A reading from the prophet Isaiah.
Cry aloud, Do not hold back. Lift up your voice like a
trumpet. Declare to My people their
transgression to the House of Jacob, their sins.
Yet they seek Me daily and delight to know My ways, as if
they were a nation that did righteousness and did not
forsake the judgment of their God.
They ask of Me righteous judgments.
They delight to draw near to God.
Why have we fasted and you see it not?
Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?
Behold, in the day of your fast, you seek your own pleasure, and
oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to
quarrel, and to fight, and to hit with the wicked fists.
Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard
on high. Is such the fast that I choose a
day for a person to humble himself?
Is it to bow down his head like a Reed, and to spread sackcloth
and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast and a
day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I
choose to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps
of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, To break
every yoke? 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 him, and not to hide yourself
from your own flesh. Then shall your light break
forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up
speedily. Your righteousness shall go
before you. The glory of the Lord shall be
your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the
Lord will answer, you shall cry, and he will say, Here I am.
If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the
finger and speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the
hungry, and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall
your light rise in the darkness, and your gloom be as the
noonday. And the Lord will guide you
continually, and satisfy your desire in scorched places, and
make your bones strong. And you shall be like a watered
garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.
And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt.
You shall rise up the foundations of many generations.
You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of
streets to dwell in, if you turn your back your foot from the
Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and
call the Sabbath a delight, and the holy day of the Lord
honorable. If you honor it, not going your
own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly, then
you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride
on the heights of the earth. I will feed you with the
heritage of Jacob, your father, for the mouth of the Lord has
spoken the word of the Lord. Please pray with me.
Loving God, I pray that He may settle deeply within each and
every one of us in this moment. I pray that your presence, your
love for for each and every one of us may be unmistakable.
It may be your words to speak today.
Your name we pray. Amen.
Please be seated. Hi everybody, I want to open
with a story that some of you may know.
In 1983, a 23 year old law student was sent alone during an
internship to a maximum security prison in Georgia to deliver a
message to a man on death row. No lawyer with him, no legal
help to offer, just a message. Your execution will not be this
year. You have another year, he
writes. I wasn't prepared to meet a
condemned man. I was eager and inexperienced
and worried. I was in over my head.
He had gone to law school because like many of us, he
wanted to do something about injustice.
And like many of us, he grew disillusioned.
Right the coursework. Like, how relevant is this?
He felt he was disillusioned by the inequities in our systems,
by his own inadequacy. But here he was.
Henry the prisoner arrived in chains into that little room.
Our speaker stuttered through his message, and Henry broke
open into relief. Another year he could see his
wife and kids. They ended up talking for three
hours, laughing, getting to know each other, becoming quick
friends until the guards abruptly tore them apart.
As Henry is cuffed and shoved out, he planted his feet and
sang a hymn. I'm pressing on the upward way.
New heights I'm gaining every day, Still praying as I'm
onward, bound. Lord, plant my feet on higher
ground. And our speaker was absolutely
stunned. He writes.
I had come into the prison with such anxiety about my
inadequacy. I had no right to expect
anything from a condemned man on death row.
Yet he gave me an astonishing measure of his humanity,
proximity to the condemned may the question of each person's
humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own.
His grandmother had always told him, you can't understand most
of the important things from a distance, Brian, you have to get
close. That law student was Bryan
Stevenson. Six years later, he founded the
Equal Justice Initiative, which has provided legal
representation to hundreds of people illegally convicted or
unfairly sentenced, the central thesis of his book?
Just Mercy and of his life's work is that we are not defined
by the worst thing we've ever done.
He attributes this to the Christian gospel.
I've had the pleasure of meeting him.
He radiates calm, purpose and warmth.
