January 19, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

Think Big!

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 40:1–11
Isaiah 49:1–6

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
Isaiah 49:6 (NRSV)

“I like to say that I’m tracing the intersection between big ideas and human experience, between theology and real life.”

Krista Tippett

The scripture we read this morning is one of the most crucial texts in the Bible showing how the prophetic tradition breaks away from its previous ethnic boundaries and how it begins to develop an approach to peoples outside those boundaries of ethnicity and religion. Here the one speaking, a servant of God whose exact identity we do not know but whose mission with which we are very familiar, is poised on the threshold of a new course given by God. The old mission with which we are familiar, and with which so much of the Hebrew Bible concerns itself, was one of recovery and restoration. God had originally commissioned the servant to recover the exiled Israelites from foreign lands and to restore the homeland of Israel to its original state of wholeness. This mission of recovery and restoration should have been enough; it was certainly ambitious enough, challenging enough.

That is why we see in verse 4 the servant expressing not only exhaustion but also frustration and a sense of powerlessness. Admitting feeling defeated, he says, “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” All the strength God had given him was spent spinning wheels and amounted to nothing.

And yet how does God respond? God does not look upon the servant’s failures and then adjust his original expectations accordingly. God does not diminish his demands so that the servant can more realistically meet them. Instead God not only renews the original calling but also adds to it. He enlarges the mission, and not by a little. To his tired, yet faithful servant, God says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

God seems to be saying to his servant, “The original mission I called you for is not everything I want from you. Just as much as you care about Israel and about me, I want you to care about the world. Just as hard as you have worked for Israel, I want you to work for the world.” This is the moment when a big idea became exponentially bigger, when God’s all-inclusive love and concern for the world became the new premise.

The problem with big ideas is how can they be put into practice, how can they gain a following, how can they create widespread change so as to be effective. Big ideas alone aren’t enough. Every innovator, every entrepreneur, every politician, every preacher, every idealist and social activist knows that big ideas, if they are going to gain traction and make any difference in the world at all, have to be put into practice, and yet transforming big thoughts into prevalent practices seems to be what stumps most of us. At the University of Chicago, an institution known for being a highly theory-oriented, idea-driven place, this dilemma is even conveyed on the T-shirts students wear. My favorite among the university T-shirt slogans is one that betrays the university’s leanings. While on the front of the shirt is the university logo, on the back is the statement “That’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?” It is easy to get really excited about big theories, big ideas, only to be stumped by the challenge of putting them into practice so that they can make a real and widespread difference in the world.

In the book Influencer, a team of authors who have a knack for putting their finger on the problems that stump most of us asks the question “What are the tools and techniques of the world’s most influential people, of the people who make big ideas widespread and effective?” To find the answer to this question, they interviewed people who are highly successful influencers, and what they found was that all of them put into practice something that Dr. Albert Bandura, a professor of social learning theory at Stanford University, had concluded after a lifetime of researching human behavior: “If you want to change the world, you eventually have to change how people behave. And if you want to change how they behave, you have first to change how they think” (Influencer, p. 20).

To test his hypothesis, Bandura experimented with ways to change the minds of people who have phobias. People who have phobias usually resist certain changes in behavior because they have a set of beliefs that are inaccurate. In order to help them become less phobic, he attempted to change the way they thought about the very thing they feared. For example, he had people with snake phobias watch other people handling them. Watching other people handle snakes helped them to overcome their fear. As challenging as it is to change how people think, Dr. Bandura found that it could be done not only through direct experience, but also through indirect, vicarious experience. Witnessing others undergo an experience is, he found, the next best thing to experiencing something yourself.

In the scripture passage that we read this morning, God introduces to Israel a radically new way to think, a new way to see the world: God calls Israel to be a champion for all people, to see themselves no longer as God’s only “chosen people,” but to see the whole world as God’s people. For those Israelites who had remained in Judah, who were spared from having to live in exile, this new way of thinking would have been so radical that it was likely unimaginable to them. But my guess is this: for those Israelites who had lived in exile, who, in order to survive, had to interact with people from whom they had previously stayed apart, this new way of thinking was likely more imaginable. Although their exiled situations could also have led to greater friction and violence, without any interaction at all they never would have had the chance to expand their worldview to include others. The exiled Israelites’ experiences, experiences of necessarily living among and interacting with persons who had been off-limits before, served as surrogate experiences for those Jews who stayed in the homeland. And the more they heard about these experiences and witnessed the change effected by them, the more their own minds could change to make room for God’s big idea.

