Over the last three Sundays, our sermon time has focused on the three core values we have identified – knowing God, building relationships, and doing justice. These values, lived through our mission statement and practiced in our openness to the whole human family, is what we are about here. They help us to know God through prayer and study and by seeing God in people and in the rest of creation. They help us to build relationships as we encounter each other and as we make new friends and acquaintances in the church and at school and work, and in our families. These values lead us to seek justice and to act fairly and righteously in our relationships, and to expect the same and sometimes demand the same from church, business, and government leaders.

The end result of our knowing, building, and doing is serving others in the name of God. The lessons read this morning call us to find a sense of restoration, renewal, and reassignment in our service. In fact, these values lead us out of ourselves and into service. We are called to be a serving people and we cannot just serve each other here.

I know that to talk about being a servant makes us uncomfortable – it sounds too much like slavery. But service in the name of God is about servanthood, not servitude. Servitude is coerced, the one giving service has no choice. Servitude is what slaves and prisoners do. On the other hand, servanthood is about choice, it is about giving yourself to something or someone beyond yourself because you want to and because it is the right thing to do.

In Isaiah 42, God promises to send a servant who will proclaim freedom and justice to people who have been in exile – forced out of their homes and powerless to do anything about it. The coming servant will have the power they need. The servant God is sending will bring delight to God and justice to God’s people. The servant of God will be one who is strong like a reed that bends in the wind, but will not break, who be like fire that will burn for the justice and peace of God, and it cannot be put out. The promised servant of God will be un-fainting, and unfailing until justice comes to everyone and everywhere. This is the promise God makes to people in exile who long for hope and home.

It is servanthood that we are called to claim. Isaiah describes a servant with a gift for changing lives and for changing systems. We have seen servants like this before. We saw them in the founding fathers and mothers of this country and in the abolitionists who convinced the country that the work of freedom could not be complete as long as all in this country were in real servitude. We have seen it in Ida B. Wells and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in their quest for women’s and human rights. We have seen it in Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa, and others whom God is raising up to serve the world in these days. This servant of God teaches us that if we are going to be God’s servants in our world, we will be the ones to bring and be light to the nations of the world, we will be God’s witnesses in the world. It will be the church that will open the eyes of those blind to the needs of the world, who will bring those in bondage into freedom’s light.

The servant God promises to send is one who is trusted by God and who is a model for all of us, for surely we are called in these days to stand on our faith in ways that make clear that we are God’s servant people.

We are at a moment when the world needs our light. We know there are dark places in this world – abuse, war, missing children and adults, too much violence, too much needless death, too little hope, too little care. There is a need for the kind of light only God’s people can give. We are the ones to say, “God is faithful and trustworthy. We can rely on God’s word to send a servant into the world. This is not the time to stand quiet and pretend that it does not matter whether we are people of faith or not. We are all called to be servants of God, and as a colleague says, we are not servants for the sake of gaining prestige, power, position, or status.

After all, there is nothing really wrong with having some recognition in the world. We want to do well, and we want our children to do well in school, at work, and in our lives and we want people to notice. To have power is to have influence. We want to be able to have some influence in our environment, and we want to be well thought of by people we respect. All of that is all right. Surely if the servant God promises is our model, then we know that all that we have is given to us to be used in service to others. Those things may come, and if they do let it be because we are faithful servants of the living God.

Isaiah 42 promises a servant; Isaiah 61 presents an unnamed servant who claimed the servant’s mantle. For Christians, Jesus is our model of service. He is the one who took on the mantle of Isaiah’s servant. He has grown up hearing the stories of exile and return. He knows the story of Isaiah’s unnamed servant who saw the needs of the people low on hope and used the power God gave him to raise them up.

It is Jesus who claimed Isaiah’s words as his own when he made them the touchstone of his ministry. It is Jesus who after the temptation in the desert wilderness is trying to get a bit of rest in his hometown of Nazareth. He leaves his parents' house to go to worship at the local synagogue and is called upon to read scripture. He reads the words we heard in Isaiah 61.

“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, it has anointed me. It has been poured over me like healing, energizing oil and I am ready to do four things. I am ready to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to help the blind to see, and to proclaim liberty and release to those who are bound especially those bound up by their indebtedness to another.”

When he sat down it was clear that Jesus was announcing that the center of his ministry would be people, the least and the lost, the marginalized and the misunderstood, the disenfranchised and the disrespected. His would be a ministry of healing, and renewal, and empowerment. He has come home to declare his faithfulness to God as he responded to the Spirit in him; to the people as he declares God’s good news to them, and to his call. This is the acceptable year of the Lord.

