Out of the Land

November 9 (Isaiah 1)Hear now from Today’s New Revised International Contemporary Updated LocalVersion 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 chequeswhat do I care for them?” says the Lord. I have more than enough money, resources, buildings. I don’t take pleasure in these thingsWhen 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 meand 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 doWhat was once service is now sinister Your sins are like scarlet

Ouch. Ouuuuuucccchhhh

2The prophets are a strange lot. If it’s not Elijah taunting the prophets of other gods thenits 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 thanleading through grand signs and wonders as in Egypt and the wilderness God knowspeaks 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 usabout 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 comedown 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 anyother in the Old Testament begins with harsh treatment of Judah’s worship. Isaiah comesdown hard on what the people do when they are gathered together as we are here thisSunday. There is some implicit assumption that the gathering of the worshippingcommunity 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 areto 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 wouldsay? Walter Brueggemann says that “the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish,and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perceptionof the dominant culture around us.” So to what extant does

our

worship create a newway of understanding and engaging the world around us? We know that worship is morethan gathering here on Sunday morning and yet we also at least implicitly acknowledgethat this time together carries a special significance. It is not insignificant that we taketime every week to gather on a morning that most of us do not work and come together ina group that is mixed in age, income, lifestyle, personality. Where else outside of familydo you gather with such a diverse group? Are we at Hillcrest open and nurturing of thissort of diversity? We should not take this expression for granted. There is no other job Iknow of where I could have gone that Chantal and I could have formed the diverse rangeof relationships that we have here. This simple act of gathering can be an alternativeform of living that speaks against the self-gratifying and narrow group expressionsoffered around us. But do we see it that way? Or are we actually more interested incoming because of the people who are like us? If a prophetic vision were to descend onus 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 celebratethe 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 amessage that I think lays covered up in our tradition. Each week we celebrateresurrection and new life. I suspect however, that is not how we enter into and departfrom our worship time together. It was assumed in Israel that worship was atransformative 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 peopleenter the new land, we find warnings about the temptations of settling in this land.

3In chapter six of Deuteronomy Moses says, “When the LORD your God brings you intothe land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land withlarge, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things youdid 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 withthe 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 newlifestyle 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 soGod 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 thecovenant imagery used by Moses. Isaiah begins by calling heaven and earth to listen towhat 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 arenow seeing the sort of complacency and disrespect Moses talked about. Isaiah criticizesthe people for their affluent clothing and jewelry. He says where there is fragrance therewill be a stench. Where there is fine clothing there will be a potato sack. As I began toread Isaiah’s lists of complaints I couldn’t help but think that we have moved past thissort of moralizing. I never understood the sermons that were spoke in German in mychurch growing up but I can remember how my mother told me that some were about theevils of wearing big dangly ear rings. Does what we wear have any place in helping us tounderstand 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 leftliving alone in the middle of it. You have so many possessions that you are isolated bythem. 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 Isaiahis 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 inthe land that God brought them into. In the wilderness their only real choice was to dailytrust 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 couldadapt practices and beliefs from their neighbours who followed other gods. And so therewere 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 thewell-being of their neighbour. The prophets came to restore a primal relationship of faithin God that was centred in right worship. It seems as though there is a pattern to thismessage 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 goingalong in our series on the Old Testament we are reaching a point where the people arekicked out of the land because they failed to return to God in faith. In the Christiantradition 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