Whose Side Are We On?

Scriptures: Selections from Isaiah 59 (Verse 1-4, 6b-8, 12-15 to be exact)

Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear.
But your iniquities have separated you from your God;
Your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.
For your hands are stained with blood, your fingers with guilt.
Your lips have spoken lies, and your tongue mutters wicked things.
No one calls for justice; no one pleads his case with integrity.
They rely on empty arguments and speak lies;
They conceive trouble and give birth to evil...
Their deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands.
Their feet rush into sin; they are swift to shed innocent blood...
The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths.
They have turned them into crooked roads, no one who walks in them will know peace.
...
So justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us.
We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows...
For our offenses are many in your sight, and our sins testify against us.
Our offenses are ever with us, and we acknowledge our iniquities:
rebellion and treachery against the Lord,
turning our backs on our God,
fomenting oppression and revolt,
Uttering lies our hearts have conceived.
So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance;
Truth has stumbled in the public square
Honesty cannot enter,
Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey.

Now the prophet speaking here in Isaiah knew exactly what sins with which he was taking issue, but he does not make them abundantly clear to us. But in this case, that is okay. In this age of fabricated news, political coverups, and echo chambers of talking points, we can imagine what the prophet might be bewailing when he says, “They rely on empty arguments and speak lies” Especially that empty arguments part, that’s Isaiah 59:4 by the way, if you want a memory verse to throw into your conversations that turn political.

We’ve heard one or two empty arguments, haven’t we? Maybe we’ve even been fooled by them, in the spirit of going along to get along. Maybe we’ve been hoodwinked once or twice by a carefully worded but completed empty and vacuous arguement in our time, but only in the spirit of good citizenship, right? We have to watch our for empty arguments, because those who seek to gain or keep power have as many people working on making their empty arguments believable as McDonald’s has working to make their hamburgers palatable. So we need to keep watch so that we are not fooled, and as promoters of social righteousness we need to call people out when they try to pull the wool over our eyes with empty arguments.

And these empty arguments are closely related to what the prophet gets mad about in verse 14, that truth has stumbled in the public square. Do you ever get the feeling that facts and figures don’t matter nearly as much as getting everyone to agree with you? Do you ever get the feeling that today it is truer than ever that if you repeat a lie enough and get enough people to echo the lie that it becomes the truth and it no longer matters anymore whether or not it was a lie to begin with? I won’t get into specifics right here and now, but I highly recommend that you do this week, and in the future in whatever way you hear God call you to do so. Sometimes as we promote social righteousness, we might have to show a little backbone. We might have to figure out how we live in this country and this world as authentic Christians without keeping quiet about things that are anti-Jesus, without letting our silence serve as our consent for things to continue as they are. We need to figure out where it is that we as the Church are going to draw our line in the sand, and say, “Far enough!” We need to decide when it is that we will stop being meek and mild and start becoming devoted and wild.

Now you might be thinking, uh, Dave, where are all these meek and mild Christians that you’re talking about? The Christians I see on tv are anything but meek and mild. In fact, they seem to be foaming at the mouth. And to that I say, you’ve got a good point there hypothetical interupter, and it also brings me to my first of three points. More like my first of three guidelines for how we should go about promoting social righteousness in our city and in our nation.

Because, yes, it does at times seem that Christians, or at least the Christians who tv executives love to put on the air, are indeed foaming at the mouth about their moral issues, and to that very situation comes my first guideline:

1.We’ve got to stop majoring in the minors. The folks on tv who always seem to be anything but meek and mild always seem to be upset about one of two things. It’s either something to do with sex, or perceived violations of their right to display their faith in public. But these are two things that Jesus never got upset about, and they are both completely absent from the prophet’s diatribe in Isaiah 59 this morning. We have to stop majoring in the minors. What does our passage foam at the mouth about this morning? The lack of justice. The collapse of truth. The oppression of the vulnerable. Acts of violence. These are the things that we should be upset about too. We have to stop majoring in the minors.

2. We have to show our work. I always got in trouble in math class for just writing down the answer to the equation when I knew what it was, and skipping the whole business of showing what steps I took to get there. That and the fact that the answer I put down was usually wrong. It seemed like too much effort to show my work. And that’s what Christians tend to do today. We jump straight to right or wrong, and fail to show our work. We forget to show why it is that we think something is wrong or right, what in scripture gives us motivation for our conclusion, what in our experience makes us think the way that we do. We forget to show all that and we end up yelling “No” at people who are yelling “Yes” or yelling “Yes” at people who are yelling “No”. And the exchange never goes much further than that. And when we show our work, we get to share the gospel with people. We get to tell them about how Jesus welcomed the outcast, about the God with a preference for the poor and vulnerable. I think we even need to abandon the terms of right and wrong and start classifying things as to whether they are Jesus-y or anti-Jesus-y. Right and wrong can always just break down to a difference of opinion, but Jesus-y and anti-Jesus-y has a little more commonground in the Bible.

3. State the obvious. Because what’s obvious to you might not be obvious to everyone else. For instance, one fact that we’re going to have deal with is the fact that we now live in a country that officially condones some forms of torture. Granted they don’t call it torture, but just as a rose by any other name wouldst smell so sweet, so torture by any name still stinks. And I’m not going to go on and on about what the passage of the bill to legalize torture means for our democracy and go on about right and wrong and Constitutional precedent, because that’s what I’m telling us all not to do.

Instead, I want to put torture through the ringer of my three guidelines. First, stop majoring in the minors. Now the Bible never deals with torture per se, but just listen to a few of these scriptures in light of this subject: Exodus 22:21 says, “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.” Gen 9:5-6 says, “And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man.Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” And let’s just assume that when Jesus praises people in Matthew 25 for visiting him in prison, for as you did it unto the least of these you did it unto me, let’s assume that Jesus preference for prisoners is visitation and not being held under water until they almost drown but not quite, over and over again. Let’s take that liberty with the text. So we’re not majoring in the minors on this issue.

And we’re also stating the obvious, because in here in the soft light of stained glass, saying that torture is wrong gets a resounding, “Duh!”. It doesn’t get the same reaction out there. There are lots of people out there saying that “Torture is good!” and that people being tortured are human debris who have it coming anyway. And instead of getting into an argument of contradiction, we can set about to show our work instead. Here’s an example of a thoughly Christian, Jesus-y way of making the argument.

1st) Human being are created in the very image of God, and therefore have an inherent dignity that should not be trampled upon. All torture inflicts harm on a person for whom Christ died.

2nd) Prisoners are inherently vulnerable and powerless, that’s why our legal system has so many layers of protection for them. As God said to Moses in the giving of the law “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt. Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. “

3rd) We believe that humans beings are sinful through and through, including those in the government...especially those in the government! Due process, accountability and transparency are important checks and balances for human sinfulness and these things aren’t possible at secret prisons, and are irrelevant when torture is legal.

See, what was I talking about there...I was talking about faith and the Bible and how it all helps us to live and think today.

So, Don’t major in the minors. Show your work. And state the obvious. Three guidelines for how we should go about the business of the promotion of social righteousness. And if those are the how, we don’t have to look very far for the WHAT. We only have to look to our gospel passage for this morning, where Jesus reads from Isaiah and sums up the gospel with his quote. "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, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." This scripture sums up all of social righteousness because it shows very clearly whose side God is on; the poor, the oppressed, the prisoner, the vulnerable.