In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
“You shall be called the repairer of the
breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” Isaiah conveys the message that
God intends to restore the people to the peace and righteousness that they are destined
for. And furthermore, God intends that it is our godly behavior that will bring
this about. Would that we be deserving of such a title – repairers of the
breach.
Because
of the reality of human sin, brokenness has always been a part of our story.
There has never been a time when we perfectly obeyed God’s law and lived
without war or oppression. There is a gap between God’s loving purposes and the
way we live our lives. That gap is the breach. It’s not that we need to find
some golden-era of our history and make that happen again. Rather the work of
our faith is to do our part to fill in that gap, which sometimes seems more
like a chasm, between the love, justice, mercy, and peace of God and the
violence, greediness, and selfishness in our lives.
I’m
younger than most of you, and so I don’t have your lived experience. But from
where I sit, born in 1984, the breach that we seem to be in right now as a
nation is wider than it has ever been. The anxiety, the dissention, the
vitriol, the mistrust, the tension, the brokenness are all palpable. We wake up
each morning and log-in to Facebook, open the paper, or turn on the news to see
what it is that we’re supposed to be angry about today. It’s almost as if we’ve
forgotten what peace or tranquility feels like. We’ve become so accustomed to
scapegoating and raging that we can’t function when we don’t have an object to
absorb our anxiety. This era that we’ve living in feels different than any
other that I’ve lived through.
As
I said, I didn’t live through World War II, the Vietnam protests, or the Civil
Rights movement. Maybe those of you who did live through those times have felt
this societal tension and unrest before, I don’t know. But I do know that we
can’t go on like this much longer. Our collective blood-pressure is too high,
the tone of conversations is too caustic, the prospects for our future are too dim.
In
our text from Matthew, Jesus conveys the importance of the writings of the Old
Testament. We would do well to take a cue from our Savior and focus in on the
words from Isaiah this morning. This passage of Isaiah comes in a section of
the book known as Second Isaiah. Chapters 40-59 were written after the Exile of
Israel in Babylon, as the people were liberated from their captivity. As they
return to the land, they sought to reestablish their religious rituals – fasts
and sacrifices. But they were also returning to some bad habits – an inwardly
focused religion, ignoring the needy, and constant quarreling with each other.
If it sounds like the version of Christianity that seems to be prevalent in
America, well, then all the more reason to pay attention to Isaiah’s prophecy.
There
really are two sorts of religion out there. One version focuses on the
individual – God’s salvation to me and my allegiance to God. There is certainly
some truth in this sort of faith, but it misses the larger point. It’s sort of
like confusing one puzzle piece for the entire thing. God, through Isaiah,
critiques this version of the faith, saying “Announce to my people their
rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.” God notes that the people are
seeking to follow God, claiming to be a nation of righteousness, asking for God
to bless their nation. The people even like to draw attention to their faith
with public prayer services and picking religious fights with others, even
saying to others “My sincerely held religious beliefs dictate that I tell other
people how to live their lives.” They were becoming me-first nation, one that
was closed off to others and focused on securing their borders instead of
helping those in poverty. I want to be perfectly clear on this: I’m talking
about ancient Israel – all of this stuff is in the Bible, you can look it up.
If you find parallels to our modern situation, all the more reason to keep
paying attention to Isaiah.
But
God isn’t swayed by this legalistic and uncompassionate sort of faith. The Lord says “You serve your own interest
on your fast day, and oppress all your workers.” God asks his people, “When did
I ever ask you to make yourselves a miserable bunch people who spend all day
judging each other and fighting with each other?” Rather, God has made it clear
through Abraham, Moses, Ruth, and Micah that God chooses a fasting from
injustice, a cessation of slavery, a stoppage of oppression. God isn’t as
interested in the things that we do not do, but rather the things that we
actually do. Instead of people saying “My faith tells me that action is
immoral” and then forcing that opinion on others, God makes it clear that the
sort of faith that God is expecting is the sort of faith that eliminates
poverty, and homelessness, and breaches in community.
And
in our society you can see that these two sorts of religious understanding are
still alive and well. I want to be perfectly clear, Republicans or conservatives
are not to be identified with the self-serving version of faith any more than
Democrats or progressives are to be identified with the justice-oriented
version of faith. Political party or ideology is not a part of this
conversation. The issue isn’t what beliefs you bring to the table. God’s altar
is plenty big enough that there is room for everyone. The issue is what you do
at the table.
