Isaiah 58:6-14
Presented January 29th, 2006, by J.D. Kline
Preached at Second Baptist Church, Elgin, IL
Not too long ago I read the story of Grace Thomas, a gentle Christian woman raised in the Southern Baptist Church who, in the 1930s, moved from Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia to begin her married life and working career. Grace became a clerk in one of the state government offices, and through that work, developed an interest in law and politics, and eventually enrolled in a local law school that offered night classes.
After years of part-time study, Grace finally completed her law degree. To her family’s surprise, Grace announced that she had decided to enter the 1954 election race for governor of Georgia. There were nine candidates—eight men and Grace—but only one over-riding issue. That issue related to the schools, since in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court had just declared that racially “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional, thus paving the way for school integration. The other eight candidates spoke forcefully and angrily against the court’s decision, while Grace raised a counter perspective, asserting the decision to be fair and just, one which ought to be welcomed across the country. Her campaign slogan was “Say Grace at the Polls.” But not many did; in fact, Grace came in dead last, and her family was relieved that she had gotten politics and controversy out of her system.
But she had not. Eight years later, in 1962, Grace once again ran for governor of Georgia. In the midst of the growing civil rights movement, Grace offered a message of racial harmony. In response, Grace received a significant number of death threats, but she would not be deterred. Once again Grace finished last on election day, but she continued to be convinced that her message needed to be heard.
Near the end of the campaign, Grace made a stop in the small town of Louisville, Georgia, and chose the town’s old slave market as the site for campaign speech. On the very spot where slaves had been auctioned a century earlier, a hostile crowd gathered to hear what she would say. Began Grace, “The old has passed away, and the new has come.” And then, gesturing to the market, Grace continued, “This place represents all about our past over which we must repent. A new day is here, a day where Georgians black and white can join hands to work together.”
It was not a message the powers-that-be wanted to hear in the Georgia of 1962, and someone shouted accusingly, “Are you a communist?” Pausing in mid-sentence, Grace responded softly, “No, I am not.” “Well, then,” continued the heckler, “Where’d you get those gall-durned ideas?” Grace thought for a moment, and then pointed to the steeple of a nearby church. Said Grace, “I got them over there, in Sunday School” (source: Tom Long, Testimony, pp. 133-135).
I tell that story to encourage us to consider the extent to which we allow our actions, our involvements, our public positions, and even more, our life direction, to be set by the values of the faith we profess. This is the issue that stands at the heart of this morning’s lesson from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 58—those compelling words that challenge us to put our faith into action, to live in such a way that we serve as bearers of God’s light and love, God’s compassion and peace.
Consider the lesson with me, which is set in the days following the ancient Israelites’ return from their period of exile. Recall the story of the exile—how the temple was destroyed, the city of Jerusalem left in ruins, and much of the population forced to live in the enemy territory of Babylon. It was a time when all the underpinnings of life had been knocked out from under the Israelites. All they had known, all that had been comfortable to them, even their spiritual base—all seemed to be lost. By the time in which this morning’s lesson takes place, the people had been allowed to return to their beloved homeland. But after an initial time of joyful celebration, reality soon set in, as they recognized that their homeland was still in shambles. The people began to settle into yet another time of deep discouragement, going through the motions of worship, yet feeling as if God has left them in the lurch. In verse 3, the people question why they should bother to worship and fast and pray when God seems to little hear their prayers.
Problem is, human nature being as it is, the returning exiles little learned the lessons of that exile. They wanted God to restore Israel to a position of prominence and glory, but they did not want to grapple with what it means to live faithfully as the people of God. And so the prophet tells them that their acts of worship, their fasting and praying, count for little, because they continue to mistreat and abuse one another. “Look,” the prophet cries, “you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist” (v. 4). And then, speaking for God, Isaiah questions,
Is not this the fast/worship 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 to hide yourself from your kin? (vv. 6-7).
The longer I serve in ministry, the deeper I journey in my relationship with God through Jesus Christ, the clearer it becomes to me that worship, loving and serving God, is the central task of the church. Worship is at the heart of all that we do. But the act of worship stands empty if we do not continually open ourselves to the transforming power of God’s Spirit. Our beautiful music, our words of comfort and support, our sanctuaries that provide space for our worship—all this counts for nothing, if our acts of worship do not lead us along the pathways of change. If the way in which we live our lives does not take on a new quality of compassion and grace, if we do not begin to view life’s challenges as unfolding opportunities to serve God and neighbor, if we do not come to view one another as persons of value and worth, if we are not filled with gratitude to God for the very gift of life—then our worship is in vain.
