Think Fast

Isaiah 58:1-14

There was this game I played as a kid, maybe you’ve played it, too. It’s called “think fast.” It’s not much of a game. Basically you chuck an object at a friend while shouting “think fast,” and then, when it hits them in the face, you laugh and mock them for not catching it. It was always their fault for not catching it, not the thrower’s fault for catching them off guard. Looking back, I guess I can confess that it’s not really the kindest game. But since when has kindness been a priority of the culture of young boyhood?

If we can be honest, I think kindness has escaped the “priorities” of a lot of cultures. Yet I would venture this, even at the beginning of my sermon, I would propose that teaching kindness is the purpose of religion. If there is a higher power, a creative power, a Creator who breathes light and life for no reason other than the delight it brings the Creator to witness goodness, then creation, in and of itself, becomes an act of kindness…the first act of kindness out of which all other acts are born. To be created in the image of this Creator, then, would mean that humanity is created with a capacity for kindness. Those of us who have studied creation, who know the story well, know that creation is a contradictory process: light and darkness are created at the same time; sea and sky; oceans and dry land…nothing is created without its opposite. Our capacity for kindness is no different. We also have a capacity for cruelty, for selfishness. To know the story of Cain and Abel, is to know the story of how kindness lost out to the human priority of self-preservation.

This is a mistake from which God has been calling us back since…well…since almost the beginning.

Paul Hanson calls Isaiah 58 a “classic example of prophetic tradition in the Bible,” in which themes of ‘justice and proper worship’ come to clear expression.”[1] I would joking ask why such a text would appear in our lectionary this Sunday as it clearly doesn’t seem to have much to do with the Super Bowl, except I think that we have all, no matter who we like or what we like, have experienced intense unkindness in the past months. We know what humanity is capable of in choosing to reflect something other than God’s image. We all know. We have all been hurt.

I don’t think there was an unharmed soul in Isaiah’s audience either. But neither was there a soul not guilty of perpetuating unkindness. Isaiah criticizes them for confronting God “as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.” I might be oversimplifying that ordinance into “kindness.” Paul Hanson calls this ordinance “the order of compassionate justice God has created and upon which the wholeness of the universe depends.”[2] I would simplify it to: “objective compassion”…yet still think that is a bit too “fancy” of a term to except everyone to digest without a bit of help.

The good ol’ “golden rule” might actually become our baseline for an example of “subjective compassion”: to “treat others as you would want to be treated.” Some have corrected the community ethic to a step deeper than that: to “treat others as they would want to be treated.” But I think Jesus went yet one further (because we can all desire to be treated in ways that would require others to be treated cruelly), Jesus asked us to consider that we, all of us, insist on being treated as God would have us treated--that God could look at how we treat ourselves and others and say, as God LOVES to say, “that is good!”

A recall, as it were, of our priority toward kindness.

The issue that Isaiah calls to attention isn’t a tendency towards irreligion, but towards hyper-religion: a delight in exhibiting piety that misses the essential point, “God’s order of compassionate justice.”

You fast to draw attention to yourself, not to the problem. This was my major issue with the protests that followed the inauguration: the amount of trash that the protesters left behind, and the amount of “trash”-language that their protests used. It was as if “unkindness” were being celebrated as necessary tool for winning whatever battle they felt they were fighting. But I guess, if I’m going to be fair, I can’t blame them for thinking that cruelty is the only language that carries weight these days.

That’s why I turn to you, as Isaiah turned to his people long ago, to ask that our expression of devotion to God be something more.

So says our God: "is this what I choose, that you express religious devotion through releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke, setting free the mistreated, and breaking every yoke? Isn’t [my will sharing] your bread with the hungry and bringing the homeless poor into your house, covering the naked when you see them, and not hiding from your own family?” These words echo in Jesus’ controversial, but powerful, words to his disciples in the 25th chapter of Matthew, when the “Son of God comes in his majesty to sit on his majestic throne.” 'Son of Man' here being indicative of the one who, in perfect unity with God, reflects God’s image in creation—an image of kindness, of objective compassion. This Son of God invites those who “gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcome to the stranger, clothes to the naked, care to the sick, and visit to the imprisoned” to join him in the kingdom prepared for them before the world began. Before the world was created. Before God’s kindness was contradicted with an equal but opposite cruelty.

Isaiah probably caught folks off-guard, suggesting that God remained unimpressed with their religiosity, their so-called “fasting.” They were working hard to impress themselves with their “self-affliction”, their “sack-cloths and ashes”, their feigned piety which drew attention to themselves, but not to God’s goodness…not to God’s compassion…not to kindness.

“Are you serious?” asks God? Will you call this a day “acceptable to the Lord?” With this, Isaiah attacks self-serving, dehumanizing religion; Isaiah attacks unkindness. And we have all been unkind to one another. Isaiah’s plea—God’s plea through Isaiah—is a plea back to kindness—the same plea that God has been making since Cain’s protest of Abel’s “favor in God’s sight”—since the very first witness to the viability of the unrighteous victor.

But what does righteousness look like? And Isaiah offers this to us, because he was speaking to folks on either side of a controversial decision: the decision to return to Jerusalem from exile. Isaiah 58 comes from the portion of the book known by scholars as “3rd Isaiah” the prophesies to the community who returned to “Zion” from exile in Babylon. “In the 540s B.C.E., Second Isaiah [who was not the author of today’s passage] had announced to the Jewish exiles in Babylon God’s intention to bring about their release from captivity and their return to Zion.” Well, they were released from captivity, but their exodus did not exhibit the fullness of “kindness” that one might expect from the people of God. Also, to be fair, not all of the exiled community returned to Jerusalem, some were prosperous in Babylon, why leave a good thing? Isaiah 58 is a part of a section of Isaiah that “describe[s] the bitter enmity between rival groups in this returning community.”[3]

The final chapters of Isaiah describe the conflict of the returning-community: bitter vindictiveness against the mood of promise and hope that prevailed in the middle section of Isaiah.[4] Paul Hanson describes this section of the text as “harsh accusations hurled by one segment of the community against the other.”[5] We know this environment, no matter which “segment” we claim to be a part of. Against the judgments, the bitterness, the unkindness, Isaiah summons God’s judgment, God’s kindness. The challenge of the entirety of the book of Isaiah comes in this—and as I’ve taught, Isaiah has multiple authors—“can God’s work be found in the dissonance between the major sections of the Book of Isaiah?”

Our current social, economic, political, and religious reality has multiple authors, too. Can God’s kindness win out in the midst of our contradicting human temptation toward ugliness, argument, violence, and cruelty? Can our lives make God say, “That is very good”? Christians, think slow. Think long and hard about your life, about what you believe, about whose image you bear. To whose image do you want your life to bear witness?

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” –Mark Twain

[1] Hanson, Paul. “Isaiah 40-66” from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Westminster-John Knox, 1995. Louisville, KY. Page 204.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 186.

[4] Ibid, 192.

[5] Ibid.