I see around the room some new faces and some
old ones and so I will say a couple of things
at the beginning that will connect to yesterday
and then take off in some new directions.
Let's begin with a prayer together.
Our gracious God, we are thankful for your
gifts to us.
We're thankful for this rain, which though it
inconveniences us, fills the ponds and
lakes and streams and gives us promise of new life.
We're thankful for the beauties of nature,
which we sometimes ignore, but when we pay
attention to them, we see in them you.
And we're thankful today for the words of long
ago as your people sought to find ways
to speak about you, to express their longing
and desire for you, and sometimes their frustration.
And may we enter into that deep and great
engagement with you that they also were part of.
May we also find words that express the deepest
instincts and desires of our hearts.
Through Christ we pray, amen.
Yesterday we started this discussion of Isaiah
56-66 and if those of you who were, the
two of you who were here, will forgive me, I
think three actually.
Let me just say a couple of things to tie in
what we're doing to that.
What I tried to say yesterday is this, that if
you read the book of Isaiah as a whole,
like all the big prophetic books, it has
wonderfully complex things going on.
I compared it to a set of pearls on a string.
Like pearls, it sometimes is one thing after
the other, a little hard to sort out, at least,
well, a little hard to sort out exactly what's
going on.
Like pearls also, the way it sometimes works is
that any individual section is made up
of different layers that have to be sorted
through and read and understood as poetry,
as a set of images and metaphors playing
themselves out in beautiful ways.
I tried to say too that however you thought
about how the book was put together, the way
it reads now is that it reads in three large
sections that have references to different
times in the lives of the people of God.
The first 39 chapters talk about life before
exile, life when it was still possible to
make some choices about whether we went one
direction or another.
And then in the middle of 40-55 are these songs
of redemption and restoration.
We've gone to exile, we didn't turn back before
it was too late, and yet God reaches down
into us and among us and pulls us back,
comfort, comfort my people, says the Lord,
speak comfortably
to Jerusalem and say to her that her warfare is
ended, that she's paid double for all
her sins.
This beautiful hymn that all of us know, if we
don't know it from Isaiah, we know it
from Handel's Messiah.
I won't sing it because Jerry Taylor did some
of that last night in his beautiful way.
And then we have this last part that we're
going to talk about yesterday, today, tomorrow.
56-66, the part that for a lot of people seems
very anticlimactic.
If I were writing Isaiah, I would have ended I
think at 55 or maybe 56, somewhere right
in there I would have stopped.
I would have walked off the stage, taken up the
collection, moved on into that good night.
But that's not where it stops.
It goes on for another 11 chapters.
And what I'm trying to say is that at least one
way to think about what's going on here
is, that the book wants us to think about still
another time, when we have come back
from exile, when we have experienced God's
grace, and yet when this soaring rhetoric,
you see in 40-55, doesn't quite line up with
the reality that we experience.
And in that sense, it speaks to where all of us
live, in our churches and in our homes
and in all of our lives, that we have on the
one hand the beautiful story of the gospel
and the people of God's experience with God,
and on the other hand, we have elders meetings
and church services that sometimes come off and
sometimes don't, and families that break
up and sometimes stay together by the skin of
their teeth, and all the other messinesses
of our lives.
And so then the question is, how do you deal
with that?
Do you on the one hand just ditch the beautiful
rhetoric, throw it all away, and if you do,
do you therefore abandon hope?
Do you abandon any sense that there is
something beyond the reality of the moment?
Or do you on the other hand live so fully in
that rhetoric that you can never deal with reality?
Or do you somehow do both?
And what I'm at least trying to argue is that
these chapters are trying to work out how
you do both.
So that's some of what we talked about yesterday.
Today I want to talk about one theme in these
texts, and that's the theme of worship.
I know that in all of our churches, worship is
really not a topic of discussion, that
everybody's on the same page, that we all agree
on all the issues, and that there's
no conflict, right?
Yes, amen.
So thank you for coming.
We'll see you tomorrow.
No, I mean, that's not the reality we live in.
I said yesterday that worship is important,
worship is worth talking about, it is crucial
that we even in Churches of Christ have
conversations about worship, but that in many
ways the conversations
we have are probably not at the level we need
to have them.
That they are focused on things that frankly
don't matter very much.
And so to get out of some of the things that
don't matter very much, you know, as I said
yesterday, whether you have a praise team or a
song leader, I can't imagine caring
very much about, you know, in a world where
millions of people go to bed hungry every
night, I really don't care very much.