When
you see someone who is hungry, do you share some bread? When you have an extra
room, do you invite in the homeless refugee? When you see someone without a
winter coat, do you give them one? When you encounter someone you disagree
with, do you say “thank God I’m not like them,” or do you see them, first and
foremost, as a child of God? This is what God expects our religion to be about
– not following rules, but doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with
God.
This
is what St. Paul writes about in his letter to Corinth. He says “I decided to
know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” There were
fierce debates in the early Church about all sorts of things – whether the
faith was only for Jews, or if foreigners should be allowed in, or who was
qualified to be a leader. Paul could have gotten sucked into this deformed
version of Christianity. He could have weighed in with his opinions or
thoughts. But he doesn’t. In another place, he says that he regards all of that
sort of stuff as “rubbish.” All that matters is Christ crucified. And what does
the Cross shows us but the realization that being right doesn’t count for
anything, that those who seek to preserve their life will lose it while those
who lose their life will find it, that compassionate action is preferred to
pious thoughts.
The
Cross is so crucial because it repairs that breach between us and God, between
God’s intention for us and our sin, between our divisions and God’s peace.
Because Jesus was willing to stand in that gap of being forsaken, bloodied, and
beaten, he becomes a bridge for us who are willing to follow his way.
In
Matthew, Jesus exhorts us to be the light of the world and the salt of the
earth. It’s a question of what we do with light and salt. Do we put the light
in a lantern or a lighthouse? The same candle can either be used selfishly, or
for the good of the whole world. Jesus
knew what he was doing when he offered us these metaphors. The interesting
thing about light and salt is that when you use them, they dissipate and
dissolve. It goes back to the reality that faith isn’t to be self-serving.
Sure, we can hoard onto our light and our salt, just as we can use our religion
to validate our political agenda – that isn’t hard to do, we’ve been perfecting
that approach for thousands of years. Light and salt though only become
effective and find their purpose when they are given up to something bigger
than themselves. This is what the Cross shows us, that because Jesus was
willing to give up his life, we were able to see the love of God in a deeper
way.
Isaiah
makes the choice clear: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of
the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer food to the hungry, and satisfy
the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness.” We
have breaches that need to be repaired, we have dark places that need light. In
Lent, we’ll focus on the breach of racism in our culture during our Wednesday
night program.
God
trusts us and empowers us to do this work. Isaiah writes “The Lord will guide you continually… 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 we are going to be deserving of these titles, if we are
going to practice the sort of religion which God desires, then we are going to
have to realize that Jesus was right when he said “Unless a grain of wheat
falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it
bears much fruit.”
You’d
think that after 2,000 years we’d have figured this out, but we haven’t yet.
New life only comes through death. Resurrection only comes through the Cross.
Salvation only comes through defeat. If our religion, or politics, is self-serving,
focused on being right, or about following rules, we’ll never get to the hope
of Resurrection.
There are plenty of breaches to be
repaired. It is up to us whether they grow wider or find healing and reconciliation.
What sort of religion do we practice – one that draws people together or one
that divides people, one that tells others what not to do more than it informs
what we are to do, one that focuses on our comfort and security more than on the
suffering and oppression of others? It is not my job to tell you what to
believe, what to think, or what to do. I’m not in that business, because, God
knows, I don’t have it all figured out.
But
here’s what I can tell you – as a nation, we need to decide what kind of people
we want to be. Are we a nation with a priority of security and prosperity or a
priority of “liberty and justice for all”? Do we want to be a lantern or a
lighthouse? And as individuals, we will also have to decide what sort of person
we want to be. Will we focus on ourselves or will we be the light of the world
and the salt of the earth? Will we seek first our power, prestige, and comfort,
or will we die to ourselves so that we might live for God? Is being right more
important to you than being together? Will we repair the breaches of our world?
Is your faith more about you or more about God, more about judgment or mercy,
more about gaining your life or losing it?
Whatever
you decide, however you choose to live, whatever you choose to believe, whomever you choose to judge, how much you decide to love, whether or not you
seek to save your life or to lose it – that’s your choice to make. Just make
sure that you’re comfortable with that choice. We begin most Sundays with a
prayer that acknowledges that to God “all hearts are open, all desires known,
and no secrets are hid.” Make sure the choice that you make is the one you want
to be judged by.
