Rev. Rachel Lewis Cooley
“You've Still Got To Do It”
Collaborative Preaching, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville TN
October 21, 2019
Isaiah 58: 1-9a
1Shout 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 want God on their side.
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 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 straps 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 rear guard.
9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.”
Creator God, moving, speaking, inspiring Spirit of the living God, and Christ Jesus, who continually calls us and walks with us along the way.
Be in this space and this moment as you were in the times of study and reflection, questions and excitement I and my roundtable sermon peers experienced in coming to this text.
In the conversation and thoughts spurred and disagreements and life examples and perspectives shared during our discussion.
And as we sought to discern and become your emerging word in community together and in our world.
Grant, please God, that my work to represent that conversation and the people who participated in it and your word as represented in this text
Be faithful to them, to your creation, and to your call for us, which is ever-present and filled with grace and love and hope.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, oh God, our rock and redeemer.
Amen
What do you do and where do you go when you’re seeking spiritual nourishment? When you know something isn’t right, though you maybe can’t quite put your finger on it. Or maybe it’s a general sense of hopelessness and disconnection as you see a world around you that’s full of injustice, or random suffering, for you or for others. Maybe you can absolutely put your finger on what specifically is causing this feeling, because it’s suffering or sadness from a life-shaking event you're reeling from.
Katie, a youth from this week’s roundtable, goes to youth group at Eastwood, because the conversation and learning there causes her to reflect deeply on her faith and what it means, and to identify and explore difficult questions about it.
Jess, when his father was very ill and the doctors said he might die soon, found himself speaking aloud Episcopal communion liturgy that he had spoken with his family time and time again, and found comfort that people had spoken it repeatedly for generations. It felt like a
bridge across time and human experience.
Rae looks for God in the faces of people she attends church with every week, knowing she can find the divine in at least one, often a child, and knowing that at least one will reflect back to her some of what she can be and who she is.
At our roundtable, Luke put where he may turn like this: “I find value in rituals because when your back’s against the wall, you're just completely done, what do you turn to?,” he asked. “You turn to things in memory, you turn to rituals. And you may say ‘I don't feel like being here or doing this but I'm going to do it cause it’s the right thing.” Ritual can then be a part of “resetting yourself,” Luke says.
The audience of our text today knew about turning to ritual. They knew about fasting as a ritual to humble themselves before God, and as a faithful habit: a way, sometimes, to experience God and seek God’s favor.
They were so caught up in the importance of ritual, and what it can do for them, though, that they began detaching from the deeper meaning and significance of the act. The fasts were meant to be about God’s interests, but the people were serving their own interests and fighting with each other on the fast day. As Rae put it in our roundtable, they may have been saying “oh look at me, look at how great and religious | am.” Our roundtable group even began characterizing the ritual-following people in this text as “dancing around in their sackcloth and ashes,” saying, “look at me, look at me!” both to those around them and to God.
God’s concern is not how holy or righteous those following the ritual actions looked, however, but for the workers who were still being oppressed... for the bonds of injustice, the thongs of the yoke. All the while during the fast days, the people fasting were not treating their workers right, losing those bonds, or breaking every yoke.
Even if those performing the ritual intended to humble themselves and listen to God’s call, God called them to action in the face of present injustice and suffering. “You can be committed” to a ritual, Jess said, “and still screw over your neighbor.” You can act as though you’re “holier than thou,” and even believe you are doing the right thing. Especially given societal norms—perhaps upheld particularly strongly in the South—that say that someone who goes to church every Sunday and even volunteers to cook or serve communion is a “good person,” a religious person, a “God-fearing” person, an upstanding citizen, and on and on, while many of us may know how you walk away from a conversation with that person and, as Rae put it, say “wait a second!” and find a knife in your back. Maybe the knife in your back is rude talk about you, behind your back, or maybe it’s that you need someone to advocate for justice for you, or declare that you need to be treated right, and though that person says they care for you and greets you with the “peace of Christ,” they aren’t living out that call. They aren’t doing what you need, they aren’t doing what people living in poverty or oppressive circumstances of all kinds, millions of people, all of us living in structures of inequality, injustice, and isms need, particularly if those oppressed may not in fact be served by the church and its words or rituals. Maybe the oppressed are directly harmed by them, even if “directly” simply means that all the time talking and maintaining the rituals is time not spent loosing those bonds of injustice, undoing the thongs of the yoke, and letting the oppressed go free.
Maybe the oppressed can be served by the rituals, though, if they’re done with God’s call continually present and in intentional ways to include the marginalized and oppressed. Maybe if they offer love and hope alongside challenge; and if they're done alongside, and do not replace, the work of service and justice.
In the text, God calls both the people doing the rituals, including those who may be dancing around in the ashes, as my roundtable characterized it, and those doing the work of service and justice. Through the prophet, God says, in the NIV, “shout it aloud!... Raise your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion...their sins,” including those sins and rebellions done when they think they're being faithful and righteous.
