"The Fast I Choose"
February 9, 2020
I preached this sermon on Isaiah 58:1-12 for Uncommon Chapel at Noon at Shenandoah University
I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say “I pray for you” when they know that that’s not so.
It’s been quite a week.
It’s been quite a week for religious and political discourse in America.
It’s been quite a week, that culminated in the President of the United States, at the start of his address to the National Prayer Breakfast, levying this thinly veiled attack on those who have opposed him over the past few months—even those in his own party.
It’s been quite a week.
And the question that we’re left wrestling with after all of it, after the panels of pundits have walked out of the studios and the televisions have been turned off, is what role does our faith play in the ways in which we conduct ourselves. How should our faith impact the choices we make and the actions we take right here and right now?
How should our faith affect the ways we relate to one another? To the society and beloved community that we’re trying to build?
Not all that much.
Not all that much if we pay attention to those with the loudest voices. To those with the biggest platforms and the biggest pulpits. Religion is, as it would seem, something that’s supremely personal. It’s a private matter that’s only between you and your God. Only welcome in the public square insofar as it upholds the status quo.
If we pay attention to those with the loudest voices, our faith is merely about securing salvation for ourselves. Be and act like a good Christian to make sure that you’re saved. Say a simple prayer asking for Jesus to come into your heart and you're all set.
Well, singing aside, I don’t have that loud of a voice. And I left large pulpits back in the local church. But I’m here to tell you that there’s another way to be a Christian. In fact, I’d argue that if we paid attention to the richness of our scriptural witness, we’d see that there’s a better way to be a Christian.
Our text from Isaiah, a moving and convicting oracle in which the prophet lays out God’s preference for justice for the oppressed and marginalized, shows us as much.
But before we dive in too deep, it might help to understand the waters that we’re swimming in. Here, as in all things biblical, context matters.
Israelites and adherents of the One God, the God Who Is, the God of Abraham were kind of going through a crisis of identity in the late 6th century BCE. The captivity and exile at the hands of the Babylonian Empire had come to an end. Cyrus and his Persian Empire were the new power players in the Ancient Near East, and he allowed the exiles to return to their homeland, so long as they understood that they would be a vassal state and ultimately subordinate to Persia.
The Babylonian Exile is widely seen as one of the defining moments in the history of the Israelites. It was a historical trauma for the people that would leave its mark on theology and religious thought for centuries to follow. However, today, we often talk about it in monolithic terms—as though the exilic experience was universal among the Israelites—when that just wasn’t the case. We know that economic and social status, even immigration status, changed how each group felt the impacts of the Exile.
The only Israelites who were forcibly removed from Jerusalem were the religious and political elite. Some of them would return to their homeland in seventy years, but others would remain scattered throughout the ancient world and never see their home again.
The peasant and working class were left behind to watch their city burn to the ground. The Book of Lamentations gives us a taste of what their experience was like, but that’s another sermon.
And of course, there was also the matter of the non-Israelites who had moved into the land during the captivity.
Each of these groups had vastly different experiences during the exilic and post-exilic periods. This is not to say that one group had it necessarily worse than the other, just different. There isn’t a hierarchy to societal suffering, but rather it’s a web that weaves through each and every one of us today as it did back then. And moving forward, these three groups were vying for control over the normative claim on Israelite identity and experience.
Struggling to figure out which group was the real Israelite.
It should come as no surprise that those who could trace their families back to the experience of being exiled, the religious and political elite, managed to consolidate power for themselves in this post-exilic reality. They were the ones who re-built the Temple and the city walls. They were the ones who were given their ancestral homes and land back. They were the ones given prominent government posts in the new Persian-influenced government. They were the ones funding it all behind the scenes and enriching themselves in the process, again, just as they had done before the Exile.
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There isn’t a hierarchy to societal suffering, but rather it’s a web that weaves through each and every one of us today as it did back then.
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This is the world in which the authors of our Isaiah passage lived. Most scholars agree that this chunk of the book (chapters 56-66), called Third Isaiah (because it’s the third and final chunk of the book and biblical scholars are really good at naming things), was added to the Isaiah text in this Persian period, probably shortly after the exiles returned. And it’s a remarkable bit of text because it swims against the dominant theological current of that time.
