August 3, 2008 + Called From the Womb + Frank Alton

Isaiah 49:1-7



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At a retreat I attended last year I was reminded of something I had learned many years earlier about Greek drama. The Greek term for the lead actor in a drama is the word from which we take our word “protagonist.” The term for the supporting cast is the word from which we take our word “hypocrite.” That much I knew. But the learning went to a whole new level when the speaker said, “Each of us was born to be a protagonist in our life story. When we’re hypocrites in our own life story, everyone loses – the world, our neighbors, family, and ourselves.”

This morning’s text from Isaiah evokes that image as the prophet declares: “God called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb God named me, and made my mouth like a sharp sword.” The one who speaks is referred to simply as “the servant.” While the “servant” is a unique character in sacred history the deeper truth is that each of us is called from the womb to make a specific contribution to the world. In verse 3 the servant is referred to as Israel. While the first verses sound like a specific individual, here the entire community is described as the servant. In that ambiguity is an invitation for each of us individually to be that servant; and yet we are not to do it individualistically but as part of a larger body.

James Hillman is a Jungian analyst who has thought a lot about these matters. He describes this sense of call like this: “There is a reason my unique person is here and that there are things I must attend to beyond the daily round and that give the daily round its reason, feelings that the world somehow wants me to be here, that I am answerable to an innate image, which I am filling out in my biography.” (The Soul’s Code, p. 4)

Daniel Berrigan offers the same message more specifically from the Isaiah text: “the claim of the servant is of some consequence because the story of the servant of God is the story of all. In every life, at its very inception, God has intervened. All are to embody the word of God. By no means does God exempt the servant from tragedy and death. The question arises and often takes agonizing form: Shall my life go some where, mean something to others, mean something to God?” (Isaiah, p. 127)

In other words, each of us is called from our mother’s womb to be some thing special. We grow up with clues about what that is though we don’t always pay attention to them. You may remember the clue as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere came to you: this is what I must do; this is what I’ve got to have; this is who I am. Or it may have been more like gentle pushings in the stream in which you drifted unknowingly to a particular spot on the bank. Perhaps it was a recurrent dream you had throughout childhood.

If your upbringing was anything like mine, you weren’t encouraged to see much importance in those dreams or pushings or signal moments. Sometimes those around us actually discourage us from looking at what is most real for us. In Isaiah’s case, maybe the servant had people around who said his/her words were too piercing and that they ought to be toned down. What is celebrated about the servant in this text may have been criticized in childhood. We’ve all had people like that who told us not to pay attention to what is most real for us; that the projectile of life is forward; that everything is about growth and development.

Even as adults often the only reason to look back is to get in touch with traumas that messed us up so we can fix them and get on with life. But Isaiah is saying that the essential truth is closer to what Picasso said: “I don’t develop; I am.” (Soul Code, p. 7) The essential image with which we are born may develop, as it does for the servant in this text, but our person is that essential image. What children need as they grow up are people who are wise enough to discern in the midst of a child’s excesses the seeds of an authentic call.

It may help to look at a few well known people to better connect us to this truth. Yehudi Menuhin, the famous violinist, showed excesses around his authentic call at a very early age. Before he was even four he used to go with his parents to the Gallery of the Curran Theatre, where he frequently heard the concertmaster Louis Persinger break into a solo passage. He remembers that during one such performance he asked his parents if he might have a violin for his fourth birthday and Louis Persinger to teach him to play it. His wish seemed to have been granted when he was given by a family friend a toy violin made of metal with metal strings. He wrote about that moment later: “I burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing more to do with it.” Yehudi’s four year old arms did not extend far enough nor did his fingers articulate well enough for a full sized violin, but the vision was full-sized to match the music in his mind. He says, “I did know, instinctively, that to play was to be.” (Soul Code)

Every story is different. Some children were obvious in revealing their call. Others appeared almost the opposite of who they would become. Golda Meir was an example of the first group. She led Israel during the 1973 war. Her biography tells us that when she was in fourth grade she organized a protest group in the Milwaukee public schools against the required purchase of schoolbooks, which were too expensive for the poorer children, who were thus denied equal opportunity to learn. The 11 year old child rented a hall to stage a meeting, raised funds, gathered her group of girls, prepped her little sister to declaim a socialist poem in Yiddish, and then herself addressed the assembly. (James Hillman, Soul’s Code, p. 20).

Eleanor Roosevelt, on the other hand, was an unhappy child who grew up with a fear of insanity, having lost her mother, a younger brother, and her father all before age 9. She lied, she stole; she threw antisocial tantrums in company. She was taught and subdued by a tutor, whom she hated for years. But she also carried a story in her imagination that she was living with her father as the mistress of his large household and a companion in his travels. She said it was the realest thing in her life. It became, of course, the thing she did as First Lady to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. .” (Soul Code)

The fact that I’ve used three examples of famous people does not mean that this dynamic is limited to geniuses and famous people. It is the basic reality of all children, born from the womb of their mothers. What are the recurrent dreams of your childhood? What were the games you wanted to play, that would not die, and of which you never tired? What things did you do that were a little out of the ordinary that you have no idea why you did? What information did they hold for your future? What were you called to be and do even before you were born?

