Making Space for Grace

Isaiah 60:1-62:5

Philippians 1:27-2:18

Psalm 72:1-20

Proverbs 24:11-12

This Sunday in church we'll be looking at Isaiah 61 through the lens of Luke's Gospel as Luke relates to us the story of Jesus going to the synagogue in his home town and reading to the people part of this chapter of Isaiah. By reading this section Jesus tells the people of his home town what the character of his mission will be. He does this as much by what he leaves out from the Isaiah passage as by what he actually quotes.  Here is the original Isaiah passage.

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me,

for the Lord has anointed me      

to bring good news to the poor.  

He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted      

and to proclaim that captives will be released      

and prisoners will be freed.

He has sent me to tell those who mourn      

that the time of the Lord’s favor has come,      

and with it, the day of God’s anger against their enemies.

Now, contrast this with what Jesus reads in Luke -

18"The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

     because he has anointed me

     to preach good news to the poor.

  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

     and recovery of sight for the blind,

  to release the oppressed,

   19to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Jesus stops the quote just before the section about God's anger against Israel's enemies. Why did he do that?

He seems to have done this deliberately to provoke a response from his listeners. Some passages of scripture, along with some hymns and styles of sermon act like comfort blankets to people in churches.  James Hogg once spoke in the 1600’s about the people of Auchtermuchty (yes, it is a real place name) that “Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation.”  Now that might have been true in Hogg’s day but for much of the rest of history it would be better said that, “Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning someone else to eternal damnation – preferably their enemies!”

I suspect that in the Synagogues this passage from Isaiah probably had the same effect on people.  They would have loved hearing it, thinking of themselves as the poor (because everyone’s “poor” compared to someone else right?) They were all prisoners of the Romans (even those making a fortune out of feeding and supplying them) and they all wanted to see God’s enemies (who also just happened to be their enemies) getting a good kicking.



But Jesus goes and leaves out the best bit!  What about kicking enemies?  It’s all very well talking about the Lord’s favour but for many people it’s not enough to get blessed by God, someone else has to be roasting in hell as well to make it all worthwhile.  Jesus speaks more about the reality of Hell and God’s judgement than just about anyone else in the Bible but more often than not Jesus is also accused by many of the religious people around him for being too soft on people and taking the side of sinners instead of the good people who read the Bible and thought they were good before God.

Here in this passage Jesus provokes anger from his audience by making space for God’s grace to act in the life of people.  God is not in a hurry to judge.  He is “Slow to anger and quick to love” as the writer of Psalm 103 tells us.  Am I like that or do I jump quickly to put people in boxes and leave no room for God’s patient mercy and grace to operate in their lives?  Make space for grace and allow the Living God to work at his own patient speed in the lives of other people.  Sometimes we are in a bigger hurry than he is.

The call from God's Word

Isaiah 57:15-59:21

Philippians 1:1-26

Psalm 71:1-24

Proverbs 24:9-10

 6 “No, this is the kind of fasting I want:

   Free those who are wrongly imprisoned;

      lighten the burden of those who work for you.

   Let the oppressed go free,

      and remove the chains that bind people.

 7 Share your food with the hungry,

      and give shelter to the homeless.

   Give clothes to those who need them,

      and do not hide from relatives who need your help.

Many of the clergy I know have a passage of scripture that God has used to call them in to ministry or to confirm in their vocation. A friend of mine who is a Roman Catholic priest received a message from God through the Old Testament book of Chronicles that strongly affirmed him in his calling and others I know have been called through passages in Romans, the Gospels, etc.

The passage God used to call me to this work is found here in Isaiah. I have seen that with other people the passage that God has given them has set the tone for virtually their whole ministry and that is the case with this Isaiah passage for me.

In the UK in the early nineties there was a movement called March for Jesus. This involved churches joining together across denominations to walk through towns and cities in carnival style processions shouting and singing a liturgy that proclaimed in a joyous way God's love and Christ's Lordship. I took part in the Belfast version of this as the bass player in one or the bands and every week in the run up to it our local churches in Monkstown met to practice on Sunday evenings.

