On last
Wednesday, January 6th, a passenger became disruptive during an airlines flight from Portland, Oregon to Hawaii. Despite repeated requests by the
flight attendants, the 56-year-old passenger from Salem, Oregon made threatening remarks, and refused to stow his carry-on bag. Fearing for the safety of the passengers, the captain made the decision to return to the Portland
Airport. He declared an emergency, and two F-15 fighter jets
were scrambled over the Pacific Ocean and escorted the plane back to the airport. Upon
arrival, the man was taken off the plane, and was questioned by law enforcement authorities before being released. The plane then was searched for bombs, and then the flight departed once again for Hawaii. Despite the security efforts, three of the original passengers
chose not to re-board the flight.
The same day, an airline’s
gate agent in Costa Rica flagged Joan Rivers’ boarding pass as looking suspicious, and refused to
allow her to board a flight to the Newark, NJ airport. It seems that both Joan
Rivers’ married name and her professional name had been printed on her boarding pass. To
the agent it looked “fishy.”
People are on-edge. It used to be that we thought that we were safe when we took an airplane flight, and that we would
get to our destination. Yet that feeling of security is gone forever. Let anything happen out of the ordinary on an airplane flight, and immediately
fear overtakes us. For none of us knows what the next moment will hold.
It is one thing to trust God, to feel close to God when our life seems
stable and secure. Then suddenly our world seems to shift on its axis,
the earth beneath our feet shakes violently, and terror overwhelms us.
Perhaps the greatest challenge
to our faith is at those moments in our lives. A famous historian (Eric
Hobsbawm) writes about his own life growing up as a Jewish orphan in Berlin. On a cold day in January 1933, when he was 15 years old, his life in Berlin took a drastic turn, and it changed from a relatively secure place to a fearful place. That
day had begun as most days. As usual he had been walking his younger sister
home from school. However, as they passed a newsstand, he saw a newspaper headline
which read, “Adolph Hitler Appointed Chancellor of Germany.” From that moment on, he began to sense that his whole
world was being ripped apart—a new but unknown world was being born. He later wrote that it was like living “Between
a dead past and a future not yet born.”
“Living between a dead past and a future not yet born”—that is how the Jews felt in Isaiah’s time. Their old world
had died. The world’s greatest superpower of that era, Babylon, had conquered them, leaving their capital, Jerusalem, in ruins. Many of them had been forced to go to Babylon as prisoners. One of the religious leaders of the destroyed Temple was in such despair,
that he wrote in one of the Psalms that they “sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept.” However,
over the years they had endured. Some even had prospered in their businesses
and had settled into a routine. Some of them even had begun ignoring their
distinctiveness as Jews, and had begun seeing themselves as Babylonians. For
them it was the “new normal.”
Then a new superpower began to
arise on the horizon—the nation of Persia, led by King Cyrus.
Moreover, this new superpower Persia began to crave more territory to add to its empire. It had grown stronger militarily than Babylon, and everyone knew that in a
war, Persia would prevail. Moreover, the
Jews felt caught in the middle of the conflict. War fears struck the city.
The weak and frightened little colony of Jews knew that once again, forces
over which they had no control would sweep them aside in history’s march through time. To
those fearful people, the Prophet Isaiah brought an amazing and almost unbelievable word of promise. Isaiah told the people that God had created them as a nation through the exodus experience, and that
same God was telling them, “Fear not,
for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you”—the
word “redeemed” was a legal
term, in which a relative would buy someone out of bondage for a sum of money. Isaiah told the people that God, like a relative,
was buying them out of bondage in Babylon. However, the ransom that God
would pay was not going to be gold or silver—rather God was trading off other nations’ freedom for their freedom.
Indeed, God was playing favorites, and God was going to let the other nations go into bondage as a ransom for the Jews’
freedom. God was going to set them free from their exile, and return them
to their homeland. Like their ancestors, who were slaves within the grasp
of the superpower Egypt, God once again would enter the political arena and give them their own exodus.
“I have called you by name, you are mine.” Throughout the Biblical story, God has
been the God who has entered into relationship with people, and he has given them names by which he called them. He established a covenant with Abram and gave him the name Abraham. Moreover,
God journeyed with Abraham, and with all his descendants: Isaiah, Jacob, Moses,
Samuel, Isaiah, Mary, and Joseph.
