Isaiah 53 "Wrong Side of the Tracks" Scott Hoezee

A few years ago in another sermon I told you about a very poignant story that once ran in The New York Times. The article centered on a thirteen-year-old girl from Dixon, Illinois, named Wendy Williams. Based on the story it appears that Wendy is a bright, sweet girl from a stable, two-parent family. She loves her pet cat, Katie, and has an aptitude for art and math. Wendy has a lot going for her, yet she spends most of her days struggling to hold onto her self-esteem. Because, you see, Wendy lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and the other kids don't let her forget it.

Wendy lives in a mobile home in a tin-plain trailer park with the unlikely name of "Chateau Estates." Her father works hard as a welder but earns only $9 an hour. Her mother spends a few hours a week as a cook for a Head Start program, but also earns very little. So in a school full of kids who look like walking billboards for names like Nike and Tommy Hilfiger, Wendy must walk around in rummage sale slacks and belts bought at the Farm & Fleet, attire that her classmates do not hesitate to call "tacky." While her fellow students talk about their new $1,000 computer toys and look forward to their family's next trip to the Caribbean, Wendy must face a reality in which her family cannot afford the $45 fee now charged to play school sports. Even on those occasions when Wendy finds cause to smile, she hides her smile behind her hands so that no one will notice the overbite that her parents cannot afford to get fixed and that once earned her the nickname "Rabbit."

A girl like Wendy just doesn't fit in a school full of children who have grown up as the targets of savvy marketing campaigns by J. Crew and Walt Disney. The expectation of prestige and wealth is so common now the teachers at Wendy's school report that all of the kids they meet these days say when they grow up, they want to be doctors, lawyers, or professional athletes--anything that will earn them gobs of money and prestige. A vocational teacher in the local high school complains that he can't get anyone to sign up for courses that teach skills like the tool-and-die trade. Even though such jobs can earn $70,000 a year, many kids believe that salary would be too low.

So Wendy Williams spends her time trying to hold onto enough self-esteem to stick with her studies so she can avoid the fate of her three older sisters, all of whom finally gave up on high school, dropping out to have babies. It's not easy, though: at the end of each school day, Wendy's bus stop is first, and so all of her more wealthy classmates get to watch Wendy as she shuffles toward her trailer, face down, eyes fixed on her generic tennis shoes.

In a world where money counts, where image is everything, and where the incessant hype of the celebrity-driven media invades every segment of life, folks like Wendy don't fit. Such common, low-income, non-glitzy people don't register on the media's radar scope. Even an article as poignant as the New York Times piece probably didn't make any impact on the words and attitudes of those who routinely make Wendy so uncomfortable. Feel sorry for her if you wish, but Wendy and her family won't serve as anyone's role model.

Even her parents hope that Wendy will herself one day achieve something better. For how painful it is to see your child be humiliated. Wendy's mother, Veronica, sadly told the Times reporter of her inner anguish at seeing her daughter come home from school more often than not with her head bent low because once again someone had reminded Wendy that her attire and lifestyle don't make the grade.

Of course, what we routinely forget, even as Christians, is that according to the Bible, the salvation of the cosmos also emerged from the wrong side of the tracks. As Isaiah predicted and as the gospels confirm, when the Son of God came down to this world, he lacked everything that would catch people's eyes. Born in a barn to low-income parents, Jesus was raised in the ancient world's equivalent of a run-down trailer park in the little podunk backwater of Nazareth. He wasn't particularly handsome and seemed so meek as to qualify as shy. No one thought he was a bad person, just an unremarkable one, that's all.

Most everyone knew (or at least suspected) that Jesus had been conceived out of wedlock--it doesn't take a genius to run the numbers, and little Jesus' birth came something just less than nine months after Joseph and Mary were wed. Some time later when his parents brought baby Jesus to the Temple for his dedication, they brought the poor person's sacrifice of two pathetic little pigeons. It was the ancient world's equivalent of driving up in a rusty Yugo in a parking lot full of Lexuses and Jaguars.

