SERMON SUNDAY MARCH 16TH TRUE WORSHIP Isaiah 58 English Standard Version (ESV) True and False Fasting 58 “Cry aloud; do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet; declare to my people their transgression, to the house of Jacob their sins. 2 Yet they seek me daily and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the judgment of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments; they delight to draw near to God. 3 ‘Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?’ Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,[a] and oppress all your workers. 4 Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicked fist. Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high. 5 Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a person to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord? 6 “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed[b] 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 him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? 8 Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. 9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, 10 if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. 11 And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail. 12 And 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 dwell in. 13 “If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure[c] on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure,[d] or talking idly;[e] 14 then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;[f] I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” If you’ve ever seen a Charlie Brown cartoon on TV, you are familiar with Charlie’s teacher, Mrs. Donovan. Whenever she talks in the cartoon all you hear is the “Waa –wa – waa – waa” sound of a trombone. Only by the responses of Charlie Brown and his beloved pals do we have any clue as to what the teacher is saying. I think of Charlie Brown’s teacher whenever I read this Isaiah passage and also when I think of 1 Corinthians 13:1 which reads, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Or a stuttering trombone. Our talk, our prayers, our worship minus love just sound like “waa – wa- waa –waa” to God. Or maybe that is too tame. Too humorous. Too soft on ourselves. Perhaps our words and our pleas, when absent of true worship, sound more like a movie so saturated with offensive language that we have to physically get up and leave the theatre. What if our singing and prayers, so empty and self-serving, so devoid of love and justice, caused God to get up and leave this morning? When the prophet spoke our text today, he was facing a serious spiritual crisis in the community of faith. From chapters 56 – 66, three things seem clear about the Israelites. First, there is a problem with the people’s commitment to maintain justice – to guard and provide for the basic needs, requirements, or even rights of people living together in community. Second, the people were tired and impatient for better days. They had returned from 70 years of exile in Babylon. They had expected God to come and establish his dominion over all the earth. But times were hard and the future was anything but bright. By the time of Isaiah 58, nearly 20 years had passed and still no new kingdom. No golden age. Apathy and discouragement had dimmed their vision of the future. Third, they were now moving beyond disappointment and apathy to cynicism. They had heard the promises all their lives, and no longer believed them. The people were going through the motions of religion expecting God to reward their external piety, their fasting. The Israelites were at the most one generation out from seeing some mighty miracles of God. And they were forgetting. They heard the stories, they practiced the rituals that were testimonies to God’s faithfulness – but they didn’t really believe them anymore. I get this. Does it sound familiar? Some of us may have testimonies of God’s miraculous works in our lives. Maybe even in the lives of some of our family or closest friends. But for some of us, we are living on stories. We practice the rituals without truly believing that what we are here to remember really matters anymore. But we keep coming. For whatever reason. Perhaps because we still have some hope. Perhaps because this is what we Christians do. We go to church. We give our tithe. We dot our “I”s and cross our “t”s. We eat the bread and we drink the cup. But we’re still hungry and frustrated by what appears to be no response from God. Are you watching, God? Have you seen our faithfulness to the tasks? Are you taking note of how religious we are? Day after day we seek you. Why are you so hard to find? Why aren’t you answering us? Why are you not pleased with our sacrifices?” How can the Israelites, people who seem so intent on serving God, be considered so rebellious and sinful? Because they were not really serving God at all. They were serving themselves in the guise of serving God. In verse 3, God responds. “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, 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. Is such the fast that I choose a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?” God rejects their worship. God will not be manipulated by public displays of godliness and a lack of humility. God will not listen to our voice when our devotion is to our own interest rather than the interests of God. Before we move on to hear what God is interested in, we need to spend some time here. Time here in the rebuke and the judgment that we’ve earned for the church today could very easily be the audience for God’s proclamation through the prophet. Before we can move forward, we need to take an honest and difficult look at where we are. What does our worship consist of? What are our pleas to God? When we gather together and when we come to the table what charges can be brought against us? Look, you serve your own interest while serving my church and ignoring the hurting. Look, you petition me with prayers to make your life more comfortable and easy while turning a deaf ear to the hardships of others. You complain to me that your wants are not met while turning a blind eye to the needs of others. You remind me not only of the moral sacrifices you make but how others fail to make them. And you do all of this with a self-righteous attitude and indignant expectation that I owe you something. Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? God owes us nothing. God owed the Israelites nothing. God was wise to Israel’s superficiality. On the surface, they may have looked godly. But they hadn’t changed their underlying behavior. God is never satisfied with rituals and liturgies when the hearts of His people remain corrupt. So He suggested in this passage something that ought to stun our own beliefs about prayer – that because of their hypocrisy, He would not even listen to their prayers! We take it as foundational that God will always listen to our prayers, but this passage suggests that we should not expect God to listen to prayers offered by insincere hearts. So what does please God? What does God choose as an acceptable fast or authentic worship? God acquaints authentic worship with feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and bringing justice to the poor with an attitude of humility and love. v. 6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine and author and speaker on issues of biblical justice, attended seminary in Chicago. One day, he and some of his classmates decided to do a little experiment. They went through all sixty-six books of the Bible and underlined every passage and verse that dealt with poverty, wealth, justice and oppression. Then one of Jim’s fellow classmates took a pair of scissors and physically cut out every one of those verses out of the Bible. The result was a volume in tatters that barely held together. Beginning with the Mosaic books, through the books of history, the Psalms and Proverbs, and the Major and Minor Prophets, to the four Gospels, the book of Acts, the Epistles and into Revelation, so central were these themes to Scripture that the resulting Bible was in shambles. According to The Poverty and Justice Bible, there are almost two thousand verses in Scripture that deal with poverty and justice. When Jim would speak on these issues, he would hold his ragged book in the air and proclaim, “Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible; it is full of holes. Each one of us might as well take a Bible, a pair of scissors, and begin cutting out all the scriptures we pay no attention to, all the biblical texts that we just ignore.” Jim’s Bible was literally full of holes. Would God say this about us? Would God hold up His Word and say, “Your Bible is full of holes. It is empty of what truly pleases me and full of what pleases you.” A young couple from the hills of Arkansas got involved in a church where there was a lot of shouting and clapping and running for Jesus. They were trying to convince Grandma that she should attend. “You should have seen it,” the young man said to Grandma. “The Holy Spirit was really there!” Grandma kept rocking and didn’t say a word. “And, Grandma,” said the young woman, “you should have seen the preacher. He really got with it. He was screaming at the top of his voice and the people were popping up like popcorn to praise the Lord. It was unbelievable!” Again, Grandma kept right on rocking. Finally, the young man said,” Grandma, don’t you think you would like our church?” Grandma finally spoke: “Honey, let me just put it this way. I don’t care how loud they shout, and I don’t care how high they jump. It’s what they do when they come back down that counts.” God agrees with Grandma. We can make a lot of noise with our worship, lots of noisy gongs and clanging of cymbals, lots of stuttering trombones. But the only way our worship is authentic and pleasing to God is if our worship makes a difference in our relationship with others. If we are to be part of this coming kingdom, God expects our lives – our churches and faith communities too – to be characterized by these authentic signs of our own transformation: Compassion, mercy, justice, and love – demonstrated tangibly. Only then will our light break forth like the dawn, our healing quickly appear, and our cries for help be answered with a divine HERE AM I. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “It is in the process of being truly worshipped, authentically worshipped, that God communicates with men.” o Today we desperately need to be reminded of the blessings of obedience. Especially if we want to shine light into the dark places, we must have a firm and certain knowledge of God’s love for us, founded about the gift of God’s Son (cf. key passage on 52:13-53:12). Apart from such encouragements that remind us of the joy that is set before us, we will not have the faith needed to give like Jesus gave on the cross (Hebrews 12:2-3). Isaiah 58 The Message (MSG) Your Prayers Won’t Get Off the Ground 58 1-3 “Shout! A full-throated shout! Hold nothing back—a trumpet-blast shout! Tell my people what’s wrong with their lives, face my family Jacob with their sins! They’re busy, busy, busy at worship, and love studying all about me. To all appearances they’re a nation of right-living people— law-abiding, God-honoring. They ask me, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’ and love having me on their side. But they also complain, ‘Why do we fast and you don’t look our way? Why do we humble ourselves and you don’t even notice?’ 3-5 “Well, here’s why: “The bottom line on your ‘fast days’ is profit. You drive your employees much too hard. You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight. You fast, but you swing a mean fist. The kind of fasting you do won’t get your prayers off the ground. Do you think this is the kind of fast day I’m after: a day to show off humility? To put on a pious long face and parade around solemnly in black? Do you call that fasting, a fast day that I, God, would like? 6-9 “This is the kind of fast day I’m after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families. Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The God of glory will secure your passage. Then when you pray, God will answer. You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’ A Full Life in the Emptiest of Places 9-12 “If you get rid of unfair practices, quit blaming victims, quit gossiping about other people’s sins, If you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out, Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight. I will always show you where to go. I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places— firm muscles, strong bones. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry. You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again. 13-14 “If you watch your step on the Sabbath and don’t use my holy day for personal advantage, If you treat the Sabbath as a day of joy, God’s holy day as a celebration, If you honor it by refusing ‘business as usual,’ making money, running here and there— Then you’ll be free to enjoy God! Oh, I’ll make you ride high and soar above it all. I’ll make you feast on the inheritance of your ancestor Jacob.” Yes! God says so!
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:39:08 +0000
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