Before one of these practices I felt something that I had never experienced before which was God calling me to speak to the people gathered there on Isaiah 58. I asked my minister if I could do this and he very graciously said yes. I had never read Isaiah 58 and so had no idea what God was calling me to do.

As you can see from the section above, Isaiah 58 is a call from God away from false, loud, demonstrative worship that is hollow and meaningless and a call for God's people to get involved in social justice to show they were truly worshipping God. I read this and panicked! This was going to sound like a direct criticism of the whole project, or at the very least people's motivation for being involved in it.

Sunday came round and with 3 churches gathered there I stood up to bring the the Word of God. I spoke for about 30 seconds on something rambling and apologetic (in the sorry sense, not the robust defence sense of the word) and then froze.  I couldn't think of a single thing to say for about 1 minute (it felt more like an hour!) and then finally God gave me the words to say. What they lacked in finesse they made up for in sincerity and people were moved by this call to act for social justice from Isaiah through the mouth of this stuttering and unsure 16 year old.

This was the start of my calling to what we Presbyterians call the ministry of word and sacrament. That initial call through the words of Isaiah has more than left its mark and even now my preaching  and ministry is tinted with a strong sense of God's call to social justice and his love for the poor.

Nice Idea Paul - We just don't want to do it...

Isaiah 54:1-57:14
Ephesians 6:1-24
Psalm 70:1-5
Proverbs 24:8

The One Year Bible is normally great at splitting bits of the Bible up into meaningful chunks so that each day you get a bit of the Old Testament, New Testament and Psalms and Proverbs that makes sense and (unless it's a big long Old Testament story or series of prophecies) it rarely divides passages that are meant to be read in the one go.

With today's Ephesians reading however it splits what appears to be a kind of teaching poem of Paul's in two. I call it a "kind of teaching poem" because it is a mixture of sentences about different "opposites" in society and how they should behave towards one another arranged in parallel lines. A bit like Hebrew poetry but in Greek :)

That the One Year Bible splits this very obvious unit up might seem odd at first but this section is probably one of the most edited, censored and spoken against sections in the Bible short of the Sermon on the Mount. All of this editing, censoring and speaking against is not being done by opponents of Christianity, by and large it is being done by Christians.

So why do we edit this passage so much? Is it that it sounds too much like a 1960's hippy speech ranted from the stage of Woodstock after too much cannabis? "Like, man, love your woman. Like, woman, love your man. Bosses, like, look after your workers. Workers, don't diss the boss-man." and so on and so forth. Or do we fear that if we take this seriously and put it into action that our whole world might get turned upside down?

The first bit of editing that takes place is that the overall header of the piece tends to get cut out by those "useful" little headings that Bible translators put in to divide up passages. Verse 21 "Submit to one another out of reverence for the Lord." is divided off in the NIV and other translations (although thankfully not by the NLT) so that the next line, "Wives submit to your husbands" is taken out of this context of love and mutual submission and made to sound like a chauvinist rallying call. Next even the NLT (New Living translation) goes through splitting sections up so that they look like they are all different little commands given by Paul rather than a joined up recipe for how a Christian society might function.

Finally when it comes to preaching on this passage in the Bible Christians of most flags and flavours seem to side with the powerful side of each of Paul's equations and balances and ignore or minimise for the most part the needs of the weaker half. Almost any time I have heard this part of chapters five and six preached on the preacher has focused upon the duties of the wife to submit, the child to obey and the slave to serve. It has been a very rare Sunday when I have heard a call to husbands to enter into a spirit of mutual submission, parents to not provoke their children and bosses to remember that God sees all men as equal before him.

Why is it then that when we hear someone talk about gender issues there is always someone "sound" from the church to label them as undermining God's plan for marriage? Why is it when someone speaks up for the voice of youth that they all too frequently get shouted down in the church for not respecting their elders? Why is it that when someone starts to talk about workers rights in a Christian context that they get labeled a communist? Paul is being radically egalitarian here. He is calling for a massive amount of mutual respect for people of all genders, age groups and social positions. We hear him, we know that he is speaking the word of God but whether out of insecurity or out of prejudice, out of lust for power or fear of using it, we tell him in nice theological sounding words, "Nice idea Paul but we just don't want to do it..."