In short, there was absolutely nothing striking about Jesus or his family. In fact, quite the opposite: the whole clan was eminently forgettable. So when one day Jesus put down his wood shaver, left the carpentry shop, and lit out onto a preaching career, a lot of people sadly shook their heads. As though his poor mother, Mary, did not have enough to make her existence miserable, now her eldest son goes off his rocker, too! Early in this new career, Jesus was asked to preach the weekly sermon at the local synagogue in Nazareth. But nobody took him seriously. Most folks gave each other a cheeky grin and said, "Isn't that old Joseph's kid? We never paid him no mind before, we're not about to start now." And so they tried to shove him off a cliff to put the poor guy out of his misery.

That's just the way it would mostly go for Jesus: he'd tick some people off and leave many others scratching their heads. About the only people who did hitch their wagons to Jesus' anything-but-rising star were crackpots, lowlifes, women, and foreigners--exactly the kinds of pathetic people who always seem the most vulnerable to the get-rich-quick schemes of con artists. On and on it went for a couple years until finally even most of the people who had briefly entertained delusions of grandeur about Jesus gave up on him, leaving him easily vulnerable to be crossed-out by the Romans. Why, even one of his twelve closest friends became the one to turn Jesus in. Jesus was so unsuccessful he couldn't keep the faith alive even among a group as small as a dozen!

We tend to forget all of this now. Today Jesus is a kind of celebrity figure in his own right. A couple of years ago Jesus achieved a feat that even the likes of Michael Jordan and Bill Gates have never pulled off: getting his picture onto the cover of every major news magazine in this country on the very same week. But that's not how it went during his own lifetime. Jesus was never like the high-paid spiritual gurus of today--a famous person like Deepak Chopra dispenses his New Age nuggets of wisdom to standing room only crowds who pay Mr. Chopra $25,000 per lecture. Jesus probably could not have received 25 cents had he tried to charge admission to a sermon.

"Who has believed our message?" Isaiah asks in verse 1. Who indeed? Who could believe that when God's own Son came down to this planet, it would be in the guise of so unremarkable a figure as Mary's boy Jesus? But the question I'd like us to wrestle with for the balance of this message is this: why would God reveal the strong arm of his salvation on the wrong side of the tracks? Why would he hide himself in someone who had more in common with Wendy Williams than with even most of us here tonight?

Why did God sneak down the back staircase of history, quietly plopping an infant into a manger, when he could have busted down the front door of history with a full-scale display of power? Why did the God who dwells in the blinding light of glory end up merely flickering in this world like a candle in the wind?

You know, Elton John made that last phrase famous with his song about first Marilyn Monroe and then Princess Diana. But guess what: neither of those women was "a candle in the wind"--they were blazing fireworks in the sky, making a splash and an eye-popping spectacle that routinely took the world's breath away with beauty and glamor and fame. As a matter of fact, someone like Jesus is the real candle in the wind. He was no more than a flicker during his brief life and ministry and then, by all appearances, he was gone.

Why did God operate this way? The reason is spelled out in Isaiah: it has to do with sin. For God's Son to solve our world's problem with sin and evil, he could not be born "above it all" because that wouldn't do us any good. Salvation had to come from the wrong side of the tracks because it's precisely there that the sting of evil is felt with particular force.

Jesus had to be all the unhappy things Isaiah predicted because in the long run, we represent all those unhappy things ourselves. We're finally the ones who have been made unattractive by sin. Our hearts are the places where plots of great ugliness get hatched, where fantasies of wretched luridness get cooked up, where pride and envy and anger rage to the destruction of our neighbors. "Surely," Isaiah wrote, "he took up our infirmities." In other words, we're the ones on the wrong side of the tracks.

But, as Shakespeare might say, there's the rub. We don't want to admit to our own spiritual poverty. We resist believing that Jesus' rejection, Jesus' wounds, Jesus' death all came from me and from you. "What you see in the Messiah," Isaiah predicts, "is really just a reflection of yourself." But we don't like that. We don't want to be identified with the Wendy Williams of this world. We'd rather be a winner, a friend of the rich and famous. So we wrap up our bodies in the logos of Mr. Hilfiger and company in the hope that maybe nobody will notice that it's still just plain old us underneath.

