Dec. 12, 2010 Advent 3
Roger Ray, Pastor
Isaiah 35:1-10, Matthew 11:2-6
If you have ever bothered to ask which version of the Bible I prefer then for the past 20 years there has been only one answer and that is the New Revised Standard Version. Many other translations are either terribly dated and use a language which is nearly foreign to us in the 21st century or they are not really a translation…. The New International Version and the Living Bible and their cousins are more commentaries…. Translating texts to support church doctrine rather than being true to the original manuscripts.
The Revised Standard Version and, since 1991, the New Revised Standard Version are the most scholarly and technically the best translations into modern American English….. there is an excellent translation in British English but as the years roll by we are increasingly two great nations divided by a common language.
I’m not a linguist. Foreign languages were always my weakest subject in school and so I am entirely dependant upon reliable English translations of scripture. But even this version which is the product of the very best linguists alive in America during the 1980’s is not perfect. Sometimes a translation committee will feel obligated to go along with tradition. The Lord’s prayer, the 23rd Psalm, and John 3:16 are so firmly planted in our minds in the King James Version that modern translators feel that they have to at least bow to the form of King James at many junctures.
As close as I came to the actual translation work of the NRSV was my acquaintance with one of the Hebrew scholars who worked on the translation of Isaiah, Dr. Walter Harrelson. Dr. Harrelson was the emeritus professor of Old Testament at Vanderbilt when I was a student there and I got to hear him lecture on a translation issue in which the committee voted down his translation of Isaiah 35, verse 8.
If I may ask you to look at it with me in your bulletin: The committee insisted that they keep the familiar form of the sentence saying that this highway, immortalized in Handle’s Messiah, this Holy Way; it says in the second half of verse 8, “the unclean shall not travel on it.”
Which is to say, that this highway which leads to the Kingdom of God is reserved strictly for those who are without sin. This was not an uncommon sentiment in ancient Judaism. Priests and those who lead in worship were to be pure both physically and spiritually, with a rash or blemish on their skin or a blight on their soul. Churches, in one way or another, have a tendency towards the same kind of narrow path….. there are people who are in and there are people who are out.
Churches have defined people out for a whole host of reasons….. women cannot lead in church because…. Well, because they don’t have the right plumbing….. the handicapped, the divorced, the addict…. Maybe the wrong skin color, the wrong sexual orientation…… the unclean shall not travel on it, but is shall be for God’s people!
Almost all of us here have been found to be unworthy in some religious tradition and so we understand this passage, no matter how much it may set our teeth on edge.
Dr. Harrelson argued, and I think quite convincingly, that they have the sentence structure so that it means the exact opposite of what the original author intended. It should not be, he said, “The unclean shall not travel on it,” but rather, it should read: Those who travel on it shall not be unclean. That is, if you will walk on this path…. If you are willing to live your life towards God’s Kingdom, then you will be made clean. In stead of being exclusive and keeping people out, the prophet’s intention was to insist that everyone is included and that by being in the faith community, by living the live, by walking in the way, you are restored.
And this is not simple wishful thinking on Dr. Harrelson’s part. Look at verse 3: Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. The prophet is talking about how the call to be in community heals the infirm.
Look at verse 5: Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
A lot of you, a lot of us, have been wounded by your religious tradition. A lot of us have been wounded by family members or that person with whom you once stood with a crowd of witnesses and swore an oath to God that you would love, honor and cherish one another until the day you died. And sometimes we start to believe in our wounds.
Sometimes we start to identify ourselves by how we have been hurt. The tradition in A.A. is to begin the meeting by going around the room and everyone says their name and claims their brokenness: Hi, I’m Bill and I’m an alcoholic. It is a part of the tradition which gives me some pause but I can tell you that outside of A.A. meetings, other people will do it for you.
This afternoon I’ll be going back to Louisville, Kentucky where I will speak at the funeral home across the street from the church where I was the pastor for several years before I moved to Springfield. I’ve been here for nearly 20 years now and I’ve done a lot of things in that 20 years. I’ve been a part of building dozens of Habitat Houses, hundreds of houses in Nicaragua, I’ve published three books and hundreds of articles. I’ve been a visiting fellow at Harvard and I’ve become a friend to hundreds of homeless and poor people in this community. But when I walk into the Foreman Funeral Home where I have not been for many years, to those people who knew me back when I will be, that preacher who got divorced…… twice. You would like to think that no one is keeping score but the people who have known you since you were young…. Keeping score is what they do best.
What does it mean to be shy other than to be afraid of the judgment of others? On the list of anxieties, the list of things people are the most afraid of, snakes is number one, death is number three and public speaking is number two. Now, I think there is good reason to be afraid of snakes and of dying, and for me those two things can come pretty close to one another, but why are you afraid to stand up here and be a worship leader? Why would you be afraid to speak to gathering of people?
Because we know how harshly people can judge us…. And, in part, we know that because we know how harsh we are towards other people! I think the biggest hurdle to getting over being shy is to stop judging other people so harshly so that you can take a more charitable view of human kind.
One of the great paradoxes of the practice of the Christian faith is the observation that Jesus was tolerant of everything except intolerance. You cannot find any instance of conflict in the New Testament between Jesus and anyone, not the Roman occupation forces, not even his own executioner or the friend who betrayed him…. The only time Jesus gets mad and calls people names it was for intolerance.
Jesus was known for keeping company with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners specifically because that was so uncommon. Religious people didn’t socialize with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners…. They didn’t want to be associated with the unclean. Jesus, on the other hand, didn’t mind being associated with the unclean, he just didn’t want to associate with the people who thought they were clean….. the self-righteous, the religious hypocrites who used religion to brand people because of their failures rather than to try to love them into health.
The vision of the prophet Isaiah was that when the Jews were released from Babylon, when they were again allowed to be a people, a community of faith, that those who walked with them would be healed…. Metaphorically, the lame learn to walk by walking, the blind will see, the deaf will hear and the unclean will be forgiven, healed, made clean, they will be fully restored so that no one remembers their past brokenness.
Matthew records this very telling exchange between Jesus and some of the disciples of John the Baptist. It is pretty clear that John the Baptist was from that Essene community which was waiting for God to send a Messiah who would deliver the nation of Israel from bondage in much the same way that the Maccabbees or the kings of old had.
If you take the baptism scenes in all four gospels as being in any way historical, John the Baptist had endorsed Jesus as being the one but some months have passed, John is in prison, and it does not seem to John that Jesus is getting with the program. John expected Jesus to get on with some serious butt kicking and name taking…. Getting a revolution started and he just doesn’t seem to be acting like any Messiah John had ever envisioned.
Jesus tells John’s disciples to go back and tell them what they have seen. Jesus doesn’t really give John an answer in so many words, he just wants his disciples to give him a report of what is going on…. The blind see, the lame walk, the poor have good news preached to them.
John would recognize that language from the prophet Isaiah and we can only hope that he understood and accepted this for what it was. Jesus wasn’t going to lead a military revolution. He wasn’t going to change the world by force. He was going to change it by showing compassion.
Compassion may not be the quickest way to right certain social wrongs… compassion is not a direct path to justice but it is the right path, and, if you believe the prophet, those who walk on that path will be made clean.
