Monthly Archives: February 2025

Transfiguration, Exodus and Their Anti-American Narratives

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TRANSFIGURATION OF OUR LORD

Exodus 34:29-35

Psalm 99

 2 Corinthians 3:12 — 4:2

Luke 9:28-43

Prayer of the Day: Holy God, mighty and immortal, you are beyond our knowing, yet we see your glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Transform us into the likeness of your Son, who renewed our humanity so that we may share in his divinity, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

This story of Jesus’ Transfiguration is told also in the gospels of Matthew and Mark. It has a close parallel in John’s gospel where Jesus’ prayer to be glorified is answered by a divine voice like thunder. John 12:27-32. Each account is unique in the telling. I am struck by two details given to us in Luke’s account. The first has to do with timing. Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus and the disciples ascended the mountain “after six days.” Thus, the Transfiguration would have occurred on the seventh day. The number seven is heavy with meaning in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. It signifies completion, perfection and wholeness. At the dawn of time, God rested on the seventh day, having completed the work of creation. God commands us to do the same each seventh day or sabbath. The sabbath is a reminder that work has its limits. There will be an end to toil and struggle. Sabbath rest is a foretaste of God’s promised rest for a weary creation, a rest that knows no end.

Luke, however, has the transfiguration occurring “about eight days after these sayings,” these sayings being his admonitions for all who would follow him to “daily take up their cross.” Luke 9:23. One may take the number eight to signify not merely the completion and perfection of creation, but a new creation. We can perhaps hear an echo of the vision imparted to John of Patmos where God declares at the close of the present age, “Behold, I make all things new.” Revelation 21:5. The Transfiguration therefore points forward and back. Its glow reaches back to the dawn of creation and floods the Hebrew scriptural narrative. It also shines forward into the future illuminating the culmination of time where God is finally, “all in all.” I Corinthians 15:28. On the mountain of Transfiguration, time is enfolded into eternity. The lines of demarcation between past, present and future dissolve into God’s eternal now. The universal and seemingly irreversible process of death is universally reversed such that Moses and Elijah, two long dead figures whose lives were lived centuries apart, are seen conversing with Jesus and one another.

Luke’s account is also unique in another respect. Unlike Matthew and Mark, Luke tells us what Jesus, Moses and Elijah were talking about. They were discussing the “departure” Jesus was to accomplish at Jerusalem. The Greek word for “departure” employed by Luke is “exodos,” referring back to the book by that name and the story it tells of God’s liberation of Israel from slavery in Egypt. It is a remarkable story, not merely because it proved formative for Israel and continues to be so for Jews today, but also because it has no peer in ancient religion and mythology. This is not the story of a god who sits at the apex of a divinely ordained hierarchy topped by a king who reigns as the god’s representative through a standing army of subordinates with slaves at the base. The faith of Israel is not merely a metaphysical justification for an oppressive status quo. Exodus is the story of how the God of slaves and refugees turned the hierarchy of empire on its head by making of a people that was no people a nation governed by Torah, by precepts that apply equally to kings and servants. The land of promise was so called because it represented the promise of a different way of being human. It was a land where the poor, the widow, the orphan and the resident alien were not to be left on the margins but shown particular care and sustenance. The measure of this new nation’s greatness was to be its treatment of the most vulnerable in its midst in accordance with Torah.

It is perhaps owing to Luke’s insight that the church’s liturgy and hymnody have from the beginning woven our observance of Lent, Holy Week and Easter into the saga of Exodus and the Passover. Like the Exodus, the ministry of Jesus turns hierarchy on its head ignoring national, social, religious and class distinctions. He turns the imperial notions of glory as power, domination and victory on the field of battle inside out by his identification with the lowest of the low, by being executed as a criminal in the company of criminals. He embodied a preferential option for the “least” and most vulnerable in his life and death. God’s resurrection of Jesus was God’s stamp of approval on all that Jesus was, said and did. The way of taking up the cross is, contrary to historic measures of greatness, the way of life. It is a way now open all.

