Married in Your Baptism

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I’m in California this week for a gathering of the Iowa Preachers Project. My friend Ken Sundet Jones delivered this morning’s service at our host church, Lutheran Church of the Master, in Corona Del Mar.

Here it is:

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Until a year ago, in my pre-retirement job as a fully tenured old coot college professor, I taught a course called “Christian Faith and Life” each semester to earnest 19-year-olds who by and large knew little about the story of God and those chosen people, the Israelites, who figure prominently in our holy book. One of the ways I tried to open up God’s word to my students was to tell them to pay attention to the names of biblical characters and places.

I often recommended to them that the Bible would make a great source when deciding on names for their future babies. You’ve got Sisera and Gomer, Lo-Ami and Lo-Ruhamah, and Jephthah and Jezebel. Certainly they’re no worse than my grandmothers’ non-biblical names: Mamie, Hedwig, and Luberta. There’s even a name an Oscar winner’s parents bestowed on him: Mahershala (although in the Bible it’s really Mahershala-Hash-Baz). If you don’t like Zephaniah or Zebulon, you could choose a wild Bible name like, say, Dan or Deborah or Donkey (who was in both the Christmas story and Shrek).

So often names in the Bible function as a short-hand way to let you know something about the character.But that generally only works if you’re a native speaker of ancient Biblical Hebrew. We know the stories about Jacob getting his brother Esau to sell his birthright to him for a bowl of stew, about how Jacob had to bargain with his relative Laban to marry his daughter Rachel but got tricked into marrying her sister Leah instead, and about how Jacob had an all-night wrestling match with God. They’re great stories but they’re all the better in Hebrew where you’d catch the jokes in the names.

Esau's name means “Big Red” and Jacob’s name in Hebrew is “Cheater.” Even more enlightening is that the cheater wants to marry Rachel, “the little ewe lamb,” and is conned into marrying her older spinster sister whose name means “heifer.” And when the cheater and conniver spends the night wrestling, God renames him Israel which means “God grappler,” a name handed to his descendants the Israelites whom, we are to understand, are chosen as a people to wrestle with what it means to be connected to this particular God.

All of which is to say that, in our Old Testament reading today, when God gives the prophet a word to speak to the exiled Israelites and includes names being changed, we ought to pay attention. The names in Isaiah’s words to the God-grapplers are to be grappled with, because they are names we bear ourselves. In the prophetic utterance, God says he sees who we are by naming us Azubah, and he names the place we live Shmarnah.

Azubah means “forsaken.” To be forsaken means to be abandoned and left behind, to be utterly lost and disconnected. Forsakenness was regarded as being visited upon you as God’s wrathful judgment. Any number of people in the Bible could be seen as forsaken: Sarah who had never born a child into her 90s or Hannah who was equally barren, for instance, or the woman Jesus encounters who was caught in adultery, or the blind man by the side of the road, or the Ethiopian eunuch. Each of them was a forsaken outsider unable to concoct a righteous, blessed, fruitful, or pious life.

Shmarnah means “desolate.” If you lived among the people in the Bible, you wouldn’t have to walk far before you found yourself in desolate country. Lonely, arid places were all around. It was close to them than you are to Death Valley. Arable land where you could grow crops was in short supply, and moisture was undependable. But the desolation of Shmarnah is worse. It’s like soil strewn with salt. It’s a place where no way and no how is anything going to grow up there again. All hope for that acreage is lost.

The Israelites, the God-wrestlers Isaiah is preaching to, wouldn’t have been surprised at the prophet’s words. They saw themselves as having been forsaken by God when the Babylonians had conquered their land of Judah and carted them off to exile and for good measure had torn Jerusalem’s temple to the ground. God’s face was turned away from them, and what they’d left behind at home was desolation. Salt-strewn earth. What could ever come of them or the land God had promised their ancestors? Azubah and Shmarnah were what they were now and ever would be.

