Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
There is a story in the Middle East about a man who discovers flying carpet in a cave. He is delighted of course and he brings the carpet home to his wife. She is thrilled too and they go off for a spin. They are tooling around in the sky and they past over the market and Abdullah sees them. Now Abdullah is sly. So he catches this guy when he is alone. He says to him, “I’d like to buy your carpet”. The owner responded, “I bet you would, it’s very valuable”. Abdullah replied, “I know, name your price.” The man responded, “You couldn’t afford it”. Abdullah continued, “Try me”. “OK”, the man quipped. “100 dinars”. Abdullah replied, “Sold” and gave him the money. The man returned to his wife. Smiling and happy and reported the sale to her. “How much did you get”, inquired his wife. 100 dinars. Only a hundred dinars? his shocked wife replied. “Is there any number higher than one hundred?” The man answered.
Duh! huh?
How often don’t we reveal our limitations? This man because of his lack of knowledge, his lack of experience, and his lack of wisdom deprived himself of what could have been a whole new life. How often aren’t we like him because we ask God for so little, when God could give us so much.
Pastor Jim Weis had a book in his library which I found here called “Your God is Too Small”. It’s a classic text that somehow I never got around to reading. It’s a great book about how our limited conceptions of God have the effect of restricting or thwarting God’s ability to minister to us. Someone used the image “trying to get a drink out of a fire hydrant”. One of the prayers in our worship book says it best I think. It goes this way. “Almighty and Everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray and to give more than we either desire or deserve”. I’ve always loved those words because they reveal how inadequate my concept of God is.
In this book, he has a brief chapter about “the man upstairs” and in it he talks about probably the most common inadequate image or conception of God. We often think of God as just a big us – as children think of their parents as “big” thems. And it is perfectly OK to refer to God as human or because God is compassionate and loving and has so many of the nurturing characteristics we humans prize. God is also in charge of the universe and is in every guadrant and sector. I hear people say, “Oh I’m not going to bring that to God, God’s too busy”. Such a statement reveals how limited their “man upstairs” image of God is. Yet see how it limits them and God. God doesn’t have just two hands, or just two ears. When we think of God as having only a human form. We never allow God to get as up close and personal with us as God would like to come.
Our lesson from Isaiah is spoken to exiles, dispirited people who had been carried off by an army from Jerusalem to Babylon – a distance of some 700 or so miles. It was common practice for conquering armies to take away the leaders, the teachers, the fine artisans and craftsmen and women and bring them to the capital. Such a tactic had two effects. One it enriched the capital and concentrated the brightest and best in a vast metropolis. It also left the vacated area with few folks who could become leaders making it easy for the empire’s administrators to keep things under control.
We don’t know the precise date that these words were written, but these exiles may have been in their 40th or 50th year of captivity. Many had never seen Israel and their worship of a god who had let them be defeated didn’t make sense. All around them there were signs of Babylon’s great power. The Babylonians worshipped a set of astral deities – the stars and we still have remnants of their belief system in modern astrology. But note in verse 26: Isaiah the prophet, speaking for God says “Look up and see the stars, but remember it is I the Lord who created them”. The Lord is reminding them that their view of God, their God was too small too.
We can relate.
We can relate to their feelings too of being overlooked by God. Verse 27 finds Isaiah preaching to them in God’s name “My way is hiding, my right is disregarded”. The Israelite exiles felt that God was reading their minds when they heard these words. Elsewhere in scripture we hear similar words, “Why have you hidden your face from me?”
We can relate to those words. Perhaps someone you love has cancer or another threatening health concern. Your prayers seem to go unanswered. You entreat God for a job to replace the one you have been downsized from, and you are still waiting and it has been over a year. You are frustrated with a child who has a special learning need, or just cannot seem to respond to the discipline you’ve tried and you grow weary with waiting. Your prayer has become, “Give me patience Lord and give it to me now”.
We each come to God this morning with different needs different hurts, different concerns. No matter who we are, there are parts of our lives over which we have no control. Speaking in Isaiah’s words we do feel or seem as insignificant as a grasshopper at times, but that makes the glory of the incarnation all the more splendid.
C. S. Lewis, of Chronicles of Narnias fame once wrote, for God to become human would be like a human wanting to become a garden snail. Why would you? You’d have to love garden snails an awful lot and feel terribly tender toward them. And that is exactly it. God is creator. Creator of the vast universe and our creator. Our best guess about the universe’s size is this. Our galaxy contains 100 billion stars, and we now believe (latest best estimate) that there are 100 billion galaxies. We can’t even begin to contemplate their size (at the time the New Testament was written they didn’t even have a world for a million. Their largest number was a myriad equivalent to 10 thousand).
God is bigger than that 100 billion. 100 billion. Yet God is also human just like us in Christ. Small enough to understand our frustration and impatience with waiting. Yet enormous enough, huge enough, gargantuan enough to be able to take care of every detail in our lives.
Is there any number higher than 100.
Is our image of God too small?
Perhaps.
Today’s scripture reminds us that if we simply wait or the Lord our strength we’ll be renewed, and like eagles we will soar….
Have faith, the Lord is near and incredible powerful.
In Jesus’ Name. Amen
Who We Are