God Has Work for Us to Do: Isaiah 58:6-12
Fourth Week of Lent
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? 7Is 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?
8Then 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. 9Then
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, 10if 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. 11The 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. 12Your 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. (NRSV)
I have a
confession that would horrify my Eastern European ancestors: I am a terrible cook.
It’s not that
I’m bad at the mechanics of cooking, it’s that I don’t care. I am bored with the sautéing of vegetables
and the precise temperature of baked chicken; I have other things to do than
decide whether or not there needs to be garlic in this dish. (I’m informed by my Italian friend that the
answer to that is always yes.) Sometimes,
fasting looks like a grand idea not because I want that particular spiritual
discipline but because I can’t be bothered to remember to take the pork out of
the freezer and buy broccoli.
Cooking with
other people, though, changes the game; it’s harder not to care about creating
something with others. At the church I
attended just after college, it was a spring tradition for a group of women to
take a Saturday morning and gather to make fettuccini noodles. There is nothing quite like a flour-filled
kitchen at ten in the morning as the rain batters the windows, five
conversations flickering over the stretching, stretching, stretching of dough
while the sharp-eyed matriarch gently corrects your rolling technique.
If you’ve never made noodles from
scratch before, it’s not a terrifically short process; it’s making the dough
and letting it sit, it’s stretching it over and over (or, in the case of things
like biang biang noodles, slapping them against the counter in a deeply satisfying
way); it’s realizing that there are now so many noodles to boil. With the women at the church, it was feeding
the dough into the hand-cranked noodle machine clamped to the style of counter
that is in every mid-century Protestant church kitchen, the strips of dough unravelling
our into waiting fingers that we had to be careful not to ball up again and
undo our work. Eating the noodles we
made doused in sauce from the last of the canned tomatoes, paired with
fresh-made garlic bread from the piano teacher down the street—I never had a
desire to fast from that kind of a dinner because that one was anchored in
meaning, in something like family.
“Is not this
the fast I choose?” asks Isaiah on God’s behalf at the beginning of today’s
text, and we need to go back a bit to know what fast God doesn’t choose. This section of Isaiah is known as Trito or
Third Isaiah, likely written about five hundred years before the birth of
Christ and about fifty years after the return of the people of Israel from the
Babylonian exile. There had been enough
time for the people to settle back into patterns, to remember what boredom in
safety felt like, and to start wondering where the God of world-changing events
had gone. The religious rituals of the
day were perfunctory; the offering of fasts was out of pattern rather than
piety. The people at the margins of
society were forgotten; the metaphorical meals of the community were prepared
without heart, without conviction.
“Look,” says the prophet, “you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers. 4Look, 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. 5Is 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?”[1]
Rev. Dr.
Howard Wallace writes that, “The questions that follow in vv. 6-7 redefine
fasting in the people’s eyes. Fasting is universally associated with
self-deprivation, with withdrawal or abstention from food mostly. But these
verses put a much more active and positive spin on the nature of fasting. The
implication is that loosing the bonds of injustice, letting the oppressed go
free, and breaking every burdensome yoke are a significant part of fasting (v.
6). Fasting is also sharing bread with the hungry, housing the homeless,
covering the naked, and being available to others (v. 7). There is no doubt
that some of these tasks will require of the doer a personal cost, in effort,
time, money, maybe even in reputation. It will mean sharing what is possessed
with those who have no possessions.”[2]
The worship,
the ritual offered becomes a meal made in community; it becomes a practice,
together, of the faith claimed. It
becomes an invitation, a recognition, a reverence for God’s hope of wholeness,
not to starve ourselves but to eat our full of the connection to each other. Over and over again in Scripture, God tells
the world that the most beautiful thing is a community where everyone is seen,
heard, and valued. “Do justice and love
mercy,” says Micah; “Let justice roll down like an ever-flowing stream,” says
Amos; do not offer empty acts of worship while people are starving, says
Zechariah, says the psalmist, says Jeremiah; at the end of all things, taking
care of others is taking care of Me, says Jesus; care for the ones among you
who are cast to the margins, for they are beloved, too, says Paul. Feast on the richness of giving up that which
separates us from one another, deliberately stepping into the kitchen to pull
noodles together, to fight injustice together, to become the reflected light of
the Holy not in a solitary candle but in a field of lanterns.
