Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
Feb. 6, 2011 Epiphany 5
Isaiah 58:1-10On Thursday mornings when the guys are lining up to be served for lunch at Bill's Place, we pause for a moment of prayer. I'm not sure that we are supposed to do that in a Burrell operated program.... In fact, I'm pretty sure that we're not, just like I know that it is not legal for us to be serving food there at all.... We are not, after all, health department approved and the city has passed an ordinance against expanding homeless services on Commercial Street but I feel like, being the kind of church that we are, that we should do a couple of things that are illegal every week. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, moral people are obligated to break immoral laws.
Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins. 2 Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. 3 'Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?' Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day, and oppress all your workers. 4 Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. 5 Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? 8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard. 9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, 10 if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.
Matthew 5:13-16
'You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
14 'You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
Besides, for all of the things that Jim Payne might have been arrested for in his life, seeing him handcuffed and carted away for feeding the homeless would seem like a real triumph!
But when I am there, I am the designated prayer. We have a lot of folks who are better cooks than I am so I am rarely called upon to actually do anything any more complicated than bringing the paper plates but I say the prayer and I'm not usually too imaginative about that. I thank God for the food and for the generous people who donated it and cooked it.
And I always add something to the prayer, asking God to help us to leave that meal inspired to show compassion to the people we meet who have not eaten, who are too paranoid to come into a crowded building.... Who are too frightened to leave their stash of collected old clothes and canned food that they have hidden in a storm sewer. I don't want our guys at Bill's Place to see themselves always as victims in need of a handout..... they too will encounter people who need a hand.
They too can be a part of solving someone else's problems. Most weeks, after we have served lunch we set out some take away foods.... Sandwiches or something wrapped that they can stick in their pocket for later. I always like to imagine that some of those sandwiches and brownies are handed off to someone they encounter who is also hungry.
If you wait until you are all fixed up to show compassion.... If you wait until the house is paid off, the kids are out of college and your pension fund is fully funded.... If you wait until the world presents no real threat to your future comfort to show kindness to those who are in crisis then, my friends, we are going to find ourselves living in a very mean world.
When I looked at the scripture readings in the lectionary for today, I said to our musicians that I would like to have this text engraved in the stone of the walls of our church. This says it for me. Isaiah chides the hypocritical religion of his audience.... People who act like they are great friends of God while they go about trying to line their own pockets without caring about anyone else. He quotes his fellow Jews who ask God,
3 'Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?'Religious people can feel so sorry for themselves. We pray, we go to church. We have a fish emblem on the back of our luxury automobile and we have a big Bible on a hand carved olive wood stand from the Holy Land on the coffee table in our mansion's living room..... why doesn't God do more for us?
Isaiah loves to answer questions like that. He explains to them:
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day, and oppress all your workers. 4 Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. 5 Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
I don't want to necessarily make light of the popular religion which says that you have to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.... Even though that concept can be found no where in the Bible... the word "personal" isn't even anywhere in the two thousand pages of the Bible. Just because Jesus never said anything like that and wouldn't have even understood the point of it is no reason for us to make fun of it.
But if you take the sum total of the expressed values of the cultural religion which bears the name of Christianity while having virtually nothing to do with Jesus and what he taught..... having a personal relationship with Jesus, inviting Jesus into your heart... being saved, being born again, being baptized in the spirit.... All of the rituals, sacraments, texts and liturgies..... you can do all of that stuff but if you rise from your prayers to go out and abuse your workers, to fight with your peers, to promote your own interests over the interests of everyone else then your religion is subject to derision, not necessarily from me or from us but by God.
Or at least that's what Isaiah says and who am I to argue with him?
Many mornings I start my day with coffee and an hour watching Morning Joe on MSNBC. Joe and Mika are intelligent hosts who represent both conservative and liberal perspectives and they have a lot of important and intelligent guests but one morning when the subject of labor unions came up I was shocked that everyone on the set was united in their insistence that labor unions must make concessions on wages and benefits, on job security and health care in order to get the economy going again.
You can be a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative but when millionaires get together to talk about how the middle class ought to make sacrifices for the good of the aristocrats then they all start to look a lot the same.