Of course none of us reach adulthood without serious doubts about that call from our mother’s womb. So it was with the servant in Isaiah: “I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.’” The doubt in people who are genuinely called does not have to come from opposition they receive as children from the adults in their lives. The called one is often full of doubts as to the validity of the call because it is usually evaluated based on results & success. But according to this text it isn't success that establishes the mission; it's call. And that call cannot be ignored. The servant could not ignore God’s call even when the carrying out of that call felt like failure. In fact, later on in the passage the mission is expanded. It obviously wasn’t because the servant saw herself as successful. In fact, the servant felt like a failure: "I have labored in vain.” This is the human condition – not just the prophetic one. “To be human means to suffer that which is incurable while longing for what seems impossible.” (The Water of Life, p. 327)

There is a poignant moment in the movie Romero about Monsenor Romero of El Salvador when he fell on knees, spent with his good intentions to oppose the oppressive government. He was trudging out to one of the villages. He was tired and discouraged. He fell to his knees and cried out, “I can’t. You must. I’m yours.” He got up and arrived at the village only to find the army using the church as barracks and holding all the villagers hostage. When they see him, they think he is just a local priest coming to say mass. They rip his shirt off and mock him. A woman from the crowd puts a shawl over his shoulders. He finds his courage, and says, “Let us begin the mass.” The people begin to line up around him as the soldiers cower in the background. A fearful man had found his courage to do the impossible.

The servant’s future ministry didn’t depend on the success or failure of the last one. Daniel Berrigan tells how success and results can be a distraction: “The servant has embraced what one can only call a certain willed ignorance. She simply does not know, more, does not care, is unconcerned with such matters as outcome, result, effectiveness, and success. Concentrating on such can only mean that the substance of activity is squandered away in favor of justifying oneself, proving something. Thus we become distracted from the main issue: vocation, task, worthwhile undertaking, the hope of God… willed ignorance clears the terrain of the soul. One is then free to concentrate on essentials, on the goodness and truth of the task itself. Rather than being burdened with an obsession with results, the many tasks of truth telling and truthful action carry their own credential.” (Isaiah, p. 126f)

Rather than shrink the servant’s ministry due to perceived failure, God expands the call: “I will give you as a light to the nations.” The essence of the call to Israel to be God's servant has not changed. What changed is the scope. The servant was no longer to only restore the lost sheep of Israel in their own nation but in all the nations where they had been scattered. This represents a frightening change in their call – a change that evoked resistance. It does the same for us: we don’t want things to change. Ultimately, God doesn’t take no for an answer, so it behooves us to listen for a continual expansion of our call beyond the confines of limits we’ve put on it, even if we believe the limits came from God.

One of the most powerful images of the entire text is one that Christians have applied to Jesus, but which applies much more broadly than that. “To one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, ‘Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.’” The renewed servant who will extend the mission to a larger scope is one who was despised and abhorred. While that language may be too extreme to be helpful to many here today, I think all of us have experienced it at some point: our ministry has been rejected because we were too young, or because we are women, or because we don’t have enough formal education, or because something disqualifies us. The promise is that the very one that came to be despised would be honored by the same people that despised her/him. This is part of the Gospel message to all.

When people despise and abhor other people, Isaiah calls it idolatry: “Those who misname humans misname God…the disenfranchising of humans, by way of slavery, murder, stigma, devaluing, despising, ostracism… is also the business of idolatry. Maltreatment of humans, denying them a name, naming them for death, cheapening and devaluing the living, is a summons to the idols: Come, make the world your killing field.” (Isaiah, Berrigan, p. 125)

Sometimes the Gospel appears in places we least expect it. This past week it was the U.S. House of Representatives. The House passed an official apology for slavery and segregation. In so doing, it brought another measure of healing to our nation. Government policies were both complicit in and directly responsible for this great inhumanity and injustice. Even though nobody alive in America today participated in slavery, all white Americans have benefited from the poisonous legacy of slavery and discrimination. Over the past few years, five southern states have apologized, but efforts in Congress had failed. Congress has issued apologies before, to Japanese-Americans for their internment during World War II and to native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893. In 2005, the Senate apologized for failing to pass anti-lynching laws; but never for slavery. Now that is corrected.

Isaiah calls us out of a herd mentality that despises the scapegoat de jour. The message is, “remember who you are, who you were born to be.” Don’t measure yourselves by short termed definitions of success and failure. Be open to my call to broaden the scope of your impact. And know that if today people fail to acknowledge that it is God who is at work in you, tomorrow they will see clearly that God has chosen you.