February 17, 2010
Southminster Presbyterian Church, Boise, Idaho
Isaiah 58:1-14
Shout out, do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments,
they delight to draw near to God.
“Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The LORD will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.
If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the LORD honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the LORD,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10
We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.
For he says,
“At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
and on a day of salvation I have helped you.”
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!
We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.
We are entering Lent, a 40 day period of retrospection, traditionally a time of fasting and prayer to prepare our hearts and minds and lives for the Good News of Easter. And the best way to prepare for new and deeper relationships is to repent. We have a prayer of confession in worship each week, but this is the service of confession and repentance.
And true repentance is rare in our culture. Mark McGwire, the homerun champ, recently acknowledged what everyone could tell just by looking at him. He’d used steroids.
I wonder about the value of his repentance. I hope it will lead to restored relationships. But he acknowledged that he is only coming clean now, despite years of lying about it to everyone –including his family, friends, investigators, and congress—he’s only coming clean now so that he can get a job with the Cardinals as a batting coach. And he still claims that he took performance enhancing drugs only for their health benefits, not to strengthen his hitting. Again, I hope his repentance is true and will lead him to restored relationships.
But if you look around our culture, you see disgraced politicians from both sides of the aisle, telling their constituents they are sorry for their “indiscretions” while their wives stand faithfully behind them. And then many of those same politicians go on with their lives as if nothing has changed. We offer cheap repentance in our culture.
While I certainly believe in second chances, I do wonder what kind of message we are giving to our kids with our cheap repentance. What are they learning from us when we say we’re sorry and then go on with our lives, business as usual?
Apparently, things were similar back in Isaiah’s day. They may not have had steroids, but they seemed to have self-serving repentance too. And these people had some real reasons to seek God’s forgiveness, for they had abandoned the covenant and the ways of their God and ended up in exile. They needed deliverance from captivity and bondage.
Yet the people were going through the motions of fasting, repentance, dust and ashes, but were not changing the way they lived. Isaiah even accuses them of serving only their own interest on fast day and makes it clear that this is NOT the fast that God chooses.
What God wants in our repentance and in the religious acts that surround repentance, is spelled out pretty clearly. We are to seek the welfare of our community by fighting injustice, setting free the captives, sharing our bread with the hungry, clothing the naked, and welcoming the homeless poor into our homes.
Sadly for us, what God wants from us is often far from what we are willing to offer to God. Many people give up things for Lent. And perhaps giving up caffeine, or chocolate, or brussel sprouts might bring you closer to God, but how many of us have decided that for Lent we’re going to invite the homeless poor into our homes? How many of us have decided to actively seek justice as our Lenten practice?
There is a dichotomy in our Isaiah passage between selfish concerns and the concerns of the community. If our repentance is self-serving, worshipping God so that God will do something for us, it will not bring us closer to God. The repentance God wants is free of the anxiety of selfish concerns. It asks us to freely give to help those in our community, with no concerns for how we will benefit.
Because, here is the truth.
All of our benefits come from God.
They do not come about because of our own actions.
This is the mystery of grace. In grace, we are freed to live more fully in community with our fellow brothers and sisters.
In the fast that God chooses, “we are invited to receive ourselves and others as gifts, discovering in God’s engagement with us a life that can only be a life together.” (Thomas W. Currie in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol 2, page 4). Do our acts of repentance help us see the people we meet as God’s other beloved children? Do our acts of repentance help us see how our society has broken down, reflected in the reality of widespread hunger, homelessness, violence, and oppression?
In Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, he seems to be wearing his ashes pretty visibly. Paul has taken such a stand for reconciliation of God’s people and such a stand for the gospel, that he has suffered because of it. Like Isaiah, he understands that our faith should not be self serving, but focused on the welfare of the community. Reconciliation is what we are called to as the church, even with people to whom we don’t particularly want to be reconciled.
But Paul wants us to see that reconciliation is worth it all. Like Isaiah before him, Paul wants to make clear to people that we aren’t fasting for the sake of fasting, or suffering for the sake of suffering. But both of them want us to see the connection between our mortality—our frail human lives—and our eternal lives. From dust we come and to dust we shall return is our story just as is the story of the cross that leads to eternal life.
Ash Wednesday, for Presbyterians at least, is the one day of the year you wear your faith visibly on your face. A little later in the service, we’ll put ashes on our foreheads, and go out into the world with the mark of our cross visible to the world. We will wear our mortality on our foreheads as we proclaim the promise of eternal life. Ashes are an ancient liturgical practice. Job repented in dust and ashes (Job 42:6). In Joshua, the Israelites put dust on their foreheads before the ark of the covenant (Josh 7:6). Daniel repented with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes as he prayed to God (Daniel 9:3).
As we go out into the world with the sign of our repentance on our forehead, I pray that it will not be in vain. That it will lead us to a repentance that will benefit the lives of the people we meet, freeing us to live into the grace that has saved us, with clean hearts and right spirits.
And when that happens, hear the promise from Isaiah:
If you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the LORD,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.
Amen.
