Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 & Luke 12:32-40
Twelfth Sunday after
Pentecost/ 11th August 2013
Isaiah throws us into court. A trial is about to start. In the dock is Israel; on the stand, the
people of God. The entire nation is on
trial. Yahweh is both prosecuting
attorney and judge. And the prophet
Isaiah is a witness against the people, testifying against Israel. This is his testimony.
They are guilty. What’s their crime? Stupidity. What have they done? Willful
stupidity.
Now, you’re right to think: It’s not a sin to be stupid. Being stupid isn’t a crime. It’s not one of
the Ten Commandments.
So what has Israel done that’s so
stupid, that’s worthy of God’s judgment?
It’s right there in 1:2: “Hear, O
heavens, and listen, O earth; for the LORD has spoken: I reared children and brought them up, but
they have rebelled against me. The ox
know its owner, the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my
people do not understand.” What don’t
they know, what don’t they understand?
That they belong to God. The ox
and the donkey are wiser than Israel because at least they know to whom they
belong. As for Israel, Israel does not
know. They have turned away from God.
And as the leading Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann puts is, turning
away from God is just plain stupid. Willful
stupidity.[1]
Rebellion against God is not only wrong, it’s just plain dumb, it’s not very
wise.
Israel, aloof and far from God, is
suffering. The entire nation is full of iniquity, evil, and corruption, in young
and old alike. Desolation is all around
them. The entire body politic is hurting. From head to foot, the wounds are deep;
sores are bleeding and festering.
There’s no soundness, no health, no wholeness in the people. Then to
drive the point home, Isaiah says Jerusalem, the Holy City of Yahweh’s peace,
is no better than the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah—an unimaginable, shocking
comparison—cities destroyed because of their faithlessness. There was no one left who truly welcomed the
sovereignty of God, no one left who truly worshipped Yahweh.
Like Sodom and Gomorrah, Jerusalem’s
faith and worship life had become a joke.
And Isaiah has no difficulty locating the source of the trouble: he blames the temple. And he doesn’t hold back against the temple
in Jerusalem, he doesn’t hold back against the priestly activity of the temple,
against the empty religiosity of the people.
It’s become a charade, a joke, and an insult to Yahweh. Yahweh has had enough. “What to me is the multitude of your
sacrifices?...I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed
beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats”
(Isaiah 1:11). Yahweh effectively says,
“Don’t bother coming to my sanctuaries any more” (Is. 1:12). “[B]ringing offerings is futile; incense is
an abomination to me” (Is. 1:13). Your feast days and rituals and festivals and
liturgies “have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them” (Is. 1:14). They’re
tiresome. And your prayers—your prayers are hollow because there’s blood on
your hands (Is. 1:15). You think you worship me, God says, but my people suffer
and die because you refuse to help.
Remember, God authorized the
building of the temple, required the sacrifices of rams and bulls and lambs and
goats, sanctioned the festivals and liturgies for the Sabbath, and welcomed
prayers. God wants nothing to do with
them now.
Yahweh doesn’t welcomed them. Why? Because
religion can become toxic. Their liturgies and their pieties and priestly
functions have failed them. Why? Because their worship didn’t lead them into a
deeper relationship with God. They went through the rituals, Sabbath after
Sabbath, but failed to help their neighbors, failed to ease their burdens. Their worship was false, their offering
dishonest, because their worship didn’t deepen the connection with God. How do we know that? Because
one’s relationship with God yields a life whose actions are congruent with who
God is and what God desires for all God’s people. You become what you worship. Jesus said, “By their fruit you shall know
them” (Matthew 7:16). Yahweh now rejects
Israel. You’re on your own now. There’s
the door.