So it should be possible for us to have some
discussions where we as Christian people listen
to each other and think deeply about issues,
and also ask questions about why and to what
end we're doing what we're doing.
So I'd like to talk a little bit about worship.
As you know, the Bible, the Old Testament in
particular, talks about it a great deal.
There are a few, if any, texts that give you a
detailed theory about what worship is or
how to do it.
There are pieces of it.
And what you see is you, if I can just do the
view from the space shuttle here, you
see different things being talked about.
You see an emphasis on the presence and or the
absence of God, and therefore the nature
of God.
You see discussions about what does it mean to
be God's people.
You see discussions about story and how do we
connect worship to the story of redemption
that we're all part of.
You see talks about how do we connect the
physical world to worship.
Because in the Bible, the Bible is not a,
forgive me, the Bible is not a Quaker meeting,
right, where we all sit around waiting for the
Spirit to speak to us.
That is the world in which worship takes place
very connectedly to the physical world.
You kill animals.
You go to a particular building where there's
an altar.
And you have human beings who process in ritual.
And there are elaborate and loving discussions
about all of this.
How many of you have ever heard a sermon on the
bells of the high priest's garment?
Answer I think is no.
Come Sunday and I'll preach one out in the
country somewhere.
Those are the only jokes I have.
I mean, that's as good as it gets.
Or a building, right?
You have this wonderful story about the book of
Exodus, the story of redemption from Israel.
And you go along chapters one through 18, 19,
wonderful story.
And then the law, grand story.
And then 16 chapters about a building, except
for the three in the middle about a golden calf.
A building.
What is that about?
Loving detail about a building fit for the
presence of God.
There's a strong connection to the physical.
Because we are physical beings.
We don't just have bodies.
We are bodies.
And we are connected to this world.
And so you go into a place like the temple and
it's a place of sights and sounds and
smells and appeal to all the senses.
You have other topics that come up.
And I just want to survey some things in Isaiah
56-66 about this.
Five things.
Good Church of Christ number.
Five things I want to talk about briefly.
One is that these are texts that talk about the
nature of God.
Second thing is they talk about the nature of Israel.
And I would say very briefly, they talk about
the nature of prophecy, leaders in the life
of the community.
And I want to leave that there.
I couldn't quite figure out which day to put
this in, so it's going to go in this one.
We have discussion about sacrifice, fourthly.
And we have praise and lament.
And it's on that fifth thing that I want to
camp most of all.
But first of all, the nature of God.
If you look through scripture, you see that,
and I'll just state the obvious, most important
character in the Bible is God.
And yet the Bible is fascinated by God,
disturbed by God, pleased with the presence of God,
overwhelmed by the absence of God.
You have this extraordinarily complex, rich,
emotion-laden discussion of who God is.
Our God is a consuming fire, the author of
Hebrews says.
God comes from Edom, chapter 63 of Isaiah says.
God is what?
Think about some of the images of God.
A colleague and I are teaching a course on God,
the doctrine of God.
And I asked my students, let's take a poll.
How many of these images of God appeal to you,
rate of scale of one to 10?
And let me do that with you, if you would let me.
Scale of one to 10, one being this doesn't make
any sense to me at all, 10 being this
really hits me where I live.
Let me give you some images, father, somebody
give me a number, 10, midwife, one, now that's interesting.
If we had a room full of women, I wonder what
the numbers would be, it might be a little
bit different, son, S-U-N, 10 again, warrior,
lots of 10s and lots of other people being
quiet, I don't know what that's about, tree,
rock, river, you see what I'm saying?
If you make a long catalog of these images of
God, and this is just a very small sample,
I mean it's clear the text thinks a lot about
God and it's trying to find the right language
and it never quite, it doesn't say this is the
one right way to describe God because
there's no way to do that, it's impossible.
And so there is this exploration, who is God?
There's also this complicated sense that God is
both loving and embracing and warm and
wonderful and also if you cross Him, this is a
very bad idea because God is portrayed
and even in this text as destructive.
The last verses of this book, Isaiah, which I
would have ended at 55 if it had been up
to me, talk about all the dead bodies lying
around as God brings about redemption.
And you can say, well this is because the
prophet says in the real world you don't get
redemption from enemies by saying nice things
to them, you have to deal with the way reality
really works, but even so it's an uncomfortable
picture of God and so it is throughout scripture
that the people of God welcome God, love God,
embrace God, want God's presence, but at the
same time are not entirely comfortable with that.
