FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY
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.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 