“Shout out! Do not hold back!” God tells Isaiah, and we all know we’re in for it now. Trumpets were used, frequently, as calls to war in Israel, but God finds a trumpet blast a suitable start for this sermon.
The people of Israel are passionate about their worship. They are faithful and regular and devote. They are a nation chasing after God, fasting and humbling themselves, desiring to draw closer to God, filling the temple to the brim, desperate to know God’s ways—imploring God to answer them. Their actions may seem outwardly holy, but their spiritual practice ends at the temple. And they have the audacity to wonder why God doesn’t kiss them on the forehead with gratitude. God is not impressed by their posturing and whining. God says they serve their own interests on the Sabbath and not God’s. They oppress their workers. They quarrel and fight. And that, in short, their fasting will not make their voices heard on high. It’s not enough to go through these actions when their hearts aren’t in the right place. God doesn’t want to hear it. Worship, if it is not backed by action, is not what pleases God the most.
I know that we look around and lament all the empty space in the pews. When we tell stories of our past, we remember times when we needed the balcony and even further back when we needed the chapel downstairs for overflow. We remember Easters when there was standing room only, when the choir loft was full, when there were 20 babies in the nursery. We sit in meetings and wonder how to get back to those days, how to fill up our pews, how to increase our attendance and membership numbers.
And as a church, we are not alone, all across the nation in mainline denominations, other churches are asking the same questions: why are we hemorrhaging members and money, and have been for the last 40 years and how do we make it stop? While some suggest that mainline Protestantism took a liberal turn in the 1960s and can never grow again unless it becomes more conservative: keeping out gays, no longer ordaining women, stopping our focus on social justice or political progressiveness . . . what we’re really looking at is a world that is skeptical of institutions, that is postmodern and diverse. We’re looking back at the end of Christendom, at a time that has long gone, a time when everyone who was respectable went to church, some for religious reasons and some out of social pressure or shear habit.
We live in a land of many different faiths and many who identify as “Christian” but never set foot in a church. The church no longer has the central place in society that it once held, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. I imagine that most of you are here because you want to be, not because you feel pressured or to obey the rules of society—because our wider culture tells us that we should spend a Sunday morning at brunch, or with the newspaper and a cup of coffee—it’s just another morning, afterall, except that the office is closed.
In our passage in Isaiah, the temple is not facing these problems—people are showing up for worship, it’s the central part of their life, it’s what you do on a Sabbath, take a bath, put on your nice clothes, get to temple, shake hands with all the right people, sings songs, say your prayers, make your sacrifices and your fasts, listen to scripture, and then go out into the world, feeling good and pious. Maybe even to grandma’s house for Sunday dinner or out for a Sunday drive. Kind of like it’s 1952 in America again. And that is what we mourn when we look around the sanctuary and wish for more company. Those days when everybody showed up.
Jesus never said anything about being the center of society . . . Jesus was much more focused on saving individuals and forming a community of love and service to carry out his work. His was a radical group, not concerned with social conformity or respectability.
God says to Isaiah, this is not about worship. I don’t care what’s going on in the sanctuary, but I do care about what is NOT going on in the world. Because the point of worship—comes at the very end of our service together—we come to be nourished, built up, encouraged, and then SENT OUT to the world.
Sadly, when we tell the stories of our church, this is what I do not hear: we used to be really active in the community. All over town, we were known as the church to go to if you needed help. The dinners we cooked for the homeless were legendary. We had the best food pantry, we bought the most coats, we worked with the mayor and city council to find solutions to homelessness and poverty in our city.
I know there was some mission work and giving, but it’s not what is highlighted—it’s not what defines our church, not like our fine music program, or our drama group . . . I’m talking about the stories we use to define ourselves, to tell of our history . . . What we talk about is who we were, are, or want to be. And that’s part of why it’s so hard for us to talk about the future, because we still want to talk about worship style and music, we want to talk about our buildings and our finances, we want to talk about our physical appearance and accessibility in Old Town, our presence as a place to worship . . . but what we need to discuss is our presence as a missional church, our presence to those in the community who are in need physically and spiritually.
We’re starting to get a reputation around town as a place to go for a meal and warmth. The Open Table is truly working at Washington Street. We give the hungry bread. We welcome the homeless into our doors. We are starting to be noticed in ways that we haven’t been perhaps for decades. But there is so much more we need to do t owork to end injustice and oppression.
Listen again to what God promises if we are faithful and care for the poor and work to fix injustices . . . “Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt.” A good walk-through of our buildings can show us a thing or two about “ancient ruins” and a good walk through our financial situation and the realestate situation of Old Town can show us just how unlikely it is that we can “rebuild” anything on our own.
There are churches like ours who have managed to turn around when they focus on mission, when they stop navel gazing and longing for an extinct past and stop focusing on their problems—and remember what God really desires, far beyond lovely music and beautiful prayers and full pews
God doesn’t just want us to show up at church on Sundays but “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. 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.” Because we are all children of God, and we cannot praise God with our lips and then deny God with the rest of our actions.
Only then, God tells Isaiah, “Light shall break forth like dawn and your healing shall spring up quickly; You shall be like a watered garden, spring of water whose waters never fail.”
In these days of finding a way forward, this is our message of hope. Thank be to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment