Sunday Service | The Second Sunday of Lent: February 28, 2021
The Second Sunday of Lent
In this season, we are seeing a Church that wants to be married to Christ, but also wants to find fulfillment in power and wealth, and the tension is ugly.
But this season of change is a mercy, as one of our elders wrote this week:
Mercy
That the Lord is allowing the Church to lose faith in itself is a mercy. Better that we feel for a time that the ground has been removed from beneath our feet than for us to drift from our foundation entirely. Better that we feel the sting of disappointment in ourselves than to continue letting the pride of identity numb us to reality. Better that we fall flat on our faces, humiliated in full view of the world, than to keep contorting ourselves into something lovable by their standards, than to continue to prize being lovable over being loving.
The Lord disciplines those He loves.
In our weakness His strength is made perfect.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
His perfect love will drive out all fear of what we will become.
Behold, He is making all things new.
Andrew Collins
Jesus is trailblazing this new path, if we will follow him. He isn’t changing, even in the midst of an evolving church, in the midst of our connection with him transforming in new ways. And through all of this: we belong, we are loved, and we are pleasing to God.
The song in these chapters of Isaiah that we are studying this Lenten season, are also full of tension. Suffering and questions are colliding with life and promises from God.
Suffering is isolating, as perhaps all of us have experienced in this past year more than in years past. But Isaiah is offering us someone who will stay with us, talk with us, and empathize with us right in the middle of our suffering.
Isaiah 53.1-3
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Verse 1
Who has believed - who receives the arm of the Lord?
Our temptation in suffering is to look away from Jesus, and to look for success, for ways out of suffering. We want quick fixes instead of God’s goodness and wisdom.
Israel, at the time Isaiah is writing this song, follows this same route: looking to Egypt as their way out of being conquered by another nation, instead of God who led them out of Egypt and made them their own nation.
We are called to look to God for our NEXT:
Meal
Moment
Promise
Need
Verse 2
Jesus is undesirable and not enough -- or so he seems at first glance.
Israel was laid bare after a war. Jesus comes out of that chaos. This makes him as a king look fragile. How can a story of redemption come from one so tender and vulnerable?
We too have been laid bare in the past year. How can Jesus do anything in these circumstances?
By appearances only, maybe he’s not able to. Jesus looks just like anyone else. Jesus looks like us.
He’s not elite. Not super-human. He is just as we are. We all view ourselves in this same way.
And the rest of his story, amazingly, doesn’t diminish his humanity. His bodily resurrection and ascension keeps him connected to our human frame, enhancing his humanity--and, by extension, our own.
Verse 3
Identifying with us in suffering, sorrow, and grief--still we hold him in low esteem and reject him.
Here’s the great irony: we’ve turned the very miracle of Jesus becoming like us into a reason to reject him.
We despise him for it.
Why? Because we’d rather have a HERO in our suffering stories, instead of an identifier, an empathizer.
He grows us through our suffering instead of merely rescuing us. And we despise him for it.
Jesus shows us mercy, inviting us into a whole life. But the call of that whole life is to look to him. Not to a hero, but to a servant who stays with us. To look to our good shepherd, who meets us, sees us as he himself is: a tender plant who has no reason to grow here, but who does anyway.
Jesus understands us. He empathizes. Find security in his presence and love. How? By doing the basics of our faith: pray, confess, forgive.
We want a new formula for this following, but there isn’t one. Take time and spend energy to seek God. The idea that you don’t have time or energy is a LIE. Jesus makes it possible. He makes time and energy happen.
This week, read and meditate on Isaiah 53.1-3 with these prompts:
Take a word or phrase and turn it into a praise
Take a word or phrase and make it a confession
Take a word of prase and make it a request