Even Jesus himself, right, my God, why have you
forsaken me?
At the critical, pivotal moment of the turning
of the ages expresses his discomfort with
the behavior of God.
So let's look at 62 before I just go on and on
about that, 62, just an example, a little
example and you can go through here and it'd be
interesting to go through and just underline
all the places it says God is this and so on.
62 of Isaiah, for Zion's sake I won't keep
silent and for Jerusalem's sake I won't rest
until her vindication shines out like the dawn
and her salvation like a burning torch.
The nations shall see your vindication and all
the kings your glory and you shall be
called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord
will give.
You will be a crown of beauty in the hand of
the Lord and a royal diadem in the hand
of your God.
You won't be termed forsaken and your land
won't be called desolate, but you will be
called my delight is in her and your land
married or in Hebrew Beulah.
You know the song I've reached the land of
great juice, no of corn and great juice and
corn and wine, this is a stupid joke, of corn
and wine and oh Beulah land, sweet Beulah,
well Beulah, married, Beulah land, this is
where this song comes from.
For the Lord delights in you and your land
shall be married.
And then notice again this beautiful turn as a
young man marries a young woman so or
a virgin your builder will marry you and so on
he goes and he talks about God.
Verse 8, the Lord is sworn by his right hand
and by his mighty arm.
I won't give your grain to your enemies.
Who is the God who is being portrayed here?
And we'll see this more in a minute that this
is a God of Exodus, this is a God of creation,
this is a God who marries his people, embraces
his people, he is a God of mercy.
But turn to the next page, 63.
Who is this who comes from Edom?
From Bozra in garment stained crimson.
Who is this so splendidly robed marching in his
great might?
It is I announcing vindication, mighty to save.
Now who is it?
Sort of a mystery novel question, who is it?
Well it's God.
How many of you have ever heard a sermon on
this text?
How many of you would like to hear a sermon on
this text?
There is this image of God the warrior, the God
who is coming to destroy but also to redeem.
And I bring all that up because it seems to me
that even in our own discussion, and I'm
not going to keep talking about our own
discussion about worship, but even in our own discussion
the first question that really we ought to ask
is who is God?
And behavior in worship that befits the
Majesty, the holiness, the beauty, the kindness of
God should be reflected.
And we'll talk about this more tomorrow when we
talk about ethics, because in the prophets
and in the Bible you can't do worship without
ethics or ethics without worship.
They're intimately connected and so that's tomorrow.
I couldn't figure out how to sort this out, I
mean it goes in so many different directions
so that's what we're doing.
It's arbitrary but that's what we're doing.
Who is this God?
He is unspeakable, indescribable.
And that's where our discussion about worship starts.
The second thing I want to say about is the
nature of Israel.
If you read these texts you see Israel as
people who are needy, as people who are broken,
but also as people who have a great story, a
story of redemption, a story of dignity
and honor, a story in which we begin in the
slave pits of Egypt but we're called to a
promised land and we are called to be a people
who though we lived in a place where people
were treated like animals, we are now a people
who treat even the animals with dignity and honor.
This is the Ten Commandments, right?
On the Sabbath day, who rests?
Well, among other people, your animals.
In Israel the vision is that we are the people
of God not just in some kind of vague abstract
pious sense but in everything we do.
I'll say more about that in a minute.
Third thing I want to say about is prophecy.
Now this is not a topic we talk about much but
it's a topic that the end of the book
of Isaiah wants to talk about.
Chapter 40 gets the voice crying in the
wilderness and 49 gets the prophet who is
Israel, who
is the servant, who knows how that all sorts out.
The role of the prophet is important.
I will just look at a few verses, 57, 1 and 2.
The righteous perish, maybe the righteous
prophets, maybe.
The righteous perish, the righteous one,
singular, and no one takes it to heart.
The devout are taken away while no one
understands because the righteous are taken
away from
calamity and they enter into peace.
Those who walk uprightly will rest on their
couches and so on.
Now that's one, one, 59 is better, 59, 21.
As for me, this is my covenant with them says
the Lord.
My spirit that is upon you and my words that I
put in your mouth will not depart out of
your mouth or out of the mouths of your
children or out of the mouths of your
children's children
says the Lord from now on and forever.
He's left there.
And then the most famous one, 61, 1 and
forward, the one quoted by Jesus, Luke 4, right?
