Isaiah 58:9b-14 (NIV)
“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
11 The Lord will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
12 Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
11 The Lord will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
12 Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.
13 “If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
14 then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
14 then you will find your joy in the Lord,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Building Community God’s Way
Back in the late 1800s, several Christian women in America started to become more active outside of the home “due to the invention of labor saving devices” like washing machines and canned foods.[1] Many women became more active in their churches through assisting the poor and sick, bringing kids to Sunday school, and witnessing and ministering to people who weren’t Christians. A lot of untapped potential was present in middle class women who no longer spent so much time doing housework, so much so that women started to organize to influence society more effectively. At the time, women taking leadership roles, both in church and in American society, was frowned upon. The greatest vehicle that expanded women’s voice into the public sphere was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. This group saw “drunkenness, alcoholism, saloons, and the liquor industry as the determinate factors in crime, abuse, poverty, unemployment, and corruption.”[2] While I don’t hold to the same commitments concerning temperance, I do admire the WCTU’s ability to analyze and courageously address a problem for positive change. Methodism had a strong tradition of temperance at the time, so naturally many Methodist women were on board with the WCTU paradigm. One of those women was Frances Willard.
Willard was elected executive secretary of the WCTU in 1874 and later president in 1879, a position she held for 19 years until she died in 1898[3]. She spoke and travelled tirelessly for her cause, espousing a vision for a transformed society and a transformed church. Willard’s theology and vision starts with liberation of the human heart by our becoming born again through trust in Christ and being filled with the Holy Spirit. From there, God’s transforming power spreads outward, touching the home, society, church, and government. Willard pushed for egalitarian marriages, for women to have lay representation in the Methodist Episcopal Church, for a ban of the dangerous substances of alcohol and nicotine, and for women’s right to vote in American government.
Under the leadership of Frances Willard and other like-minded women, the WCTU became an outlet for women to grow in their Christian journey, find their voice when the culture didn’t think they should have one, advance intellectually, exercise leadership, and work for positive change in society. Willard’s causes carried on beyond her lifetime, and though she didn’t live to see it, women eventually did obtain the right to vote in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1900, sending the first lay women delegates to general conference in 1904. The eighteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the sale of alcohol was ratified on January 16th, 1919, and the nineteenth amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified on August 18th, 1920. For Willard, it all began with a personal life transformed by Jesus Christ and it spread outward from that life-giving relationship.
I think Willard serves as a good counterexample to how Israel is described by our Isaiah text this morning. The people being addressed in the text are very religious, but also very unethical. They were trying to love God in their rituals, but completely disregarded their neighbors. Their faith bolstered personal aggrandizement, but did not have a positive impact on those around them.
Isaiah 58 is a Hebrew poem written to an Israel in exile, and it addresses the nature of true fasting and true religion.[4] There is no universally agreed upon theory for the composition of Isaiah, but most OT scholars today hold that there are several traditions that make up what we have in Isaiah that were compiled by a later editor. Chapters 1-39 are thought to compose the first book, which was written to a disobedient Israel and often foretells of coming disaster, with chapter 39 containing the last reference to Isaiah son of Amoz.[5] A drastic shift occurs at chapter 40, and the author assumes that the exile has already happened. Chapters 40-66 are thought to compose the second book, with traditions coming from the times of Israel’s exile from and eventual return to Jerusalem. The setting for our text seems to imply a lot of suffering and oppression, which makes it seem likely that this was written for Israel while they were in exile in Babylon.
Isaiah 58 reveals a big hypocrisy of which many of the people of Israel are guilty. And these aren’t ignorant unbelievers that we’re talking about. They don’t even appear to be lukewarm in their spirituality toward God. These are people who pursue God diligently and are even fasting so that God might draw near. People who fast aren’t slackers when it comes to religiosity; in fact, they often are some of the most zealous people. But their zeal is misguided, for they have a misunderstanding of how their relationship with God works. They believe in magic rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
With magic, you say a certain incantation, do the right rituals, and boom, God does what you want. You see, magic is about getting the formula right. That is why paganism had such a strong appeal to Israel and why it still has a strong appeal today throughout the world; we Christians even slip into that sort of mindset ourselves even though we know the true God! We want to manipulate God into doing something for us that he otherwise would not do. The God of Christianity has always been about relationship, not magic. We don’t manipulate him, but rather we surrender to his love and grace and come under his rule and authority.[6] It’s out of this relationship and out of a desire to see his will done on earth that we pray and ask God to move in power. The fact that some of our prayers don’t get answered is a testimony that we’re dealing with a sovereign God, not magic. The recipients of this prophetic critique have not grasped this truth, however. Though they seek God, they seek him on their own terms, not on God’s terms. They have a gap between their actual conduct and what they say they believe in worship.[7]
Isaiah 58:3-4 reveals their main mistake: they did not let their faith in God translate over into their relationships with others. They viewed God as a god of goodness and blessing, but not as a God that has expectations for their conduct. Specifically, their sin has to do with economics and how they interacted with each other. They are oppressing their workers as well as arguing and fighting with each other. It doesn’t seem too hard for me to imagine how they got there.
