Year C — 1 Epiphany

God Doesn’t Play Favorites

The Rev. Gerald W. Keucher

The Sunday after Epiphany is an important day in the Church Year. One way you can tell it’s important is that the lessons before the Gospel are the same every year. We’re on a three-year cycle of readings, as you know, so it’s uncommon for the lessons before the Gospel not to be different every year of the cycle. But on big days, like Palm Sunday, Easter, Christmas, Pentecost, and All Saints, the lessons before the Gospel are the same.

To me that means that today’s lessons speak of themes that are vital to the Baptism of Jesus. There must be something about the Suffering Servant song in Isaiah and St. Peter’s realization in the house of Cornelius the Centurion that the lectionary wants to put before us every year. So let’s look at those lessons a bit.

The Lord says through Isaiah, “Behold…my chosen, in whom my soul delights…A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench…He will not fail or be discouraged.” Isaiah was speaking to people who had been completely defeated. Jerusalem had been conquered, Solomon’s Temple had been completely destroyed, and for 70 years the people had been in exile in Babylon. Those people knew what it was like to be crushed and to have their hope for the future taken away. They felt bruised, and their light was nearly extinguished.

I wonder if you’ve ever felt like a bruised reed or a dimly burning wick. I know I have. It happens in my own life when I think about the mistakes I’ve made, the feelings I’ve hurt, the times when I could have done something good and missed or spurned the opportunity. I love God, and I know I want to love God, but the light of God in me feels pretty dim sometimes.

The Church that I love also feels sometimes like a bruised reed and a dimly burning wick. It’s no surprise that diocesan staff people like me are seldom invited to work with parishes that are doing well. We get calls from the ones facing challenges.

Before the Bishop asked me to come to Intercession, here’s what most of my Sundays were like. I’d be invited to come to a parish with financial issues of one kind or another. I’d preach and meet with the leadership. I’d see the love people had for their parish. Just as here, in all those congregations I was almost always deeply touched by the love of God that I experienced in the people. It was clear that they love God just as you do, and I knew they wanted to love God just as you do, but sometimes the challenges seemed pretty big, and the parish itself felt like a dimly burning wick.

This part of the Book of Isaiah is all about God’s promise of restoration to people who have been defeated. That’s why this part of Isaiah is so much a part of Advent, the 12 days of Christmas, and Epiphany. “Comfort, comfort ye, my people…Ev’ry valley shall be exalted…And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed…He shall feed his flock like a shepherd.” Isaiah speaks to people who are afraid to hope, people who are too anxious to have faith, people who are hurt and suspicious.

Yes, Isaiah’s hearers are fearful and anxious and mistrustful. But that’s not all. They also long to be comforted. They have an aching desire to see Jerusalem and to rebuild the fallen city. The wick is smoldering, but the fire still burning is the desire to be faithful to God no matter what comes to them from a faithful God.

And what does God’s faithfulness lead to? Isaiah thinks of Israel as the Suffering Servant, given by God to be a covenant to the people, a light to the nations. In God’s faithfulness Jesus becomes the Incarnation of the Suffering Servant, the One who lives out what Isaiah talks about. And because of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection, we are enabled to recognize what God was doing in Jesus and let it happen in us.

That’s why Peter could open his mouth and say, “Oh. Okay. Now I get it. God doesn’t play favorites.” This is an enormous revelation; it’s the whole point of God’s actions in Jesus, and it’s the opposite of the way we live.

All of our societies and cultures, and our own personal identities, are built on the fundamental idea that some people are better than others. We always have insiders and outsiders, believers and infidels, the saved and the damned, the group and the scapegoat. We always need “people like us” the chosen, the good, who are completely different from “those bad people over there.” They are bad because they are not like us.

We always find our identity in “people like us.” Sometimes the criteria are racial. Sometimes it’s women against men; sometimes it’s straight against gay. We build our identities on who we are not.

So we build human solidarity by excluding somebody else. Girls’ nights out, stag parties, segregated schools, anti-Semitism, gay-bashing, anti-Muslim prejudice — they’re all part of building solidarity by excluding someone — that is, by playing favorites.

In any office or parish two people will build a friendship on the basis of not liking a third. We can always go to our friend and complain about the third person, and that will strengthen our relationship with our friend. Pilate and Herod had disliked each other, but when they both rejected Jesus, it created a bond between them, and they were friends.

