Worship as Our Self Giving
Reflections on Isaiah 58.9b-14
RCL Proper 21C
25 August 2019
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
N.B. Holy Trinity Cathedral is using the complementary series of Hebrew readings and psalms during Ordinary Time rather than the semi-continuous series printed in The Book of Alternative Services.
Isaiah 58.9b-14
58.9bIf you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, 10if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. 11The Lordwill guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. 12Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.
13If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lordhonorable; if you honour it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; 14then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the Lordhas spoken.
Be careful about what you pray for.
For more than a thousand years it has been the custom of the churches who claim a catholic heritage to expect candidates to write to their bishops four times a year to report on their progress, their struggles and their hopes. These occasions are called the Ember Days, not because they are glowing but because they are quarterly --- in Latin quatember.
In Lent of 1981 I wrote what was to be my last seminary Ember Day letter to my Bishop, Bill Frey of Colorado. It was an uncertain time for me. I had heard nothing from the Bishop about when I was to be ordained and where I was to serve. All around me my classmates were making preparations for ordination and were in correspondence with their future parishes. Mealtimes were especially painful. I tried to share in my classmates’ joy, but my heart really wasn’t in it.
I wrote all these things in my letter to the Bishop and told him that I was praying for patience. Bill rarely responded to Ember Day letters with more than a quick postcard acknowledging that he had received the letter and had read it. Three days after I wrote the letter a postcard arrived for me from Bill. It read simply, ‘Stop praying for patience. Love, +Bill.’ As you can imagine I was a bit surprised and felt even more at sea.
Two weeks later Bill happened to be visiting my seminary to meet with one of my classmates who was transferring to another diocese. Because the visit to my seminary was one of three stops that he was to make that day, I had only a few minutes to speak with him privately. So I asked him, ‘Why should I stop praying for patience?’ He looked at me and said, ‘If you pray for something, God will provide you with the opportunity to act on what you pray for. I think that you have enough on your plate right now. Pray for patience after you’re ordained.’ And off he went.
What does the Lord require of us?
Our reading from Isaiah this morning is taken from a portion of that collection of prophetic wisdom written just after the people of Israel returned from their exile in Babylon and were struggling to re-create a society based on the covenant had made with them in the wilderness of Sinai. The years in exile had caused some of the people to become estranged from their identity and their customs. Others were proud of how they had preserved their heritage and were not hesitant to point the finger at those who had not.
The writer of this portion of Isaiah will not let any of the people off the hook. He knows that worship and religious ritual that is divorced from faithful action in the world is empty. We can say all the right words. We can follow the rituals in precise detail. We can do all these things and still lose our souls. Enjoying the Sabbath rest avails us naught if we fail to free our sisters and brothers from unjust burdens. Sharing in the Sabbath meal avails us naught if we take no steps to alleviate the hunger, physical and spiritual, that plagues so many men, women and children. Reciting the Shema, the confession that there is only one God, and then acting as if that God had not created all people, whether known to us or unknown, whether of our faith or not, will not make us holy in the sight of the Creator of all.
In recent years there has been a public backlash to a familiar phrase used by political leaders in the face of the violence and catastrophes that have afflicted people all across the world: ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with you.’ Thoughts and prayers are good if they lead us into concrete actions that address the causes of violence, climate-related disasters and human neglect. It is good to remember the motto of the Benedictine Order, the religious community that influenced the spiritual and liturgical DNA of Anglicanism, ‘Ora et labora’--- ‘Pray and Work’ --- the two are inextricably linked.
Think for a moment about the implications of the Lord’s Prayer. We hallow God’s name because we dare to claim that we are called to act as members of God’s family. We pray for the coming of God’s kingdom because we dare to claim that we are working for that day to come in our own daily lives. We pray for our daily bread because we know that all we have in this life is dependent upon the mystery of the seasons and the labour of others. We pray for the forgiveness of our sins because we cannot experience true forgiveness unless we ourselves forgive. It is, as I have often said, the most dangerous prayer I know because it puts us right in the thick of things, right in the midst of what God is doing in the world, in us and through us, right now, right here.
When we participate in the prayers of the community, we name for ourselves the arena in which God expects us to be living agents of the good news of God in Christ. Every petition for the leaders of our world, our nation and our communities is a ‘memo to self’ that begs the question, ‘How shall I work for the common good?’ Every petition for those who are in any need or trouble is a ‘memo to self’ that begs the question, ‘How shall respond to those needs?’ Every petition for peace and justice is a ‘memo to self’ that begs the question, ‘How can I be an agent of God’s peace and justice in my family, in my workplace and wherever God leads me to be?’
See who you are and become what you see.
Now, my friends, I say these things not to encourage guilt or a sense of inadequacy. We know that we do not always live up to the promises that we made by us or for us when we were baptized. We know that each time we renew those promises we become more aware of how much more lies before us. Hardly a day goes by that I do not re-run a conversation or an action in my mind to ask myself whether I acted in a way that was faithful to my identity as one of God’s beloved gathered into the community of Christ’s disciples. I don’t think that the writer of Isaiah or Jesus in today’s gospel reading from Luke wanted their audiences to give up on the Sabbath and its observances. Those audiences and we just need to be reminded that what we do here is meant to be a ritual expression of what we are doing when we are not here: gathering people into beloved community, proclaiming the good news, holding the whole world in our prayers, feeding others with the life of Christ given freely to us and going forth knowing that we are God’s agents not pawns. What we do here is not play-acting. What we do here is the weekly rehearsal of the kingdom of God so that we can play our parts on the world’s stage.
No comments:
Post a Comment