Isaiah 49:8-18 "God's Palm Pilot" Scott Hoezee

The New York Times advertises itself as the newspaper that "brings you the world" as it presents "all the news that's fit to print." Those of you who read the Times know that this is not just hype--the newspaper does cover most everything. Sometimes I wish it didn't. As a preacher, I try to stay informed not just so that I can find fresh sermon illustrations but so that my preaching might have a shot at connecting with your real lives in the wider world Monday through Saturday.

But sometimes you run across information that makes you feel so sad or so sickened that you wish you had remained ignorant. That's the sinking feeling I had a month ago when reading a Times article about the increasing trend of sexual activity among children as young as 4^th and 5^th graders. According to this article, children today are more and more being left alone by their parents, resulting in very distressing practices.

In many places it is now typical that already in the 3^rd grade children are aware of slang terms for sexual activities. By the 4^th and 5^th grades boys and girls begin an early form of dating, including kissing games. By the 6^th and 7^th grades petting and oral sex are common. Indeed, some 13-year-olds said that their parents sometimes let them rent limos to go into New York City where they go to clubs, drink, dance, and then experiment with sex in dim corners. Worse, many of these middle schoolers treat oral sex as no big deal, as no more than a kind of goodnight kiss following 7^th grade dates.

Not surprisingly, many of these children are ending up at psychologists' offices. They are deeply confused, culturally jaded, morally shattered, and finally also dehumanized as they feel reduced to no more than a mechanical set of parts. Perhaps by now some of you are joining me in wishing you didn't have to know this.

Whether or not this specific trend is evident in the community of you young people here this morning, the larger social malaise that leads to this kind of activity is something you may know about. In this fast-paced world you also may sometimes feel like you're being left on your own. Many times it's difficult to feel like you have any roots.

In fact some have suggested that if the current high school-age generation needed to adopt a group symbol, it could perhaps do no better than a remote control. The remote could symbolize the near constant change all around us today. So much of life is like channel-surfing: we flit from one thing to the next, never quite landing but zipping from place to place, receiving a powerful barrage of audio-visual stimulation everywhere. The jarring nature of reality is perhaps nowhere better seen than on the average web page on the Internet.

Unlike TV which pauses for advertisements, the Internet combines multiple sources of information and commercialism all on one spot. If you go to the Weather Channel's homepage, in addition to viewing the latest weather forecast you will also see whole columns of other information: news headlines will flash, any number of advertisements for Nike and the like will cry out for you to "Click Here."

We get bombarded with multiple "hits" from all directions,. What we generally do not get in a cyber-driven, techno-world is a sense of unity or coherence. What does it all mean or add up to? Small wonder that one of the fastest growing areas of technology is the creation of "virtual reality." Whether it is a movie like The Matrix, a video game, or the creation of fictitious identities in chatrooms, people are more and more losing themselves in unreal worlds. But maybe that's because there does not seem to be a real world anywhere. Maybe everything seems virtual now. Maybe all of life seems as fleeting and flitting as spending an evening surfing from web page to web page or from channel to channel.

It is what Neil Postman has called a peek-a-boo world: we see now this, now that, and nothing shocks us. "Been there, done that" is the new motto of many youth. We're not shocked by anything and will believe almost anything if it appears to have some kind of scientific backing. Postman even likes to conduct an experiment in which he tells people highly improbable information to see their reactions.

"Say, did you hear that the University of Michigan conducted a study that showed a connection between jogging and lower intelligence? The more you jog the less smart you become. Say, did you hear that John Hopkins did a study that showed a diet which includes three chocolate eclairs a day is a great way to lose weight? Yeah, it seems there is a special nutrient in eclairs called encomial dyoxin which really speeds up calorie burning."