The feast of the Transfiguration prefigures Jesus’ Resurrection even as it stands at the precipice of our Lenten journey to the cross. It offers us a glimpse of the feast to come beyond lifelong struggles with our urge to dominate and control, our addiction to wealth and privilege, our bondage to the cycles of retribution and violence, our allegiance to the false gods of nation, race, blood and soil. The Transfiguration reminds all who spend their lives standing with LGBQT+ folk, the undocumented living in our midst, the sick insurers have deemed unfit to live and the homeless whose very existence is fast becoming a crime that they are on the right side of history. Though hated for their associations and persecuted by a government driven by racist hate, theirs is nevertheless the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Exodus story as well as the gospel narratives are in many respects Anti-American. They tell a story quite different from the narratives that dominate our American culture’s civil discourse, its politics and too much of its religion these days. Ours is a story that desperately needs retelling and, perhaps more importantly, living. God knows and we should know as well that those of us who claim to follow Jesus have often wandered off course. We have been seduced by ideologies that equate wealth with divine favor, violence with justice, exclusion with holiness, whiteness with rightness, patriotism with faithfulness, privilege with blessing and might with right. Yet somehow, as much in spite of us as because of us, the gospel narrative has survived. The light of the Transfiguration has flared up at critical times throughout history to renew the church, sustain it through difficult times and purify it from corruption. By God’s grace, the faithful witness of saints and martyrs and the power of the Holy Spirit, the “Old, Old Story of Jesus and His Love” remains for us to retell and relive.

Transfiguration

The sky was dark and overcast the day

we began our ascent to the top of that mountain.

Cold mist soaked our garments from without

as did the sweat of our weary bodies from within.

Up and up we followed in His footsteps,

each of us wondering how He knew the way

and how He could see the path through the

impenetrable fog all around us on every side.

Our hearts pumped frantically, our lungs gasped at the thinning air,

our aching limbs longed to fall motionless to the ground.

And so they did at long last when finally we reached the summit.

Broken with fatigue we lay down on the grass,

heedless of the cold and wet, leaving Him to His meditations.

Of what we saw-or thought we saw-when we awoke

I still cannot find words enough to tell the half of it.

His face shone like the sun as he conversed with the ancient ones.

The cloud enveloped us and brought us to our knees

with the power of a mighty ocean wave.

But most terrible of all was that voice driving

like a nail into our very souls these words:

“This is my Son, my Beloved. Listen to him.”

Small wonder we fell to the earth and hid our faces.

When at last we found enough courage to open our eyes

the cloud was once again cold drizzle and fog,

the voice silent, the ancients gone

and only He remained to lead us back to the plain.

Source: Anonymous

Love as an Act of Resistance

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SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

Genesis 43:3-11, 15

Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40

1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

Luke 6:27-38

Prayer of the Day: O Lord Jesus, make us instruments of your peace, that where there is hatred, we may sow love, where there is injury, pardon, and where there is despair, hope. Grant, O divine master, that we may seek to console, to understand, and to love in your name, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Luke 6:27.

“We are to serve our enemy in all things without hypocrisy and with utter sincerity. No sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved is too great for us to make for our enemy. If out of love for our brother we are willing to sacrifice goods, honor and life, we must be prepared to do the same for our enemy. We are not to imagine that this is to condone his evil; such a love proceeds from strength rather than weakness, from truth rather than fear, and therefore it cannot be guilty of the hatred of another. And who is to be the object of such love, if not those whose hearts are stifled with hatred.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, (c. 1951 by SCM Press, Ltd.), p. 165.

At age eleven, I hated Keith for good reason. Three years older than me, he and his younger friends made it their mission to make my life as miserable as possible. Twice Keith beat me to a pulp. Once he sneaked into my yard and cut the heads of the garter snakes I kept as pets (Yes, I know. Keeping snakes is pretty weird). He would routinely show up with his crew of followers in the ally in back of my house to hurl insults and rocks at me. He was probably the worst enemy I ever had.

Standing up to Keith on the field of battle was out of the question. But there are other ways to fight back. Keith’s home was a block away, separated from my yard by a vacant lot. From the safety of the underbrush, I could lob rocks, dirt clods and insults at Keith whenever I found him in the front yard. Sometimes he gave chase, but I knew the vacant lot like the back of my hand, every nook, cranny and hiding place. He soon grew tired of my little game of whack-a-mole and retreated home. I remember well the day I found him flirting with a neighbor girl he was obviously trying to impress. From my hiding place I made loud smooching noises that made his love interest laugh-and that only made Keith more livid. Of course, I knew I would pay dearly if Keith ever caught me out in the neighborhood. Consequently, whenever I left my yard, I kept a wary eye out for him.