In which, because as I said yesterday, Luke
really loved the book of Isaiah and I guess
he knew it rather well.
The spirit of the Lord is upon me because the
Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to bring good news.
Now it's interesting because if you read the
first 39 chapters, most of the first 39 chapters
of Isaiah or you read a text like Jeremiah, not
a lot of good news.
I once taught a course on preaching Jeremiah
and about halfway through it, I kept thinking,
I really wish I'd picked another text.
It's unrelentingly depressing.
You get to 30, you get in the middle there and
it's kind of, that's pretty, that's nice.
But the rest of it is just, you have to wonder
if they had had Zoloft in antiquity, how the
world would be different.
No, because the prophet's job was not to go and
say, let's be comfortable, woe to those
who say peace, peace when there is no peace.
The job of the prophet, if you don't say the
danger is coming and the people are killed,
the blood of those folks is on your head, right?
The job of the prophet is to warn, to call
people to justice, to integrity, to lives
of holiness and faithfulness.
And though they do hold out hope now and again,
that's not their main job perhaps.
Yet these prophets, the new age, after return
from exile, the job of the prophet is at least
in part, not entirely, but in part to offer hope.
Yes, to rethink, what does it mean to be a prophet?
What's the purpose of prophecy now?
And that gets to the question of what's the
nature of our community and what's the nature
of God?
Sacrifice, I'm going to go to theme four,
sacrifice, and then I'll get to the thing
I want to talk about the last 30 minutes.
Sacrifice, we're going to talk more about this
tomorrow in chapter 58, but I'll just
look a little bit in chapter 56 again, which we
talked about yesterday.
56 is this extraordinary vision of what's going
to happen in the world that the prophet's
imagining, among God's people.
He invites in the foreigners, which seems
absolutely flabbergasting, because who are
these foreigners after all?
These are the folks whose daddy's burned our
daddy's houses, whose daddy's carted our mothers
off as their personal property.
You're going to welcome those people?
These are the people who rule the world and do
it to their own advantage and treat us,
a tiny little minority as we are, whatever way
they want to.
You're going to welcome those people?
And so he says in 56, he talks about inviting
them to the temple.
He talks about verse seven, they're going to
come to his holy mountain to Jerusalem
and they make them joyful in his house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will
be accepted on my altar.
Sacrifice is going to be restored in this new
community, which means that the link between
us and God is restored.
That's one thing.
Let me throw out another thing, chapter 60.
Again we looked at this briefly yesterday.
Again we're talking about the nations coming
and verse six, 60 verse six, a verse I have
a little trouble reading with a straight face,
though it's not intended to be humorous.
A multitude of camels will cover you.
The people are going to come from Arabia,
coming to the temple.
I guess if we were here today, we'd say a
multitude of Mercedes will cover you or something
like that.
Hyundai's maybe.
They will bring gold and frankincense.
All the flocks of Kedar will be gathered to you.
The rams of Nevaoth will minister to you.
They will be acceptable on my altar.
It's interesting because what the prophet is
doing is he's saying things are back to where
they were before at some level.
There's a temple again.
There's sacrifices again.
There's restitution again.
There's restoration again.
What's different about it is who's bringing them.
It's not just us, not just Israel.
It's these other people too.
It's not for nothing that when a Luke wanted to
think about and find the right language
to express the glories of the new community in
which Gentiles are brought in, this is
where he goes, to Isaiah.
And then there are other texts about sacrifice
we could talk about, and I'll pick up some
of them tomorrow.
Because I want to go to the last thing, and
that's about praise and lament.
Many of us are familiar with the revival of
praise in our churches.
And there are a lot of good things about that.
Praise seems fairly important in our
interaction with God.
But sometimes this seems so, I guess, I'd say
one-dimensional, one-sided, not fully
reflecting the fullness of our relationship
with God and not fully reflecting the words
of Scripture.
Half the Psalms, for example, give or take, are
laments in which we say to God, you know,
frankly, we don't know where you are or what
you're up to.
Actually, most of them are much more direct
than that.
Some of them come fairly close to trying to
take God out.
And if you don't believe me, I'd just encourage
you to read some of them.
And these two things seem to go together.
They go together in life, and they go together
in the life of faith, that God, who can create
the universe, is not going to be intimidated by
my questioning of him, and is not going
to be bewildered or at a loss for words,
because I'm at a loss for words in my expressions
of doubt.