Curiously, the vast majority of the people on whom Postman has tried this have believed him (or have at least been willing to believe him). Responses to these absurdities generally fall into three categories: "Really? Is that possible?" Or, "Where did you say this study was done?" Or, "You know, I've heard that!" There are different conclusions one could draw from this, but Postman asserts that at least one explanation is that people today are willing to believe most anything simply because they fail to have a coherent view of life.

When you don't believe in anything in particular, you are vulnerable to believing everything in general. If in this fast-paced world of the Internet and cable television you come to think that everything is a random series of constant change, then there is less that could throw you off kilter. You expect the new, the unexplained, the weird. And you are less likely to believe anyone who tries to press upon you what is old, traditional, and typical.

All of which leads back to our unhappy opening about middle schoolers and high schoolers who have little sense for how precious they are. They'll try and believe most anything--anything, that is, except the idea that maybe life does have a larger purpose and a set of guidelines that can help achieve that purpose. Everything seems up for grabs. Is there anything you can know for sure that is constant?

For today's Youth Service you asked me to talk about the words we just heard from Isaiah 49. It's a good choice. Because Isaiah also talked to people who wondered if anything was stable in the world. Like maybe some of you young people and certainly like many other youth in today's society, the Israelites of Isaiah's day found themselves going through hard times in a world where the unexpected had become normal.

Their country had been wiped out by the Babylonians. Everything that had once been familiar had been burned down, tossed out, trampled on, trashed. Now they were slaves and they wondered if a better day would ever come. Some people wondered if there even was a God. A few others said that yes, God was real all right but he was weak and so lacked enough power to make a difference. Still others said that yes, God was real and yes, he did have enough power to save them if he wanted to--the problem is that they were convinced he did not want to! "Maybe God just doesn't care," they said to one another.

But starting in Isaiah 40 Isaiah promised that God was going to redeem them. So also in verse 13 of this 49^th chapter the prophet dances and sings in front of the people, saying, "Let's celebrate because God is bringing comfort to us!" But then comes verse 14 in which the people reply, "Yeah, right! Can't you see our situation, Rev. Isaiah? I mean, Duh! God has forgotten all about us!"

They felt cut off, without roots. Their world had changed too quickly and there didn't seem to be anything firm to grab hold of or believe in anymore. Maybe they felt like you young people, or maybe like any number of us. Nobody can guarantee that bad things won't happen. Nobody can be sure that a Columbine won't happen here. Nobody can be sure that asteroids won't fall from the sky and wipe us out like the dinosaurs. Nobody can say for sure what the future will look like even one year from now--things are just changing too fast. Nothing stays the same. So why not live for now? Why not whoop it up for the time being and not be bothered with rules?

That's basically what the Israelites said back to Isaiah, but God was ready with an answer. Not only was God able to do great things for the people, he desperately wanted to do those great things! So in verse 15 God says, "Can a mother forget about the child she carried around in her womb for nine months and nursed at her very breast?"

On this Mother's Day it would be nice if we could answer that question by saying only and always, "Of course not! Of course mothers always remember their children!" But we can't say that, can we? Most every day we read about mothers who basically forget their children. They forget to protect them and so stand idly by while Mom's new boyfriend molests a seven-year-old daughter. Mothers forget to nurture their children and so ignore the obvious smell of marijuana smoke that seeps under the kid's bedroom door. They abandon their parental responsibility to educate the child and so let the kid make his or her own decisions about sex and drugs, as though that is a sign of being a progressive parent (when really it's a sign of not being a parent at all).

Can a mother forget the child at her breast? As God goes on to admit in verse 15, yes she can. But God our heavenly Father and Mother, our divine Parent, is better than any human being ever could be! Even if a mother were to fail at the most tender relationship in all of life, God will never let us down. He has your name tattooed right on the palm of his hand! Maybe that image doesn't mean much to you--about the only time we write something on our palms is if we don't have a piece of paper available and so scribble somebody's phone number or email address onto our hand. We'll wash it off later, but for the time being writing it there is, well, handy!