Yahweh is angry here, full of rage
toward Israel. But before we get too
comfortable in Christian self-righteousness here, we need to remember that the
early Church saw itself as an extension of Israel. The Church is an ever-expanding community
called the people of God. The
indictments leveled against Israel can easily be leveled against the Church at
any time in its history, including the present time, for precisely the same
reasons Isaiah is furious with Israel: for the stupidity, the willful stupidity
of the Church that tries to go it alone, that forgets it’s dependence upon God,
that forgets that the Church doesn’t belong to itself, it belongs to God, when
its pieties and liturgies and offerings are dishonest and empty because worship
is not connecting us with God, when worship is having no tangible effect upon
the way Christians live their lives, no bearing upon the way it cares for all
God’s people, cares for its neighbors, eases their burdens. I wonder, does God ever
reject the Church and say, “You’re on your own, I’m outta here”?
It might feel this way at
times. What we’re left with is a God
full of judgment. And there is a lot of judgment here—with good reason. Just look at the mess the world is in. This
is a spectacularly beautiful world, but look at the mess we’re in. Just look at the mess of the Church today—with
it’s idolatrous obsession with self-preservation at the expense of doing the
gospel.
It’s easy to get depressed—you’re
probably already depressed by all of this. This is a burdensome message—and
we’re only looking at ten verses in the first chapter of Isaiah; just keep
reading! Isaiah is relentless. No one ever welcomes the voice of the
prophet. And the Church is often uneasy
with prophetic preaching because no one comes out looking good or feeling good.
In fact, in twenty-three years of preaching no one has ever said to me, “Ken,
give us more prophetic sermons.” Israel
has a long history of killing the prophets, as does the church. Who wants to hear all this judgment? Who can bear this?
We don’t want to hear this because deep
down we know it’s true. We know we’re
guilty. That guilt informs the way we
hear scripture, even verses like this. Guilt
informs the way we imagine God as essentially an angry judge. We’re kind of pulled
toward that image of God as judge because at some level we know we’re guilty or
think we should feel guilty about something.
Unfortunately, our guilt hinders us from hearing and seeing the other
thing going on here.
The great Reformed theologian Karl
Barth (1886-1968) insisted that theologically, biblically speaking we need to
hold judgment and mercy in tension. In our society we tend to want to separate
them, either judgment or mercy. However,
Barth observed that judgment and mercy are the opposite sides of the same coin,
as it were. There’s judgment in God. But God’s judgment and anger are never ends
in themselves. (This can’t be stressed enough!) The intent of God’s
judgment is not to destroy or
annihilate. If “God is love” (1 John 4:16b),
as the Bible affirms, if in the face of Jesus Christ we know that God is love,
then we need to ask: what does judgment
from a loving God look like? God’s judgment is upon the things that hinder
God’s will for creation. It is judgment
that judges sin (not people) in order
clear away everything that hinders God’s desire for the world, for God’s
ultimate desire is to redeem, to restore,
to heal, to make whole. It’s the
kind of judgment that embodies what the Bible understands as restorative justice. Yes, there’s plenty of judgment here to go
around, but the judgment is never the last word. The last word is always mercy, grace.
And that mercy, that grace, arrives
as a kind of whiplash, it’s not what we expect; it catches us by surprise, catches
us off-guard. It breaks in and undoes
what we expect. It breaks the cycle of violence and death. We expect the judgment to just keep on
coming, of God giving up on his people.
And then the great reversal comes: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to
do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the
orphan. …Though your sins are like
scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall
become like wool” (Is. 1:16-17, 18b).
You see that’s what God really wants for God’s people. Not judgment, but mercy. And that’s what God really wants to give and
is giving God’s people, if only we remember who we are, that we belong not to
ourselves, but to God.
The Revised Common Lectionary for
today links this Isaiah text with Luke 12.
We’ve been walking through Luke this summer, looking at the parables of
the kingdom. As we’ve seen, the kingdom
is not “up there;” God’s kingdom is here and now and on the way. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is
your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). Good
pleasure. It’s directly related to
the angels’ message to the shepherds in Luke 2, “I am bringing you good news of
great joy for all the people: to you is born a Savior…. Glory to God in the
highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” (2:10-11,14). On earth peace. And the coming of the kingdom of God means we
can trust in God’s providential care over the earth, which means we don’t have
to worry (as we saw last week) or hoard things.
