Finding Spirituality: Isaiah 1: 1, 10-20
Ordinary Time
The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw
concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and
Hezekiah, kings of Judah.
10 Hear the word of the Lord, / you rulers of
Sodom!
Listen to the teaching of our God, / you people of Gomorrah!
11 What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? / says the Lord;
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.
12 When you come to appear before me, / who
asked this from your hand? / Trample my courts no more!
13 Bringing offerings is futile; / incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation— / I cannot endure
solemn assemblies with iniquity.
14 Your new moons and your appointed festivals / my soul hates; /
they have become a burden to me; / I am weary of bearing them.
15 When you stretch out your hands, / I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers, / I will not listen; / your
hands are full of blood.
16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; / remove your evil deeds
/ from before my eyes;
cease to do evil;
17 learn to do good; / seek
justice; / rescue the oppressed;
defend the orphan; / plead for the widow.
18 Come now, let us argue it out, / says the
Lord:
If your sins are like scarlet, / will they become like snow?
If they are red like crimson, / will they become like wool?
19 If you are willing and obedient, / you shall eat the good of the
land,
20 but if you refuse and rebel, / you shall be devoured by the sword,
for the mouth of the Lord has
spoken. (NRSVUE)
It may be that the only place you
wish to go in our series on travelling after hearing that Scripture is away
from anything having to do with Isaiah.
It’s a rough text, especially to Christians in the 21st
century who would much rather gravitate to the image of kindly Jesus than a God
Who demands obedience and flat-out says, “I will not listen” to the words of
prayer. The prophet Isaiah would not
have been celebrated as a guest preacher in too many modern sanctuaries.
Yet it is part
of our travel, part of this holy text we claim as the library of faith, the biblios
or Bible. Our journey takes us even into
verses like these where the references to Sodom and Gomorrah scrape at our
skin, where God’s invitation to “argue it out” seems like nothing more than a
trap. How do we travel there, the place
on the map where surely, here be dragons?
Perhaps we
come at it from the side. Several years
ago, I went to Scotland to visit a college friend who was living in Glasgow at
the time; during the week I was there, he encouraged me to visit the abbey of
Iona off the western coast. I borrowed
his one-person tent so as not to have to rent a room, and went.
It was an
adventure to get to the island at all, an adventure written in his neat print
on an index card guiding me through two trains, a ferry, a bus, and another
transport ship. For those of you who
haven’t been there, the Isle of Iona is a treeless rock in the Sea of the Hebrides
with a one-street town on the east coast and a golf course on the west. In between is a beautiful stone abbey
originally founded, it is said, by St. Columba in the 6th
century. Why St. Columba decided to
settle on a rock nearly at the end of the world, I’m not sure; perhaps he, too,
was running from the harshness of Isaiah’s words.
I spent some
time in the chapel at Iona, thumbing through the prayer books and being
generally pious in the way that seems necessary in imposing stone holy
spaces. I sang a hymn with some members
of the community, carefully guarding any kind of real connection to the
service. I was far more present to that
experience as a medievalist than as a Christian. Now I can tell people I have worshipped at
Iona, very impressive, what a mark on my Pastor Bingo card.
That night, I
huddled in my borrowed tent as a storm ripped across the island. Remember, there are no trees; where I was
camping, there were no buildings, no light poles, no caves. There was a small natural hill to break some
of the ferocity of the wind, but for the most part it was me and the tent and
the unforgiving brutality of the opened sky lashing against the nylon. I will never forget the sound of the thunder
bouncing off the waves crashing against the shore, or the intense blackness of
a world without electricity or stars. “’What
to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?’ / says the Lord; ‘I have had enough
of burnt offerings of rams / and the fat of fed beasts.’”
Now, the coast
of Scotland and the temple of Israel are rather far apart, and my story and
Isaiah’s are even further in the reality of time. As we read these scathing words about the
sincerity of worship, it is important for us to remember that this text may be
written to us—in the sense that we can gain insight and deepen our faith
by reading it—but it was not written for us; we are not its original
audience. Professor Corinne Carvalho
notes, “Although this poem is placed near the beginning of [Isaiah], most
scholars view it as part of the last layer of the text. It would reflect a
time, after the Exile, when Judea was no longer ruled by Davidic kings…During
this period when the temple was rebuilt and Judean society restored, many
groups vied for positions of power. Within the Persian context, the temple
would have been the single most important social institution, both economically
and politically, so control of the temple was more than just a religious issue.”[1]
We of the
United States in 2022 right after a primary election of course have no idea
what it’s like to be in a time of vying for positions of power, nor for control
of the religious institutions to be a point of secular contention. It is true that the way we handle that
push and pull is different; we cannot underemphasize the disparity between the
covenantal sacrifice of Israel before the common era and the way in which we
gather on Sunday mornings to melt quietly in sanctuaries now. The anger of the Lord in Isaiah’s words
against the worshippers with bloodstained hands was not against the blood
itself but the way in which the focus there ignored the human blood shed
outside the temple’s walls. Bringing
offerings was futile not because the offerings were unwanted but because they
were not offered in good faith.
