Last week, we heard from the prophet Micah. This week, we’re looking at a different prophet with a similar, but different message: Isaiah.
The part of Isaiah we’re about to hear was likely written after the exile to Babylon. When the southern kingdom of Judah was overthrown in 687 BCE, Jerusalem was ransacked and the temple was destroyed. Most of the upper classes and skilled labor were carried into exile in Babylon, scattered throughout the empire. A full generation later, after the Persians had overthrown the Babylonians, the king allowed the people to return to their homeland and begin rebuilding. They struggled mightily, not only with the physical labor of building walls and homes, but they struggled to re-center their faith and life without the Temple and its rhythms, and to find common ground with those who had stayed behind and now owned the land.
This is what God has to say to those people.
Scripture: Isaiah 58:1-12
Shout out; do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments;
they want God on their side.
“Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day
and oppress all your workers.
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 straps 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?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you;
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.”
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually
and satisfy your needs in parched places
and make your bones strong,
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.
On the one hand, these returned exiles are delighted to be back in the land. They are excited to worship. They seek God relentlessly. They are glad to fast and humble themselves.
But at the same time they’re doing all of this for God, they’re fighting with their neighbors and oppressing their workers. They are going through the motions of piety, repentance, and change, but their main motivation is not actually change.
They are fasting to get God to pay attention to them. They do these rituals in order to pressure God into giving them what they want. They have mistaken their self-interest for faithfulness.
When God does not respond in the way they wanted, they’re frustrated. Why don’t you notice when we humble ourselves?, they ask.
In reply, God points out the massive gap between seeking God’s ways and their real, actual lives.
The fast that God would choose for a struggling people is not simply to refrain from food and drink for the sake of not eating, but to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for those in need, and to not hide themselves away and assume someone else will deal with it.
When you can get over pointing fingers, when you can stop being jerks to each other, when you can take care of one another and make sure everyone has what they need – then, God says, you will shine like the dawn. Your healing and hope will come. Your ruins will be rebuilt. You will be called repairers of the breach and restorers of the streets.
But you cannot skip straight from pious going-through-the-motions to healing and repair. First, you have to deal with the actual problems in front of you – reconcile with one another, learn to care for one another again, flex those empathy and community-building muscles.
Theologian Carol J. Dempsey, a Dominican Sister, points out that we are not the first to try to work out the connection between worship and justice:
“Many of the early church fathers’ understanding of fasting was influenced by the poetry of Isaiah…. For Cyril, drawing near to God was associated with living a life worthy of God, not just asking God to draw near in favor and providence. Cassian makes clear that fasting without good works is neither pleasing nor acceptable to God. Many of the ancient church fathers and members of religious orders fasted on a regular basis, but always the fast was connected to their life of prayer and good works. Fasting was a means of freeing one’s self to receive the gifts of God, which were always intended for the common good.”
Fasting is a means of freeing ourselves to receive the gifts of God, which were always intended for the common good.
For some insane reason, there seems to be a cultural pressure – especially in our communities right now – to choose between worshipping God and doing justice. As though these two things are not connected as intricately as inhaling and exhaling. As though we could do one without the other, or we can only focus on one at a time.
But throughout Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation and everything in between, the love and grace and compassion and forgiveness of God was always meant to flow into God’s people and out into the world. We were built for relationship with God and humans, designed to love God and love our neighbors. There’s a reason Jesus put those two commandments together and said they’re the most important things in the entire Torah!
We all struggle, to some extent, at some point, to meet our neighbors with grace and compassion. We struggle to figure out the best ways to do things. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. There is grace and encouragement to be found in God for that struggle. But what we cannot do – what God will not tolerate – is any attempt to declare: “God says that I don’t have to care what happens to you.”
I don’t use this word lightly, but that is heresy.
One of my friends put this either-or, worship or justice question to bed so succinctly this week that I nearly choked on my water when I heard it:
“The answer is both. We have to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
There is comfort in knowing that the temptation toward rugged individualism and self-centeredness has always been part of humanity’s struggle. And yet, day after day, year after year, millennia after millennia, God has called out to us, reminding us that we are not alone, that we can try again. There is a lot that is not within our power to do, and plenty that we cannot change in others – but what we can do, we must do.
Several centuries after this conversation, Jesus comes along and reminds God’s people once again that our faith was never meant to be a private, me-and-Jesus-and-forget-everyone-else scenario.
You are the salt of the earth, he says – but if you’re going to be any earthly good, you have to stay salty. You are the light of the world, but what good does a lamp do when it’s hidden away in a closet?
Side note: I always wondered how salt could possibly lose its saltiness. Salt is just a mineral, right? How can it not be salt?
It turns out that sea salt – the main source of salt in the ancient world – was usually not pure sodium chloride (what we know as table salt.) Because it was harvested from the Dead Sea and other salt water sources, it had impurities like gypsum, magnesium, etc. But salt dissolves insanely quickly when exposed to any kind of moisture, even just humidity in the air. So after a while, the salt would dissolve and leave behind a gross, white powdery substance with no salt, no flavor, no use.
In the same way, we cannot let the general chaos of this world drain our love, our compassion, our empathy, our trust in God’s goodness and love.
Beloved people of God, here is the good news: our faith and faithfulness can bring illumination and flavor to the depths of the world’s spiritual winter. In a time when it is more tempting by the day to say “I’m out, y’all are on your own”, God calls us beyond ourselves, beyond our comfort, beyond our piety, to love the world as Christ has loved us.
It will be hard, but it will be worth it.
Thanks be to God.