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On Leading Amended Lives
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 9, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 1:11-17 Matthew 23:23-36
With the words of the prophets before us this fall--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve Minor Prophets--we take a final turn in our reading of the Old Testament that will lead us inexorably toward the manger. We turn, as well, to Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann, whose now classic book on The Prophetic Imagination invites us to hear, in the ancient address of the prophets, God’s word to us for such a time as this. “The task of prophetic ministry,” says Brueggemann, “is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us. Thus,” he suggests, “prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated.” We call such domestication in our day “civil religion”—the phrase itself takes its cue from secular culture--whereas in the days of the prophets, the same phenomenon was judged to be idolatry, a word rooted negatively in the command of God to have “no other gods before me.” Not incidentally, we live in a land whose constitution was written to keep the state from being co-opted and domesticated by religion. Concerning this divide, Mark Lilla noted in his provocative New York Times Magazine article two weeks ago, that “…the American experience…is utterly exceptional….Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions.” Given the current religious make-up of the Supreme Court, I am not as sanguine as Lilla is about our future luck in this regard. But that aside, note how the safeguards do not operate the other way around, and this is Brueggemann’s point. Religion is incredibly vulnerable to domestication by the state and the culture, in large part because religion—for reasons I will never understand given my reading of the biblical witness--functions in society to conserve the norms of that society. Never mind Jesus’ “woe to you” spoken against the scribes of his day. Each age interprets Scripture such that its verses shore up the status quo, and religion champions the effort. Because this also was the case in Israel and Judah in the eighth century, the prophets were not concerned, in the main, with the behavior of those who ran the state but with the witness of the community that had been called out by God to be a light to the nations. Their ire was against a community bowed down before the idols of the culture; their judgments opposed a people prone to trust the rhetoric of politicians before they dared believe the revealed and raucous truth of God’s word. To wit, the Isaiah of our text prophesied to the Southern Kingdom, to Judah and Jerusalem, in the last forty years of the eighth century when Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah reigned. Not for nothing were the lives of God’s people during these years marked by a radical insecurity. Assyria would overtake the Northern Kingdom in 721 B.C. while the siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C. set the scene for the people’s deportation to Babylon. These were the specific public crises that provoked Isaiah to speak the word of the Lord. But as Brueggemann suggests, prophetic speech means to cast a much wider net by way of its critique of God’s people, a net wide enough to snare a 21st century church no less domesticated and co-opted by the events that have overtaken our common life, especially the events since six years ago this Tuesday next. Therefore our text for this morning has to do not with the nations and their rattling sabers, but with the worship and witness of God’s people that had become indistinguishable from the worship and witness of the culture. “The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah” was just this: the nation was going to hell in a hand basket while God’s people busied themselves with religious ceremonies. “Your country lies desolate” says Isaiah, “your cities are burned with fire” and your witness is going up in smoke. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord. I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?” The answer, of course, is “You did!” This is the same God who, many pages ago, had carefully dictated to Moses the burnt offerings necessary to atone for wrong-doing. Yet centuries later, Isaiah’s words evoke the religious practices of people going through the motions of belief while ignoring the commands of the living God day by day. Therefore the sacrifices that had once been commanded and offered to the people as a means of grace, the burnt goats that had once ordered the encounter of a sinful people with a holy God in the way God had instituted, had become the thing they believed in instead of God. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” roared Jesus. “For you tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” Or as one theologian put it, “Offerings are substitutes for what [the individual] really ought to render God, but never does do, and never will.” So religious ritual functioned to keep God’s people from presenting themselves as a living sacrifice and returned them to society from their festivals and full moons unchanged. They reentered the week as people who made no connection between faith in the God who brought them out of slavery and doing justice; no connection between the God who fed them manna in the wilderness and their care for the least of these. Religion had become indistinguishable from the culture such that the people who once had been called out to be God’s people were lost to God among the uncivil society of Judah. On this Sunday when the habit of worship at 10 o’clock kicks in and the pews begin to fill again, we would do well to attend to Isaiah’s words as God’s word to us too. How is it that we who have been called out by the God who raised Jesus from the dead have to do with the living God not only in this hour but throughout the rest of the week? In what sense are the trappings of the church what we believe in instead of Him who was the friend of sinners? Who might we become if we were to allow God’s prophets of old to nurture, nourish and evoke in us a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us? On one hand, some might say that our coincidence with the culture is precisely what provokes radical Islam as well as the most conservative of Christians against us. Again Lilla writes, “…if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal something [we] cannot fully know on [our] own. This revelation then becomes the source of [God’s] authority, over nature and over us, and we have no choice but to obey [God] and see that his plans are carried out on earth. That,” says Lilla, “is where political theology comes in….The world we live in now…is a world in which millions of people, particularly in the Muslim orbit, believe that God has revealed a law governing the whole of human affairs.” But that is not the political theology of the prophets! Clearly we must keep our wits about us as we listen to their words for God’s word in times such as these. Lilla distinguishes between what he calls “liberalizers” who are “apologists for religion at the court of modern life” and “renovators” who “stand firmly within their faith and reinterpret political theology so believers can adapt without feeling themselves to be apostates. Luther and Calvin,” he says, “were renovators in this sense.” They spoke not the language of toleration and progress but rewrote “the language of Christian political theology and demanded that Christians be faithful to it.” Likewise, our text for this morning has no interest in theocracy. Instead Isaiah calls the community of faith to account for its own witness within the social order. Clearly for Isaiah, to use a good Presbyterian rubric, worship ought to lead to an amendment of life such that those who have bowed down in praise and thanksgiving before the living God have also come to do business with their own evil ways, to confess their own wrong-doing and be cleansed, to learn anew what the Lord requires: do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Surely this is the prophet nurturing, nourishing and evoking a consciousness alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us. Surely this is what people do who try to follow Jesus. Imagine, then, what would be different about this community of faith if we allowed ourselves to be nurtured in a consciousness alternative to the consciousness of the culture around us. Imagine us first as a people who hope for what the world has found unthinkable. The language of this hope is enormous and is found in prophetic speech and supremely in the words of Jesus. Review the beatitudes for starters, and consider it more than thinkable that the poor, them that mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted are blessed. Then, in the second place, imagine us as a people whose hope becomes a public witness, who put our flesh around the enactment of this hope, who together live as though the least of these in the social order are the most blessed in God’s sight because they are. In fact, imagine us ordering our life around ministries of mercy, going every week in numbers, with our children, to spend ourselves and our precious time seeking God not in here but in the hungry fed, the thirsty given drink, the stranger welcomed, the naked clothed, those in prison visited (to review another world evoked by scripture). Then finally but not exhaustively, imagine us as a people whose language is marked by amazement. It is a language, says Brueggemann, “that engages the community in new discernments and celebrations just when it had nearly given up and had nothing to celebrate. I believe,” he concludes, “that rightly embraced there is no more subversive or prophetic idiom than the practice of doxology which sets us before the reality of God, of God right at the center of a scene from which we had presumed [God] had fled.” Surely it is this amazement that ought to overtake us at the sound of the choir singing “My Lord, What a Morning,” sending us into this morning with lives amended not by way of solemn assemblies and appointed festivals but by way of a people struggling against all odds to sing to the Lord a new song. Thanks be to God! |