by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Psalm 30, Jeremiah 31, Isaiah 58:1-12, Galatians 5
Transcribed from the sermon preached on JULY 3, 2022
Today we get this powerful pronouncement from Isaiah 58 about the kind of nation the Lord expects.
Now we suspect that the book of Isaiah has two major parts written at different times. The first part, Chapter 1-39 are called First Isaiah, written by the original prophet who spoke of the fall of Samaria to Babylon in the 8th century. Second Isaiah, chapters 40 – 66 written by another prophet in Isaiah’s name, either during exile in Babylon and or after some of them returned home. It seems likely that our chapter 58 is written in Israel, after the exile.
Ritual fasts in four separate months were instituted after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 587 and those left or returned from exile both to please God and invoke a message from God. So, there is this institutional campaign, a public display of prayer in hope of making Israel great again.
They proclaim they seek God daily and delight to know the ways of God. Yet they wonder where the help of God is, why things are not improving.
But Isaiah says, you spend all this time in religious ritual, but oppress all your workers. You show religious piety in the worship service and then go out to hit with a wicked fist. It is kind of like having the police knock people out of the way so you can hold up a bible.
So basically, their prayer is fake humility, for they turn right around and arrogantly disregard the rights and wellbeing of those less powerful around them.
Is this not the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke.
Power lets them do it. The law may even let them have slaves and discipline them. But this is one of the remarkable things about scripture: despite the fact that history is always written by the powerful, the prophet of justice, the critic of the powerful somehow finds a voice.
I read a social media post recently that said freedom of speech always hurts the minority and the marginalized. But that is wrong. It is true that to the degree a majority holds a certain opinion, those who don’t hold the same opinion will be in the minority. On the other hand, who has the power to limit speech but the powerful? Following the golden rule, love your neighbor as yourself, even if we are in the majority, and even when we are confident we are correct, we have to maintain the right for those who disagree with us to speak. Because when we are in the minority, we want that right.
But as Christians, we also know that the majority is often not on the side of God, even when we say we are, even when we make big public displays of our faith, even if or when the government institutes public prayer. It may be important to maintain the freedom to pray in public, but just because we make a point of praying in public doesn’t mean we are on God’s side.
If we worship and then turn around and support policy that enables exploitation of labor and gives freedom to corporations to put profit over the health of the land and people, we might expect a God inspired critic to have another opinion, another word. If we make a point of going to worship, and yet hide ourselves in great houses so we don’t have to face all the people in need, God isn’t going to buy that.
Is this not the worship that I choose: to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked to cover them, to not hide yourself from your people. Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing will spring up speedily. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer.
Truly to have a heart of love, to desire the rights, freedom and good of all, when you pour yourself out for the hungry, and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness, the Lord will guide you, and you shall be like a watered garden whose waters fail not.
Now for Paul in Galatians, Freedom is the freedom and the power to do what is right. While Paul is not talking of the nation as a whole like Isaiah, the message is similar. Using freedom for self-indulgence and greed, being a slave to those selfish desires and the wrong use of language and power to meet those selfish desires is the way we lose our freedom.
For a while as a teenager, I thought that freedom was the freedom to not do or be what others, particularly my parents and adults thought I should be or do. Now this point of view boxed me into a corner because in order to prove to myself my own freedom, I thought I couldn’t do or be what others hoped for me. So, I would become frustrated with adults who kept telling me what to do or expressing their hopes for me. The real me must be something different. As many teenagers think similarly, there are always certain popular forms of behavior that fellow teenagers think show that you are the brave and independent person free from the laws of adults. Isn’t it funny how in our attempt to prove we are free we follow the actions and opinions of others to get our proof? I had a revelation one night when I went out and did something stupid on impulse, without thinking, and without really wanting or needing to do it.
Only later did I realize I had done it because my parents told me not to. I realized that even when I did the opposite, even when I disobeyed the laws and norms, I was still enslaved to their opinions and laws. And I was enslaved to the unwritten social laws of youth culture that said if you were free and cool you have to do or be like this. It wasn’t on freedom that I had acted, but on impulse, on an emotional tug of war to get my parents to give up acting like my parents. So, in order to grow up and truly become free, I had to forgive them for acting like my parents and forgive myself for being unable to change how they acted toward me. Only then was I free to be me and do what was good for me whether others thought it was a good idea or not. But it also freed me up to listen to my parents and adults in case they actually knew something that might help me be a better me.
Mark Twain said: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
When we are freed by grace, all that family and social strife, jealously and anger, quarrels, dissention, and factions, even the drunkenness and carousing is not so necessary. Such things are not so much a proof of our freedom as they are a sign of our enslavement to the struggles of emotional attachments, what Paul calls the desires of the flesh.
No doubt we have some struggle and activism in order as the distribution of wealth is way out whack, God’ s creation is under very serious threat from greed, and basic democratic rights we thought were solidly established are under threat. But as more and more people from all sides are tempted toward legal sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissention, and factions, we can realize those are not signs of freedom but of slavery. There may be sacrifices to approach the struggles we have before us without getting sucked into this kind of behavior. But this is a sacrifice for freedom, not against it. For if we fight viciously with propaganda and lies to win a world where people are not vicious liars, we have already lost. Life is too short. What we are is what we get. Let us choose the freedom and power of the Spirit now. Now is the time to be free.