We can open our tight fists and give; there’s no need to grasp. True
security is found in God.
Then, Jesus says, we can “be dressed
for action.” Be ready for vigorous
activity. For the kingdom is coming. And
the lord of the kingdom is on his way. So
be ready. And he’s not only coming to judge, so relax. The master is coming and when he arrives,
something remarkable and unexpected will happen, be on your guard or else
you’ll miss it, for it will shock and surprise you. What will happen? Jesus says, “[T]ruly I tell you, [the master] will fasten his belt and have his
servants sit down to eat [at this
table], and he will come and serve
them.” The servant becomes the master. The master comes to serve. The
master invites the servant to sit down.
He will serve the servant. For in the kingdom of God roles are reversed. The kingdom is all about reversal. “The first will discover they are last and
the last will be given the place of honor. The mighty come down, and the lowly
find themselves exalted. The rich go
hungry, while the poor are filled with delights. Priests and temple functionaries pass by
victims, while hated Samaritans demonstrate the meaning of faithfulness [and
grace]. Sinners attain justification,
while the prayers of the righteous rebound against the floors of heaven (Luke
18:11-14).”[2]
Luke’s entire gospel, from beginning
to end, establishes a larger context of God’s kingdom and the kingdom is an
extension of God’s good pleasure. That’s
what Jesus wants his people to know, to claim for their lives, and then from
that knowledge he wants us to go out and preach the kingdom, serve the kingdom,
live the kingdom, receive the kingdom, discover it. This becomes the foundation for Christian discipleship,
the Christian life. Greg Carey, New
Testament scholar at Lancaster Theological Seminary, is right when he says,
“Discipleship emerges not from fearsome demands but from the outpouring of God’
love. Divine generosity sets the tone for all of God’s expectations.”
It’s the same divine generosity
pouring through the prophetic judgments of Isaiah, because, he too, knows that
Yahweh is merciful and faithful and seeks our welfare. He, too, knows God’s expectations for us.
Isaiah, too, envisioned the kingdom of God.
God’s generosity, an awareness of
God’s generosity, shapes who we are as a people and then it informs how we live
in the body politic, out in the community. We discover God’s generosity in our worship
and devotional life, in prayer, in the depths of our relationship with God. And
from that relationship, we act.
For Isaiah (and for Jesus) right
worship leads to right neighbor practices, which is how the Bible defines social
justice. This is what the Bible means by
righteousness.[3] Right worship will lead us away from evil
toward the good. Right worship will lead
you into the cause of God’s justice.
Right worship spills over into social relationships and personal
relationships and the responsibilities that come with them. In the worship of Yahweh, you and I discover
that we have an obligation to rescue the oppressed. We have a responsibility toward the orphans
and the widows. In other words, our focus and concern must be for the weakest
members of society, the most vulnerable in our society, the ones without an
advocate or friend, those subject to political exclusion and economic
exploitation. This is not debatable.
Walter Brueggemann, again, is pretty blunt: “An appeal to the authority of the Bible, in
all its literalness, is phony if these issues [of social justice] are not front
and center.”[4]
In other words, you can’t say that the
Bible has authority for you and ignore these issues.
Our faith is a charade if worship
doesn’t make us ready for action, to follow where Jesus leads, leading us into
the kingdom that is here and on the way, knowing that it is God’s good pleasure
to give the kingdom.
What difference will having been at
worship today make in your week? Or, how
about this, name an orphan or widow you know.
Right now, think of someone you know who is vulnerable, alone, scared,
terrified, weak. Now, what are you going
to do about it?
For it is God’s good pleasure to
give us the kingdom. We are called to action. Called to serve the one who came
not to be served, but to serve.
[1]Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 1-39 (Louisville: Westminster
John Knox Press, 1998), 13.
[2]Greg Carey, “The Social
Shape of Divine Generosity (Luke 12:32-40), http://www.odysseynetworks.org/news/2013/08/02/the-social-shape-of-divine-generosity-luke-1232-40.
[3] Brueggemann, 19.
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