The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A
Isaiah 58:1-9a
For the record, if you ever want to make a curate
break out into flop sweats, just tell her or him that one of the lectionary
texts begins like our Old Testament reading did this morning:
Announce
to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.
I had a
conversation this past week about the Hebrew prophets, and I mentioned that I found them
deeply comforting and deeply disturbing. Comforting, because they always end as
our reading does today, Then
you shall call and the Lord will answer…
Disturbing, because they always require a lot of soul searching to get there. As
a Christian, the fifteen books of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible are some of
my favorite texts of Scripture, texts in which I always find something new, texts which make
me grow in my walk with God, especially Isaiah. But as a priest, I
often cringe when they come up in the lectionary, especially Isaiah, because they are so difficult and so hard
to hear. And it would be so much easier to preach this morning about salt and
light, wouldn’t
it?
That’s where all of you
come in, thank God, because you keep me honest. Every time I’ve tried to take the easier road and
skip over the difficult lectionary text, many of you ask me about it on your way out the door after
services, so I have to preach an impromptu second sermon. So, given the choice
of Isaiah with notes or Isaiah without, I choose with.
By all accounts, the people of Judah to whom this
section of Isaiah was addressed were doing things right. They’d come back from
exile in Babylon,
and they’d
put aside the idols and false gods that they’d previously worshipped. They were worshipping the Lord
their God alone, and they were even rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. They
were doing things right, living by the Law of Moses, keeping kosher, dotting
all their Is and crossing all their Ts. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough because it
was purely external.
Nothing they were doing actually affected their hearts. They were the same old
people with the same old hearts of stones, they were just trying to put a
better spin on things. In fact, it sounds like they viewed religion as a form
of magic: if I do this God, then you have to do this. So they fasted, and they
prayed, and they conducted elaborate, beautiful worship before God. And
God sent Isaiah to them to say,
“You’re doing it wrong.”
I don’t know about you,
but I can sympathize with the people of Judah. My second year of seminary, my class
was required to go on a four-day silent retreat. I didn’t want to go, because I had a lot of
important things that I needed to do. It didn’t
help that, once I got there, one of my classmates shared the flu with all of
us. So I was sitting there, silent
except for coughing and blowing my nose, and feeling pretty sorry for myself. And
my retreat director told me that I should meditate on the story of Elijah on
Mount Carmel. In that story from 1 Kings, the prophet Elijah is feeling pretty
sorry for himself too. He’s
on the run from the wicked Queen Jezebel, who is trying to kill him, and he runs to Mount Carmel, the
mountain of God. And there, God causes a great wind, and an earthquake, and a
fire to pass by, but God comes to Elijah in the sound of sheer silence. So I
meditated on this passage of scripture. And as I began to imagine myself in the
story, I found myself saying Elijah’s words to God, “I have been very zealous for the Lord,
the God of hosts…” In the story from the Bible, Elijah
gets to say a lot more before God cuts him off, but in my meditation, God
stopped me right there. God said, “No you haven’t, Josh. You have
been very zealous for the church, and that’s a different thing. You have been very zealous for bishops and
commissions on ministry and standing committees. You have been very zealous for
impressing seminary professors. But you’ve forgotten why all that matters.” Now, part of me
wanted to reply that I was an Episcopalian, and that Episcopalians don’t expect God to
talk to us, but I didn’t
feel like this was wise.
Maybe it was the flu, or the silence getting to me after a couple days, but I
did need to hear that word from the Lord, just like the people of Judah needed
to hear the word that Isaiah brought to them.
It’s hard to hear, but it’s easy to let our
religion become external, a matter of observing the right rituals. It’s even worse, sometimes, to let our
religion become internal, something
private between ourselves and God. The people of Judah
did both of these things.
I’ve done both of
these things. And
in response, Isaiah
tells us about the fast that God chooses. It’s not giving up chocolate for Lent. It’s not something private between
ourselves and God designed to draw me and only me closer to Jesus. It’s a fast from
self-obsession,
which is what happens when we let our religion become too external or too internal.
The
fast that God chooses, Isaiah says is: to loose the bonds of injustice, to
undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every
yoke. And
oh, this is a hard fast.
It’s hard because it
changes us. It’s hard because it
tells us that the way to love God is to love the people around us. And that’s hard. And it’s hard because, as
you know, loosing the bonds of injustice can seem like an impossible task. But there’s a quote from Mother
Teresa that is a touchstone in my own spiritual life: “You can do no great
things. You can only do small things with great love.” When
we do small things with great love, God does amazing things through us.
Glennon Doyle
Melton, a blogger, author, and Ted Talk presenter, shared a story about her son’s fifth grade
teacher recently.
Glennon had gone to the teacher to ask for help understanding the new way long
division was being taught—her
son understood it, but she didn’t. What started out as a
parent-teacher tutoring session ended up becoming a deeply meaningful
conversation. It turned out that each Friday, the teacher passed out
ballots to every student in the class. Each student was supposed to pick four students they’d like to sit with
the next week and to
nominate one classmate as citizen of the week. The teacher wasn’t especially
interested in help in coming up with her seating chart or honoring good
citizenship. More than these things, she was looking for
patterns in the responses. Who had suddenly gone from popular to unpopular? Who
couldn’t
name four friends?
Who was never nominated for citizen of the week? The teacher made
notes of those names, and she singled them out for special attention, for more
love the next week.
Glennon asked how
long the teacher had been doing this, and, with weary eyes, the teacher answered,
“Every
Friday since Columbine.”
This is the fast
that God chooses.This is loosing the bonds of injustice, and letting the
oppressed go free.
How
will this fast look in your life? It’s hard, sometimes, I know to figure
out how to start.
This
is a big question to attempt to answer. It’s about ultimate importance. But, on Saturday,
March 8, our Outreach Committee is offering a Listening Day as one way to begin
to understand what God is calling you to do. This fast is big, and it’s scary, and it
will change us. But we need to be
changed. And our world needs
to be changed, too.
And
God will bless us with enough foolishness to dream impossible dreams and enough
strength to accomplish them, so that, through God’s grace, our fasts to loose the bonds
of injustice will accomplish what others say cannot be done. Amen.