The experiences we observe, read about, and hear about can make a difference, even a radical difference, in how we think about the world. Vicarious experiences can change our hearts and minds. As a young man in college, Martin Luther King Jr. encountered the philosophy of nonviolence by which Mohandas Gandhi defied British colonial rule in India. While in seminary, King began a serious study of Gandhi’s work. It was in the Montgomery bus boycott movement that Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance was put into practice. Though he had been exposed to Gandhi’s theory in college and though he studied it seriously in seminary, King admitted that he wasn’t convinced about how well Gandhi’s theory would work against the violence of white racists in the United States. Even after the success of the Montgomery movement, King continued to carry some doubt. It wasn’t until he finally traveled to India that he became more completely convinced in the power of nonviolent resistance. In an essay entitled “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” King described his trip to India as a sort of looking and listening tour. He described himself, his wife, Coretta, and his good friend Lawrence Reddick, with whom they made the trip, as a sort of “three-headed team with six eyes and six ears for looking and listening” (I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, p. 41). King wrote that in India he had the “most eye-opening experiences” of his life, because the radical social reform that he vicariously witnessed there left him “more convinced than ever before that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” (p. 43). He went on to say that despite the social and economic problems that India still faced, “it was a marvelous thing to see the amazing results of a nonviolent campaign. The aftermath of hatred and bitterness that usually follows a violent campaign was found nowhere in India.”

King was convinced that whereas “the way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers . . . the way of nonviolence leads to redemption, a change of heart, and the creation of the beloved community” (p. 43). Through his looking and listening tour in India, King himself experienced vicariously the convincing results of a nonviolent movement on foreign soil. Like Gandhi, he came to believe and trust that the majority of people who witness nonviolent resistance cannot help but have their hearts, minds, and, in the end, their behaviors changed.

In the scripture passage we read today, we see the start of how Israel developed a nonviolent approach to peoples outside its own ethnic and religious boundaries. Speaking for the first time to foreigners living in lands far away, the servant introduces himself. And though he introduces himself as having been called and commissioned by almighty God, what he says immediately puts his listeners at ease. About himself he says, God “made my mouth like a sharp sword.” What they hear in his address is an amazing thing: that words instead of swords will be used. In place of weapons for war, the servant has been equipped with words from God. They can, therefore, let down their guard and hear what the servant has to say.

If they listen long enough, what they will hear is that God’s faithful servant is one who labors and lives on their behalf just as much as on Israel’s behalf; that God’s faithful servant is one who spends his strength on their behalf just as much as on Israel’s behalf; that God’s faithful servant is one who suffers for their sake as much as for Israel’s sake.

A message like this can sound too good to be true. There is no shortage of real-life reasons why we should be cynical and reject the possibility of putting into practice such a radically big and generous idea. For words like these to make a difference in the world, hearts and minds would first have to be changed.

What does it take for us to contain our cynicism? What does it take for our hearts and minds to be changed? It takes the vicarious experience of God’s love. That’s what our religion teaches us. That’s what Christ, through his life and labor, his suffering, self-sacrifice, and death, teaches us. Until that day when we may see God face-to-face, it will always take vicarious experiences to convince us of God’s love. The reason I believe with my whole heart in a message that sounds too good to be true is that, over and over again, I have vicariously experienced this love. To be sure, through my family, through the people I have known and counted on all my life, through the communities of which I have been a part, and especially through the church in which I was raised, I have heard, have seen, and have been formed by the good news of God’s love.

But if I’m really honest, it was not in these spheres, spheres in which I have been so comfortable and at ease, that I learned about the radically all-inclusive love of God—a love that is not just for me, not just for people like me, not just for people I like and who happen to like me, but for the whole world. While at home I learned to be hospitable, it wasn’t until I was living in a foreign country that I really came to appreciate radical hospitality. While in my hometown I had grown up witnessing people helping out their neighbors, it wasn’t until I found myself vulnerable, because I was outside my familiar surroundings that that I came to appreciate the amazing kindness and generosity of people who didn’t know me and would nevertheless advocate for me. While I had grown up in a church that taught God’s love for the world, it wasn’t until I experienced being a religious minority that I clung all the more tightly onto the all-inclusiveness of this love. My hypothesis is this: it is in settings when we are not at home, when we are the stranger, when it may even feel like we are in exile, that the profound experiences we have of God’s all-inclusive love can serve the rest of the time as the vicarious experiences that make life-changing impressions upon peoples’ hearts and minds. Wherever we see people willing to labor and live, suffer and sacrifice not just for themselves but for the sake of strangers, that’s where the big idea of God’s love for the world has a chance actually to change the world. Amen.