Centuries later, another superpower
was in charge of the world. This time it was Rome.
Once again, the people feared for the future. This
time God acted in sending his son Jesus to live among us, dust of dust, and flesh of flesh. God
gave him the name “Jesus”—which
in Hebrew was “Joshua”—which
literally meant, “God will save.”
At that time of Roman oppression, the name Jesus was a popular name that carried with it a political connotation—a
connotation that through Jesus, God would free his people from bondage. In Luke 1, the angel Gabriel elaborates on what Jesus will mean for the world: “He
will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God
will give to him the throne of his Father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there
will be no end.”
In identifying with those he
had come to save, Jesus went forward into the waters of the River Jordan. There
in those muddy waters he was baptized. Moreover, when he came out of the
waters, he sensed God’s affirmation of him—and he heard God’s voice speaking to him, “You are my son, my beloved.” Then
in time, Jesus called by name disciples to him: Peter, Andrew, Philip, John, and Paul. Sometimes
Jesus would give them a new name, a new name to signify their new relationship with him.
God still
is the God who knows our name and calls us by name. Moreover, in our baptism,
our parents declare our Christian name by which God calls us.
You and I likewise live within
a fearful world. We likewise are living between a dead past and a future
that has not yet come into being.
· In the last year, the stock market has swung up and down so violently. Many people
that thought their retirement was secure are now seeing it evaporate.
· Every day on the evening news, there are stories about terrorist bombings in hotels
and marketplaces in distant places. Then, on Christmas Day, there was an
attempt by a terrorist to bring down an international Northwest airlines flight to Detroit.
· In some high schools, police guards patrol the hallways and restrooms because of
student violence.
· People are afraid, and that fear often has been translated into anger at our governmental
officials who seem inept to solve the crises that are engulfing us.
We are afraid. Yet our deepest fears are not about the stock market,
nor are they about the possibility of being touched by violence. Our deepest
fears are that we are frail and transient creatures living in a threatening world. Therefore, we desperately need to hear once again God’s words through the Prophet
Isaiah, “Fear not. I know you. I have
called you by name. You are mine, and I will not leave you alone.
No one can predict what will
happen to the economy, or the stock market. No one knows when and where the next terrorist will strike. God certainly will not keep all harm away from us, for then he would be disregarding our precious
humanity. Nevertheless, God does promise that he will not leave us alone in the midst of our troubles. When we go through life’s turbulent waters, even there
he will be with us. When life’s cruelty threatens to engulf us in
its flames, even there God will be with us.
During the bicentennial celebration of our country in 1976, a
writer came up with a creative idea. He began searching for someone who
was old enough, to have known a family member that had been old enough to have lived at the time of the founding of our nation
in 1776. The writer fortunately found Burnham Ledford, a Kentucky farmer who was over 100 years old. Burnham Ledford remembered as
a little boy being taken by wagon to see his great-great-grandmother. She
was then somewhat over 100 years old. She had been a little girl when George
Washington had been inaugurated as the first American President.
When the writer asked Burnham
Ledford what he remembered from that visit, he recalled being taken as a little child into his great-great-grandmother’s
home. She was very feeble, and the years had robbed her of her sight. She was sitting in an old chair in the corner of a dark bedroom. Burnham’s father told her, “We brought Burnham
to see you.” The old women turned toward the sound of his voice,
and she reached out with her long-bony fingers, and said in a crackling voice, “Bring
him here.”
Burnham Ledford recalled, “They had to push me toward her. I
was afraid of her. But when I got close to her, she reached out her hands
and began to stroke my face. She felt my eyes and my nose, my mouth and
my chin. And all at once, she seemed to be satisfied, and she pulled me
close to her and held me tight. ‘This boy’s a Ledford,’
she said, ‘I can feel it. I know this boy. He’s one of us.’ ”
In an even deeper way, when we are frightened, God comes
close to us, holds us tight, and says, “I know this one. I called this one by name. This one belongs to me. Fear not. I know you by name.”
Dr. William dePrater