We do not simply come to worship on Sunday mornings so that we might feel good for the rest of the day. We come to discover a new way of seeing and relating in the world around us; we come to put on a new vision and a new way of hearing and experiencing life. We come to find a new set of lenses through which we might look at the world around us. We come, that we might be filled with a new spirit. Isaiah puts it this way,
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 (vv. 9-10).
The ancient Israelites returned to their homeland, eager to settle back into comfortable patterns, into “business as usual,” but they quickly discovered that God was asking much more of them. God was calling them to become light to the nations, to take on God’s special care for the poor and the broken in their midst, to work at tearing down barriers of suspicion and misunderstanding, to become a beacon of justice in the midst of a sea of oppression and injustice, to offer bread for the hungry and shelter for the homeless, to walk in the ways of peace. This is what it means to be the people of God, a people who worship God and seek to live life with God at the very center of all their living.
I heard a fellow pastor once speak of his growing conviction that both he and the congregation he served needed to work more intentionally at connecting with the community around them. The pastor went to the leader of a local community agency working with children with special needs, and asked how the church might be of service. The director’s response was one of surprise, and she responded, “Who would have thought that the church would want to help!” What does it say about the state of today’s church, that many community leaders, many involved in human services, sense that the church is little interested in what they are about? How did it come to be, that a people who claim to follow the way of Christ—the One who displayed the heart of a servant, the One who embraced the path of self-giving love—how can it be that the many think the church is not interested in their needs and their struggles? Could it be that we have not taken our worship seriously enough? I’m not speaking about the quantity of our worship, so much as the quality of our worship.
Preaching professor Tom Long suggests that we need to allow worship to train us to have what he labels a “double vision.” That is to say, we come to see one another, ourselves included, as flawed, broken and vulnerable, persons who frequently fall short of what God yearns for us to experience in life, but at the same time, we also see one another as persons who have been created and chosen and beloved by God. Someone once said that if we truly learned to see with the eyes of our souls, we would see angels going before every person we meet, crying out, “Make way for the image of God! Make way for the image of God!”
Created in the very image of God, you and I are persons of deep and remarkable potential. I once heard the story told of Michelangelo, the great sculptor, pushing a huge piece of rock down the street. A curious neighbor sitting lazily on the porch of his house called to him and inquired why he was laboring over a worthless piece of stone. Responded Michelangelo, “Because there is an angel in that rock that wants to come out.”
What a difference it makes when we begin to take seriously the simple lessons we learned in Sunday School and worship, the lessons that remind us that each one of us is created in the image of God, that each one us is a person of worth and value in God’s sight, and that together we are called to be the people of God. And what does it mean to be the people of God, but to mirror God’s compassion and loving-kindness, God’s grace and peace, God’s love and mercy. As the ancient people of Israel embraced their call to be light to the nations, Isaiah assured them, they would become “like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail” (v. 11).
I wonder what might happen if we allow the message of the gospel we hear proclaimed week after week—if we allow that message to take hold of us, if we allow that message to transform our hearts and minds, to grant us the kind of double vision that enables us to accept persons as they are, and to help them become the persons God created them to be. All around us, we hear competing voices. Voices that tell us that the way of compassionate service is but an idle dream, that in our kind of world we ought not take Christ’s message too seriously. Voices that proclaim that war and suspicion and violence are the only answers for humanity’s deep problems and failures, that Christ’s way of peace cannot be embraced in our kind of world. Voices that tell us that there is no hope, that things will never change. But thanks be to God, we serve a living Christ who proclaims that life is worth the living. We serve a living Christ who turns our perspective inside out, who plants our feet in new directions, who calls and empowers us to live as citizens of the kingdom of God—doing justice, making peace, going the extra mile in relationships, loving even the enemy, being light to the nations.
Sisters and brothers in faith, may we worship our God so deeply, so completely, that our vision is transformed, and we do indeed become the people of God. Amen.