This past
week, several hundred of us went to Lansing to speak with representatives about
the need for legislation to curb gun violence.
We gathered “as multiple bills are moving through the Michigan
Legislature that address safe gun storage and universal background checks, and
create so called ‘red flag laws.’… Rev. Paul Perez read a statement by
Bishop David Alan Bard…‘I understand that no single set of laws will eradicate
gun violence,’ said Bard. ‘I'm also convinced that simply because we cannot do
everything does not mean we should do nothing.’”[3]
Isaiah’s words
do not cover every possible version of being in community with each other in a
way that honors God. The noodles the
women of Faith Alliance made could not feed anyone for a lifetime. The legislation passed this week in both the
House and the Senate will not stop gun violence entirely. But this is the fast I choose, I who
follow the God Who calls me by name: to speak up for safety as often as I can,
anyway. To make noodles that feed a
laughing gaggle of girls, anyway. To do
the work of breaking yokes, anyway. This is the fast I choose: to write
letters, templates for which are on our website or will be at Connections after
the service; to educate myself on the ways the Church perpetrates injustice; to
let the oppressed go free everywhere I find I have any part of holding them
captive.
Isaiah sets up
an if-then clause: if this happens, then this happens. If you clothe the naked, then your
light shall break forth. If you
feed the hungry, then the Lord will answer. This feels a little dicey to those of us who come
behind Martin Luther’s adamant declaration of sola fides, faith alone;
it is God Who does the work of answer, of being the Light, of being among
us. It is not that we earn it, or that
we bargain with God to be God.
But the if/then
clause is only in this section, and is a reminder never to carve out Scripture
without remembering the larger body; put in context of the tapestry of
Scripture, it is not a clause but a dance learned from a Teacher Who moved
across the waters in the chaos at the beginning of time. “There can be no mistaking the language in
which this ‘fast’ that God chooses is cast,” writes Dennis Bratcher. “This is the language of the exodus, when
Israel was the people suffering under injustice, bound under the yoke of
slavery, oppressed by the lords of the land. And when they had cried out to God
for relief, he had heard their cries and had entered human history to bring
freedom and deliverance as an act of grace.
“But this is even more than the
language of the exodus. This is also the language of the return from Babylonian
exile…When they were treated unjustly and cried out, God had responded to their
cries (cf. Psa 137). When they were slaves and exiles God had freed them. When
they were bound under the yoke of oppression, God had loosed their bonds. When
they were hungry and thirsty in the wilderness God had provided them food and
drink. When they were naked God had provided them clothes that did not wear out.
When they were homeless and wandering in the wilderness and exiled in Babylon
God had brought them into the land. They had experienced all of these things in
their history. And God had expected the Israelites to learn from all those
experiences as he revealed himself through them the nature of the God whom they
served. It was the nature of that God that defined who they were to be as his
people.”[4]
We in a 21st century
Methodist sanctuary, we on our computers and phones around the world, are not
Israelites recovering from exile, but are we not creations taught of the nature
of God? Are we not humans who have been
hungry and thirsty in this wilderness we wander for the 40 days of Lent? Are we not learning constantly how to give
and receive grace that frees? “God has
work for us to do,” says the title of this sermon, and yes, the work is that of
justice—of breaking yokes, of fighting oppression, of feeding the hungry. But it is also the work of listening to the
way God is walking and learning how to walk the same; it is the work of
rebuilding ancient ruins not to trap people within them but to create shelter
that can become home; it is the work of gathering in flour-dusted kitchens to turn
a hand crank and create noodles to feed a community, even when we hate cooking.
What a feast that work is. What a lifetime of things to do, and to
decide not to do, and to learn how to do better. That is the fast I choose: to love as God has
loved us, knowing that your humanity and mine are bound in the Human One Who
walks with us in this Lenten season and all the others.
What fast will you choose,
sibling? How will you restore the
streets to live in? What does it look
like for you to be a spring of water, whose waters never fail?
Shall we find out together? We can even bring some noodles for the
journey. May it be blessed. Amen.
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