Out Of The Land

Out of the Land November 9 (Isaiah 1) Hear now from Today’s New Revised International Contemporary Updated Local Version of Isaiah chapter 1, Listen up sun above and earth below for the Lord is speaking. I gave birth to and raised Hillcrest and now they have rebelled against me. Listen up Hillcrest, “That offering plate that you pass around your cash and your cheques what do I care for them?” says the Lord. I have more than enough money, resources, buildings. I don’t take pleasure in these things When you gather here Sunday mornings, who has asked you to do this, this superficial expression? You can stop already all your meaningless activities your well-planned services are sickening to me. Communion, Potlucks, Meetings, Retreats, Christmas and Easter I can’t stand all these gatherings. All your special times to get together your Venture Club, Junior Youth and Women’s group I hate them. They’re a burden to me and I’m tired of carrying it. When you fold your hands in prayer I will plug my ears Even if you spend extra time in prayer I will not listen Because I have seen what your hands do What was once service is now sinister Your sins are like scarlet Ouch. Ouuuuuucccchhhh

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The prophets are a strange lot. If it’s not Elijah taunting the prophets of other gods then its Elisha calling down bears on a group of kids for calling him ‘baldy’. The entrance of the prophets marks a shift in how God communicates with his people. Rather than leading through grand signs and wonders as in Egypt and the wilderness God know speaks to the people through visions and judgments. And there is something about the prophets that I have not been paying enough attention to. We know they confront us about our immoral behaviour about addictive tendencies whether it is for wealth, power, sex, attention or any other self-gratifying behaviour. We know that the prophets come down hard on unjust rulers and wealthy business people who take advantage of others for their own gain. But the book of Isaiah the prophet who is perhaps cited more than any other in the Old Testament begins with harsh treatment of Judah’s worship. Isaiah comes down hard on what the people do when they are gathered together as we are here this Sunday. There is some implicit assumption that the gathering of the worshipping community is central for anything and everything else considered important by God. Worship is the beginning and end of faithful living. Worship is what shapes how we are to live and worship also reflects and says something about how we are already living. What if we for a moment simply allowed a prophetic vision to descend upon this place and speak to us about our worship? Would we know what that is or what it would say? Walter Brueggemann says that “the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” So to what extant does our worship create a new way of understanding and engaging the world around us? We know that worship is more than gathering here on Sunday morning and yet we also at least implicitly acknowledge that this time together carries a special significance. It is not insignificant that we take time every week to gather on a morning that most of us do not work and come together in a group that is mixed in age, income, lifestyle, personality. Where else outside of family do you gather with such a diverse group? Are we at Hillcrest open and nurturing of this sort of diversity? We should not take this expression for granted. There is no other job I know of where I could have gone that Chantal and I could have formed the diverse range of relationships that we have here. This simple act of gathering can be an alternative form of living that speaks against the self-gratifying and narrow group expressions offered around us. But do we see it that way? Or are we actually more interested in coming because of the people who are like us? If a prophetic vision were to descend on us I can’t imagine it would be satisfied with this being a nice social club. The church, moving away from the Jewish Sabbath of Friday night and Saturday, decided to meet Sunday mornings so that each week they gathered they would celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. In some small way each Sunday is a celebration of Easter. Even during Lent when people fasted they always broke their fast on Sunday. This is a message that I think lays covered up in our tradition. Each week we celebrate resurrection and new life. I suspect however, that is not how we enter into and depart from our worship time together. It was assumed in Israel that worship was a transformative space. The prophets call us back to this reality. I want us to consider what I think is a pattern that they address. Already in Deuteronomy, before the people enter the new land, we find warnings about the temptations of settling in this land.

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In chapter six of Deuteronomy Moses says, “When the LORD your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” In making his covenant with the people Moses calls heaven and earth as witnesses to this agreement of faithfulness. And with this covenant made the people enter the land, settle down and establish a new lifestyle there. As they settle the land God is in fact concerned that the people are beginning to forget God and drift away from how they should live and worship. And so God sends prophets to try and show them how they are to return to God. It is interesting that in the book of Isaiah it seems as though Isaiah recalls the covenant imagery used by Moses. Isaiah begins by calling heaven and earth to listen to what he has to say. He reminds heaven and earth of what they witnessed years ago before the Israelites entered the land. And Isaiah reminds heaven and earth that they are now seeing the sort of complacency and disrespect Moses talked about. Isaiah criticizes the people for their affluent clothing and jewelry. He says where there is fragrance there will be a stench. Where there is fine clothing there will be a potato sack. As I began to read Isaiah’s lists of complaints I couldn’t help but think that we have moved past this sort of moralizing. I never understood the sermons that were spoke in German in my church growing up but I can remember how my mother told me that some were about the evils of wearing big dangly ear rings. Does what we wear have any place in helping us to understand faithful worship? Isaiah does not stop here but goes on. He says woe to you who stretch our your property adding one to another until you are left living alone in the middle of it. You have so many possessions that you are isolated by them. But we should stop here for a minute. Surely Isaiah is going beyond the issue of worship. Isaiah is now snooping into our closets and bank accounts. But I suspect Isaiah is only following Moses who old the people that their faithful worship can be challenged by their homes, wealth and possessions. Isaiah and many of the other prophets address this result of the people living in the land that God brought them into. In the wilderness their only real choice was to daily trust in God. They could grumble but in the end they needed to rely on God for their basic provisions. But in the land the people could store up food and wealth. They could adapt practices and beliefs from their neighbours who followed other gods. And so there were many other things that the people could directly acknowledge and look towards for contributing to their well-being. And in turning from God they also turned away from the well-being of their neighbour. The prophets came to restore a primal relationship of faith in God that was centred in right worship. It seems as though there is a pattern to this message as every few generations we need people to bring this message and way of living to us. The people of Israel were only in the land for about 200 years before the prophets began issuing some pretty serious challenges to the way they were living. As we going along in our series on the Old Testament we are reaching a point where the people are kicked out of the land because they failed to return to God in faith. In the Christian tradition this was not the only call for God’s people to shake off their complacency. Jesus’ ministry was also this sort of prophetic calling. Jesus was concerned that worship

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no longer connected to faith in God. Jesus was concerned that certain people were beginning to profit off of worship. Jesus was concerned that worship no longer created a space where people could understand their faith and identity apart from Roman culture. But Jesus was also not the last attempt at a prophetic calling that took the role of worship seriously. The first few generations of the church faced varying levels of persecution and so in many ways the church was much like the Israelites wandering in the desert. They were often driven out of one place or another and had no permanent home. Worship and spirituality often thrived in this time because having faith had implications in all aspects of your life, you could be thrown in prison or put to death. It was only a couple of hundred years after the early church was founded that Constantine, the emperor of Rome, declared Christianity to be the state religion. This was great relief for many Christians as persecutions were ended and stability was introduced into the life of the church. At this time the church had in many ways entered the land as the Israelites had earlier. However from that time onward there was also a movement of men and women who felt that the church and the church’s worship was somehow being corrupted by its newly formed relationship to military and political power and the wealth that was being acquired by the churches. So in response men and women fled from the cities and sought refuge and community in the Egyptian desert. They believed that worship had been laden too heavily with selfish interest and pursuits that were allowed to them in this period of stability. Their message began to sound a little like Isaiah or Jesus. These men and women seemed just as strange to many of the people around them as the prophets did earlier. They were not afraid live outside the norms of their surroundings. In fact they assumed that faithful worship would likely take them into new and uncharted territory. Worship shaped for them a new way of living in the midst of temptations to unfaithfulness. They did not force their way of life on everyone, indeed they often tried to discourage it. Their prophetic witness was their example of the union of life and worship. I am not familiar enough with medieval church history to know about the possible prophetic expressions of worship that occurred in that period. However, we know that by the time we reach the Reformation in the 1500s there was again a strong sense that worship was being corrupted. Much of Martin Luther’s famous 95 Theses criticized how some churches were profiting from selling indulgences which the church promised could absolve not only the buyer from sin but even purchase the salvation of someone who was deceased. One of the main criticisms of the Anabaptists at this time was also related to worship. The asked how the community of God could be formed with its members included at birth before they could make their own decision and commitment. So they began baptizing people as adults even if that meant it was their second baptism. The implication for this action was clear. By law it was illegal to re-baptize a person. And so for this and other beliefs the Anabaptists were heavily persecuted by both Protestants and Catholics. We often associate the Mennonite church with Protestantism but Martin Luther himself viewed the Anabaptists as a type of new Catholic monastic movement. And so again this expression of the church underwent a type of wilderness experience where they were driven from place to place and where it was the gathered body in worship that sustained them.