But this image had a very wonderful meaning in Isaiah's day. Back then servants and slaves would be tattooed with their owner's name. If you were a slave, the name of the person who owned you would be carved into your palm, kind of like the way cattle are branded with the logo of their ranch. That way you could never forget that you were not your own but were somebody else's property. Once in a while today you may still encounter a Jew who has a series of numbers tattooed onto his or her arm. When you see that, you realize that this was someone who was once a prisoner at Auschwitz or Buchenwald--the Nazis tattooed i.d. numbers right into their flesh as a reminder that they were owned like a piece of property.

So how stunningly amazing that in Isaiah 49 God turns the tables and says, "I'm going to become your servant! I belong to you and to prove it, your name is tattooed onto my hands! I cannot go anywhere or do anything without remembering you, seeing your name, and so caring for your well-being."

It is curious that among high school and college age students the phenomenon of tattoos and body piercings has become so prominent. At a pizza place in Chicago last week I saw a waiter with a row of four silver beads pierced through his tongue. We've also seen pierced navels, noses, eyebrows as well as a variety of tattoos. I've read various explanations for this practice ranging from the interesting to the absurd. But there does seem to be some desire on the part of Gen Xers for deep, bodily experience--a desire to set themselves off from the wider society through bizarre piercings that can only make most other people squirm. There is a desire to be marked, permanently marked, in an intimate, bodily way in a manner that will make an obvious, visible statement.

Of course, it may be no more than just a silly fad having no more meaning than other silly fads like yo-yos, poodle skirts, and Chia pets. But even if it is just a fad, it is an extreme and radical one. So how amazing that God is willing to go to these extremes to mark himself with our names. How radical for God to take on the role not of supreme master but of servant, so determined to show Israel his love that he'll take on a permanent, obvious mark of humiliation if that's what it takes to reassure and also save these dear folks.

By now you've no doubt already made the connection to Jesus. He is indeed the very Son of God who humbly took on the role of a servant. He was born poor. He was treated like a sinner even though he was the only one who never sinned. He was rejected by the very creation he helped to make once upon a universe. He was rubbed out atop a garbage heap, impaled between two lowlifes and seen as a lowlife in his own right.

Jesus has got nail holes and sword holes and thorn pricks and whip marks all over him now because he is absolutely determined to let you young people and all of us know that he has our names written into his very flesh. He'll never forget!

That doesn't mean there won't be hard times or bad days. That doesn't mean you will always succeed, never have a romance go sour, never feel confused again. But it does mean that even when life is a bummer God is close. He's not uncaring when you hurt, but he cries, too. When you come to God in prayer, he doesn't need to flip through his church directory or punch up a list of names on his palm pilot saying, "I can't come up with your name but just a minute, just a minute--I think I've got you here somewhere." God doesn't have a palm pilot he's got you on his palm!

On this Mother's Day many, if not most, of us have the privilege of giving thanks for really good parents. Our mothers did not forget us, and that's a great gift. But even if that had happened, Isaiah assures us that God is better. He can't forget you and he won't. He wants the best for you. He's given you the whole Bible to help make your life better.

You young people are precious to us, too. We want you to have a life, and life abundant at that. But we're not perfect, either. Sometimes we can't come up with your names; other times we fail to listen to you because we're too busy talking at you (forgetting that the only way we can help is to understand you and that requires that we learn from you, too). We mess up. We forget. But God does not mess up and he never forgets you.

Since coming to Calvin Church five months ago, Curt Kuiper has been putting a Bible verse into the bulletin each week, always following that verse with what he calls a "Clencher," forcing you not just to read that verse but use it and apply it. Well, today Jesus shows his scars and God shows your name written into those scars, saying to each and every one of you but really to all of us, "See, I've got you right here. You're that close. I will never forget you." So here's the Clencher: In this fast-paced world of novelty and change, how will you let this piece of grand news help you the next time you feel lonely, isolated, tempted, or confused? Amen.