“Shout out; do not hold
back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! (Isaiah
58:1a)
So how much do you know about Isaiah? Most of us know that he was an Old Testament prophet, and that the book which bears his name takes up a big chunk of the Bible. Besides those two things, I don’t think many folks in the pews could say much about the old boy. There’s not a lot of plot in Isaiah. Books like Genesis and Judges and First and Second Samuel have all kinds of exciting blood and gore and sex and are a lot more fun to read at the beach. Isaiah is kind of dry. So! I figured I’d start this post with a little background on this long-winded prophet.
First off, Isaiah’s not really that long-winded. A whole lot of the stuff that makes up the book of Isaiah was really written long after the prophet had gone to his heavenly reward. In fact, he’d probably been dead a good 300 years by the time the book was put into the form in which we find it in our Bibles. What’s more, the prophet himself probably didn’t write a word of the book, but had some of his prophesies written down by scribes. Other parts of the book were written by his disciples or later writers influenced by Isaiah. It was a thing back in the ancient world—in the days before copyrights and royalty fees—to give your teacher or the person who inspired you credit for the stuff you wrote under his influence[i].
The actual prophet Isaiah, as far as anyone can tell, may have started his prophetic work around the year 692 BCE. Things were actually pretty groovy back then for both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. But Isaiah, being a clever guy, noticed some rather disturbing developments. First, King Uzziah of Judah had just died. He was no longer king at that time because he got a bad case of leprosy and was forced to give up the throne to his son. Some folks said the leprosy was God’s punishment on Uzziah for his pride. Isaiah noticed that pride and political treachery of one kind or another seemed to be the order of the day for both kingdoms. Secondly, the Assyrian Empire was growing in strength and just spoiling to find some nearby disorderly kingdom to pick on. This did not bode well for Israel or Judah. Isaiah began to sound the alarm that, unless the people and their leaders stopped being selfish jerks and began working together for the common good, things were going to go south real quick. He was right.
For the next three centuries or so, prophets writing in the name of Isaiah would be saying basically the same thing: Get your act together because God won’t protect you from the results of your own selfish, prideful, and compassionless stupidity. They could say the same thing to us in America today.
Our First Lesson for Pentecost 5 in the
Revised Common Lectionary (Isaiah 58:1-9a) was actually addressed (in Isaiah’s
name) to the people of the post-exilic nation some 200 years after Isaiah first
began his preaching. The exile was over, the families of the captives had been
allowed to return to the land promised to their ancestor Abraham, and
everything was supposed to be peachy again, just like in the good ol’ days.
Except it wasn’t. Some new Isaiah had to tell them their Old Time Religion
didn’t mean anything unless it was connected to a sense of justice, compassion,
and a mission to be a blessing to the world. The folks needed to stop feeling
sorry for themselves and start looking after the needy and the oppressed.
Fast forward to New Testament times. Jesus, in our Gospel Lesson (Matthew 5: 13-20), tells us the same thing all those Isaiahs told us. But he puts a different spin on it. Jesus reminds us that we—all of us who bear the name of Christ—are the salt of the earth. We are the ones who have been blessed with the gospel. We are inheritors of eternal life. We are baptized into God’s forgiving grace. We are given the encouraging gift of the Scriptures, the sacraments, and the fellowship of one another. God’s actually been pretty darn good to us. We have nothing to feel sorry about. We need to stop looking inward and start looking outward to the mission God has given us.
We can’t keep our light under a bushel basket. Our faith can’t just be about our individual salvation. The church which is emerging today has to be a church concerned with mission and dedicated to the healing of the world. The emerging church doesn’t replace the old church. It builds on its foundation. Just as Jesus tells his disciples that he hasn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfill it (v. 17). The emerging church will be all about fulfilling the law to love God and love everyone else through deeds of mercy and the promotion of social justice.
But what if all we have is a small congregation of retired folks and widows? In that case, we rejoice that we are the salt of the earth, and that God allows and inspires us to continue to do the ministry we do. Just by being the church we are still able to feed hungry folks, welcome strangers, promote healing, and create fellowship. Our light keeps shining, and that’s a reason to shout.
Keep shining! Thanks for reading this
week!
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