Lament seems to be an integral part of the life
of faith and of worship.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
I wonder what would happen if Fanny Crosby had
put that to music.
I wish she had.
Maybe she did.
If she wrote bazillions of songs, she might have.
But it's not in any of our books if she did.
And I wonder why.
Somebody's proposed that we ought to have
lament teams.
I can imagine, though, the job description.
You know, if you'd like to be on the lament
team, who would take that?
I don't know.
But maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
Maybe it would allow us to reclaim the depth of
biblical expressions of worship.
And maybe in moments of crisis, then we would
be able to use the language of the church
to express the deepest needs that we have.
Let me preach for a second.
How many of us on September 11th went to church
services where they had flags and patriotic songs?
I don't know if it's sacrilege.
I think it probably is.
And I think probably we ought to call it a repentance.
But on the other hand, we ought to ask
ourselves, why is that the language we
gravitated toward?
And I would say that maybe that's where we
went, because at a moment of crisis, that
was the biggest language we knew.
That was the language that lay closest to the
sources of our identity.
And if that's right, then we have a problem.
Because that means, one, that we don't know the
language of scripture very well, and two,
that we're not clear on what our identity is.
And we're confused.
Now I understand, and I'm not going to take
anybody out.
I mean, this was a moment of crisis, and people
make decisions, and they have to put these
together in a few hours, and all of that.
I understand that.
But maybe the lack of having a conversation
about this is creating some serious problems.
Maybe it creates problems for adults when we
come to church, and after a while, we've
heard the same old songs, and the same old
themes, about how wonderful it is to be a Christian.
It's not quite that simple.
And then we either go to church and go to
sleep, or we struggle.
Maybe it's a failure to recapture the words of scripture.
Well, there's the indicting sermon.
So let me go to Isaiah, because the text tells
us to comfort each other.
And since I know, never get to preach to you, I
will end my indictment there.
There'll be an invitation afterwards.
And no more jokes.
I want to look at a text that in 63 and 64,
63-7-64-12 in English, a little
different in Hebrew, that's fine.
What you have is, at least in part of this, a
psalm of lament.
You have many of these in the Bible.
They take a variety of forms.
Some of them are laments of a one person.
I'll just give a few examples, Psalms 3, or
Psalm 13, Psalm 88, 102.
There are quite a bit, many more of them.
You have laments of the people, like Psalm 44,
58, 74, 79, 80, 83, 106, Heike, Lamentations 5.
We call them laments of the individual because
it's one guy singing, laments of the people
because it's everybody singing.
This is the wonderful thing about scholars, you
know, you can take a very simple idea
and find a very elaborate term, and preferably
in German, Latin is also good, laments.
Ways of talking to God, not only about how bad
things are, but about God's responsibility
for that badness.
Laments take several forms, but they tend to
have common elements.
They usually say something and address the God.
Then you usually get the lament, what are we
talking about in the first place?
And then you get a confession of some kind, and
then you, again, you repeat, God help
us in a certain way, and then finally you say,
and if you do, we will praise you.
Not always.
There's a lot of variety, and actually this
text doesn't quite fit that pattern exactly.
So let me just look at some of this, 63 and 64,
start in verse 7.
The lament itself starts in verse 15, but it
seems like the prophet has taken this lament
and then kind of reworked it.
You know, it's not a cookie cutter sort of thing.
You take it and you think about it and you
explode it in some ways, you recast it.
So let's look at it.
I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord,
63, 7, the praiseworthy acts of the Lord.
Because of all that the Lord has done for us
and the great favor to the house of Israel,
that he has shown them according to his mercy,
according to the abundance of his steadfast love.
Now, I just read that verse, what does this
sound like?
Does this sound like lament? No.
This sounds like what? Praise.
We're going to have fun.
This is, you know, we could sing this in chapel
at 615, right?
I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord.
Now, it's interesting.
What are we going to talk about?
Are we going to talk about God in some abstract way?
No, we're going to talk about what God has done.
We're going to talk about his gracious actions,
his salvation history.
Because of all the Lord has done for us and the
great favor to the house of Israel, God's
actions are characterized by mercy and
steadfast love.
I think about this word, chesed, steadfast love.
What is steadfast love?
And I think about my friend, Harold.
Some of you may know Harold.
He's now about 80, I would say.
Twenty years ago, his wife, dean of women at
ACC, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
And she goes in the nursing home and every day
for 20 years, nearly, Harold comes in
and she doesn't know who he is.