Glimpses of Jesus

Isaiah 51:1-53:12

Ephesians 5:1-33

Psalm 69:19-36

Proverbs 24:7

Have you ever had the experience of walking down a busy street in an unfamiliar town and suddenly catching sight of someone you know?  You think to yourself, "Is that such and such?" And then you go, "no it can't be, not here" and then you realise it is and catch up with them to say hello and "what are you doing round here?"

This is the feeling I got today reading through the Isaiah section. My mind had kind of gone into autopilot reading yet more material about Judah's return from exile when all of a sudden there is a glimpse of Jesus.  A glimpse that turns into a full blown encounter with the one John called, "The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

 5 But he was pierced for our rebellion,

      crushed for our sins.

   He was beaten so we could be whole.

      He was whipped so we could be healed.

 6 All of us, like sheep, have strayed  away.

      We have left God’s paths to follow  our own.

   Yet the Lord laid on him

      the sins of us all.

This is not just unfamiliar territory to see Jesus in but a totally unfamiliar time. The latest this prophecy could have been written was in the 6th century BC if you go for the idea that this was written by a later follower of Isaiah and not the man himself.  So, 600 years before he is born we see a glimpse of his death and what it will mean.  God certainly works over long time scales.

Salvation through faith alone Old Testament style

Isaiah 48:12-50:11

Ephesians 4:17-32

Psalm 69:1-18

Proverbs 24:5-6

The end of today's Isaiah reading goes like this -

 10 Who among you fears the Lord

      and obeys his servant?

   If you are walking in darkness,

      without a ray of light,

   trust in the Lord

      and rely on your God.

 11 But watch out, you who live in your own light

      and warm yourselves by your own fires.

   This is the reward you will receive from me:

      You will soon fall down in great torment.

What's striking about this is the way on which this captures the heart if the Gospel so neatly but does it 700 years before the time of Jesus. Those who are walking in darkness without a ray of light are those to whom God will show his favor but the ones who will bear the brunt of his wrath are those who rely on their own goodness before him.

We make all sorts of false distinctions between the Old Testament and New Testament but while there are differences (and it would be foolish to say that there are not) there are a lot less than you would think. It is not as though God became a Christian in the inter-Testamental period and suddenly found grace and love.  They were always there but can so easily be overlooked.

A mature church

Isaiah 45:11-48:11

Ephesians 4:1-16

Psalm 68:19-35

Proverbs 24:3-4

I really like days like this when the readings join up and seem to give pretty much the one message.  In the Ephesians reading, the apostle Paul is writing about maturity in the church. This maturity is a gift that is given by the risen Jesus. He speaks about a church that is united in it's diversity, a church that is a song made up of rich harmony and counterpoint rather than voices singing in hollow unison.

For Paul the church is not a homogeneous unit but rather a diverse body with people who are as different from each other as arms are from eyes or hair is from kidneys. This difference manifests itself socially, racially, culturally and internationaly allowing for differences in age, gender, outlook and (within limits) theology.

How does this beautifully diverse church grow to maturity then? For Paul the recipe is very simple - at least on paper.  Paul tells us that God has gifted the church with a variety of different types of leaders. Apostles, prophets,evangelists, pastors and teachers. This variety of different people stands in sharp contrast to the unhealthy one man ministry model of many churches. Here in the Midlands as elsewhere people often refer to churches as William's church or Bob's church. This is unhealthy both for the congregation who become passive and the minister who either burns out or becomes conceited.

These evangelists, pastors, etc. exist not to do ministry for the laity but to encourage and enable the People of God in their own individual and collective ministries.  "12 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ."

This gives many church leaders the heebie jeebies! If everyone is given responsibility for the church then who will be responsible for maintaining orthodoxy and the true Presbyterian/ Methodist/ Catholic/ Lutheran/ delete as appropriate faith? But ironically enough Paul is telling his readers that it is when power and responsibility is distributed throughout the body of Christ in a more or less even way that "Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love."

In other words good leadership that distributes power and responsibility around the Body of Christ is the very best type of leadership for ensuring that the People of God remain orthodox and orthopractic. Let's leave the last word to today's reading from Proverbs -  3 A house is built by wisdom and becomes strong through good sense. 4 Through knowledge its rooms are filled with all sorts of precious riches and valuables.

