"Tattooed"  San Williams, UPC

Isaiah 49:8-16a; Matthew 6:24-34

Of the four pastors on our staff, only one of us has a tattoo….as far as I know.  Rather than spoil the suspense, I’ll leave it to your imagination to guess which one of us that is.  As we are all well aware, tattoos have made a huge comeback in our culture.  The stigma tattoos once carried as something tasteless or seedy has largely disappeared.  Today, tattoos are not only considered as a form of artistic expression, but also as a means of self-expression, especially among young people—a way to represent something meaningful in a person’s life, experience or values.   My son has a tasteful and—from a parent’s point of view—mercifully small tattoo on his back.  It’s a Celtic symbol of the Celestial Trinity of the sun, moon and earth.  He says he’s felt a connection with this symbol since first seeing it in Ireland years ago.  Well, I’m not suggesting that we all go out and get tattooed.  (I’m probably already in trouble with some parents here).  Rather, I bring the matter up only because we read this morning that God has a tattoo.  God, speaking through the voice of the prophet Isaiah, declares:  “I have inscribed you on the palm of my hands.”   Metaphorically speaking, you and I are forever inked onto the life of God.

Of course, what the prophet means by this image is that God won’t forget us.  God’s promise to comfort, to have compassion, to pity and to help is permanent and irreversible.  It cannot be erased or washed away.  Our sacrament of baptism for William this morning is the church’s way of affirming our faith that William’s name has been engraved on the palm of God’s hand, and that God will never forget or forsake this child, or any of WHOM GOD HAS CLAIMED.

Using yet another metaphor to make the same point, the prophet likens God’s love to that of a nursing mother and an expectant mother.  It’s unthinkable that a nursing mother could forget her child or fail to show compassion.  It’s impossible for an expectant mother to forget about the child in her womb. Yet even if that would happen, the prophet assures us that God will never forget us.  All biblical reflection about the character of God is based on God’s irrevocable relationship with us and with all that God has made.   God declares to Noah; “I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature…”  God promises to go with Abraham as he journeys to a new land.  God tells Moses to go to the Pharoah, assuring Moses that “I AM will be with you.”  The prophets often speak of the pathos of God, meaning that God loves so fiercely that God cannot break God’s bond of compassion even if God is justified in doing so.  For example, the prophet Hosea likens God to a husband wedded to a harlot.  Even though God’s bride, Israel, is often faithless, God’s love IS SUCH THAT IT compels God to stay in the relationship.  With indelible ink, God has stenciled our names on the palm of his hands.  You see, declares God through the prophet, I will never forget you.

But this claim about God’s goodness and faithfulness is often challenged.  “Zion said, ‘The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.’”  There is always a voice among us, and within us, that wonders:  Has the Lord forgotten me? Has the Lord forsaken us?  Perhaps God’s tattoo has faded over time.  Maybe God finally got fed up and opted for a laser removal process, and now has simply moved on to other universes. Who could blame God for giving up on a people who so stubbornly refuse to love one another, and who seem hell-bent on destroying the beauty of GOD’S earth?

I’m not a big fan of the television series, Desperate Housewives.  But Jan likes to watch it, so sometimes—just to be a supportive husband—I’ll watch it with her.  On a recent episode, Lynette, one of the main characters, is in church listening to an innocuous sermon by a stuffy Presbyterian minister.  His topic is God’s love. When Lynette can’t stand it any longer, she leaps to her feet and blurts out, “How can you say God is love?  Don’t you know that innocent people are being killed every day?  Children are starving to death as we speak.”  Lynette’s question is one that nearly everyone asks at some point or other. People have been asking it these last couple of weeks as we’ve seen such suffering caused by the natural catastrophes that have struck Myanmar and China.  The voice of Zion that sounded in the prophet Isaiah echoes through the centuries and down to the present day. “The Lord has forsaken me.  My Lord has forgotten me.”

Yet is it possible that we are looking for God’s love where it cannot be found? Remember that song title from years back—Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places?   Like Lynette, we look for God’s love to consist of God’s putting an end to wars, and eliminating poverty, misery, persecution, and catastrophes of all kinds. This is the kind of evidence people demand, but never receive, from God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer looked out on the horrific suffering of Nazi Germany and wrote “…as difficult as it is for us, and as deeply as it disturbs us that God’s love is so hidden from the world, we can be especially thankful, particularly in such times, that we no longer need to look for God’s love where it is not to be found…”  But Bonhoeffer goes on to say that what is hidden from the world has been clearly revealed in the person of Jesus.  Jesus is the evidence that God has not forgotten us.  He is the sign that God has not forsaken us.  The proof of God’s love, writes Paul, is not that sin, turmoil and suffering have been eradicated, but rather that, in the midst of the world’s woes, God sent the Son as an irrevocable sign of God’s REMEMBRANCE.  If God is tattooed with the image of humanity; humanity is tattooed with the image God in the person of Jesus. 

And for this reason, and this reason alone, we don’t need to be consumed with worry and anxiety.  Jesus said to the disciples, ”Don’t worry… Don’t worry about what you will eat or drink or wear…Don’t be anxious about tomorrow.” Jesus invites us to consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, because in them we can discern something of the freedom from worry that ORU NON-HUMAN CREATURES SEEM TO POSSESS SO UNSELFCONSCIOUSLY.  A poem that touches me deeply is called The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry:

            When despair for the world grows in me

            and I wake in the night at the least sound

            in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

            I go and lie down where the wood drake

            rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

            I come into the peace of wild things

            who do not tax their lives with forethought

            of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

            And I feel above me the day-blind stars

            waiting with their light.  For a time

            I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Craig Dykstra, Vice-President for Religion at the Lily Endowment, tells about how as a seminary student he gave swimming lessons to children at the local YMCA.  He described how the children would reluctantly get in the water, shivering, clutching their arms across their chests and gritting their teeth.  Everyone knows you can’t swim while cramping your body and gnashing your teeth. So he would gently take a child in his arms, try to make him or her smile and ease the child into relaxation.  As the child began to relax his knees, loosen the muscles in his neck and slowly draw air into his lungs, the child would begin to get the feel of what it is like to float.  Only then, could he or she roll over and start to swim.  The first priority in teaching children to swim, Dykstra learned, is to enable them to trust the water, to come to a knowledge of the buoyancy of the water.

Then, Dykstra concludes, “So it is with the life of faith.  At the heart of the Christian life there lies a deep, somatic, profoundly personal but very real knowledge. It is the knowledge of the buoyancy of God.  It is the knowledge that, in struggle and in joy, in conflict and in peace—indeed, in every possible circumstance and condition in life and in death—we are upheld by God’s own everlasting arms.”

 Some of you here are graduating later today from seminary, and you will soon begin your ministry in the church. While you will undoubtedly have many responsibilities, in ESSENCE your church is asking only one thing from you: that you employ every ounce of your energy, intelligence, imagination and love to spread the knowledge OF the LOVE OF GOD THAT has been imprinted upon the world in the person of Jesus. God has not forgotten us.  God will never forsake us.  Therefore, do not be anxious about your life.