And he feeds her and he paints her toenails and
he holds her and she holds him back.
That's steadfast love, right?
God is loyal in this way and this is our experience.
Surely, they are my people, children who won't
deal falsely.
Notice the image here, verse 8, that God, we're
talking to God about
what apparently is God's view of us, children
who won't betray him.
I have two little children myself.
I don't watch my back when I'm around them.
I trust them, more or less.
And I trust them as much as they trust me.
I figure I can live with them if they can live
with me.
That's the image.
In all their distress, it wasn't an angel,
verse 9, it wasn't a messenger or an angel,
but his presence that saved them, again, a
reference back to Exodus.
In his love and in his pity, he redeemed them.
He lifted them up and carried them all the days
of old.
It's an interesting statement.
What are we going to say about our past?
What does it mean to be the people of God with
a long history?
Well, it's a history in which God has carried
us, not we ourselves. Right?
That sounds like Paul.
You know, it's grace all over the Old Testament.
That's not supposed to be there.
It must be a misprint.
No, but there it is.
They rebelled, verse 10, but they rebelled.
The other thing we know about ourselves in the
story of Israel, and this is remarkable
because it's all over the story, the other
thing we know about ourselves is that we don't
live up to the calling we have committed
ourselves to.
This is also true of us Christians.
You think about this.
You remember the story, for example, of the
Last Supper.
The story of the Last Supper is that on the day
that Jesus instituted the thing that we
do every Sunday and have for 2,000 years, 52
times 2,000, nearly.
What is that, 100,000 times, give or take.
That day, the very people with whom he had the
supper betrayed him.
Before the cock crows three times, you will
deny me.
The one with whom I share this bread will
betray me.
Every Sunday we remind ourselves that we are a
community built on the testimony of people
who betrayed Jesus Christ at the decisive moment.
That's not the way I would have put it together
if it had been up to me.
This is not just the New Testament.
All the way through the Bible, they rebelled
and they grieved his Holy Spirit, which just
means him.
They grieved him.
He became their enemy.
An echo you see in Lamentations 2 also.
He became their enemy.
He fought against them.
The redemptive action that he should have been
carrying out in fighting, he carries
out as a deed of punishment.
Then they remembered the days of old of Moses,
his servant.
Where is the one who brought them up out of the
sea with the shepherds of his flock?
Where is the one who put within them his Holy
Spirit, who caused his glorious arm to March
at the right hand of Moses, who divided the
waters before them to make for himself an
everlasting name, who led them through the desert?
He's going back to Exodus, 40-55 does this.
And now we're doing it again with a little
different twist.
Let's remember the Exodus.
Let's remember redemption, but let's remember
also that the redemptive presence is something
we long for and don't always have.
Like a horse in the desert.
They didn't stumble.
I'm not sure I would have compared myself to a horse.
Like Secretariat maybe.
This sounds more like an old nag.
Like cattle that go down into the valley and so
on you get the rest of it.
So we're going to talk about that tension.
Praise lament.
Life disaster, holiness, sinfulness, success, failure.
And we're going to go to lament.
The other thing I said yesterday was that
throughout these texts you have a two-sided
relationship, a dialogue, God on one hand and
his people on the other hand.
And you get both sides.
This has always amazed me that in the Bible you
don't get just one side, it's not propaganda.
You get both sides.
Here's the other side.
Look down from heaven and see from your holy
and glorious habitation, where are your zeal
and your might, the yearning of your heart and
your compassion, they are withheld from me.
For you are our father though Abraham doesn't
know us and Israel doesn't acknowledge us,
you O Lord are our father, our redeemer from of
old is your name.
Why O Lord do you make us stray from your ways
and harden our hearts so that we don't
fear you?
Have you ever heard this prayer in church before?
This is the only place in the Bible it appears, right?
Like this?
Well, no.
The answer is no.
It's all over the place.
There is this sense that in the life of faith
there are moments at which it is appropriate
indeed necessary to say to God, where are you?
Why haven't you delivered?
You made these promises, you promised to be
with us and to love us and to embrace us.
Where are you?
And this is the ultimate act of faith because
it trusts that the story of God and God's
promises really should be delivered on.
It assumes that when God says something he will
do it.
And sometimes doubt is a great expression of faith.
That's one I want taken in context, if I may,
that last sentence.
Why do you stray from us?