I know that there are examples of abuse and greed among labor unions, and as soon as we get rid of the multi-million dollar bonuses on Wall Street and the seven figure salaries in the banking system then I think we really ought to take a look at some of those labor union issues.
So Isaiah is willing to patiently school his listeners in how to make their religion more relevant... remember now, Isaiah is not a politician.... This is not politics.... This is scripture.... Don't ever let anyone tell you that making religion relevant and real takes it out of the realm of spirituality and turns it into politics. I'm not reading from some socialist handbook or communist manifesto.... This is the Bible and this is what Isaiah said that God expects from people who pray, and worship, and get born again:
6 Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
If you don't do those things then your other religious gyrations are really just a disappointment to yourself and an insult to God. I would have this carved on walls of our church because this defines our defiant view of the prevailing religious environment which is so hypocritical and so laden with magical thinking and superstition and self serving idolatry.
But we know all of that. If you have attended here for two or three weeks, you probably could have rehearsed most of this stuff yourself. The one thing I want to add to this conversation today is the awareness that Isaiah did not deliver this sermon on Wall Street or to a gathering of investment bankers or millionaire television hosts.
This is not the prophet who preached in Jerusalem before the fall of Judah. This isn't even the poetry of Second Isaiah. This comes out of chapter 58, the third phase of writing. This is a sermon preached in a ghetto in Babylon. A sermon preached to slaves, albeit slaves who had been allowed a certain amount of personal property and business. Even among the poor, there is a pecking order. Even poor white farmers in my native Kentucky often had one or two slaves back in the 19th century.
Isaiah is not speaking to the well healed, not the rulers or politicians, not the plantation owners or the people with big shops in the market place. He is speaking to people, many of whom are barely getting by..... people in the middle of what you might call a 40 year long economic down turn. It was to these people that he was preaching that if they are not willing to share their bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into their own shack, to cover the naked with their own worn out clothing that their worship, their prayers, their songs and sacrifices were insulting to God.
I wonder sometimes how the very wealthy can stand themselves. I wonder how a person with millions of dollars can fail to do everything in their power to address homelessness, hunger, the uninsured sick, the talented kid who can't afford to go to college, how do they turn their backs on the world in which they live. And it is a great sport among we well intended middle class folks to console ourselves with thoughts of what we would do if we were among the elite club of the super rich.
It is a great pass-time but it has nothing at all to do with this text. This text was not addressed to the super rich. It was, in very truth, addressed to the barely getting by poor. We can play "what I would do if I won the lottery" later. Right now we're being asked to consider whether our religion is just a self serving, self deceptive joke, or if we really plan to take our faith to heart and do something godly with it.
Ah, people so often tell me that they are looking for a church where they can feel comfortable..... and I have to say, "well this isn't it."
If you can feel comfortable with what is being said in church then you really aren't much of a church.... Not one Isaiah would be caught dead in, that's for sure.
In the Sojourners community in Washington, D.C. they have a soup kitchen where they serve a hot meal to a couple of hundred homeless people every day. Some of the people who once had to come there to eat, after they had gotten on their feet, gone back to work and had shelter, would come back and volunteer in the soup kitchen.
One of those former guests, a woman Jim Wallis called "Lucy," was, according to Wallis, their designated prayer. Every day, before they unlock the front door to let the guests come in and be served, they would pause to pray. And Lucy would pray, "Dear Jesus, we know that you will be among the people in line to eat today. We pray that when it is our turn to serve you that we will show you kindness, that we will treat you with respect, that we may show some gratitude for those who served us when we were on the other side of the serving line."
Men and women, you are the salt of the earth.... Without you there is not much compassion, not much kindness, not much hope. You are the light of the world.... Without you there is no hope for justice, no end to violence, prejudice, oppression.
And so, let us work together to untie the poor from the yoke of oppression, to unlock the handcuffs of injustice, to liberate those held in bondage to poverty and discrimination.
Give us the courage, even in our economic insecurity, to share our bread with the hungry and to open our lives to those who are homeless, to open our closets and share our coats and boots with those who are cold and ill clad. Let our light break out of the bondage to fake and symbolic religion that we may, in fact, be God's own family.
