If…

Isaiah 58:9b-14

“When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks they can radically change the future by doing something small.”

One of my former campus ministry students shared this post and it got me thinking. Everything we do or don’t do, say or don’t say, is tremendously impactful. I suppose the danger of “overwhelmed paralysis” looms over those who are prone to overthink this, but there is equal danger in completely overlooking the impact of our words and actions. To cut to the point, God cares tremendously about this and calls us to a faith which encourages and enables us to have a healthy awareness of how our present actively participates in shaping a particular future.

The author of last week’s text from Hebrews defined faith as “the reality of things hoped for, the proof of what we don’t see.” Can you see the connection between present and future in this definition? Hope is how we shape our present towards a vision of the future. Faith is how we shape our hope within God’s will and wisdom. Last week, we talked about the bible characters whose “moments of faith” had tremendous impacts on the outcome of their life, their family, their nation, their neighbor. We talk about these characters from the past who radically changed the world with an act of faith, but how many of us think that we can radically change the future by being faithful to God’s vision now?

Isaiah certainly hopes to convince his audience that they are capable of this. He begins the 58th chapter with a prophecy of judgment against a people whose exercise of religion is missing the point of faith: to fill them with hope and strength to shape the world in partnership with God’s vision for it. He bemoans their woeful worship, their fasting as a practice of self-affliction, and self-resignation, of “mourning and complaining to God to do something. God is doing something; God is calling them to repent of the past, to change their hearts and lives right now, and to participate in shaping the future. “Isn’t this the fast I choose: releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke, setting free the mistreated, and breaking every yoke? Isn’t it 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?”

Maybe we recognize some of Isaiah’s prophecy from Jesus’ parable about the day of judgment in Matthew 25, a parable also seeking to remind the “faithful” that their faith requires more than simple lip-service to God. As Paul Hanson puts it, faithfulness to God requires “the exercise of justice and the practice of compassion”; it requires “replacing cold, calculating self-interest with acts of loving kindness.” We join Isaiah’s prophecy today with a simple word that reminds us we have a choice to make here and now. That word: “if.”

“If you remove the yoke from among you, the finger pointing, the wicked speech; if you open your heart to the hungry and provide abundantly for those who are afflicted…” In other words, if you repent of the past, then you will find a faith in God that guides you to acts of compassion, if you allow God’s love for you to change your hearts and lives, then “your light will shine in the darkness and your gloom will be like the noon.”

At no point in this prophecy is God’s love removed from God’s people, what are being removed are those self-imposed obstacles that keep us from truly receiving and responding to that love. “If” is a powerful word. It has the power to free us from the past and unlock a future of new possibility. It also has the power to imprison us in the past. I’m thinking particularly of the phrase, “if only.” How often have you locked yourself in the dungeon of lament with these two little words? “If only I had listened…”, “if only I had done [blank]...” “If only” is a woeful reflection on how something in the past has impacted the present, and it tends to distract us from the power we have in the present to impact the future. It becomes a “yoke,” a burden tethered around our necks. Isaiah uses the image of the yoke to describe the weight of “if only’s.” We tend to turn “if only’s” into weapons we use against others in blame and shame and anger. We’ve already looked at Isaiah’s alternative vision for our weapons: transform them into tools for cultivating growth. God encounters our “if only” with a “what if.” The shame and blame and guilt and fear you hold so tight…what if you let go of that? What would that free up your hands to do?

I’ve heard many of you mention interest in participating in more “hands-on” service projects. I think that’s an indication that the what if of God is at work in you. Think about this: think about VBS, and Brunswick stew, and blessing bags, and hunger offerings, and packaging hunger meals, and donating socks and clothes, and starting up a Presbyterian Women’s group, and all of the many meaningful and impactful ministries of this church. There was a point in the past when all of these things started out as God’s whisper: “what if.” Your ancestors' faithful response, your faithful response, has kept God’s “what-if” from becoming an “if-only.” Thanks be to God!

I want to invite all of us into a practice of prayer that listens for God’s “what if” with open hands. Let us continue in the ongoing service and ministries inspired by God’s whispers to our ancestors. But let us also continue, as they did, to dream together, and pray together, and seek out God’s will for the work we continue to do. Let’s get excited about the future. I want us to take a moment this morning to pray with open hands and listen for the whisper of God. What if we allowed the word of God to sit upon our hearts? What if we allowed our moments and our days to flow in endless praise? What if we allowed our hands to move at the impulse of God’s love? Take a moment to listen, and if you hear something...write it down so that we can listen to that whisper together. Take delight in the sabbath and listen for the Lord’s way. Let us pray.

[1] Hanson, Paul. “Isaiah 40-66” from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. 205.