Carvalho
writes, “This section contrasts the care that they give to liturgical practice
with their disregard for the poor and marginalized within their own community…the
sacrificial system was hugely expensive. The daily sacrifices referenced in
this passage consisted in what are called ‘whole burnt offerings,’ meaning that
edible food, in the form of meat, vegetables, and grains were placed on the
altar and completely burned as a way to send them up to God. The amount of food
was increased on Sabbaths, and even more on the New Moon. The ‘festivals’
referenced in Isaiah 1:14 were probably the three major festivals in Israel’s
liturgical calendar, when the amount of food burned was enormous.”[2]
“I have had
enough,” says God through Isaiah—enough of worship that is ritual without
substance, enough of liturgy that ignores the people who are supposed to be
part of it; enough of empty hymns in an abbey on a rock while refusing to see
the Spirit in the panhandlers in the train stations along the way, enough of
prayers uttered with a heart closed to the invitation of faith that transforms,
faith that gets its hands dirty in the cleansing of scarlet sins.
Those of us
who claim Christianity here in the United States—and, increasingly, abroad—know
that the way in which we worship and why we do so are increasingly important to
articulate. A Buddhist friend of mine
texted me last week with an article link about some of the current federal
representatives’ comments supporting Christian nationalism. “I feel like this is the only sermon topic
until it’s destroyed,” he wrote, and he’s right. We who claim the Christian faith must say
that we, too, are weary of bearing the festivals proclaiming God’s glory and
ignoring the oppressed; that we, too, have had enough of appearing in church on
Sunday and CNN headlines on Monday with bloodstained hands clasped against the
mouths of widows. What do we say,
Church, when people ask us about our journey of faith, our discovery of
spirituality? Do we insist that “of
course we’re not like those Christians” and applaud ourselves for having
sung hymns at Iona? Or do we
wholeheartedly admit that God has changed us, is changing us, to say honest
prayers in the loud wind that tears away our own artifices about Whom it is
that we serve every day, including Sunday?
For God does not condemn worship in
general; there is nothing here that says people should abandon the Temple to
hang out with widows instead, or that honest prayer is less important than
defending orphans. In our modern
culture, we too easily slide into the either/or binary—especially in church
settings, weirdly, considering so much of our faith lives in the in-between. We tell ourselves that conservative
Christians care only for blood-soaked hymns and over-developed rituals without
ever seeing the need right outside the sanctuary doors; we tell ourselves that
progressive Christians don’t bother going to church to find spirituality and
only want to do work among the people without a faith community.
This is a
false dichotomy. “Wash yourselves
clean,” says God through Isaiah, but never “do so alone.” Professor Carvalho states, “While this text
does liken justice to the treatment of the oppressed and marginalized, the
conclusion that social justice replaces liturgy is incorrect, especially in
light of the whole book of Isaiah. Positive images of God’s relationship to the
temple permeate the book. Isaiah’s call in chapter 6 takes place in the temple.
[Adonai] saves Jerusalem in Isaiah 36 when King Hezekiah prays in the temple.
In a stunning image of inclusivity, the marginalized foreigners and castrated
become fully integrated into the community by their inclusion in worship
(56:3-8). The book ends with a vision of restoration that likens salvation with
temple worship (66:23). Isaiah does not say liturgy is evil, unnecessary, or
insignificant.
“Instead, the passage invites us to
experience liturgy through the eyes of those we have oppressed, ignored, or
abandoned. What do our hymns sound like to someone who lives on the brink of
destitution? Do our prayers evoke anger in the woman who can barely feed her
children in the week between our services? Does the hope that we preach sound
hollow to a child who does not feel safe in her own neighborhood or his own
home?”[3]
In the habitual rhythm of many United
Methodist churches, we gather on this first Sunday of a new month to take
communion. Already the ritual is
strange; those who worship with us online are not here to take the elements
with us, to have the cup placed into their hands, plastic and wafer-laden as it
may be. Some who worship with us will
not do so now, in this moment, because the internet has allowed time to become
a far more nebulous thing. How does our
worship recognize that they, too, are the Body of Christ? Are their sins, too, made whiter than snow?
For those of us here in the
sanctuary—literally “holy place,” from the Latin sanctuarium[4]—do
we gather to take the wafer and juice because it is what is done on Sundays and
the habit is ground into our bones, or do we gather because it is here that we
meet the Christ in a way that turns us inside out and releases us into the rest
of our life as transformed people? Come
now, let us argue it out; the table is open to all who come knowing that it is
the offering of ourselves that God desires most, knowing that worship is where
we learn together what justice looks like on tannin-tanged tongues. Shall we worship together like that, Church? Shall we promise obedience that changes us
and changes the world?
Let us find our spirituality here, then, here in a windswept tent where there is nothing but honesty, here in a humid sanctuary where there is true safety, here at a wool-white table where no one goes hungry. Amen.
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