The acceptable year of the Lord is called Jubilee. In the Bible, Jubilee is that period that comes every fifty years. In the Jubilee year, slaves are freed, debts forgiven, and land that has been borrowed against and taken is restored. It is time for a year of Jubilee because we live in a time when the crushing debt that so many families live with has been likened to 21^st century slavery, with people indentured to their bills. As a result, homes are lost, and hope is being lost. Should we pay our bills and debts? Of course we should, it is the responsible thing to do. But it gets hard sometimes in an unsteady job market, 21% credit card interest, and fees of $30-35 for a returned check. That is not to mention the price of a gallon of gas. What if religious and political leaders got together and for the good of society, declared a period of Jubilee, and for the next twelve months, we would not have to make mortgage payments, car payments, or Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express payments because our debt for the next year has been forgiven, and we are free to use our resources in ways that help the neediest among us and honor God as we do? That is what Jubilee is about.

Now is the time, when in the spirit of Jubilee, what has been broken has been restored and made whole. Jubilee justice is indeed about restoration. People are restored to their homes and to safety and peace of mind. Now is our time of restoration when we who would be God’s servant’s in this world will make good on our trust in God and do all that we can to bring jubilee to the world around us. We need a time of servanthood and jubilee.

In our time of spirit-led service inspiring restoration, people have jobs that allow them to provide for themselves and their families; and health care for body and mind. In such a time, justice is a matter of facts and fairness, and not profiles and prejudices. The hungry eat, the naked are clothed, the sick and imprisoned are visited, children receive excellent educations just because every child deserves one, and those who are unjustly bound are set free.

That is the ministry Isaiah’s servant claims, it is what Jesus did, and it is the service we are called to render in God’s name. It really does make a difference that we are where we are. Our congregation is one of the mission stations in our community. It is where people will come to find a word of hope and healing for their lives. God’s servants, you and I offer our service to church and community so that where we are will be a place of safety and respect, of holiness and hope not of outsize egos and thoughtless statements such as we heard last week. The world does notice what people who say they are Christian faith do and say. We are to speak the truth in love for the sake of Jesus Christ, we are not to speak carelessly words that shame the body of Christ.

Careless speech causes can lead to careless actions, and careless actions to great grief and the world has enough grief. Grief and mourning are exhausting, they can so debilitate us that we don’t care how we look, what we eat, or if we work; we do not have the energy to do much more than get up, get dressed, and put one foot in front of the other. In the name of God, we are called to replace tears of heartbreak with tears of celebration.

The promise of God is of restoration and renewal. Renewal comes for the exiles when the one who is about to lead the people back into the Holy City claims it for them. There is renewal and in the renewal there is a kind of reassignment. The people have some new responsibilities now. If survival were their job in exile, if their work were just getting through it so that they could tell the story of how they got over, if it were up to them to bear witness to what had happened, now their job description has changed. Now it is to rebuild the city, to reverse the curse of generations stuck in negativity and cynicism. Now their assignment is to take on the high calling of following God’s servant and of finding their means of service in the world.

We are a people restored, renewed, reassigned. It is time for us to break loose from whatever it is that has us bound because Jesus has set us free. I know that once I was freed from envy and defensiveness, my life got much better. You know what has you bound up, be set free and listen to the liberating word of Jesus, the words with which he began his public ministry.

As he claims the servant’s ministry, Jesus leaves us with a question: what kind of servants has God anointed us to do, and how will we serve God and the world in our time? We do a lot around here as we fulfill the ministries of this church. Let me suggest a few more things we might do.

We can in these days live with restored and renewed hope, and possibility. We can let go of the pessimism and hopelessness that holds us back, and move forward with energy that helps us move forward. We can take on a new assignment and proclaim freedom and justice wherever we are.

And we can do this one more thing. We can give ourselves anew to God’s servant who has all that our spirits need.

After all, it is Jesus who is the loving servant, who opened his arms and his heart to make room for all who needed him and who wanted to have a relationship with God. We serve God by being a welcoming place.

He is the teaching servant who gathered a community around him to learn about love, justice, faith, and service. We serve God by being a teaching, learning, asking what we can do to make our world better – then doing it kind of place.

He is the laughing servant who shares our joy, and the crying servant who shares our sorrow. He is the suffering servant who died for us and he is the risen and returning servant who will ransom his church and bring us one day to that place long prepared for we are prepared to go with him. We serve God by offering this church as a healing, nurturing, strengthening place.

It is Jesus, the servant of God, the son of God, the anointed Messiah of God who took on the mantle of liberating servant and he calls us to do the same. Let’s do it with hope and joy and thanksgiving for Jesus Christ, the anointed one. As we do, let’s do it as servants of God’s son, our Savior, about whom we would say, to God be the glory, and thanks be to God. Amen.

Dr. LaTaunya M. Bynum
Senior Pastor