At the Same Time Prodigal and Beloved

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Texts:

Psalm 119:9-16

Isaiah 43:8-13

2 Corinthians 3:4-11

The texts for today spin an interesting web between comforting and disturbing.  We tend to shy away from messages like the one proclaimed in Isaiah: "I am God, and also henceforth I am He; there is no one who can deliver from my hand; I work and who can hinder it?"  At first glance, this text seems directly opposed to our postmodern understanding of the way in which truth works.  It starts to get at Pilate's famous question of Jesus that we will read on Good Friday, "And what is truth?"

Read backward, beginning with the last verses in Isaiah's text, we see truth as that which is witnessed; truth is the proclamation of the work of God among God's people.  "I declared and saved and proclaimed, when there was no strange god among you; and you are my witnesses, says the LORD."  We are witnesses to the declaration, to the salvation, and to the proclamation. 

What is it to witness such a thing? What is it to be stewards of the mystery?  "Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet have ears!  Let all the nations gather together, and let the peoples assemble.  Who among them declared this, and foretold us the former things?Let them bring their witnesses to justify them, and let them hear and say, 'It is true'."

To witness is to point to the truth.  To point to the truth is to point to the proclamation of God being in the business of saving sinners.  To point to the truth is to live in the tension between deafness and sound, between blindness and light, between the letter and the spirit, between death and resurrection.

The tension is inherent in our lives of faith, as Luther indicates in his essay, "Concerning the Letter and the Spirit:" "It is impossible for someone who does not first hear the law and let himself be killed by the letter, to hear the gospel and let the grace of the Spirit bring him to life." On the other hand, "It is certainly true that wherever the law alone is preached and only the letter is dealt with, as happened in the Old Testament, and where the Spirit is not preached afterward, there is death without life, sin without grace, misery without consolation," (Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, ed. by Timothy Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 83).  We tend to be good at one or the other, but it is someplace between the two that the ministry of reconciliation, as St. Paul indicates in 2 Corinthians 3, occurs.  We live between the law and the gospel, between the knowledge of being a sinner and having been made a saint, between the already and the not yet.  It is in the ministry of reconciliation, in the tension of the life of faith, that we proclaim the truth of our humanity: it is to live in the in-between place, wandering along the path, continually straying and continually coming home.  We are prodigal yet beloved, both at the same time.  And what is truth?  It is to live into this narrative and into this tension, which is quite possibly one of the quintessential hallmarks of postmodern culture.