A Lovesong

Isaiah 5:1-7

Anyone who walks away from reading the Bible with less than a conviction for social justice, peace and mercy, hasn't read enough.

That's how I feel coming off this week's lectionary scripture from Isaiah.

Isaiah paints us a picture - an object lesson, if you will - in the voice of God. God has great hopes and plants a vineyard on a hill of fertile soil. The vintner removes all the stones, plants the finest vines, and is so confident of the glorious harvest to come the gardener builds ("hews") a wine press. This is truly a love song.

But the love turns sour.

The vines do not yield choice grapes, but wild grapes - unsuitable for cultivation and useless for good wine-making. At any rate, they aren't what the Vintner was hoping and working for. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Isaiah expresses God's disappointment as the destruction of wrathful vengeance, as a clearing-away of the garden, as the Gardener's abandonment of the garden to the threats of the wild.

But the threat of imminent doom stands only to emphasize the source of God's disappointment: God expects fairness among the people, and finds only injustice (NRSV: "bloodshed"); expects righteousness, but finds only cries of distress. The people's failure to live a zionic lifestyle, to live in right relationship with each other, to treat each other and foreigners with compassion and fairness. Injustice is the real plague of the vineyard! And it is already bearing its fruit - useless to God.

From a rhetorical point of view, this poem is amazing. It was likely written at the time of the annual wine harvest, when such songs were common entertainment and praise in the streets. Isaiah plays on this. Typically, women would be primarily responsible for singing during the wine harvest, singing love-songs where they themselves are the vineyard and their lover is the vintner, their fruit children. Hearing a grizzled man singing this must have been a sight. (Perhaps the crowd might have listened to hear the story an old man's tryst in younger days, or the sexual imagination of a supposed man of God.)

The song's replay of working the fertile soil, clearing and planting the vineyard, would all have been heard as references to love-making. But at the end of verse two, Isaiah turns the tables, and declares the fruit unsuitable. The term "wild grapes" is literally "noxious fruit."

Even the wordplay in the final stanza would have impressed listeners: Isaiah poetically juxtaposes justice (Heb: mishpat) with bloodshed (mishpakh), righteousness (tsedaqah) with a cry of distress (tse'aqah).

Beautifully composed, the wine-harvest festival poem shows a genius of marketing - taking the occasion of the day, even a successful harvest (presumably a sign of God's favor and pleasure), and artistically turning it on its head to highlight the shortfall of the people in their (true) worship of God: social justice.

This is a love song that we need to sing again.

Hope and Forgiveness Under Captivity

Isaiah 55:1-9

The background of captivity and exile for these verses is important. It is one thing for those in power to sing about the justice of God and about their nation being a light to the world. But here, deutero-Isaiah speaks of God's steadfast love and everlasting covenant with the people - a people defeated and exiled and returned to the kind of slavery from which they were delivered in Egypt. To speak of God's steadfastness and love in this context is daring and unexpected.

But it is also a song of comfort and reassurance: come and drink and eat, you don't need money or to work for what God offers. While all around you you are ruled by money and markets and demands and exchange, God offers what is God's freely, without price. Even David, so long ago a warrior and king, is lifted up as still meaningful - "you still have a nation," deutero-Isaiah seems to be saying, "you still have an identity as a people, you are still unique and special and beloved." And then, as if to glory in the inversion deutero-Isaiah is creating here, the writer shouts that nations they are not aware of will run to them, that God is working beyond them to bring new people to them (as a rescue from the Babylonians, or referring to the Babylonians themselves as having been brought to the Israelites to learn something from them?). Even in the midst of enslavement and exile, God is working to bring people together.

Who are the wicked here? The Babylonians? Israelite exiles who have abandoned their religion for that of their captors? Hebrew or Babylonian overlords who deal unjustly with their charges? We don't know, but are assured that God's forgiveness extends even to them - should they turn from unrighteousness.

It takes extraordinary suffering, sometimes, to cultivate an awareness of forgiveness. Profound hardship can sometimes (hopefully) lead to a profound forgiveness - a forgiveness so deep that it mirrors a divine compassion, and is articulated as God's own pardon.

Isaiah 62:1-5

In the context of "Racial Justice Sunday" and so near the celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, this scripture takes on forceful meaning. "For Zion's sake, I will not keep silent" - about injustice, about prejudice, about militarism, about nationalism. All of these themes King lived and spoke about. Our particular debt to King rests in his having put plainly before us the undeniable economic dynamics of our moral malaise. Racism is an economic proposition, too, designed and perpetuated in part to maintain economic relations in place. Injustice is an economic issue as well. Militarism and nationalism are racism writ large, and serve the same economic ends - to further enrich the wealthy, at the expense of maintaining the grinding poverty of the poor.