In retrospect, I think it must have been an unhappy summer for both of us. I longed to be able to go where I wanted without always looking over my shoulder. I have no doubt that Keith longed to be left in peace to work on his dirt bike or chat with his love interest without harassment. But the conflict had gotten bigger than both of us. I think we both wanted it to end, but we didn’t know how. On one of the many occasions on which I was badgering Keith from the shelter of the vacant lot, I made an insulting remark about his mother. Suddenly, Keith exploded with an energy I had never seen before. He raced across the street to the lot as I hunkered down in my hiding place. “F@#k you Cotton Tail (his derogatory name for me)!” he shouted. “You don’t know nothing about my mom. Nothing!!! I swear to God that I’ll kill you the next time I see you!” Keith spent more time than usual hunting me down that day, but to no avail.

I think that was probably the last time I went out to harass Keith. Part of my reluctance was fear. I more than half believed he might kill me or make me wish he had. But there was something deeper. I knew that, somehow, I had inflicted a deeply hurtful blow. I had wounded Keith in way deeper than he had ever hurt me. To say that I now loved him would be a stretch. But for the first time, I saw him as something other than a bully. I saw him as someone who had a mom, someone who could be hurt. Tormenting Keith no longer seemed clever, funny or adventurous. I saw it for what it really was. Just plain mean.

Keith and I never became friends, but our mutual animosity gradually cooled as we both grew older. By the time he was in high school and I was in junior high, we were waving and greeting one another. Keith remained in our hometown after college and medical school where he started his dental practice. If I ever get back there again, perhaps I will pay him a visit. I would like to know what triggered his hostility against me. Was it because he, being short for his age, saw in a younger kid who was nevertheless four inches taller a threat or a challenge to his manhood? Was I just an easy target because I was weird. (You must admit, a kid who keeps garter snakes as pets is clearly on the far side of normal). I would also like to know how my remarks upset him. What was going on with his mother and his family? I am not interested in obtaining an apology or offering one, though one is probably owed on both ends. I only want to understand and, perhaps, be understood.

More than a few insightful people have said that the definition of an enemy is a person whose story we do not know. When threatened by hostility, real or imagined, we have a natural tendency to ascribe the most sinister of motives. In reality, however, there is always a lengthy and complex road that has led all of us to who, what and were we are today. Our lives have been shaped, for better or worse, by family, church, peers and education. We are the products of every life experience, every triumph and trauma, success and failure, friendship and betrayal. If we are to follow Jesus’ commands to love our enemies and “do unto others what we would have done unto us,” then we need to learn our enemies’ story. We need to get ourselves into their skin and view the world through their eyes. Only then does it become possible to love one’s enemies, forgive them and begin to address their needs.

I do not mean to suggest that any amount of trauma, tragedy or abuse one suffers can justify or excuse one’s own acts of cruelty, violence or abuse. But knowing where the enemy’s hostility is coming from can enable us to avoid needlessly triggering it and give us the tools to diffuse it. More importantly, knowing one’s story makes empathy possible. Knowing the pain, fear and loneliness from which hostility springs can help us become more understanding, generous and forgiving. We discover in our enemy’s story common ground and opportunities for building bridges and opening doors for justice to be done, reconciliation achieved and peace made.

Love is less a matter of feeling than of action. You don’t have to like your enemies to love them. You don’t have to respect their opinions, ideologies and bigotry. And under no circumstances must their abusive behavior be enabled by reluctance to provoke them. While Jesus absolutely enjoins his disciples from taking revenge against their enemies, employing violence against them or usurping the prerogative of God alone by executing judgment upon them, he does not advocate acquiescing in the face of their aggression. There are numerous manners by which hostility can be resisted nonviolently and constructively. Jesus’ entire life was one of resisting the forces of oppression, violence and cruelty with the power of love. He employed parables that deconstructed his opponents’ prejudices and opened their minds to a deeper and richer reality. He exercised radical hospitality embracing all who sought his help, begged for healing and came posing questions. He could be found in the banqueting halls of religious and civic leaders and in places where notorious sinners and outcasts gathered. He embraced even his torturers with a prayer for their forgiveness. In essence, love is the most potent act of resistance to evil. It is a refusal to be drawn into the vortex of retribution that knows no end. It is a refusal to allow the enemy to dominate space in our minds and hearts. It robs our enemies of the power to transform us by their malice into a mirror image of their hatred. Love breaks the cycle of tit for tat, leaving the enemy powerless.

Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies requires that we be truthful with them. Truthful speech is the deepest expression of love. It is no act of love to allow a bigot to continue in his bigotry. It is no act of love toward your congregation to smooth over or ignore abusive and bullying behavior by some members against others. It is no act of love for one’s nation to remain silent in the face of injustice. Love does not always inspire love in return. Sometimes it sparks hostility and resentment. But disciples of Jesus know that the truth, painful as it can sometimes be, sets one free. Disciples know that they have been saved from self destructive behavior by the Truth that is Jesus. How can they withhold that lifegiving Truth from those they are called to love?

Here is a poem by Frank Chipasula love for country that reflects the sort of clear eyed love that is truthful, passionate and hopeful.

A Love Poem for My Country

I have nothing to give you, but my anger

And the filaments of my hatred reach across the border

You, you have sold many and me to exile.

Now shorn of precious minds, you rely only on

What hands can grow to build your crumbling image.

Your streets are littered with handcuffed men

And the drums are thuds of the wardens’ spiked boots.

You wriggle with agony as the terrible twins, law and order,

Call out the tune through the thick tunnel of barbed wire.

Here, week after week, the walls dissolve and are slim

The mist is clearing and we see you naked like

A body that is straining to find itself, but cannot

And our hearts thumping with pulses of desire or fear

And our dreams are charred chapters of your history.

My country, remember I neither blinked nor went to sleep

My country, I never let your life slide downhill

And passively watched you, like a recklessly driven car,

Hurrying to your crash while the driver leapt out.

The days have lost their song and salt

We feel bored without our free laughter and voice

Every day thinking the same and discarding our hopes.

Your days are loud with clanking cuffs

On men’s arms as they are led away to decay.

I know a day will come and wash away my pain

And I will emerge from the night breaking into song

Like the sun, blowing out these evil stars.

Source: O Earth, Wait for Me. (c. 1984 by Frank Chipasula; pub by Ravan Press). Frank Mkalawile Chipasula (b. 1949) is a Malawian writer, editor and university professor. He earned his B.A. from the University of Zambia, Lusaka and, following graduation, worked as a freelance broadcaster for the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation while studying English and French. In 1978 Chipasula went into exile in the United States and studied for his M.A. in Creative Writing at Brown University. He earned a second M.A. in African American Studies at Yale University and earned his Ph.D. in English literature from Brown University in 1987. His first book, Visions and Reflections, published in 1972 was the first published poetry volume in English by a Malawian writer. You can read more about Frank Chipalusa and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

Why I Am Not A Progressive

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SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

Jeremiah 17:5-10

Psalm 1

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Luke 6:17-26

Prayer of the Day: Living God, in Christ you make all things new. Transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of your grace, and in the renewal of our lives make known your glory, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals
   and make mere flesh their strength,
   whose hearts turn away from the Lord…..

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
   whose trust is the Lord. Jeremiah 17:5,7.

The most direct reason I can give for not being a progressive is that my faith is in Jesus, not progress. Now let me unpack that for you. I have nothing against progress per se. Furthermore, I am thankful for what I believe most of us would agree represents progress. Polio vaccine is a great advance over the iron lung. Brown v. Board of Education is a great progressive advance over Plessy v. Ferguson. The ball point pen is an improvement over the quill and fountain pens. But I also believe that progress is tentative, uncertain and easily reversed. Witness the dismantling of USAID, the threatened dismantling of the department of education and the reversal of numerous regulations implementing civil rights hard won by the work of lawyers, legislators and community organizers from the 1940s to the present. Progress is a fragile thing. Once made, it can easily be unmade. Trusting it is a dicey proposition.