Wood Idol

Isaiah 43:14-45:10
Ephesians 3:1-21
Psalm 68:1-18
Proverbs 24:1-2

Idol is one of those weird words in our language that changes it's meaning from time to time. It started out referring to little statues that people worship, made it's way on to refer to people of great ability or beauty that were worthy of some sort of celebrity style adoration and now it has morphed again to refer to talent show contestants some of whom have skill some of whom very clearly do not.

Isaiah in today's reading is going back to the first definition and is in great comedy form again. I could try paraphrasing him but it's better just to quote straight.

12 The blacksmith stands at his forge to make a sharp tool,
pounding and shaping it with all his might.
His work makes him hungry and weak.
It makes him thirsty and faint.
13 Then the wood-carver measures a block of wood
and draws a pattern on it.
He works with chisel and plane
and carves it into a human figure.
He gives it human beauty
and puts it in a little shrine.
14 He cuts down cedars;
he selects the cypress and the oak;
he plants the pine in the forest
to be nourished by the rain.
15 Then he uses part of the wood to make a fire.
With it he warms himself and bakes his bread.
Then—yes, it’s true—he takes the rest of it
and makes himself a god to worship!
He makes an idol
and bows down in front of it!
16 He burns part of the tree to roast his meat
and to keep himself warm.
He says, “Ah, that fire feels good.”
17 Then he takes what’s left
and makes his god: a carved idol!
He falls down in front of it,
worshiping and praying to it.
“Rescue me!” he says.
“You are my god!”

18 Such stupidity and ignorance!
Their eyes are closed, and they cannot see.
Their minds are shut, and they cannot think.
19 The person who made the idol never stops to reflect,
“Why, it’s just a block of wood!
I burned half of it for heat
and used it to bake my bread and roast my meat.
How can the rest of it be a god?
Should I bow down to worship a piece of wood?”
20 The poor, deluded fool feeds on ashes.
He trusts something that can’t help him at all.
Yet he cannot bring himself to ask,
“Is this idol that I’m holding in my hand a lie?”

It struck me reading this that there is something of the good side of Richard Dawkins about Isaiah. He is using all of his wit and rhetorical verve to puncture an idea of God that is shallow, stupid and meaningless. If only we Christians were a bit less dumb and gullible sometimes in how we present Christianity to the world then we wouldn't need the likes of Dawkins to come along and expose the emptiness at times of our own rhetoric or the Christian idols that we build for ourselves to replace the living God.

Isaiah's favourite tunes

Isaiah 41:17-43:13
Ephesians 2:1-22
Psalm 67:1-7
Proverbs 23:29-35

If you were going to summarise the book of Isaiah into a short number of phrases they would probably be something like this:

Yahweh (the Hebrew name for God) is the God of the whole earth, not just one place

Yahweh really cares about Israel but is really hacked off with them

Yahweh is in charge of everything

Yahweh really cares about poor people

Because of her sin Yahweh is sending Judah into exile

Because of his love for her he will bring her back

Yahweh has something really special planned for the future

Idols are crap!

In this passage we have the last two tunes in Isaiah's top ten. The "Idols are crap song" is one that he seems to approach with a great amount of relish. He seems to really enjoy making fun of idols and going into detail about how these "gods" are made. The way he keeps goading the gods of the nations or the idols of Israel to just "do something, anything if you can" seems to be sung by him with great aplomb.

He contrasts this with Yahweh, the true God who not only knows what will happen in the fututre but is the one who makes it happen. His riffs on idol worship might be comic poetry but his conclusions are pretty serious. Idols make you filthy because they are filthy. Idol worship means taking a part of creation and putting it in the place of the creator who made it. This could be a person (a loved one, a saint, a leader), an object (money, art, a place) or an idea (your country, political party, a favourite partisan dogma). Anything that is not God but put in the place of God is an idol.

If worshipping the true God in the true way enriches our life then worshipping an idol degrades us as human beings. Isaiah finishes by talking about God's great plan for the future and in this we get a 600 year early glimpse of Jesus. It is by no means a complete or clear picture but we can clearly recognise who Isaiah is talking about. Jesus is the one who enriches us as we draw closer to him in worship.