People even approach religion and spirituality in trendy ways that seem calculated to keep us from seeing the truth about ourselves--the truth as the Suffering Servant Jesus reveals it. In the book Bobos in Paradise author David Brooks profiles the religious approach known as "Flexidoxy." This is the salad bar approach that picks and chooses from among this world's range of choices for faith, doctrine, and belief, finally cobbling together a quasi-religion that insists on nothing except flexibility and independence.

The bourgeois bohemians today, or Bobos, try to worship God even though they have taken it upon themselves to decide that many of the Bible's teachings about sin and such are wrong. They try to establish religious rituals even though their lives revolve around experimentation and a refusal to get pinned down to set orders of worship and lifestyle. Maybe that's why sociologist Robert Wuthnow recently encountered a 26-year-old therapist, the daughter of a Methodist minister, who now describes herself as a "Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew." The Bobos, Brooks says in summary, are trying to build a house of religious obligation on a foundation of personal choice.

But we're not going to accept Jesus, and the truth about ourselves that Jesus reveals, by adhering in Bobo fashion to a set of lightly held beliefs. If we re-package Jesus to suit our needs, if we gloss over the quiet, lowly, even unsuccessful-looking way Jesus lived, we may find it more difficult to reach with the gospel message the very people who need to be reached the most. Recently the famous German theologian Jürgen Moltmann recounted his experience at the end of World War II when he was a POW in Scotland. There they were shown graphic photos taken in the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen--photos of the Holocaust horror which, these former soldiers now had to realize, they had unwittingly helped to defend just by virtue of fighting on behalf of Hitler's Germany.

Moltmann's entire world collapsed in on itself under the weight of shame and humiliation. Only one thing, he writes, turned his life around: receiving a Bible. As he read, most of the Bible did not make much of an impression on him until he reached the part where Jesus cries out in dereliction from the cross. "In that moment," Moltmann says, "Jesus found my soul." In the dark pit of his own despair, seeing Jesus' experience of despair told Moltmann for sure that God was there with him and that God would stay with him.

Given the world in which we live and especially the way so much has changed in this world since September 11, we and our neighbors need to know that Jesus lived and died on the wrong side of the tracks but that he was nevertheless the one true and eternal Son of God whose life, death, and resurrection add up to the salvation of the world. In fact, we need to remember that it was precisely because Jesus lived the way he did that we can know for sure how fiercely resolved God is to clean up this world's mess.

Earlier I mentioned how difficult it is for any parent to see a child rejected, humiliated, poked fun of. That very experience is now woven into the rich tapestry of God's own being. God the Father spent a long time watching his boy despised and rejected by humanity. God himself knows the pain of living on the wrong side of the tracks and from here on out he is determined to bring a better and brighter future for us all.

Why did God choose so quiet, humiliating, and apparently weak a path when he sent his only begotten Son to this world? Because to do us any good in this damaged, disabled world, God had to duplicate in Jesus the conditions we face. In the Incarnation, God obliged, making Jesus common, not famous; ordinary-looking, not GQ handsome; quite poor, not dazzlingly rich.

Because of the way Jesus came, Kathleen Norris has recently written, we can see in the ordinary commonness of our own everyday, workaday lives glimmers of holiness. The Incarnation means that the one who is true God came down here, into the fleshly, earthy, gritty reality of life on the third planet out from the sun. And what that Son of God in skin saves is also this gritty reality, this creation of cobblestones and hummingbirds, of Chardonnay and fried rice, of sexuality and walks in the woods.

The Incarnation reveals that something about my typical life and your typical life contains a little mystery, a little gospel, and so a lot of potential for good news. Jesus was born on the wrong side of the tracks, and that is profoundly good news for all of us who live east of Eden. We need to celebrate the earthy reality of the Incarnation for in that lies our very salvation. After all, as Frederick Buechner once wrote, one of the blunders we religious folks routinely make is the attempt to be more spiritual than God. Amen.