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Of course as you can anticipate by now it was within about 100 years that many groups of Anabaptists settled in places where their practices and beliefs were accepted. And again as you can now expect it became apparent to some church leaders that the church was again becoming too settled, too consumed by the pursuits of wealth and comfort. So it was in 1660 that what was to become the most famous work in the Mennonite tradition was published. The title of the book was The Martyrs Mirror. [it is not a particularly happy book as everyone in it dies] In it was a collection of stories from the New Testament until their present time of people who confessed faith as adults and ended up being killed for their beliefs. The purpose of the book was to be a type of prophetic vision that called the people back to faithful worship of God. Thieleman van Braght, who compiled the stories for the book, was no doubt thankful for the time of peace that the Mennonites experienced. But he warned the readers saying, “We must see well to it, that we do not neglect or abuse this time of grace, for it we employ it badly, and use liberty as an occasion to commit sin, it will undoubtedly happen to us as it did to Israel, who, having grown fat and strong, departed from God, and was therefore again cast into distress.” And so van Braght reminds them of zeal with which early Anabaptists lived and then he asks, “But how is it now?” van Braght then goes on to do something that I think is actually quite helpful. He does not go on to simply attack the church’s practices, although there is certainly some of that. van Braght continually asks the people to examine themselves. He says at one place, “Now, examine your heart; whether it is not divided; whether you do not seek to serve Christ and the world at the same.” Later he say, “Plow through the inmost depths of your heart, and see where most of your inclinations and desires tend.” And again later, “Consider once, on what you have bestowed your precious time.” This in many ways is the essence of the prophetic vision. It is to help people to see clearly the reality of the relationship between God and God’s people. Since that time many groups have gone through that pattern again. I know in my tradition that pattern was repeated in Russia. And to be entirely honest I am not sure I know how to bring the prophetic vision to this time and to our congregation. I began this sermon with some basic observations about worship and tried to offer a somewhat shocking paraphrase of the Isaiah passage but to be quite honest I don’t know if they apply. I’m not sure that standing up here and railing over our obsessions for wealth, possessions, beauty, strength, status, fun, and control will help anything. Is is helpful to us as addicts to simply stop our addictions? The one thing that does become clear is that when a prophetic vision descends on the life of the church then the worship of the church is restored to right relationship to the Gospel. And what is the Gospel message other than life, death, and resurrection. The prophetic vision shows us what it is that is in us and around us that is leading towards death. And then it says to us in no uncertain terms that these things must be allowed to die. But there is more. When these things are led towards death, when our addicted lives are led into exile out of the land it is also the prophetic vision follows along with us. Then this prophetic presence stands over the valley of the shadow death, the valley of dry bones, the end of our striving and it does not recite a funeral liturgy but hears the voice of God asking, “Can these bones live?” May we pray that in this space and in our lives the prophetic vision would descend us. May we also know that it often comes as a parental word of discipline

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calling us at times to particular deaths and exile from the stability we have established apart from God. And as we are led in what seems like a funeral procession may we remember that the word of God goes with us calling out the prophetic words that bring life to dry bones. I pray that this prophet vision descends on our worship. For then there is no need to be anxious about whether or not we are doing the right things. This vision calls us, wherever we are, as all prophesies do, which is to repentance. And repentance is the simple and transformative act of turning towards God. Amen.

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