Don't put your trust in kings

Isaiah 39:1-41:16

Ephesians 1:1-23

Psalm 66:1-20

Proverbs 23:25-28

I've got to say that I haven't really expected anyone to be reading this, never mind making suggestions but after a complaint from someone I will start putting the Bible readings in a list at the start of the posts.

I've just finished reading Tony Blair's autobiography and it is quite a whirlwind of material. I came away from it thinking he was 2 parts brilliant, 1 part scary, 1 part deluded and 2 parts sincere.

What disturbed me most were the days when he wrote about dealing with about 10 urgent issues all at the one go. How anyone could keep up with the job of being a modern Prime Minister, President or Taoiseach I do not know.

What's that got to do with the Bible readings? Rather a lot actually. The king in today's reading from Isaiah is called Hezekiah.  He was one of the few genuinely good kings of Israel. He cared for God's law, he looked after the poor and needy, he stood up for his country and his people against Assyrian attempts at imperial control.

But even his good story ends with a moment of real stupidity. The Bible is one of the first books in the world to depict even great national heroes as they really were warts and all and at the end of Hezekiah's otherwise good reign he does something really dim by letting envoys from "distant" Babylon come look round all the treasures of Jerusalem.

A generation later, these "distant" people would remember what they saw and come with a massive army to take it forcibly from the people of Judah. The Bible reminds us time and again that there is no such thing as a perfect leader, no-one is infallible. No-one gets it right all the time.

Maybe we expect too much of politicians and church leaders (although in Ireland some basic competence would be nice) even the best careers can end in disgrace and even the greatest and best of the great and the good can get it stunning wrong sometimes. As the reading in Ephesians reminds us, only Christ is the perfect king, the rest of us are just poor copies.

God is in control

So far in Isaiah there have been a series of fairly gruesome prophecies calling Judah and the surrounding nations to account for their neglect of social justice and their mistreatment of the poor.  The last few sections however, have spoken about how God will liberate Jerusalem from the power of Assyria.

This must have seemed like such a preposterous idea at the time. Assyria was a superpower, Judah a fairly puny little state dependant upon Egyptian military support. This is the equivalent of a tiny African or Caribbean country standing up to the full might of the American or Chinese army.

God says through Isaiah that he will protect Jerusalem and then the text moves from the poetry of Isaiah's prophecy to history mode and he relates a time during the reign of King Hezekiah when this actually happened.

Surrounded by enemy forces it was no wonder that the leaders of Judah were terrified but Isaiah knew that God was and is the only one who decides the fate of cities, nations and empires. Just when all seems lost, God drives the Assyrian army away and saves his people.

At a time when most other religions were local and tribal the people of Judah declared that their God was the God of the whole world who controlled even the great empires that tried to lord it over them. This view of God as all powerful is both deeply reassuring and also a bit scary. It reassures us that whatever happens in life God is in control and has allowed it to happen.

But then the flip side of that is dealing with the fact that when something terrible occurs in our lives that God has allowed it to happen. It boils down in the end to trust. We either trust that God knows what he is doing in his management of the world when things go wrong or we struggle and protest against the strong grip of his providential hand.

One Year Bible

To stop me from just ploughing through my One Year Bible readings without thinking about them too much I have decided to start a blog with a short thought about something that jumps out of the text at me from each day's readings.

Today, as well as Isaiah, a Psalm & a proverb there was a great section from Galatians 5. Paul is telling the Galatians that true religion leads to freedom but false religion leads to slavery. It made me think of my own first attempts at learning Scottish Country Dancing in my early twenties in Glasgow. Dancing isn't much fun when you are watching your feet and counting.

When you get into the way of it though what started as a chore, "step 2, 3, turn 2, 3, forward, forward, back, back" soon becomes something really joyful. You soon forget whether or not you are getting everything right and begin to enjoy dancing with your partner. If you step on their toes you say sorry, they smile, accept your apology and you keep on dancing.

Am I as free as I could be in my relationship with God or is it all "step 2, 3, turn 2, 3, forward, forward, back, back"?

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