This is the exact right word for us today when so many, including, I suspect, people you may know and love, have come face-to-face with the deadly destruction visited upon them when a combination of dry hills, high winds, and a spark become what one commenter said is the worst natural disaster our country has ever known. Lost lives and lost home, lost hopes and lost futures. To consider the burnt-out shell of your beloved home in Altadena or Pacific Palisades, no matter your income level, is no different from gazing at a casket bearing your loved one’s lifeless body. It is to be named Azubah in Shmarnah, Forsaken in Desolation.

I’m not interested in saddling this disaster with the assertion that it reveals God’s judgment on its victims or that those of us with four intact walls and no scorched land around us are somehow more blessed or God-pleasing. Like Joseph at the end of Genesis, I can’t claim the wisdom to discern God’s motives. But I do know this: God never shows up in a Shmarnah or visits an Azubah without renaming them Hephzibah and Beulah. For our God is the God who says, “I kill that I might make alive.” In other words, we have a God who shows up in desolated lives at the point when we are most desperate to water the earth.

God consistently remakes the desolate and forsaken ones of the biblical story into the beloved whom he marries and in whom he delights. The widow of Zarephath on the verge of starvation is given a jar of meal that yields more than its volume. God grants Sarah and Hannah children. The adulterous woman about to be stoned to death is given the Lord’s mercy instead. Peter, who denies Jesus three times, is called by him to feed his sheep. Lepers are cleansed. The sick are healed. Those bound and chained are freed. And the worst persecutor of the early Christians, who called himself the chief among sinners, is sent out to be the greatest missionary of the church.

The question is not about judgment nor about whether we bootstrap-pullers can scrape together a future ourselves from the forsaken soil of disaster and remake ourselves into Beulahs and Hephzibahs. The better question is whether God can do it. Is the desolation so bad that God cannot make it his delight? Is anyone so far gone and forsaken that God will not claim them as his bride?

Jesus himself told parables that take place at wedding parties like the one in Cana where he turns the disaster of running out of wine into a delightful miracle. When we hear the parables of the ten bridesmaids and of the wedding banquet, we ought to take a step sideways and remember God’s command to the prophet Hosea to act out a parable of God’s love and faithfulness through marriage.

God tell Hosea to get himself hitched with the prostitute Gomer, because that’s what it’s like for God to be connected to sinful self-seeking people. Yet God’s command of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is a sign of God’s promise to be here in the midst of our desolation and our disasters, personal or natural.

Last weekend I had the privilege of presiding at the wedding of a former student whose bride is an asylum-seeker from Honduras. Her immigration status has left her with great anxiety as the two of them face possible policy changes in Washington. That wedding provided some balm to their fear because with the signing of the wedding license the bride’s name was changed. Now her connection to her new husband provides her with a new identity and, they hope, with a modicum of protection.

The promise of Isaiah is that God’s naming the Israelites as Hephzibah, married, and their land as Beulah is a divine declaration of protection, good favor, and faithfulness in the face of disaster. The Israelites are provided freedom by an enemy king and the road home to Jerusalem is opened. There the Temple will be built anew and a bridegroom will arrive when the bridesmaids least expect it. He comes as Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. Jesus who cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” from a cross on a desolate hill rises from the grave to claim his beloved, to claim his people, to claim you.

And he brings you into his wedding feast at this altar where he gives himself to you in the bread and wine. Notice God doesn’t ask Azubah if she wants to become Hephzibah. He simply declares it so. Just so, does he declare you married in your baptism and celebrates his nuptials in this meal. In the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper we see that the desolations of Babylon and Pacific Palisades and Altadena are not the last word on the fore forsaken or on you. Now you can say, “I am not desolate, for my name is Hephzibah, and I’m heading to Beulahland where there will be no divorce or fires or destruction or weeping or mourning. My Lord has made me his and saved me from fiery condemnation. He’s reserved an indestructible home for me. Even in the face of loss I can rejoice. Come feast with me.” Amen.

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