Rae shared an experience of God calling continually, no matter her intentions or unknowing blindness to others, and through her seeking to do what God calls us to in this scripture, to serve the poor and break the yoke of the oppressed. In her words: “Doing changes how you think about doing, because, you know, you can be in your head like ‘feed the poor,’ you have it in your head, ‘oh I'll just go fill in at Room in the Inn, I'll just go down and fix dinner and that'll be just great,’ you know... And then you realize what you cooked, most the people can’t eat because they have bad teeth, and you say “oh, I didn't even think of that, that wasn’t even part of my reality so I make them pork chops for God’s sake and no one can eat them.”
“Your intention may not be what’s happening,” she reflected. “I thought I was doing something great and it turns out 1 might have been, but... that reality made me think ‘I didn’t do that for them, I was doing that for me, so it’s little wonder they couldn't eat my food.’ It’s just like God crept up going ‘hey Rae! Guess what? You just put that snide attitude away and I’m gonna show you what giving really means and what it’s supposed to mean.
That one took me like 6 months to figure out...,” she noted. “I didn’t know what happened... but | just walked away and went ‘boy, someone ain’t right with God.’ When you know you're not right with God, that’s what happens... yeah, you get reminded.”
Rae had to actually go and do in order to learn that to do service, you have to carefully consider what individuals who are marginalized and oppressed need and what will fit that need. Only through seeking to follow God’s call—actually taking action—did Rae open an opportunity for God to call her forward again. Make no mistake that God will continually call, and has been for all generations, in response to those in the scripture who said “why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” and in response to Rae seeking to go and do, and finding that when she did, though it took time, she learned more about giving and about connecting with other individuals, no matter the difference of circumstance. She learned something about how we need both service work—the sharing of a meal with the hungry and poor—and justice work—the advocating that affordable housing is available, as she does in her work with Nashville Organized for Action and Hope, or NOAH. She also learned that in both service and justice work, we need to be asking the critical, under the surface questions like the one she posed to our group: why is there no Room in the Inn program for women without homes, or many shelters available to them for that matter, such that most of the people on the street on the coldest nights are women?
Once you start asking such questions and taking action that continually challenges and opens you to hear God always calling toward justice, you are constantly forming, transforming, and expressing your faith through action. Your faith is not, then, only or even primarily expressed in words or in repeated acts of worship taken personally or in faith communities; but is also expressed through taking action to do service and justice. “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly,” the scripture says. This roundtable didn't think of this as healing as physical, or healing only for you, but as spiritual healing, for many.
As Rae might say, spirituality, as she conceives of it as different than religion, and as many people do today when they say they're “spiritual, but not religious,” is accessed and called forth when people can connect as though they are simply two spirits regardless of religion, or any other identifier we use in the social world, and she was reminded of how she neglected to connect with those she sought to help that night at Room in the Inn. God called her nonetheless to consider the needs of those she’d seek to serve next time, and to connect with them relationally, as two spirits learning from, enriched by, and perhaps, with the presence of God, transformed by their encounter with one another.
In Katie’s words, the light mentioned in the scripture is God’s and not yours, and when you take faithful action for service and justice, you should be filled with that light of God just as those around you may be filled with it too. And then, quate “maybe in working with others you'll be reminded of the God within them, and you, and us, and then you'll find peace with your problems because you're reminded of everything that’s already good in your life.” Maybe then you'll have a spirit of gratitude and awareness of God’s presence, despite your problems, or perhaps what you think are your problems, as Katie also reminded us that sometimes many of the worries that consume our time and energy today are not really about the things that matter or relate to what God calls us to. This passage in Isaiah, then, is a reminder to step back and remember what does matter, and that action counts.
Action for justice counts even when we’re overwhelmed by the injustice we see, or by seeming steps backwards along the arc of history, which, with God continually calling us and with our repeated attention to follow that call, does bend toward justice. To get deeper into why we are called to take action for justice, Jess urged our roundtable group to step back from a reward/punishment model, as though God seems to say here in Isaiah that “if you do the good things, feeding the poor, clothing the naked, treating workers with dignity, and letting the oppressed go free, then I’ll be good to you again.” This is not so simple as a “do this, and you'll earn God’s favor/don't do this and you'll suffer” model, but, in Jess’s words is more about quote “an assurance that taking care of the poor is to be on Gad’s side.”
Even in times when we become too self-righteous about our actions, or in times when we despair that they’re not enough, we have assurance, represented here in Isaiah, that doing for the poor means we are co-creating justice with God. “We're hoping and trusting,” Jess said,” that God will make things right in the end, and that we’re party with God in making things right in the end.” Regardless of what an “end,” might look like, eschatological or the end of a particular instance of injustice, we are reminded and reassured by this text that doing service and justice is what God calls us to and works with us for.
The roundtable was aware that this requires what we might call a leap of faith. Rae remembered a re-phrasing of Hebrews chapter 11, verse 1, where Paul argues that, from the NIV, “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Even if you're struggling with keeping faith in God’s promise of justice, Luke noted that “you can still see through the Isaiah 58 text what is favorable with God and what is not.” To take action with God toward justice, you may be acting your way into a faith and hope you struggle to profess in words, or see every day or in times of trouble, or experience in ritual, when those rituals sometimes become rote and feel empty of their meaning and significance. When you're doing it, you experience God. “Then,” the scripture ends, “you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am.” “You’ve still got to do it,” we repeated in our roundtable. Let’s do it.