Even my most skeptical non Christian colleagues and friends
that I met him with have been really moved by the way that his
faith empowers him to do such hard, costly work with such
energy and joy. We're really drawn to people
like that, aren't we? People who shine with goodness
and know what they're about. As Christians, we're also to,
we're also called to be that. Our current series on being a
Spiritual Beacon Church for the city of Chicago invites us to
consider various ways to shine the light of Christ for people
to draw them into the joyful, purposeful peace that comes from
knowing who we are in Christ. Fully known, fully loved, fully
renewed. This vision and promise is so
good. The call for how to get there,
as modelled for us in today's passage in Isaiah, is urgent and
very practical. Actually, as we turn to Isaiah
58, I want to name an important note about the particular versus
universal. The text was written for a very
particular community, in a very particular context.
The Judeans had returned from their home after a really long
exile in Babylon, only to be beset by fractured community,
economic equality, inequality, political subjugation again, and
the disorienting gap between the glorious restoration they have
been promised and the difficult reality they actually came home
too. We can relate to these
disappointments in general, for sure, as such hardships cycle
through history. But it's still important to
acknowledge that the Judeans are not us, and their situation
isn't ours. And yet this passage still
speaks to us because it addresses things that do not
change, The human tendency to perform faith without embodying
it, God's call to express our faith in concrete, proximate
care for those in need, and the reliability of God's promises to
the community that takes that seriously.
Like the Judeans, many of us may be engaging in some sincere
religious practice. Right?
We're here. Maybe particularly so during
this Lenten season, while feeling disconnected from God
and perhaps paralyzed in the face of social suffering.
The passage is something to say about why, and it's actually
more freeing than we might expect.
Thankfully, it's also urgent, as expressed by God's call for the
prophet to be loud and declarative with his message in
the opening verse. Cry aloud.
Do not hold back. Lift up your voice like a
trumpet. Declare to my people their
transgression to the House of Jacob, their sins.
While God's people are verse 2, seeking Him daily and even
delighting to know God's ways, they're doing so with hypocrisy.
As we enter into verses 3 through 5, I want to lovingly
carry us through some honest and potentially uncomfortable self
examination as we hold this passage up to ourselves as a
mirror. God anticipates the people's
questions in verse 3. Why are we fascinating?
You see it not. Why have we humbled ourselves
and you take no knowledge of it? They seem genuinely confused.
They've been dutiful, and God responds notably, not with
comfort per SE, but with a diagnosis.
Behold, in the day of your fast, you seek your own pleasure and
oppress all your workers. So let's see with how this can
be true of us. First, you seek your own
pleasure. On the very day we're performing
devotion, our primary focus may still be on our own interests
and our own comforts. And this doesn't have to be
dramatic, right? Maybe we're being faithful in
many ways, but we haven't had a real conversation across
difference in a while. Our bubble is very intact.
Some of us live and work and worship in spaces that are for
honest, pretty uniform. Similar educational backgrounds,
similar political assumptions, similar income brackets, similar
cultural references. The default posture of some of
these spaces towards Christian faith might be a kind of polite
skepticism, right? The assumption that serious,
educated people have moved past that, and many of us have
quietly absorbed some of that skepticism, perhaps while
sitting in a Pew. Others of us have lived their
whole lives inside the church, Christian School, Christian
friendships, Christian workplace, Christian everything.
We're fluent in the language, comfortable in the culture, and
the world outside that culture can feel genuinely foreign and
maybe even a little threatening. Both of those are bubbles.
Bubbles that limit the reach of God's light, the verse
continues. And oppress all your workers.
The word for a press here, nagas, is the same word used for
Pharaoh's task makers in Egypt. So it's a pretty strong word.
So consider the people with less power than you and any social,
professional or economic relationship both seen and
unseen. And I'm not only talking to
working folks here. This is very relevant to student
life too. The people we have some kind of
power over and know it, The people we have power over.
And I haven't actually thought about them very much, right?
Or the people whose labor we benefit from without much
consideration. And it's not about guilt.
This is about sight. The text is asking who has less
power than you and how are you considering them?
How are you treating them? God continues in verse 4.
Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a
wicked fist. Fasting like yours to stay will
not make your voice be heard on high.
And maybe we aren't literally hitting anyone, but where does
strife live in your life right now?
Again, it doesn't necessarily have to be very dramatic.
It might be like the chronic low grade tension with someone that
you refuse to address. Like too awkward, like you know,
the relationship where you hold power and you wield it.
The person you consistently make smaller, their quiet remarks,
small gestures. And then verse 5, the image that
looks so right, the head bowed like a Reed sackcloth ashes, all
the correct postures of humility and penitence performed over a
life that remains fundamentally unchanged.
Christian virtue signalling, like posting about a social
issue without actually changing anything about our life to move
the needle towards change. Or even if we don't use social
media, lamenting injustice in the right company while our
actual life remains sealed off from anyone affected by it.
Or feeling deeply about things and letting the feeling
substitute for the doing. Or the Lenten practice that's
entirely oriented inward. What it does for us, our body,
our habits, our health, with no outward tort, turn towards
anyone else. God is not critiquing this
devotion. God is asking, who are you
actually doing this for? When the devotion is correctly
directed at God rather than at ourselves, it doesn't just look
good, it does good and God wants us to be faithful.
God is incredibly clear and direct about what that looks
like, and it communicates them in rhetorical questions here to
engage our minds to reflect before answering.
Yes. Verse 6.
Is this not the fast that I choose to loose the bonds of
wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the
oppressed go free and to break every yoke?
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
him and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Verse 6 is about releasing people from bondage, burden, and
oppression. This can be literal.
Perhaps you're a lawyer, a social worker, a therapist, a
doctor, a teacher, a policy maker, someone whose
professional life puts you in direct proximity to people who
are trapped in a need of an advocate.
Let's use that. But bondage also takes forms
that don't require a professional license, right?
Maybe someone in your life is trapped in a story about
themselves that is not true and you're in a position to tell
them otherwise. Please do so.
It's always been so life changing when people have done
that for me. Or maybe someone is in a
relationship or a situation that they cannot see their way out of
you, Right? Like we get so mired up in it
and you can speak truth to them. You're in that position.
Help them to expand their perspective and shake off false
narratives. Persist in being there for them
as they work through all the tangles.
If you feel trapped somehow today, loosen the bonds and seek
prayer during service Today they will be prayer ministers on
either side during communion. Go up to them.
Bondage is anywhere a person is stuck and carrying something
that they were meant never meant to carry alone.
Liberation begins with whoever is close enough to notice.
So we must notice. As Christians, we must notice.
Verse 7 is what hits me hardest in some ways because it's so
direct and personal and I can't, like, intellectualize my way out
of it. 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 him and not to hide yourself
from your own flesh. We are to feed, house, and
clothe people. Food, housing and clothing are
so fundamental. They're so immediately
practical. So when we see the need, we are
to provide. And the Hebrew here is second
person singular. So God is speaking to each of us
individually here. And when God tells us not to
hide ourselves from our own flesh, God prohibits us from
deliberate social blindness. We cannot pretend that like we
don't see the physical body of our fellow human being in need.
We are to look upon their humanity as our own.
And this is really powerful because it's so physical, right?
It invites us to think about Jesus physical body on the
cross. On the cross, Jesus literally
embodied the bonds, the straps, the breaking, the not holding
himself from his fellow human being so that all the wickedness
and oppression can die with his physical body to be resurrected
in a new form and a new life, right?
That's the good news, that's the gospel.
And the gospel message is that through Jesus's life,
resurrection or death and resurrection, we are fully
forgiven for all the ways that we've fallen short, fully freed
from any need to prove ourselves to be good enough, fully
accepted into God's promise of perfect justice and peace.
And while we're on this earth in this human condition, right,
we're called to be beacons of this good news by choosing to
walk and talk like Jesus as best we can.
