Morning prayer with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 11th January 2022

 https://fb.watch/at9-E3NBd6/ 

Today, many of us are feeling afraid of what can seem like a threatening, dangerous future. It would be very easy to let ourselves be overwhelmed by pessimism, to feel the future is hopeless. But that would immobilise us. It would prevent us from responding to the real dangers we face. And it would make the bad outcomes we dread more likely.

That is not how we as Christians are called to behave. The future is not hopeless. God has given us a great gift of hope, hope for the coming of God’s kingdom. And surely we must share this gift of hope with others, who may not share our faith, but badly need our hope.

The ground of our hope is our conviction that God loves us.

Nowhere is this more beautifully expressed than in today’s reading from Isaiah (Isaiah 43:1-7). Scholars tell us that this passage was probably written around 540BC. The children of Israel are in captivity in Babylon. They are afraid for their future, on the verge of giving up hope that they would ever be able to return to their homeland. So the poet seeks to encourage them in these words:

‘But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.’

And why should the captive children of Israel not fear?

‘Because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you.

These are beautiful, encouraging and reassuring words, aren’t they?

‘Do not fear … because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you’.

Now Isaiah and the ancient Hebrews saw God’s love in exclusive terms: God loved the children of Israel in a special way; they were God’s chosen people, with whom God had established a covenant.

The very first Christians, and Jesus Christ himself, were Jews. They drew on that ancient Hebrew tradition, and we have inherited their conviction that God loves us, and with it God’s gift of hope – thanks be to God for the insight of the Jewish people!

But from the very start, with a fresh insight, Christians transformed the conviction of God’s love from being exclusive to being inclusive. We believe as Christians that God loves all people created in his image, not just Jews but gentiles like you and me, not just white people but people of all colours and ethnic origins, not just those who are like us but those we find alien.

This Epiphany season is traditionally a time to reflect on how God reveals himself to us.

So let us ponder God’s loving nature, revealed in Isaiah’s beautiful poetry: Thus says the Lord…, ‘Do not fear … because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you’.

Let us give thanks for the insight which we have inherited from the ancient Hebrews and the first Christians, that God loves us. The implications are life-changing:

·       Because we believe that God loves us, we live in hope.

·       Because we live in hope, we do not fear the future, no matter how dangerous it may seem.

·       Because we do not fear the future, we have the confidence to work for God’s kingdom.

All this poses a great question to each one of us – and to us all as a body, Christ’s body, the Church. The question is this: What am I going to do, what are we going to do, to make God’s kingdom a living reality?