Just like we get tired of bad news
from the news media,
I’m sure you are like me
and get tired of bad news
from the Sunday lectionary readings.
We’ve been getting a lot of it lately.
The punch line to Isaiah this morning, is:
”God expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness, but heard a cry.”
There is a pun of sorts, in here,
but because we don’t read ancient Hebrew —
including me —
we do not catch it.
There is a one-letter difference
between the word for justice and for bloodshed —
mishpat v mishpah —
and between the words for
righteousness and cries.
I mention it only because
I have bragged about Isaiah the poet before,
and that is some of the word-play
he often employs.
Anyway,
this doggone bit from Isaiah
begins like a love-song
to a lover
that quickly changes key.
It is all about God’s outrage
at God’s lover, Israel.
The vintner,
a metaphor for God,
did everything he could
to raise the choicest, loveliest,
most equisitely flavorful grapes
only to discover they were moldy,
smelling, rotten, and foul.
In a fit of rage
the vintner ploughs asunder
the vineyard,
tears down the protecting hedge,
and turns it back to nature.
I say, “Bravo!”
We could use a little more
turning back to nature, if you ask me.
Good thing I am not God.
Then there is that painful
Jeffrey Harrison poem,
”How it Worked.”
I’m sure all of us
had some parental trigger
when we felt slighted
or betrayed
or disfavored
by one of our parents or grandparents
who treated a sibling better.
I never knew any of my grandparents
and both my parents were only children,
so I didn’t have any aunts or uncles.
But I did have a great aunt — Aunt Elma.
She was a gem.
But she didn’t hesitate
demonstrating favoritism toward me.
For example,
she took me out every year on my birthday
and bought me whatever I wanted,
usually more than one thing.
I don’t think she did that
with my sisters,
so maybe that sowed some resentment?
Anyway, the poem
is a view from the other side
of the playing field from Isaiah,
where we only hear about God’s outrage.
The poem voices
hurt and anger
from a son who feels rejected.
We do not have Israel’s voice
in that poem from Isaiah
but if we did it might sound
like Harrison’s poem.
Or, the voices of the Ammonites
or Hittites or Jebusites
who were Israel’s neighbors
and might have worked up
some jealous rage, too,
had they known Yahweh.
Then along comes Jesus.
Clearly he is not happy to be
playing the role of fire-breathing prophet
sowing division
between those who should
be at peace one another.
But it isn’t really him
swinging a weapon.
Rather, it is simple cause and effect.
He has come, he says elsewhere,
to share a vision
for how to create
the kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven.
Just holding up that vision
is going to piss some people off,
excuse the crude saying.
Or as Harry Truman famously retorted,
when someone told him
to “Give ‘em hell, Harry!”
”I told ‘em the truth
and they thought it was Hell.”
Just putting it out there
creates division
and if it gores our ox
or calls our baby ugly, then we get angry.
If it is someone we care about
or whose affirmation we deeply desire,
who is telling us something we
do not want to hear,
then we get hurt and angry AND outraged.
Look out!
All of which is to say,
what has been caricatured
as an angry, vengeful
Old Testament God
verses a loving, gentle
New Testament God,
is horse pucky.
In each testament
God and the prophets of God
describe the causes
and warn against the effects.
If we live this way,
then this will happen;
but if we live that way, that will happen.
That is not to say
there wasn’t some smiting going
in the first few books of the Bible,
and the threat of smiting
in apocryphal New Testament verses,
but both are the exception
not the rule.
I don’t ascribe to those
any more than you do.
But what we often hear
as God,
or the prophets of God,
threatening to rain down
doom and destruction upon us,
is actually a warning rather than a threat.
They are descriptions
of what will happen
if we continue to live
in particular ways.
You may know
that I am a recovering alcoholic,
and for better or worse,
that experience and the 12-steps
are one of my primary lenses.
I have estimated it was about eight years
from the first time someone warned me
about the consequences
of my continuing to drink and
use drugs recreationally,
and when I finally acknowledged
that I was powerless before alcohol.
It was only then,
when I accepted the reality
of the reckless and debilitating
cause and effect of my choices,
that I felt God enter the scene
and nurture my recovery.
I had prophets in my life
but I ignored them
and God wasn’t going to save me
from my resistance.
The ancients texts
of biblical wisdom are like that,
the promise
that actions have consequences
and God isn’t here
to save us from ourselves.
Giving us prophets, warnings,
poetic and metaphorical descriptions
of the causes and effects,
is what God does in the biblical text.
The rest is up to us.
The laments and stories
are not God warning us
that God will clean our clocks
if we don’t shape up,
it is God warning us
that the Cosmos
is an intricate ecosystem
and operates upon interdependence.
So our actions have consequences
up and down the line.
Climate change
is the perfect metaphor
of what Isaiah and Jesus are up to
in the readings today.
There have been people
warning us for a century
about what would happen
if we keep doing what we have been doing.
There are consequences to how we live.
Whether it is draining the Colorado River
with an insatiable straw
or pumping plastics into our water,
no one is going to save us
from the consequences
of our actions
other than us.
God,
and the prophets of God,
have been giving us a head’s up
for several millennia.
The sword Jesus brings
is wisdom
not a clever.
The wisdom is how to live
in such a way
that we can create
the kingdom on earth
as we imagine it is in heaven —
how to live
in such a way
as to avoid the consequences
we dread.
So biblical images
and stories
and prophecies
of doom and destruction
are easily lampooned
in our more intellectually sophisticated
culture of the 21st century.
But the joke is on us
for not recognizing the sublime wisdom
that is actually held within
these ancient poems and stories.
They are really just warnings
that we will live
with the consequences of our actions
and there is no fairy Godmother
or Godfather
who will arrive at the critical moment
and save us from ourselves.
BUT, and this is critical,
we have the wisdom we need
in order to change our trajectory
and to create a more life-giving place
on earth
as it is in heaven.
Having the wisdom we need
is indeed, good news.
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