For the sake of Jerusalem I will not rest until her vindication shines out like the dawn. A declaration of commitment for justice activists today, and a pledge in Isaiah's day as well. Isaiah, we must remember, defined the true worship of God as defending the poor, the widow and the orphan, the stranger and foreigner. (And remember that he was speaking in the context of Israel being invaded by a brutal enemy, marching on Jerusalem itself.) For him, Jerusalem and the Temple were meant to be the center-place of worship of God - the epicenter of justice and right-treatment of others.

Isaiah was facing the imminent siege of Jerusalem. The invading Babylonians were laying waste to the countryside in their march to the holy city. And Isaiah steps back from this horrific scene of doom to say that Jerusalem will be a jewel, neither forsaken nor desolate, and that quite contrary to everyone's expectations Jerusalem will be rejoiced over by God because of her faithfulness - her treatment of the poor and lowly!

The actual fate of Jerusalem, we know from history, was more mixed - spared this time but later to fall to Babylon. But spoken on our lips, in our country, the pledge is no less poignant: we will not keep silent! We will stand up and protest and speak truth to power. We will set ourselves against the unjust actions of our nation and churches. We will rise up like lions after slumber, always before us the vision of the reign of God. We are not as naive as Isaiah was, believing that the king or president will obey God's Will in true worship, rather than serve the nationalistic, tribalistic, greedy and racist values that increase his wealth and power. The king and president serve Power. We serve God. And in God's reign there is no place for race or borders; no flags are flying in that kingdom. God serves all; so must we.

The nations will see our vindication, and we shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give. There is yet no name to describe the citizens of this new kingdom, the kingdom of God, of Zion. We are yet indescribable, indefinite, beyond any label or category. We will be given a new name.

Let's work to be worthy of the new name, the new kingdom, the new world. Keep salvation burning like a torch, setting fire to pyres of injustice and inequality. And, of course, that means that something will have to burn before the day is done.

Faithfulness

Isaiah 43:1-7 (esp. 1-2)

The connection, presumably, to the other lectionary texts this week is the mention of water (which can be interpreted to refer to baptism, specifically the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan). There is an irony here, though, since in this Isaiah passage the waters are a threat and danger against which God protects the faithful. God's promise in Isaiah, however, is companionship through the waters and fires - the same promise made by Jesus in leaving the Paraclete, "the one who walks beside", or the Spirit.

There is another parallel here with the Paraclete: redemption. The way "redeemed" is used has legal and economic implications - as if there is a debt or suit against someone, and another advocates for that person and perhaps assumes the debt or pays the suit in that person's stead. Paraclete has that same nuance of "advocate" as well as comforter.

Another part of this scripture is important: the command "Do not fear." Isaiah is just coming off a long list of charges against Israel, criticisms and chastisements. And yet, he can turn right around and in that same spirit of God speak words of consolation. You have failed, Israel, you have been unfaithful; but don't be afraid, I haven't given up on you. No matter what happens, I will be with you.

Such faithfulness, even if it is onesided, is beautiful (and anti-semitic Christians would do well to remember the pledges of God on Israel's behalf).

The Kingdom Call: Unity of Opposites

Psalm 148

I am usually uncomfortable with so much praising - seeing it as an outgrowth of imperial or kingly court influence or overlay on the religious devotion of the people, an attempt to transfer awe and allegiance of God to the king or emperor. So I found this particular psalm difficult to approach.

That being said, I can certainly appreciate the idea that the whole universe ought to appreciate the source of creative growth, stand in awe at the wondrous complexity and endurance, the fragility and perserverance of life and crystals and the atomic numbers on the periodic table of elements.

(I did find it entertaining when the psalmist spoke of the "waters above the heavens" [4] and "sea monsters" [7]. It reminds me that, yes, this an historical document reflecting a particular time and understanding, much of which I cannot share. And it reminds me to be generous in my reading.)

But something started to come together in verses 9 through 12. Fruit trees and cedars, wild animals and cattle, creeping things and flying birds, kings and people, women and men, young and old. These are all pairings of populations that compete with one another. Each of these is clearly distinct from the other and often vies for power and prosperity, sometimes for survival. Yet in this psalm they are united, singing with one voice, in praise of something greater than they. Herein lies the crux: God unifies disagreeing parties, and those who would praise God must join their voices with their enemies' if they would send a pleasing sound. This is the kingdom of God, Zion: unity in the face of division, diversity in the face of competition and forces that would wipe out diversity, holding all things sacred - especially our enemies and victims and those who oppose us (and whom we oppose). The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6)

Worship of God necessarily includes reconciling with our enemies, with our resources, with our sources of sustenance... with all creation, starting with what we most violently oppose or exploit.

And that is truly worth the whole world's praise.