January 30, 2019: Day 60 – Isaiah 56

The prophet speaks about foreigners who are living in the land and who have given of themselves to the Lord.  Do you ever find yourself thinking…American?  Let me explain.  I’ll never forget when I was a first year seminary student and I spend the entire summer in Prague, what was then Czechoslovakia, helping organize an ecumenical conference.  I was surrounded by people from all over the world who were my age.  I remember thinking that the Beatles were somehow American music.  But no, they are European.  I remember thinking that certain things like the telephone were American by nature, but actually before Bell there was an Italian who had pulled off what Bell did years later.  The list continued where things in my customary ordinary life I assumed had been American all along, but they were not.  

Did you know that the majority of Christians, by a long shot, live outside of the US?  Did you know that Palestinian Christians were worshiping Jesus 1,500 years before we were?  Did you know  that they have had church for over a thousand more  years than we have?  So much of who we are is defined by where we live and our American way of doing things.  But in this Scripture Isaiah reminds us that those foreigners who were living in Israel but still loved God were welcome in the family.

By the way, the foreigners that the prophet Isaiah is referencing are us.  We are the ones who came into the Christian life in a very circuitous way.  We were not Jewish by background, and we were not Christian by way of an apostle who spoke the Gospel to us.  We are Christian by thousands of years removed, most of us at some time had the church in Rome as part of our heritage, and then as Protestants we came along much, much later.  It should be sobering to place ourselves on the bottom of the totem pole in regards to being foreigners who were embraced in Jesus’ family even if some wanted us to be kept out.  Nice to be a foreigner who is allowed in.  That is our current status.  We are all foreigners who were shown grace.