“Then you shall call, and YHWH will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, ‘Here I am’ (58:9a).
Friends, according to the timeless prophetic witness of Isaiah, God is always available, always attentive, and always attuned to those who work for justice.
God is far less interested in great shows of religious practice.
For instance – our beautiful liturgies, our careful arrangements for the altar, our richly decorated vestments – all of these have a purpose. All of these are for the purpose of helping to point us beyond ourselves and towards the ineffable, towards the divine, towards Christ crucified on behalf of the world. When we devolve towards thinking that these liturgies and the candles and the music and the gestures are sacred in and of themselves, and point the finger towards anyone who “gets it wrong”, then we are closing in on idolatry.
I, personally, find all of this beautiful and meaningful and helpful – and I”m guessing you do as well, or you would find another way of doing church. And, I admit, there are times in which the order and the beauty of our liturgical practices in and of themselves soothes my heart and helps my mind find peace when the outside world seems chaotic and indifferent to suffering.
But Isaiah and Jesus and Paul all lift up the truth this morning, that we can follow all the rubrics, all the best practices, and not find salvation. Our worship is empty, God is not listening, if our worship does not witness to the truth of Christ crucified out of love of God and love of neighbor as self and raised as a permanent witness to justice and the eternal power of love.
God is not greatly interested in shows of religious practice. God is greatly interested in how we treat the poor and the stranger and the suffering.
When crosses, whether worn prominently as a necklace, as the current White House press secretary does, or as happened on January 6th as large objects to pray around and then use to bludgeon police officers, have no resemblance to the cruciform practices that God chooses – offering bread to the hungry, housing the wretched poor, clothing those without clothes, appreciating and attending to your kin – which are biblically defined as all other human beings, then these crosses are idolatrous.
Jesus stands as a direct descendant of Isaiah who himself stands in the long 300-year history of the prophets of Israel who had showed no interest whatever in public displays of piety.
Justice, these prophets said again and again, is the way to the heart of God.
We cannot have it both ways. We cannot have the goods of the kingdom – an intimacy with Christ, the power and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the incorporation into the Body of Christ, the Church – and the goods of the world – power to wreak havoc on others as you maintain your own privilege and security, status of being one the few chosen ones, billionaire wealthy ones, invited into Epstein’s circle of influence, or whomever the current power broker is.
The powerful people of Isaiah’s day kept the law, they groveled before God, they wore sackcloth and ashes, they gashed themselves, they offered sacrifices of grain and oil and valuables – but it was all for nothing. Less than nothing because all it did was distance themselves even more from the Divine. What they did or said or wore or sang or prayed or gave was without meaning if it was not also accompanied by the actual works of compassion and justice.
It was the same in Jesus’s day. And it is the same in our own day.
Justice, all the prophets insist. Justice is what God attends to, what God listens for, what God calls out for.
The reading from Isaiah begins
Call out with full throat, do not stint,
Raise your voice like a ram’s horn,
And tell to My people its crime,
And to the house of Jacob their offense.
I was at a protest recently and a woman arrived with one of those air horns and began blasting it. It was indeed like a ram’s horn. Loud. Insistent. A blaring warning.
My ears couldn’t take it and I moved to a different place, farther away. But even from farther away I could hear it. And the memory of the sound and my annoyance has stayed with me. The truth is, prophets and ordinary people who really raise their voices, who call out with a full throat, who do not stint in their loudness – they can be annoying. They can be off-putting. It is easy and inviting to distance ourselves from them.
And yet, there are times in which telling out the crimes of injustice and inhumanity loudly as annoying and awkward as it is – is necessary. God bless that woman with the air horn.
I don’t seen anywhere in the prophets or in the gospels or in the writings of the early church where we are excused from the essential practices of justice and mercy. We are light, as Jesus tells us. Because we belong to the Body of Christ, we are light – and our purpose is to shine so that our good works of relieving suffering and advancing the causes of justice give glory to God.
How is God inviting you, as a Jesus-following people, as a Christ-saturated community, into the cruciform – cross-shaped practices of justice and mercy – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing those without shelter, setting the downtrodden free?
It is true that our prayers and our actions, week after week, can seem like a drop in the bucket of overwhelming injustice and need. But we are people who live and move and have our being in the power and righteousness of the Eternal Almighty.
And the claim our long-ago faith ancestor Isaiah made has not ceased to be true – Your vindication shall march before you and the Lord’s glory shall be your rearguard, you shall call and the Lord shall answer, cry out, and He shall say, “Here I am!”
And the blessings that our Lord Jesus claimed for the peacemakers and the pure in heart and the merciful have not lessened. These prophetic blessings are the living tradition we stand in. It is not a fainthearted one or a shrinking one or a fearful one. It is a tradition that includes airhorns calling out injustice and quiet behind the scenes works of visiting the sick, stocking food banks, going to City Council meetings, praying, singing, studying scripture together, weeping in lament and rising in resilience and determination.
Friends, I am so glad to worship with you in a beautiful liturgy, wearing beautiful vestments, for the purpose of taking our worship out with us to do the work we are called to do – being the Body of Christ in the world, working for peace, for mercy, and for justice.