come to me in the form of this Islamic shopkeeper. Talk about “not our ways.”

But that’s the point. God loves the other. He loves the immigrant. He loves those who practice religions other than our own. He loves people of different races. And he wants us to love and respect them as well. The peaceable kingdom he outlines in Isaiah’s prophecy is a world where the divisions we humans hold so vital matter for nothing. We are all God’s children. We are all people for whom Christ came, died, and rose again. God reminds us that they are not “the other” so much as they are our siblings, fellow children of God.

God is full of surprises. He truly does not think the way we do, but calls us time and again for us to begin thinking the way he does. When that happens, the world begins to look very different and we realize just how precious all of its people truly are. Amen.