Because when we do, the light of God's goodness breaks forth like
the dawn and obliterates the darkness that plagues us all the
time, whether it's in your own mind or just like surrounding
you when you're like reading the news or just, you know what I
mean? That like darkness that we're
just like so overwhelmed by sometimes as Christians, we're
called not to just wait it out until that final day, until
God's long term vision is fulfilled.
This lice until that end is not just twiddling our thumbs and
like waiting in this malaise, God granted each of us free will
because our day-to-day decisions are a key part of that vision.
God shapes us through our choices and he didn't even have
to include us in his work, but he did.
And while it can be challenging to follow through at times, for
sure, the light, the healing, the goodness that we get to
witness. And I know many of them in here
have witnessed this right. It's so beautiful, it's so
empowering. And God has our fronts and
backs. Your righteousness shall go
before you. The glory of the Lord shall be a
rear guard. And as I read through the rest
of God's promise, I want you to receive it as His promise to you
personally. Verse 9 Then you shall call, and
the Lord will answer you. You shall cry, and he will say,
here I am. Do you believe that that God
will answer your call? Maybe you'll hear God's voice
audibly, but more likely you'll feel it right.
Something settled and known deep in you that's worth wanting, is
worth pursuing. If you take away the yoke from
your mist, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness,
if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of
the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and
your gloom be as a noonday. So much of our malaise comes
from feeling helpless, aimless and paralyzed.
And God's answer is not for us to wallow in it, as sometimes
I'm tempted to do. It is to act specifically,
outwardly, on behalf of someone else.
And that's what moves us from gloom to light.
But I want to pause here 'cause I know many of you are already
doing this work, and you are tired.
God sees you, and God's promise is liberating for you too.
Because we are not the light source.
God is. And a candle doesn't generate
its own flame. You know that.
It carries 1. And when we try to be the source
rather than the carrier, we burn out, we burn our own reserves.
That's striving, fixing, doing in our own strength.
So self-care is not selfish. Rest is not lazy.
Sabbath is not optional. I'm still working on that one.
Being in community with people who nurture you, allowing
yourself to be cared for in addition to doing the caring.
Those are not indulgent. They are how the candle stays
lit and the text asks us to pour ourselves out for the hungry.
It doesn't ask us to fix world hunger, right?
It asks us to satisfy the desire of the afflicted person in front
of you. Not every afflicted person
everywhere. And that distinction is not a
loophole, it's a mercy. So let's lessen each other's
burdens, put down the finger pointing the bitterness, the
words that diminish despite seeing that all the world
everywhere, and trust that the God who makes his promise is
already ahead of us and behind us in the doing of it.
And the promise continues verse 11 and the Lord will guide you
continually and satisfy your desire in scorched, also
translated as in drought places and make your bones strong and
you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water
whose waters do not fail. For those of us who have been
living inside the bubble, the Christian bubble, the comfort
bubble, the bubble of people who look and think like us, it's
worth considering how these bubbles can be places of
drought, right? And like, in what ways have
these bubbles limited our growth?
We know that growth comes from struggle, not complacency and
ease, right? We need to challenge ourselves
in order to grow as Christians. We need to burst that bubble of
comfort and familiarity in order to let the light free to shine.
And God promises to guide us and satisfy us, to strengthen us in
that. So for those of us paralysed and
overwhelmed, when we scroll the news, when we feel the weight of
the city, this country and things that are happening in the
world, hear this. And your ancient ruins, verse
12, shall be rebuilt, and you shall raise up the foundations
of many generations. You shall be called the repair
of the breach, the restore of streets.
To dwell in this is beautiful because it's a promise of
restoration. As we burst our bubbles and get
proximate. We are rebuilding God's Kingdom
along with him, and we as a church can do that together.
How amazing it would be if we can invite people in and they
can dwell and sit here and feel loved and known.
So let's do it. Let's shine God's light, get
proximate, maybe get a little uncomfortable and push ourselves
to get out of this bubble that we're in.
Amen.