Sometimes we’re in the favored group; sometimes we’re among the scapegoats. You would think that once we’d been the victim of racial or gender exclusion, we wouldn’t participate in excluding others. But we don’t even see ourselves doing it because we’re all completely involved in identifying others by how they differ from us and then judging and expelling them.

We think of our individual identity as something that has to be grabbed and defended. We see ourselves in rivalry with others, so when someone gets a promotion or gets elected to the Vestry, we seethe with resentment and feel the urge to react.

The religions we’ve created are built on standards of belief and conduct that tell us who’s in and who’s out, who’s pure and who’s impure. Our societies and cultures are built on expelling the innocent victim.

When God comes in the flesh, He doesn’t smite His enemies and turn His disciples into conquerors. That would just continue the cycle of violence and exclusion. Instead, God gives Himself as another innocent victim of human violent expulsion. In Jesus, God gave Himself to be expelled as the victim, to reveal our grabby violence so we don’t want to live that way any longer.

The Lamb that was slain now lives. If God can live as though death were not, we who live in God no longer have to live in the fear of violence and death. We too can live as if death were not. We can take the side of the innocent victim, exposing the lies of those who say that the weak deserve their oppression.

And we can live with each other without rivalry. We can see that all the squabbles we’re in are based on both of us being in competition for something. And if there’s a squabble, it means we’re both involved. It takes two to have a fight. If one of us is just not in competition, we’ll know how to defuse the problem. We don’t become less by letting someone else have her way. On the contrary we demean ourselves by participating in the rivalry.

In the house of the Roman soldier, Peter finally gets that God doesn’t play favorites. Gentiles can be baptized and become as much followers of Jesus as Jesus’ original Jewish followers. This is an enormous, huge deal. And most of us, because we’re still so much into the dynamic of identity-by-exclusion, still try to resist its implications.

We’re always still involved in trying to grab and defend our identity by excluding someone or a group of someones. The Spirit keeps Peter’s realization alive in us, so we can recognize what we’re doing and do what Jesus did instead. We can give ourselves for others; we can stop grabbing and stop defending. We can vindicate the innocent against those who whisper that they must be guilty because they’re “not like us.” (The parish would be better off if so-and-so would just leave. Our office would be nicer if there were no smokers or vegetarians. Bosnia would be purer if there were no Muslims. The Church would be at peace if we could just get rid of the lesbians and gays.)

So Peter’s outburst is the key to the whole thing. There are no favorites, and there are no outsiders. God shows no partiality. That’s why this lesson comes up today and on Easter morning. At His baptism God anoints Jesus to give Himself as the innocent victim, to go to the place of shame without resentment, and to live as though shame and death did not exist. And on Easter we see that God has broken the power of shame and death, so we can follow where Jesus has led the way.

But we’re not following to a place of worldly triumph where now we see who the real insiders are so we can smite our enemies. We’re going to follow Jesus to the place of shame. We’re going to be on the side of whatever innocent victims our society is excluding now. We’re going to bridle our tongues with one another so we can stop being rivals in competition with one another. We’re going to bear whatever the expellers put on us as we calmly and gently refuse to participate in the cycle of violence.

A witness like this is likely always to look to the world like a bruised reed and a smoldering wick. We have laid down the weapons of human power so we can be strong with the strength that God supplies. “’Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord.” God’s strength appears to the world as weakness, but that’s the kind of weakness that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced and that a shame-faced nation will remember next week.

Reminding a violence-soaked world that God doesn’t play favorites will always appear as weak as a dimly burning wick. But by the light of that dimly burning wick we have seen that God’s soul delights in all of us, and we wouldn’t want to move back into the darkness for any reason.

My discussion of our normal human dynamics is greatly influenced by the writings of James Alison. I gratefully acknowledge his formative effect on me and wholeheartedly recommend all of them to any reader. Here are those I’ve read: Knowing Jesus (Springfield IL: Templegate, 1994); The Joy of Being Wrong (New York: Crossroad, 1998); Faith Beyond Resentment ( New York: Crossroad, 2001); Raising Abel ( New York: Crossroad, 2003); On Being Liked ( New York: Crossroad, 2003); and Undergoing God ( New York: Continuum, 2006).