There is also, I believe, a degree of arrogance in self identifying as a progressive. It presumes that we know what progress is and that any person of good will can recognize and advance it. That presumption becomes particularly lethal when one’s perception of progress is entangled with religion. There is a line in an otherwise fine hymn in our Lutheran Evangelical Worship that sends shivers down my spine. The hymn celebrates the role of saints in the church and the various ways they fulfil their baptismal calling. The first line in the second verse is the one that gives me pause:

Some march with events to turn them God’s way;

some need to withdraw, the better to pray;

some carry the gospel through fire and through flood:

our world is their parish, their purpose is God.

“Rejoice in God’s Saints,” Text: Fred Pratt Green; Music, Music: C. Hubert H. Parry, published in Lutheran Evangelical Worship, #418.

Do we really know which way God is turning events? Is God’s purpose in history so crystal clear that we can with certainty align ourselves with it? The missionaries of the 19th century who rode the waves of colonialism into Africa and Asia did so with the firm conviction that the advance of “Christian civilization” into the lands of “heathendom” was “God’s way.” Make no mistake about it, they were persons of good will and intent. Many of them left behind family, possessions and comfortable lives to do what they believed to be God’s mission. The tragic consequences of the church’s partnership in the ruthless exploitation of colonized lands and peoples are all too evident today and constitute a dark episode in the church’s history. Lest we be tempted to look down our enlightened and sophisticated noses at these ancestors in the faith, we ought to be mindful that the next generation will likely see with a clearer eye the consequences of our own well meaning efforts to do God’s will. What blind spots, missteps and unintended results will they uncover?

The prophet Jeremiah warns us that “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?” Forty years of ministry have taught me how difficult it is to distinguish between a principled stand on an issue of importance and a stubborn need to be right. It is not always easy to distinguish between a desire to achieve a goal that furthers the mission of the congregation and the need to have something under one’s belt that counts as “success” in doing the work of a church perceived to be in decline. The confidence, trust and respect given the pastor of a congregation can easily go to one’s head. There is sometimes a fine line between ministering to the needs of another person and feeding those of your own. So, too, sincere efforts to bring needed change to society in the political realm are often sabotaged by ignorance, self interest and prejudices to which we are blind. What we imagine to be a push in the direction of progress frequently turns out to be fueled by self interest and destructive in its results.

But the prophet has more to give us than this dire warning. Jeremiah assures us that blessing follows all who trust in the Lord. Those words do not come easily from the prophet’s mouth. Jeremiah witnessed the conquest of his beloved country, the destruction of its holiest place and the loss of land it occupied for over five centuries. His was the task of speaking a word of hope and encouragement to exiles living as prisoners in the land of their conquerors. He saw first hand how human leadership, patriotism and religious conviction can be distorted in ways that lead to destruction. Jeremiah knew well that what the human heart deems progress often leads to catastrophic consequences.

But Jeremiah also knew that God’s judgment upon our misbegotten striving after progress is not God’s last word. While undue confidence in human endeavor brings curse, God responds to curses with blessing. Blessing followed a world plunged into violence so severe that it took a global deluge to curb it. Blessing found Sarah and Abraham, the wandering nomads, refugees and aliens living in the shadow of empire. God’s blessing to them endured and was passed on through the lives of their flawed, self seeking descendants. God blessed the descendants of Abraham and Sarah once again as they lived under the curse of slavery, making of them a free nation. Blessing followed Israel into exile and on its subsequent journey back to its homeland. The God who blesses can be trusted to continue blessing. But as it was in Jeremiah’s time, so it may be today. Blessing may lie on the other side of judgment. Perhaps we need to see everything we consider progress stripped away before we are able to recognize the better hope God has to offer us.

I don’t mean to say that we should give up on the United States, cease our efforts to advocate for justice or resign ourselves to the demise of democratic norms. These days are calling for even stronger witness and action on behalf of the most vulnerable among us and throughout the world. As disciples of Jesus, we need to keep doing what we have always strived to do, though, as Saint Paul would say, “do so more and more.” I Thessalonians 4:10. I believe, however, that what we do needs to be grounded in something bigger than restoring America, saving democracy or achieving any other goal we count as progress. Our witness and work needs to be to and for the reign of God-which is not the endpoint of our own notions of progress. The reign of God is so far beyond our comprehension that even Jesus could speak of it only in parables. The most we can say is that it consists of God being “all in all.” I Corinthians 15:28.

