Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We read the same bible readings in worship every three years. One might think that would get boring after a while. Yet each time I open the Bibel to study the readings assigned for the coming Sunday, something new jumps out at me. Often this is sparked by the way the scriptures interact with something I have recently read, heard, or seen.
The same happened this week.
When I read Isaiah’s words for us today, I remembered an interview I had listened to on the radio last week. The person interviewed was Father James Martin, a Roman Catholic Priest and podcaster. At one point during the conversation, he was asked, “What is a belief you had to give up?”
Without missing a beat, Father Martin responded, “The belief that God is transactional.”
He went on to explain that for many years, he thought a believer’s relationship with God was a quid pro quo; that God could be influenced by certain things people did. For example, thinking that if I pray ten Lord’s Prayers a day then God has to heal me. Or if I give a certain amount of money to the church then God has to make my child behave better.
Father Martin had to drop this belief when he studied theology and learned that what God really desires is a relationship built on love. And if you love someone, you don’t try to manipulate or bribe them; you don’t do things for them in order to make them owe you. No, you do things to please the other person out of love. You want to make the other person happy, and so you do what makes them happy. There is no hidden agenda, but just the desire to express your love by doing what the other person values.
The same applies to our relationship with God. We do what God values in order to express our love for God, our gratitude for the salvation God has offered us in Jesus Christ, our trust in God’s forgiveness, our desire for God’s wisdom, our hope for the Kingdom of God, for the world to become the way God has envisioned it.
With this testimony from Father Martin still bouncing around in my head, I opened my Bible and read Isaiah’s words. And I immediately noticed that the people he is speaking to had not dropped their belief in God as transactional.
This is what they say, “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” In other words, “God, we are doing all this religious stuff for you, but you are not coming through for us. We go to church all the time and say our daily prayers, but life is still so hard. Where are you? Why aren’t you doing anything?” The people believe their worship practices and piety should sway God in their favor and spur God into action.
Isaiah tells them where they are going wrong.
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers.
4 You fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.
Through the prophet, God tells the people that their fasting is worthless because it doesn’t have any effect on their empathy for others, on their ethics and morals.
Fasting is good, a great spiritual practice. Fasting means to refrain from eating or to limit eating in order to gain appreciation for God’s providence and empathy for those who don’t have enough to eat. As Isaiah says, fasting is supposed to humble us and connect us with our less fortunate brothers and sisters.
The people Isaiah is speaking to have completely missed that aspect. They are fasting and worshiping in order to look good to others and to get God to do what they want. Their fasting doesn’t create any empathy, for they continue to quarrel and fight and oppress the poor. God has no interest in this kind of fasting.
Here are two real life examples for these two different kinds of fasting.
A colleague was visiting a member of his congregation towards the end of Lent. The lady was telling him how proud she was of her fasting. Usually, she eats a candy bar every day. But during Lent she gave that up and saved all the candy bars. She showed the pastor the drawer full of them.
The pastor asked her if at the end of Lent, she was going to give them away. “Oh no,” she said, “Then I will eat them all myself.”
Obviously, she didn’t learn anything about God’s will during her fasting.
Compare that to a family who spend the whole season of Lent living off of what a family their size receives from welfare. They tried to get by with the food stamps and supplemental payments a family like theirs could expect. It was eye-opening to them. They learned how tight things were, and how exhausting it was to plan and budget, and how anxious they were about something breaking or other unexpected major expenses. It completely changed their attitude towards people in poverty, and they became advocates for the poor.
This kind of fasting made a profound change on those doing the fasting, and in turn it made life better for their neighbors in need and brought the world a little closer to reflecting God’s will.
This is the kind of fast God is looking for. As God says through the prophet:
6 Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
These are tough expectations. As one commentator wrote, “if we truly believe in the authority of scripture, it’s about to get real in God’s house today. [..] Can anyone survive that scorching bluntness and think, “yeah, I’m doing alright at this”?”
Throughout the ages, the church has always been tempted to do what Isaiah’s people did: go about their worship life and fasting, but not let it affect the way they act. Otherwise, how could people go to church and hear the gospel every week but still own slaves or support the interment of Japanese citizens or approve Jim Crow laws?
South African scholar of preaching Johan Cilliers wrote his dissertation on the kind of preaching that went on in white churches in South Africa during Apartheid. What kind of sermons would allow racial supremacy and racial violence? One of his key findings was that sermons tended to focus on moralism, on the piety of people and congregations. The message was, “If we are good people (or at least look like we are), then God will be for us.”
That’s exactly what Isaiah’s people were doing: keeping the fast made them look pious, but at the same time they continued abusive practices. Their worship was disconnected from their ethics.
Piety is a good habit. Fasting is a great discipline. Worship is a really good practice. I encourage us to engage in all of them. And I encourage us to let these practices change us, transform us, inspire us, open us up to the will of God. Through these practices, the values of the God we worship become our values.
When we adopt God’s priorities and concerns, we can transform the world. As Isaiah proclaims:
8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. 9a Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.” Then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. 11 The Lord will 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. 12 Your 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.
These words are so full of hope and promise. They echo Jesus’ words in today’s gospel, calling us salt of the earth and light for the world. And I wish I had more time to flesh this out. But both scripture passages today make clear that what we do in worship is to affect how we act in the world. What we do here as the people of God calls us to bring God’s values into our communities and nation: God’s justice, God’s compassion, God’s generosity, God’s love.
Times are challenging right now, and how to live as a Christian is challenging right now. May today’s scripture point the way for us. May our piety draw us deeper into God’s love and values so that we can carry them with us wherever we go. So we can be, as Isaiah proclaims, “the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”. Amen.