freedom
Sunday March 1 2020
Use this week’s GPS (GrowPrayStudy) Guide to reflect on the sermon.
Isaiah 58: 1 – 7
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.
2 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 delight to draw near to God.
3 “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.
4 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.
5 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?
6 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?
7 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?
Over dinner recently, a teenager I know entertained her dad’s friends by imitating him, repeating the phrases used in their house most often:
Where does that go?
Why is that light on?
Are you done in that room?
Where does that go? {That one is repeated fairly often.}
We all need course correction from time to time. In our daily habits, in our personal relationships, in our local and national organization, sometimes just in our own self-understanding.
In biblical history, in our faith history, that is where prophets come in. (And no, if you see him sometime soon, I did not just equate the father of that teenager to a prophet. Don’t let him think I did.)
Isaiah is one of the ‘major prophets’ we turn to, who had a great deal to say about where the people of Israel were, and how they were behaving, and what they should actually probably be doing instead. We are a few days into the season of Lent, when we take time to look more closely at our spiritual practices and see where we can more closely shape ourselves into what God has in mind.
‘Lay down your burden.’ ‘Take up your cross.’
In the New Testament, we take both instructions from Jesus … but they seem contradictory. How can we follow them both at once? Perhaps we can take this less as pressure and more as permission: to not do it all but to do what we can, to know that who and how we are IS what Jesus desires, and that God’s grace will do the work to make us work as we need to in the world.
The Christian recognition of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and moves through 40 days: a season of releasing that which controls us, those things to which we cling too tightly, anything that keeps us from depth of experience and fullness of faith.
As we look toward the coming-again Christ, this Savior reborn in resurrection, how do we overcome fear and death to bring about new life? How do we prepare ourselves? What do our hearts need to be ready for a Messiah?
The prophet Isaiah has guidance to offer. We’re going to spend this month’s Sundays looking at Isaiah 58. Just this one chapter, which we started on Wednesday night, and we’ll continue to add verses each week. We want to take a slow walk through a significant text, taking a careful look at the things that make for holiness, preparing to live life that brings us closer to God.
Prophets have ‘uncommon access’ to God’s will and intent. We see them in roles similar to the work of shamans in other cultures.
Prophets aren’t predictors or fortune tellers. They know the future God will bring, but not because of a crystal ball. “Rather, the prophets know in deep and intimate ways about the character of God”, about the ways God has worked and still can work in the world, reminding the people to align themselves with that.
Sometimes they come from outside the normal scene, to speak a new word into community. New
insight or caution and correction can encourage and empower transformation that isn’t otherwise possible with someone you know. But sometimes they are part of a culture and community, and so speak into social setting as advocates for things that are in line with God’s will.
Prophets speak as the word of God and spirit of God moves them. The poetry of prophecy reveals the reimagination of life when lived in God’s attention, purpose, and intent.
The declarations of the prophets are generally about judgment and deliverance: Judgment against those who resist will surely end badly. But deliverance says that “in, through, and beyond judgment, God will work newnesses that are beyond {anything imagined}.”
The most important part of prophetic declarations is that they reorient us: They set the entire world as the arena of God’s faithful work, showing how different life can be when God, and God’s will for the world, is the deciding factor in our action and life together.[1]
The season of Lent is about spiritual disciplines and the work of preparing, of opening our spirits for deeper encounters with God’s longing for us.
In the gospels, we receive instruction from Jesus about the ways we can prepare to be as God desires us. Give, pray, and fast.
When you give charity, he says … act like you’re not giving. Don’t show it.
When you pray … go into your room, shut the door, and do it there. Don’t let people hear you.
While you’re there praying … quit going on and on, just pray and get on with it. God already knows.[2]
This paradoxical, upside-down nature of the gospel keeps us guessing and sometimes it’s hard to know what we’re supposed to do and when and how. Generations before Jesus, those who taught and spoke into his own ancestral community – these prophets – like Isaiah – had something to say about the practices of fasting and giving as well.
As we’ve said, Lent has traditionally been marked by penitential prayer – study, self-reflection, the who-aml-and-what-have-I-done kind of prayer. But the extension of that – the enhancement of it – is fasting.
Fasting, in this sense, is not the lose-10-pounds-in-3-days Hollywood juice cleanse. The idea of fasting is removing distractions. That’s where ‘giving things up’ came from. While it is theoretically our understanding all the time, we take this 40 day season to look more closely, to be sure that nothing is in between us and our goal of being closer to God. We need to abstain from things that get in the way. And things are always in the way.
But when we remove them – when we fast from what distracts us, when we create a space – God’s hope moves in. We admit that we’re not who we should be – and there is room for God there. The whole entire idea of Lent in the first place – the whole idea of reflection and discipline and penance – is that in the end we are something better, somewhere closer to God, somehow truer to ourselves, than when we started.
Here’s the catch: Sometimes it’s our fasting itself that gets in the way.
What’s the question we ask during Lent (assuming we know what Lent is and that we’re maybe supposed to do something with it)? What do we say? We talked about this a few days ago at Ash Wednesday worship.
“What are you giving up?” we ask
Do we ask – What do you want God to make of you?
Do we ask – How can I pray for your spirit to be renewed?
Very rarely.
We say, with more than a little anguish and more than a little self -righteousness: “I can’t have cokes.” Or “We gave up bread.” Or “I’m not spending money on that.” Or “Why does Girl Scout Cookie Time have to come during Lent?!”
We often fast like it’s a badge of honor. Like it’s about us. It has been said that “Lent wasn’t created to resurrect failed New Year’s resolutions, but to put to death the very thing that makes resolutions necessary.”[3]
If whatever we think we’re supposed to be giving up is keeping us from paying attention to what God is trying so very hard do in our lives … if we’re so busy talking about the fast we choose that we aren’t actually fasting toward faithfulness, then maybe we should give up giving up.