And then he goes on, all right, now we're
calling out to God and the first part of this
lament goes from 15-19, we're calling out to
God, we're addressing God and we're talking
about him, or we could break it down this way,
15 and 16 is a regular lament.
It's an address.
Hello God, we want to talk to you.
17-19 are the lament.
The lament is we've been abandoned.
You haven't been here.
And here are the specifics, verse 18, the
sanctuary has been trampled, the temple is
in ruins.
And verse 19, another specific is we've been
people that you haven't ruled.
Now that sounds funny because it could cut both
ways actually.
Does he mean on the one hand we've been unruly
people that you haven't really taken charge
of and corralled?
Or does it mean, what I think it means, which
is that we have not been the beneficiaries
of your gracious rule in which you get rid of
the enemies and you bring in the reign
of justice and peace and harmony.
We've been barbarians, outlanders, and we need
your help.
All right, so that's the complaint.
And then longing, oh that you would tear open
the Heavens and come down so that the mountains
would quake at your presence.
This is the language of the appearance of God, theophanies.
Many places, texts like Exodus 15 or a text
like Psalm 19, various other places.
As when fire kindles brushwood and the fire
causes water to boil, to make your name known
to your adversaries.
That's an interesting image I think.
The appearance of God is like cooking.
I've never heard that in church before.
To make your name known to your adversaries so
that the nations might tremble at your presence.
That's the language, to make your name known to
the adversaries.
That again takes you back to Exodus because you
remember what God says to Pharaoh, says
to Moses about Pharaoh.
I'm going to do this. Why?
So Pharaoh will know who I am, so everybody
else will know who I am.
Or Exodus 15, all the nations, the Philistines
and all these other people know who he is.
God's reputation is at stake.
God's honor is at stake.
And the Psalm, see I use that word because
that's what it is, right?
The Psalm wants to say to God, your honor is at stake.
When you did awesome deeds we didn't expect.
God if you in the past acted when we weren't
looking for you, who is God that I should
listen to him?
This is Pharaoh, right?
When I go to Egypt and I say this to my people,
they will say to me, what's God's name, right?
This is Moses about his own people.
They weren't expecting deliverance.
You came down, the mountains quaked, from ages
past no one has heard, no ears perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you who works
for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who
remember you in your ways, but you were
angry and we sin because you hid yourself.
Notice this, because you hid yourself we transgressed.
Whose fault is it?
In a way it's a fascinating discussion because
in the prophets you keep getting this message
that if we don't straighten up our lives, God
is going to disappear.
But then you say, okay, now what happens if God disappears?
Well then we'll sin.
So we'll not sin.
He's going to do something that will leave us,
I mean there's a paradox there, right?
And so there's an awareness of that paradox.
Verse 6, we've all become like one who is
unclean and all our righteous deeds are like
a filthy cloth.
We fade like a leaf.
This reminds you of Psalm 1, I think,
intentionally or otherwise.
And our iniquities like the wind take us away.
There's no one calls on your name or attempts
to take hold of you.
For you have hidden your face from us and have
delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
Yet Lord, you are our father.
We are the clay and you are our potter.
We are the work of your hand.
Now it's interesting that the way this is often
used is the way Paul uses text like this.
God can do anything he wants to.
But that's not the claim here.
God has molded us lovingly like an artist,
makes his own work.
An artist doesn't easily destroy his own handiwork.
Why would you do that to us?
Don't be angry.
Don't remember iniquity forever.
We are your people.
Your holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion
is a wilderness, Jerusalem's a desolation.
Our holy and beautiful house where our
ancestors praised you has been burned by fire
and our
pleasant places have become ruins.
After this, will you restrain yourself, oh Lord?
Will you keep silent and punish us so severely?
What I want to get at is, what is this?
This is worship.
It's an odd kind of worship.
It's a real kind of worship.
It's faithful worship because it appeals to the
ancient story.
It says our identity is rooted in our narrative.
We have a story, it's a story of redemption,
it's a story of grace, it's a story of undeserved
favor, it's a story of salvation at an
unexpected time.
That story seems to be broken.
It seems to be broken by God.
God, would you please start the story again?
We ourselves are not able to do that.
We know we're a little tiny group of people in
the corner of the Persian Empire, often
the middle of frankly nowhere.
With Jerusalem's like Abilene, this is nowhere, right?
Or as in Abilene we say, this is Merkel out in
the country.
You're not going to be able to restart this story.