“All” is a very expansive word. It means that there is no person, place or thing God would exclude from the fabric of God’s new creation. The way of God does not always comport with our view of progress-which often comes at the expense of persons, animals, ecosystems, relationships and communities we neglect or deem expendable. God’s power is God’s patience. I think the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, captures something of what God’s way of establishing God’s reign entails.

“The sheer force of things lies in the intermediate physical process: this energy of physical production. God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”[1]    

By contrast, we who call ourselves progressive are impatient. We think we know what the final project looks like and we want it finished soon. I can relate to that. When I was young, my father tried to interest me in building model cars. His aim was to teach me to follow directions, focus on detail and develop a sense of how automobiles work. For my part, I wanted to get the job done and the model on my shelf. Invariably, I ended up with left over parts. These I simply swept into the trash along with the packaging. The finished product, once painted, looked enough like the picture on the box to satisfy me. But God will not be so rushed. The persons we deem obstructions to progress are essential pieces of the patchwork quilt that is God’s new creation. God will have no left over parts, even if it means the project takes longer and must be halted, reversed or even torn down in order to include a part that we in our haste for closure have neglected. That may not look like progress, but it surely is grace.

Here is a poem by Jacqueline Woodson speaking on behalf of some casualties of progress, parts left out of American history, American opportunity and the American Dream.

February 12, 1963

I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital

Columbus, Ohio,

USA—

a country caught

between Black and White.

I am born not long from the time

or far from the place

where

my great-great-grandparents

worked the deep rich land

unfree

dawn till dusk

unpaid

drank cool water from scooped-out gourds

looked up and followed

the sky’s mirrored constellation

to freedom.

I am born as the South explodes,

too many people too many years

enslaved, then emancipated

but not free, the people

who look like me

keep fighting

and marching

and getting killed

so that today—

February 12, 1963

and every day from this moment on,

brown children like me can grow up

free. Can grow up

learning and voting and walking and riding

wherever we want.

I am born in Ohio but

the stories of South Carolina already run

like rivers

through my veins.

Source: Brown Girl Dreaming (c. 2014 by Jacqueline Woodson, Pub. by Penguin Press) Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, but grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of over thirty books for children and young adults. Her honors include the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Newbery Honor. She received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement, the St. Katharine Drexel Award and the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature. You can find out more about Jacqueline Woodson and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

[1] Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality (c. 1979 by The Free Press) p. 346.   

How Long?

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FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

Isaiah 6:1-13

Psalm 138

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Luke 5:1-11

Prayer of the Day: Most holy God, the earth is filled with your glory, and before you angels and saints stand in awe. Enlarge our vision to see your power at work in the world, and by your grace make us heralds of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

 “How long, O Lord?” Isaiah 6:11.

This question posed by the prophet Isaiah is a constant refrain in the psalms of lament. Psalm 13 is a prime example:

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?
   How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
   and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” Psalm 13:1-2.

The children of Jacob cried out, “how long must we suffer enslavement in Egypt before you fulfill the promise you made to Abraham and Sarah to bless us and give us a land of our own?” The answer, four hundred years. Israel cried out, “how long must we live as exiles in a foreign land?” The answer, seventy years. So, too, Isaiah answers the call to prophesy to the kingdom of Judah and is told that his people will only shut their eyes and stop their ears to his words. The more he preaches, the more resistant and hostile his hearers will become. Naturally, he asks “how long? How long must I go on speaking when no one is listening? How long must I put my life on the line speaking a word that makes no difference?” God’s answer is less than encouraging:

“Until cities lie waste
   without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
   and the land is utterly desolate;
until the Lord sends everyone far away,
   and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.” Isaiah 6:11-12.

If Isaiah had anything to say in reply to that, it is not in the record. But if I were in Isaiah’s shoes, I would be asking, “so what’s the point? If your warnings will not be heeded or your promises believed, why are you sending me on this fool’s errand?”