Throughout these eleven chapters, we see the prophet time and time again simultaneously rebuke and condemn the elite and powerful while also expanding the boundaries on who gets to call themselves the people of God.
We might even go so far as to call Third Isaiah uncommon.
Uncommon in the ways the prophet aligns God with the poor and oppressed.
Uncommon in the ways the prophet calls the powerful to task.
Uncommon in the ways the prophet envisions a religion built on justice for all rather than individualized observance and personal piety.
The prophet can see the desire for the elite to be close to God.
They ask me for righteous judgements, Wanting to be close to God. “Why do we fast and you don’t see Why afflict ourselves and you don’t notice?”The rich and powerful are seemingly doing the right things. They’re saying the right prayers and performing the right rituals. They’re fasting at the appropriate times and making the prescribed sacrifices.
The problem, of course, is that they’re doing the right things, but their actions are not transforming their lives. They continue to oppress their workers and brawl and quarrel and hit violently hit each other with their fists.
What good is self-affliction—of bending your own head like a reed and making the choice to put on mourning clothes and ashes—when there are people in your own backyard whose daily existence mirrors that not because they’re choosing to perform religious rituals but because they’re hungry? Because they’re homeless? Unemployed? Without a family of their own?
The prophet makes it clear that God doesn’t care about our thoughts and our prayers. As long as there are people who are living in poverty, people who are oppressed because of the color of their skin or their place of birth or who and how they love, people who are living on the streets with no hope for any social mobility while the rich get richer and we stay silent, God doesn’t care about what we do in here.
The fast that God chooses is loosening the yoke.
The fast that God chooses is liberating the captive.
The fast that God chooses is sharing our bread with the hungry. Welcoming the stranger, the homeless, and the poor into our houses and giving clothing and warmth to those in need.
The fast that God chooses is justice.
“God is encountered and worshiped,” as biblical scholar José Severino Croatto points out, “primarily in practicing justice and identifying with the poor.”
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The fast that God chooses is justice.
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Now, Croatto, a twentieth century Argentinian priest, might have been teaching and doing ministry in a different context than our own. But his commentary on this passage in Third Isaiah rings just as true for us today here and now. He writes:
This is a sound message for our “Christian” society, which sometimes delights to “seek God” in religious rituals and practices but exploits employees, domestic help, or even those who are severely indebted. The political and ruling segments of society all too frequently promote their own interests or try to maintain their privileges without doing anything for and at the expense of those in society who suffer and are disenfranchised. Sometimes people in the church are busier with worship services and other church activities than with concrete economic and social issues. The acid criticism of Third Isaiah’s teaching is very pertinent to both cases.
Do we please God by multiplying our [religious practices]? Or by freeing people from economic and social dire needs and by providing the necessary means for survival? God’s own choice is clear in the prophetic word. Do we make the same choice? Do we align ourselves with God? (1)It’s a daunting task. A tall order. I know. It’s easier to sit here and say these words than to live them out. If any one of us took up this mantle on their own, it would be an impossible task. We can’t do it on our own. But that’s the good news. We don’t have to do it alone.
We don’t have to do it alone.
We have been given a gift in each other, and that’s a good thing because it’s going to take all of us to build the beloved community.
Hunger and homelessness and poverty and oppression and marginalization still run rampant throughout our communities and it’s going to take all of us to go out there and do something about it.
To make sure that the prayers that we pray and the songs that we sing don’t just stay in here.
To sacrifice, to make holy, the power we’ve been given through no work of our own, by going from this place to the places and people without power and standing in solidarity with them.
What we do in here should be a rehearsal for the work we’re called to do and the way we’re called to live in community out there. In our classes. In our performances. In our jobs. That’s the prophet’s message for us today.
And the promise is that when we live our lives and order our steps in that manner, our desire to be close to God will be fulfilled because there we will find God. Our light will break out like the dawn. We will be healed quickly. Our righteousness will walk before us and the glory of the LORD will be our rear guard. We will call and the LORD will answer. We will cry for help, and God will say “I am here”.
May it be so. Amen.
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(1) J. Severino Croatto, "ISAIAH 56-66" in Global Bible Commentary, ed. Daniel Patte (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2004) 204.
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