Just think: the people of Israel were forced to leave their homeland and are living somewhere completely new, losing their sense of place and questioning their identity as a people. They are staying with a people who killed Israelite soldiers and destroyed the temple in which they worshiped Yahweh. They have been forced to integrate into a Babylonian system with people who speak with a foreign tongue and worship other gods. After such a disorienting catastrophe, they may feel justified in cutting a few corners and treating others like dirt so that they can get ahead and become upwardly mobile in this new land. They probably are angry with each other and have a few theories as to why they are currently in exile, blaming each other and getting in shouting matches and fights over their identity, the causes of their present state, and the direction of their future. The ones that still believe in God realize that they have sinned against him, so they are very zealous in their religiosity.
Sometimes things fall apart for us, too. All of us have found ourselves in hard times and tough situations. Maybe you brought disaster upon yourself by the choices you made, maybe you didn’t. The question is: are you going to cheat and exploit and fight your way into better days, or are you going to follow God and love and respect others even when you’re hurting and things don’t make sense? Are you going to try to justify hurting others and cutting corners because of your pain? Are you going to blame and blow up on others for the mess that you’re in, or are you going to work toward meeting needs and providing for those who are suffering?
Our Scripture this morning tells us to put away the yoke of oppression, stop pointing fingers, and cease speaking evil. It calls us to spend ourselves on behalf of the hungry and to meet the needs of the oppressed. The text in 58:10-12 holds a promise that God will guide, sustain, and provide for the needs of those who do these things. It holds out a promise to an exiled Israel that they could be the people to rebuild the old ruins and raise up ancient foundations. They could repair the torn walls and make a devastated community a place to live again. It is a promise from God that Israel can return and rebuild Jerusalem, the most important city of their heritage, or at least build a sense of community where they are that is comparable to their glory days back in Jerusalem. “The community addressed will have the energy, fortitude, and resources that arise from genuine neighborly investment in the community. The community, as a consequence, will be renamed and reidentified as ‘repairer, restorer,’ the one who makes a new, viable community possible.”[8]
This promise holds true for us today, too. So who are the oppressed around us, those who are bound up by heavy yokes and exploited by others that they might gain? I think undocumented workers definitely fit into this category, and would urge you to pay and treat them fairly if you employ any of them. So often they are paid under the table, have no health insurance, are separated from their families, and are at risk of being deported and losing so much. And Alabama’s current policy on immigration with HB 56 is one of the cruelest and most unforgiving in the nation; it should be done away with[9]. Maybe you know of someone with a mental illness who is being taken advantage of, or there’s a person who is surrounded by negative influences and needs encouragement, or someone who just needs an opportunity. Maybe there’s folks we could stop enabling and help them take responsibility for their life. I’d encourage us to be a part of breaking the chains of oppression and poverty by helping people become self-sustaining and fruitful.
But we’re not to throw our spirituality out of the window. The call is not to lose our intimate connection with God and our acts of personal devotion while we do this good work, but to have both works of justice and time spent in intimacy with God. Our passage closes with a call to observe the Sabbath.
Sabbath is the alternative to a restless, aggressive, unbridled acquisitiveness that exploits neighbor for self-gain. The ancient command provided rest for the members of the community and for all the household of the members, including workers (Deut. 5:12-15). All will rest and enjoy the abundance of creation (Exod. 20:8-11). Sabbath is a cessation of feverish anxiety and control.[10]
Taking Sabbath and resting is one of the ultimate acts of trust in God, because in it we acknowledge that we are not ultimately in control, that the world and life goes on well enough without us. It reminds us that God is our peace, that we don’t have to frantically strive to obtain it, but simply abide in God.
So the challenge for us this morning is to have eyes to see where others are kept down with no hope of having a thriving quality of life, where others are exploited and kept poor so that others might be a bit richer. We are to stop taking advantage of the weak. We are to work for a new way, a way that genuinely honors everyone and seeks their wholeness, financially, spiritually, and socially. We are to stop blaming others and using whatever tough situation we’re in to justify sinful exploitation and backbiting and we’re to start working toward better days in God’s way. We are to spend time in intimacy with God, resting in Christ our Sabbath. Once our religion combines both acts of devotion with a holy life committed to justice and compassion, then God will take notice of our fast. Then God will come near and will guide us. He will sustain us and take care of us for all of our days, raising up beloved communities all over Randolph County and elsewhere. He can make us people who develop communities, who build relationships, who make a locality a place to call home, a place where people know each other and want the best for each other.
I confess to you that I don’t have it all together when it comes to this. That’s why the prophets are hard to preach. But I want to try. I want to be faithful by growing more deeply in my relationship with God and doing something that matters and furthers his purposes in our world. We can be people of faith like that old Methodist Frances Willard, who realized that following Jesus isn’t purely individual spirituality, nor is it purely being a force for changing others and society, but it is forever both hand in hand. Jesus, who according to Luke’s Gospel quoted from the book of Isaiah when he started his ministry, wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, he was anointed to preach good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind, release for the oppressed, and the time of God’s liberating favor. We, the church, are called to continue in this mission of Christ. Will you join in?
[1] Russell Richey, Kenneth Rowe, & Jean Schmidt, American Methodism: A Compact History (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2012), 113.
[2] Ibid., 116.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah Vol. 2 Chapters 40-66, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 186.
[5] Gene Tucker, Isaiah 1-39, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001), 30.
[6] John Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 40-66, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 497.
[7] Brueggemann, 186.
[8] Brueggemann, 192.
[9] Read what groups like Southern Poverty Law Center and Alabama Arise have to say about HB 56.
[10] Brueggemann, 193.
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