Isaiah lived during the twilight years of Judah’s existence as an independent kingdom. He saw Judah’s king abandon the faith of his ancestors and place his trust in a treaty with the brutal empire of Assyria, a treaty that required him to place images of the empire’s gods in the Temple of the Lord. It was a betrayal of Israel’s faith, but an act necessary to national survival in the world of realpolitik. In matters of state, the words of the prophet were deemed irrelevant at best and, at worst, seditious. I can hear his audience telling him, “Please pastor! Keep politics and social policy out of your preaching.”  

The prophet well knew Judah’s arrangement with Assyria was the first domino in a series of catastrophes that would bring destruction upon the land. His preaching, however, could not sway the people of his own time and place. The king continued to pursue his faithless course of action with the result that Judah was reduced to poverty through the payment of heavy tribute and its land devastated by destructive wars. The prophet failed to turn Judah from its faithless and self destructive ways. So, I wonder, what was the point?

Though it may not be immediately evident, there is some wildly good news for us here. And while it may have been cold comfort to the prophet Isaiah, I think that the answer to our question lies in the fact that the prophet’s words remain for us to read these twenty-five centuries later. They were invaluable to the nation two generations later languishing in exile, trying to understand what had happened to them and why. The prophesies of Isaiah inspired generations of Jewish believers for generations and helped them hold on to their faith through the darkest of times. They guided the earliest followers of Jesus in interpreting and understanding his life and mission. Perhaps Peter and his fellow apostles heard in Jesus’ call for them to follow him and become fishers for people an echo of Isaiah’s response to God’s call: “Here am I; send me!” Words of the prophet are engraved on the famous “swords to ploughshares” statue in front of the United Nations. As a later prophet in the tradition of Isaiah would point out, “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” Isaiah 40:8.

The lesson from Isaiah is a good word for people called to work that does not seem to make much difference. I remember Isaiah as I walk the beach picking up plastic bottles even as I know the world is dumping eight million pieces of plastic into the ocean each day. I think of Isaiah whenever I make what I know is a modest contribution to ELCA hunger relief or drop off a contribution to our church’s food pantry knowing that 25,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, die from hunger and related causes each day. I remember the call of Isaiah to preach to an unreceptive audience whenever I realize that my own preaching often seems like a whisper in a hurricane. In the end, it is for me to do what I can where I can with whatever I have, and for God to do with it what God needs done, where God needs it done and at the time of God’s choosing-which may or may not become clear within my lifetime.

Discipleship in an age of violence, racism, poverty, inequity and ecological crisis is not an easy calling. Yesterday I learned that our government is attacking, defaming and attempting to defund our ministries to the poor, the homeless, the sick and mentally ill. There is a real possibility that a legacy of ministry built up over eighty years will be erased with the stroke of a pen. I must say that I have never seen the like in this country before. Sometimes there is barely enough light for the next step forward. But none of this is new to the people of God. The saints before us have traveled this road before. We know persecution, slander and intimidation. Our ancestors in the faith have left us a wealth of preaching, poetry, song and teaching to guide and encourage us. Through them God reminds us that God is Immanuel, “God with us.” So take heart my friends. We’re going to get through this.

Here is a poem by Mary Oliver about John Chapman, better known as “Jonny Appleseed.” He was a man who lived gently on the land and did what he could with what he had in the time given him to leave behind some beauty and sweetness in a violent world.

John Chapman

He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
he cooked his supper
toward evening
in the Ohio forests. He wore
a sackcloth shirt and walked
barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went
the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
as young girls.

No Indian or settler or wild beast
ever harmed him, and he for his part honored
everything, all God’s creatures! thought little,
on a rainy night,
of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
racoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.

Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
at whose parents’ house he sometimes lingered,
recalled: he spoke
only once of women and his gray eyes
brittled into ice. “Some
are deceivers,” he whispered, and she felt
the pain of it, remembered it
into her old age.

Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever

the secret, and the pain,

there’s a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.

Source: American Primitive (c. 1978 by Mary Oliver, pub. Little Brown and Company) p. 24. Mary Oliver 1935-2019 was born in Maple Heights, Ohio. She was deeply influenced by poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her work received early critical attention with the 1983 publication of a collection of poems entitled American Primitive. She is a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award. You can read more about Mary Oliver and sample some of her other poems at the Poetry Foundation Website.