The Prophet Isaiah

Isaiah 57:14-21
Psalm 22:22-30
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-44

Tim Christoffersen
St. Timothy's
July 20, 2003

“I have seen his ways, but I will heal him.”  Words of comfort from Isaiah.  We generally do not expect to hear ‘words of comfort’ from the prophets in the Old Testament.

Their voices are often shrill to our protected conscience.  They speak in an octave higher than the ‘normal’ person and this high pitch gives their words a jarring and unnerving quality when our conscience is not able to tune them out or tone them down. They assault the sense of our freedom and, instead, open us to hearing God calling to us and expecting a response.

            Isaiah reluctantly accepted God’s calling.  He experienced his call as an intimate and overwhelming presence of God in his life.  His call came in the year King Uzziah died.  Isaiah “saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, the train of his robe filled the temple.  “Woe to me!”, he cried, “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

 

            Then he heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”  And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” Isaiah then hears the first shattering words he is to go and tell the people.  And Isaiah asks, “For how long, O Lord?”  He clearly is reluctant and feels himself unworthy.  But he has no doubt that he has seen and hears the Lord speak directly to him and he has no alternative but to respond, ”Send me.”

            His contemporaries and the established order usually rejected the prophet.  They considered him a madman or a charlatan.   The story of the encounter between the prophet Amos and Amaziah, a prominent priest of Bethel gives us an example.  Amos has prophesied that King Jeroboam would die by the sword and Israel would go into exile.  Amaziah says to Amos, “Get out of here, you seer!  Go back to the land of Judah.  Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there.”  Amos responds, I was neither a prophet nor a prophet’s son, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore trees.  But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, and prophesy to my people Israel.’

            We sense Amos is overpowered by the presence of God just like Isaiah. Amos also has a reluctance to accept his call as a prophet.  The prophets were human, just like you and I. 

            They had at least one distinctive difference from their contemporaries and most us today.  They were deeply touched by God’s living, vital caring for his people, His creation, and they recognized intimately God’s presence and involvement in the historical and political realities in which they lived.

            The prophet’s contemporaries lived, much like most of today, oblivious to God’s sovereignty and God’s audible call to them through the prophets.  They had no sense of their need for reconciliation with God.  They, like us, lived with their own false sense of their sovereignty.  They believed they were in charge and, in their blind pride, they resented the implication God was involved in their history.

            Isaiah tells us they turned away from God in two fundamental yet intimately connected ways.  They acknowledged God with their lips and their sacrificial offerings but their hearts were closed off to God and hardened.  Isaiah said, “This people draw near with their mouths and honor Me with their lips, while their hearts are far from Me; Their fear of Me is a commandment of men learned by rote.”

            Through the prophet Jeremiah, God says, “My people have committed two sins:  They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

            Their “own broken cisterns” are the way they live and treat each other, believing they live under their own sovereignty.  For they have forsaken God.  Prophetic words from Amos capture what happens when man turns a deaf ear to God and goes his own way. “Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, saying, ‘When will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market wheat?’ skimping the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales, buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals…”

            In our own time, how do we turn away from God?  Speaking personally, I have, most of the time, a ‘protected conscience.’  I allow the grim stories of kidnapping, murder and catastrophic accidents to anesthetize me to the day to day reality of the poor, the homeless, the addicts, the unemployed and the desperately lonely that I rarely come into contact with on a person to person basis.  I barely have the capacity to bring into clear consciousness the state of the poor, the hungry and the desperate in so many other parts of the world.  The loss of life in distant places like Africa barely penetrates my awareness.  My day to day world is similar to the world most of you see on a day to day basis.  We draw tight boundaries around our communities whether they be family, church, relatives and friends or the local community.  The ‘family of man’ is an abstraction to me that becomes real only when I look again at that wonderful collection of moving photographs by Edward Steichen.  Appropriately, it was called the Family of Man.

            We may tune out the shrill words of the prophet that assault our conscience but occasionally they penetrate and we gain a different insight into our understanding of the freedom we cherish.  Most of the time we understand our freedom as the capacity to express ourselves without fear of retribution.  Our freedom is our protected capacity to self expression and self assertion. 

            But when we let the words of the prophet enter our consciousness, our heart softens and we understand dimly that we are not alone in the universe.  We are God creatures and we hear a demand to which we, like the prophets, are compelled to respond.  It is a call to act. We now see our freedom also as a demand for a response.  In God’s words through Isaiah, “I have seen his ways, but I will heal him; I will guide him and restore comfort to him.”

            The prophet Ezekiel captures this healing.  “A new heart I will give you, and a new Spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes…”

            May we pray.  Father, open our minds and our hearts to recognizing your presence in our lives and your call to us to act in response to do our part to make and to keep human life human.

Amen.