I wonder what you expect to get out of a sermon. Do you hope to be given new facts about the Bible or our faith? Do you want to be encouraged because you’re feeling low – or, conversely, are you wanting God to give you a spiritual “kick in the pants”? Do you want to learn about relating our ancient religion to the issues of modern life? Are you looking for God to guide you in a difficult decision? Or – and I hope this isn’t the case too often! – are you just waiting for that moment when the preacher says, “Amen” and announces the next hymn?

Every preacher has a difficult task. On the one hand, they are speaking to a bunch of people who have come to church with a broad range of joys, sorrows, problems and worries, people from varied backgrounds who each have their experiences of life, people with a sophisticated understanding of the Christian faith and others for whom everything may still be new and confusing. So how does a preacher manage to cover all those needs, expectations and personalities? It’s an impossible task and there will inevitably times when folk go home thinking, “Nothing really ‘clicked’ with me today”. But we do our best!

Ultimately, though, every preacher must be a teacher – and more. And they’re not just teaching carpentry or quadratic equations or the past participles of Latin verbs or the history of Wales or the geology of the Himalayas or the meanings of words in the “Canterbury Tales”. For every preacher aspires to be nothing less than a mouthpiece for God, a channel through whom the Holy Spirit can speak to other people. I know that sounds amazingly arrogant, and of course what we say is always going to be intensely human. Nevertheless we hope that, as we study and speak, God will take the ancient text and speak through it once more. And it’s clear that the speaker in Isaiah 50, which we read earlier, sees himself (it definitely is a “him” as he tells us that he has a beard!) as a teacher, one who has been commissioned by God to give his message to weary or dispirited people.

Now I need to say two things which will help you to understand this passage. One is that it was probably written at a very low time in Israel’s history, about 550 years before Jesus. The country had been invaded by the Babylonians, the Temple and city walls of Jerusalem had been destroyed, and the promising young leaders such as Daniel had been carted off to Babylon. As you can imagine there was a tremendous yearning for things to get better, for normal life to be restored. Our own situation is very different, yet I think that yearning is something we can all identify with: Isaiah speaks to people living in dark times.

The other thing I must say is that this passage forms part of one of Isaiah’s famous “servant songs”. There are several of these, and you’ll be familiar with them as they include lines such as: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him … A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice” (Isaiah 42); “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away” (Isaiah 49); and, most famously, “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain … He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, by his wounds we are healed”. Now the identity of God’s Servant is a bit of a mystery, much debated by scholars; but Christians have often taken these words to be prophecies of Christ himself.

I said earlier that this servant-teacher regards himself as having been called by, and speaking on behalf of, God. I also suggested that this sounds arrogant: how dare he, or I, or anyone else claim this kind of authority? Indeed, why should we be listened to at all? I know that this church has a healthily critical attitude to what is said from the front, and doesn’t unquestionably regard every word that comes from preachers’ mouths as being divinely inspired. That’s a good thing, because you need to sift through what you hear, discuss it with each other and indeed throw out the dross. Nevertheless those of us who stand here still claim a certain authority, and not because we are respected in the church community or because we’ve spent years studying theology at college (although that helps!)

No; Isaiah tells us the secret: he can teach because he himself is still a learner. Every morning he asks God to ‘waken his ear’ to receive his word, which is in turn passed on to the people. As one writer has put it, “There is neither honour nor shame in possessing the faculties of a student. Instead, students know that they are still learning. They know that the mysteries of heaven and earth, of our life with one another, and of our life with God are still unfolding before them”. Or, as someone else has said, preachers should be lifelong learners – which probably means that, if we think we “know it all”, we’d do best to shut up!

We see that Isaiah’s servant-preacher doesn’t get an easy ride: although he’s proclaiming God’s word to a weary people they don’t seem at all keen to accept it. For he gets argued against, spat upon, physically hit – even his beard is pulled out, a painful type of humiliation. So why are the people resistant to a messenger who seems to be bringing them encouragement and hope? Why aren’t they keen to hear what God wants to say to them? Perhaps they are so tired that they are incapable of listening, so exhausted from labouring on the land and seeing the benefits going to others that they cannot handle a positive message, so resigned to their situation that they have no energy to even think of rebelling against their captors.

Yet this teacher does not give up; he accepts the brickbats thrown at him and keeps speaking. Is he daft, misguided, or simply an annoying religious pest who won’t shut up? Not in Isaiah’s eyes, anyway. For he isn’t looking for his hearers’ approval, but to be a faithful servant of God. St. Paul said much the same thing when faced with criticism from some of the Christians he was writing to six centuries later: “Am I trying to win human approval? No indeed! What I want is God’s approval! Am I trying to be popular with people? If I were still trying to do so, I would not be a servant of Christ”.

I think we have two problems here. One is when a charismatic preacher becomes able to dominate a congregation who thinks that every word they utter is divinely inspired and must never be disputed. That can lead to all kinds of abuse from bullying to financial scams to and much, much worse – just think of the sad disciples of Jim Jones who blindly followed him to South America, built their utopia there and ended up with a gun battle and a mass suicide. That kind of scenario has happened many times in history and must be guarded against.

The other problem is, I think, more common. For we’ve all heard Christians making supposedly “bold” and “courageous” public statements about the morals of society which have led to them being criticised and vilified. These people have been roundly condemned as “hard-line extremists” and I suspect that many of us have winced at their words. The problem is that they truly believe that God has called them to speak and act as they do, and that the reactions they provoke are only to be expected – after all, wasn’t Jesus sent to the Cross for speaking truth to power? Now we must be careful not to ignore true prophets, however uncomfortable and challenging their message. But, I must ask, are these folk living as learners, open to fresh insights from God’s Word? I suspect, at least, that they may not be. But, then, to what extent am I listening to God? That’s a challenge in itself!

I said, towards the start of this message, that there’s a bit of a mystery about the identity of Isaiah’s servant. Is it Isaiah himself or in fact any Old Testament prophet, is it Jesus or some other saviour for Israel, is it the faithful remnant of Jewish people who had kept faith while everyone else had given up, might it even be the entire Hebrew nation? All these answers have been given, but no-one can be 100% sure; so the best we can do is try to hold all of them in tension at the same time. And that’s useful, as it helps me think that today, although specific people are still called by God to be preachers and teachers of the Bible, there is also a sense in which all of us, every Christian in every church, ought to think of ourselves as Christ’s servants and speakers.

“But”, you may say, “Isaiah had a special calling and commissioning from God, with his vision of glory in the Temple, the seraph flying down with a burning coal and touching his lips, and God asking, ‘Who will go for us?’ I haven’t had that!”. Well, of course, you’d be right … or would you? For didn’t Jesus, moments before his Ascension to heaven, issue his own commission, one which Christians have long believed didn’t just apply to the eleven disciples who heard it but to all believers in every time and place: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel”. We don’t have to wait for a great spiritual experience, we don’t need a mandate from a bishop to come thudding through our letter-box: we have already been given Christ’s authority to speak his words to his world.

So we go, ready to speak “in season and out of season”. We go, knowing that we will often say the wrong thing but hoping that God will somehow still speak through us. We go, believing that we have Christ’s authority to speak but recognising that we must always do so with humility rather than arrogance. We go, very much aware that we don’t have the answer to everything but ready and willing to learn from God every day. “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher”, said Isaiah, “that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word”. I hope that we, too, will be able to bring God’s life to tired, sad and even despairing people today.