Just a few chapters ahead of where we read from Isaiah today, the ones who were to be on watch over a lavish banquet God had prepared, had left their posts, and let it be devoured by wild animals. As today’s chapter opens, the prophet is told to warn and proclaim loudly, shouting out and lifting his voice like a trumpet.
After God’s word to the prophet about his responsibility to speak, the voice changes, and the prophet addresses the people themselves, with the twin calls to justice and righteousness the clear focus.
The people feel God has let them down, that God hasn’t seen their acts of faithfulness, or noticed how much they’ve done; they think God hasn’t cared about their fasting. The prophet doesn’t give them sympathy, but says basically ‘You’re right. God doesn’t care.’ Because there is a vast difference between what you say you’re doing to set things right with God, and the fact that right in the midst of your community, actual injustice still exists.
When fasting becomes just ritual, the results aren’t honored. The fasting that is done should lead to justice for the community, not credit for the individual. “Fasting that doesn’t alleviate these conditions, but worsens them, stands under prophetic condemnation. Fasting is meant to be a response of penitence and contrition, seeking God’s favor. Such attitudes are inconsistent with oppression and disregard for those in need.” Saying we’re seeking God, and striving for holiness, and longing for God’s presence – whether for the first time or for a long time, for 40 days or 40 years or just for 40 minutes on a Sunday morning – saying that’s what we’re doing doesn’t matter if the results do not show in our community.[4]
The prophet’s focus is on righteousness and justice. Righteousness means right relationship with God. This can only be found by investment in community, showing attention especially to the needs of the poor and oppressed. Those who are righteous live as contributors to community, to improve and carry on the community’s well-being.
This means recognizing our place in systems of oppression. It means admitting that privilege isn’t just a buzzword, but a reality. In Proverbs, the word righteous refers especially to those who live with integrity, whose very presence and actions contribute to the stability of the community.
Righteousness is taking care of the community, and is the primary marker of what God’s heavenly reign looks like.[5]
And so here at the start of Lent, only a few days out from being marked with ash and oil, having blessed the dirt and remembered our beginnings in it …
We are here to confess our sin. Sin, not in the sense of actions that are ‘bad,’ or even in the sense of inaction being harmful. Sin in the sense of separation. Sin as a state of being. We are here to confess that we are not always very good at this human being job of ours. We are here to say that we do not always get it right.
And God is here to remind us that sometimes, though, we do. And to remind us that always, God does. God gets it right, and trusts us to live toward righteousness and justice.
Frederick Buechner says
Justice does not preclude mercy. It makes mercy possible. Justice is the pitch of the roof and the structure of the walls. Mercy is the patter of the rain on the roof and the life sheltered by the walls. Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry.[6]
So we are here for both, in this season of Lent, these weeks in which we prepare. We are here for righteousness and hope, we will fast for justice and mercy.
We are here to turn over our need to judge. We are here to sacrifice our need to be right. We are here to remember that being privileged is not the same as being entitled, and that being here first doesn’t mean we’re the most important ones here. We come to the altar of justice, fast from our superiority complex, and receive the mercy of humility and gratitude.
We are here to relinquish our spiritual pride. We are here to remember that our faith was given to us as a gift, and we attend to it imperfectly, at best. We are here to rein in our quickness to make demands of others, or dictate to them a standard we ourselves refuse to uphold. We come to the altar of justice, fast from our arrogance, and receive the mercy of forgiveness and compassion.
We are here to cast out the demon of careless words. We are here to admit that sometimes we say things because we know they’ll make a point, and sometimes we say things not giving any thought to how they sound, or what they imply. We come to the altar of justice, fast from our carelessness, and receive the mercy of wisdom and thoughtfulness.
We are here to do away with the sense that we are not worthy. Even in the midst of remembering our flaws, let’s keep in mind that light still shines through cracked windowpanes, and blades of grass come up through broken sidewalks. We come to the altar of justice, fast from our self-doubt and shame, and receive the mercy of wholeness and new life.
Buechner goes on to speak of this freedom in faith, the freedom Isaiah reminds us to proclaim:
We have freedom to the degree that the master who we obey grants it to us in return for our obedience. We do well to choose a master in terms of how much freedom we get for how much obedience.
To obey the law of the land leaves us our constitutional freedom, but not the freedom to follow our own consciences wherever they lead.
To obey the dictates of our own consciences leaves us freedom from the sense of moral guilt, but not the freedom to gratify our own strongest appetites.
To obey our strongest appetites for drink, sex, power, revenge, or whatever leaves us the freedom of an animal to take what we want when we want it, but not the freedom of a human being to be human.
The old prayer speaks of God ‘in whose service is perfect freedom’. The paradox is not as opaque as it sounds. It means that to obey Love itself, which above all else wishes us well, leaves us the freedom to be the best and gladdest that we have it in us to become[7]
We will spend forty days seeking forgiveness and justice, and we will leave having received mercy and freedom at Easter. We are marked, on Ash Wednesday and always, not so that others will ask and give us credit, but so that during Lent and well beyond we see, and we ask, and we know that God is our God, and we are God’s people.
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…
[1] on prophets, Walter Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of Old Testament Themes (WJK 2002), p158-161
[2] Matthew 6, my very loose paraphrase
[3] This was quoted by someone I read but do not know. It was cited only as ‘C. Holtz,’ so I cannot fully reference the source, but so appreciate the reflection.
[4] Christopher R. Seitz, ‘Isaiah’, New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary (Abingdon 1996), pp498-503.
[5] on righteousness, Brueggemann, pp177-178.
[6] Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words (HarperCollins 2004), p209.
[7] Buechner, p119-120.