Yeah, we can build buildings, we can cut stones
and build this temple, but that's no guarantee
you'll live there.
We can act justly, but will that do any good?
That's the question.
And again, it's not simply the statement of
faithless people, it's the statement of people
who long to be faithful, who long to find God
and hope that he finds them.
Now I say that all of this, and this could go
on and on at considerable length, but it's
striking as a kind of lesson for the rest of us
because this text seems to me to speak
to the experiences of lots of Christians, even
now, and lots of folks outside our churches.
And if I can preach again, I have to wonder if
you're a person who is in a world of desolation
and you come into a church where all they're
seeing is blue skies and rainbows and isn't
it beautiful, isn't it wonderful to be a
Christian, what in the world do you feel?
More desolation?
Seems almost like mockery.
Not that we should always be gloomy, but that
maybe we should be richer, have greater levels
of experience.
So lament.
Now there is an answer to all of this in
chapter 65.
God responds.
Because you have this discussion through these
chapters, a real conversation.
What about this and what about that?
And finally, perhaps at the end, a kind of
resolution in which God says, I will restart
the story.
This is not the end.
Do not despair.
And maybe in there, maybe we should read 66
with relief and then go back to 40 and read
to 55.
It's like a musical score, maybe, I don't know,
it's like a musical score, it says
DS at the end of 66 and there's a sign and you
go back to the beginning of 40 and then
you go to 55 and you stop.
I have no idea if that's right, but at the
moment it makes sense to me.
There is this sense of triumph at the end.
But there's also this need to live in a world
that's not utopia.
And there's a need to try to work through that
tension and to live out that intention
and to embrace it.
And that need, I think, is the need all of us
feel today in the U.S. of A in 2004.
We don't live in utopia.
All our efforts to recover utopia are doomed to
fail because utopia is not an option in
this world.
But to give up the search is to invite disaster.
And so we live in that tension of hope, knowing
that it's not fully realized, but knowing
that to avoid it is not thinkable.
Because we live in a tension where God, who
lives in utopia, can also live and work and
move and change and act and redeem in a world
that's not.
And that, I think, is the message of the
worship text of Isaiah 56-66.
Let me stop and we have a few minutes.
Any questions, remarks, violent disagreement,
jokes, I guess?
Yes, Sir?
I think that when I'm saying, I've had prayers
with a man who's been very quiet, very indecisive,
very pretentious. Right.
But I've never been a part of a congregational movement.
How many, anybody here have?
Has anybody here done that?
Would you tell us about it?
A congregational lament?
We visited the East County Church in West
Morgantown, Wisconsin, when they had a service
of lament.
And they had had a series of tragedy events
happen and the members of the church family. Right.
to it, cleaning the lives day after day, and
it's what I remember moving about. The whole
service was the service of women. There's
songs, there's prayers, there's scriptures,
there's world covers. And I remember
particularly the husband of the gentleman who
was small
when he died, at the Lord's Supper, praying how
long it would come on. So I think it was
that. It was at the same time lonely, but at
the same time healing because it was a community
that was really surrounding a number of people
who were mourning loss or tragedy.
And I took honor of that by devoting my worship
to that.
By being part of that. And so Deesta describes,
I think, lament in response to crisis in a
lot of ways. You wonder what's, you know, I
live in a family in which we lost a child,
my wife and I. And you go to church and nobody
says a word because they don't know how. It's
not they're bad people, they don't know how.
It's devastating to think that the people
of God have no language for talking about that
is fairly shocking, actually. And then
I wonder, you know, if you look at Christian
practices through the centuries, there are
other ways to do this. I mean, you have
something like days of remembrance, a time like All
Saints Day, November the 1st. Not just a day to
come down off the sugar high. You know,
you remember the past, you remember the people
who have gone on. Or in Jewish tradition,
Teshavah, the 9th of Av, you mourn the
destruction of the temple. These things come
out of the
life of the community. You know, I'm not sure
it would make sense to say on the third Sunday
in April, we're going to have a lament for no
discernible reason. But they come out of
the life of the community and they become ways
of really shaping the community. I mean,
this is a much deeper way to be community. I've
got to be happy all the time. I mean,
first of all, I can't do it. A day a year,
that's about all I can actually muster. But
I, you know, if I've got to do it all the time
and in church and I've got to smile,
well, some days I don't want to do that. So
does that mean I have to be a fake? Yes. Yes, Sir.
The service is often in search for their hope.