Isaiah
58:1-14
Ordinary
5
February
5, 2017
William G. Carter
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and
oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and
to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your
voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble
oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and
ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the
oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread
with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the
naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
I
don’t know what kind of response that the prophet Isaiah received, but I know
the kind of things that people say to me at the back door. They say a lot of
things: they tell me their children are getting married, or volunteer to bring
a crock pot of chili for the Ice Festival, or about an upcoming surgery or a
recent head cold. It’s all good information.
Most
of them speak about the hour-long worship service that they have just been
through. “The choir was good today,” someone will say, or “How about those
bells?” A couple of weeks ago, when I used a stolen prayer for the service, a
number of people asked for a copy. They rarely ask for a copy of my own prayers,
which is good because I don’t always write them down, so I was glad to give it
to them.
Once
in a while, someone may say something about the sermon. That’s a good
corrective for me, because they will often quote a line from it that I didn’t
even say. As one of my teachers said, “That’s good preaching. You stirred up
something in them that they’re still chewing on.”
But
as I’ve told many of you, of all the comments at the door, my favorite is when
somebody says, “That was a good worship service. I felt good about worship
today.” I like that. It’s not just about the sermon, or the music, or prayer,
or the good looking ushers. It’s the quality of the whole worship service. That’s
what really matters.
Worship
is what gets God’s attention. What matters is not merely the show up front, or
the quality of singing in the pews – but the whole thing. Worship nurtures our
faith. Worship expresses our faith. Worship responds to the grace of God by
expressing the grace of God. So I always hope to hear somebody say, “That was a
good worship service. It felt good to be here.”
But
today Isaiah sounds a warning to us. He’s been sitting in the back row of the
sanctuary for a while. He can watch what has been happening in here, but he can
also get a pretty good view of what’s happening outside the door. And he begins
to see that there is a serious disconnection between what we do in this room
and what we do when we go back to the neighborhood.
Now,
what’s been happening inside the sanctuary has been pretty important. The
people gather to praise Yahweh, the God of freedom, the God of love. They sing.
They give. They listen to the scriptures tell of God’s long-standing
relationship with his people. They support one another in taking on spiritual
disciplines, like praying for the needs of the world, or fasting from food as a
way of focusing on God.
But
back there in the last pew, the prophet Isaiah can overhear a little grumbling
from the people. “Why isn’t this working? We come and tell God what we want,
but God doesn’t seem to be listening. We voluntarily give up a meal in order to
pray, but God isn’t paying attention. We humble ourselves, and take on all of
these practices and disciplines, but God won’t even stifle a yawn. Why won’t
God look at us?”
That’s
an interesting thing to hear, because from where he’s sitting, Isaiah can watch
some of these very same people as they go about their business outside the
door. These are the very same people who come into the sanctuary, humble and
committed to prayer, while under their breath they are murmuring about how
demanding the priest is.
These
are the same people who sponsor task forces on peace and justice, but continue
to pay their cleaning ladies less than minimum wage. They live in their big
house on the hill and dress in designer clothing as they go to worship.
Meanwhile they conveniently seem to forget they are funding the mortgage on
their vacation house from wages that should be rightfully be going to their
underpaid factory workers, and those designer clothes are stitched offshore for
nickels a day in some sweatshop.
There
is no question in Isaiah’s mind why God isn’t listening. Among God’s people,
there is a disconnection between what happens in the sanctuary and what happens
out on the street.
In
an important article on worship and ethics,[1] Nicholas Wolterstorff reminds us that the God we
worship is a God that loves justice. According to the scriptures, justice is
not about punishment or prisons or law and order. That’s not the Bible’s view
of justice. Biblical justice is looking out for the people who get trampled on.
The Bible keeps pointing us to the widows, the orphans, and the aliens, because
traditionally they were the ones who didn’t have access to the same basic
services as everybody else.
To
these ancient categories of people, in our day we might add the single parent,
the homeless child, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, those with
chronic illness, the victims of prejudice and exclusion, to say nothing of
those who come from a different land or speak a different language. God says,
“A holy people will look after these folks, and bring them into the community
so as to enjoy its bounty.”
For
instance, take the whole discipline of fasting. In many spiritual traditions,
for thousands of years, people have voluntarily skipped some meals as a way to
devote themselves to God’s purposes. That’s a wonderful and pious thing to do,
and Jesus himself fasted for forty days in the desert.
But
when you are fasting to pursue God’s purposes over here, and then you neglect
your neighbors and ignore God’s purposes over here, there is a serious
spiritual disconnection, and God won’t pay you any attention. As someone
comments on Isaiah’s text, “The God of Judaism is not a God who likes to be
flattered in a more or less passive routine of worship; this God is out working
the neighborhood and wants all adherents doing the same.”[2]
“What
kind of fasting do you think I prefer?” asks the Lord. “Isn’t it to loosen the
bonds of injustice, to break the yoke of oppression? Isn’t it to share your
bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless and the poor under your own roof?”
If we come here to worship a God who makes every person, a God who declares
that each of these persons resembles the divine image, there isn’t a person
alive who is not our own kin.
In
his book called The Dangerous Act of Worship,
Mark Labberton tells about his experience as a guest preacher. He’s a seminary
president, so he gets around. And Mark often sees what the congregations take
for granted.
One
Sunday, he says he was preaching in a big, big church. It was a fancy place.
Everything was elaborate stone work – the sanctuary, the pulpit, the communion
table. Mark had finished his sermon, and then joined the host pastor right
behind the communion table. They stood together and led the congregation in the
communion prayers. Then, in his words, this is what happened:
The elders went up and
down the stairs to receive the trays of each element. One of the elders lost
his balance as he reached the top step and accidentally collided with another
elder. Both silver trays crashed onto the stone steps, making the loudest
reverberation in the quietest moment, communion bread tumbling all over the
steps. It was a noisy, messy, awkward situation. It was also just an accident.
I saw such a look of
fury and hatred pass between the two men as I have rarely seen. It was an
embarrassing and painful exchange. The hatred was far more of an offense to
that communion meal than the accident itself. For an instant it seemed the
curtain was pulled back and I saw what our instincts often reveal: it’s about
us more than about someone else.[3]
And
while all that fussing is going on, there were people outside that big stone
building, homeless people, hungry people, who would have given anything to have
a piece of bread to eat . . . while the elders are upset with each other about
spilling the trays.
Do
you know what God wants? I think you
know what God wants.
·
God wants a connection between Sunday and
Monday.
·
God wants a connection between a warm sanctuary and
a chilly homeless shelter.
·
God wants a holy people who care about all the
people.
·
God wants us to stop wasting food, especially
when others are starving, and to step up the distribution program.
·
God wants those who have a lot to stop taking
advantage of those who have little.
·
God wants the hungry to be fed, and the
cold-hearted to be strangely warmed.
·
God wants the Sabbath to be about God’s
concerns, and not merely a day off from human responsibility.
I
think we know what God wants. And it is a privilege to be part of a church that
seeks to be what God wants.
In
fact, when we gather for worship, hear God speak, and then take our neighbors
as seriously as we take our Lord, we might just hear God say, “Now that
was a wonderful worship service!”
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] Nicholas
Wolterstorff, “Justice as a Condition of Authentic Liturgy,” Theology Today, April 1991, pp. 8-9.
[2] Walter
Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66 (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1998) 189.
[3] Mark
Labberton: The Dangerous Act of Worship:
Living God’s Call to Justice (Downer’s Grove: IVP Books, 2007) 44.
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