Hilton Head Island, SC – October 22, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 1:1-9; Issiah 1:18-20, 2:1-5
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Come, let us reason together, says the Lord; though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall become like wool.” Issiah 1:18
The prophet Isaiah was born in Jerusalem to a high class family. He lived in the capital of Judah for his entire life. He may also have been born a priest, although scholars are not all agreed on that. Apparently his closest friendships were among the rich and well-born.
Throughout the long history of the Christian Church, I would guess that Isaiah has been read as part of the liturgy and more sermons were preached from him than from any of the other prophets. It is claimed that two or possibly three men were involved in the writing this prophecy, and that chapters 40 through 66 were the products of that anonymous man (or men’s) hands. The supposition seems accurate, but the thesis has never been proven, nor is it likely to be.
Isaiah is the first of the prophets in the prophetic section of the Hebrew scriptures, and Jeremiah is second. Both books are about the same length, each covering approximately seventy pages of script. Jeremiah is less popular, because in his prophecy almost never is heard an encouraging word, and most of his skies cloudy all day. Long ago the word “Jeremiad” came into English usage to describe any speech or writing which is an unrelenting harsh criticism of anyone or anything. And while Isaiah can certainly be barbed in his language, he has far more kind and hopeful words than Jeremiah, who lived more than a century later, and witnessed the total defeat and destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, which may explain why he was so dour and downcast.
However, when Isaiah started his first chapter, either he or an editor wrote one verse that tells us that Isaiah was the son of a man named Amoz, about whom we hear nothing else, and that Isaiah lived during the reigns of four long-reigning monarchs of Judah: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. But then he comes on with both guns blazing, as we Americans would express it.
“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken: ‘Sons I have reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people does not understand’” (1:3). It would appear that Isaiah had never read Dale Carnegie, nor had he ever attended any lectures on how to get people eating out of your hand when you give a speech or write something.
“Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, sons who deal corruptly! They have forsaken the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged (1:4)….Your country lies desolate, your cities are burned with fire,; in your very presence aliens devour your land; it is desolate, as overthrown by aliens (1”7)….If the Lord of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we should have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah” (1:9).
In 722 BCE the Assyrians had come and captured the northern kingdom of Israel. Then they tried to conquer Judah and Jerusalem, and only after a long and lethal siege did they leave and head back to Assyria. But Isaiah was one of the many who observed that disaster with their own eyes, and it is from that perspective that these words were written.
No prophets ever wrote only words of unending joy and bliss, either about the present or the future. By the very nature of their God-given vocation, their calling, much of what they said the people did not want to hear. Therefore it is a great credit to the men who agreed on what particular scriptural writings should be included in the Hebrew Bible that they included so many of the prophets, especially Isaiah and Jeremiah. Today I am beginning a series of periodic sermons that will be based on Isaiah. I shall preach them from time to time over the next year. Jesus quoted Isaiah more than any other prophet, and as I suggested earlier, Isaiah has probably been read and amplified in Christian worship more than any of the other Old Testament prophets.
With all this as background, it should therefore come as no surprise that Isaiah’s opening words were much more of a condemnation than a commendation. Most of his first chapter takes his fellow Judeans to task for forsaking God and His commandments. In only two verses does he hint that God might ease up His wrath against them if they would just pay proper attention to Him. “Come, let us reason together says the Lord; though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land” (1:18&19). These positive lines are followed by this zinger: “But if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (1:20).
Is Isaiah an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist? I hope you shall come to our own conclusion as we go through the 39 chapters that virtually all scholars agree were written by Isaiah, son of Amoz.
By the very nature of their God-given mission, prophets were not cheerleaders on behalf of the people to whom they addressed their prophecies. They perceived that their primary responsibility was to remind the people of their faults and failures, not to commend them on any stellar successes they may have had. Thus from the get-go, the populace saw them as nattering nabobs of negativism, in the words of an American vice-president over fifty years ago.
Here, from Chapter 1, is an example of Isaiah’s scathing tongue. Speaking as though he is God Himself talking, he has God say, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of he-goats” (1:11). In writing that, Isaiah was suggesting that animal sacrifice had become more important to the Israelites than showing steadfastness to God by righteous behavior. This would not endear him to the priests, especially if he had been a priest himself.
There is more. Isaiah says that God says, “When you come before me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moons and sabbath and the calling of assemblies --- I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow” (1:12-17).
Isaiah was calling attention to some religious practices which the Israelites had adopted from their neighbors, the Canaanites, Amorites, Moabites, and other “ites.” All of them were polytheists, believing in many gods. The attempt to merge two kinds of religion into one is technically called syncretism. It did not happen much when Christian missionaries entered what was to become Canada and the United States in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it did earlier when Spanish missionaries were sent into Mexico among the Aztecs and Mayans and Peru among the Incas in the sixteenth century. Syncretistic Christianity existed there well into the nineteenth century.
As for solemn assemblies, they were ancient precursors to the numerous revival meetings which were organized by groups of American Christians throughout the USA in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. When Isaiah castigated the Israelites for their assemblies, he was attacking some of the most enthusiastic proponents of a certain kind of ecstatic worship which has been displayed by religious people all over the world for millennia. And the irony is that enthusiasm literally means “in God”: en theos from the Greek. Shouldn’t people be enthusiastic in their religion? Apparently not overly so, at least according to Isaiah and the other prophets. To overdo religion is to make religion the purpose of religion. To the prophets, devotion to God, not religion, is the purpose of religion.
There was a short poem that described Boston in the Good Old Days after the success of the American Revolution: “O way up east in Boston/ In the land of the beans and cod;/ Where the Cabots speak only to the Lodges/ And the Lodges speak only to God.” There is no indication that Isaiah ever got into serious trouble by what he said. Maybe it was because he was both a Cabot and a Lodge 2500 years before there were any, and nearly everyone supinely put up with whatever he said, because he was a blue blood.
The point is, as the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” What has been is what is and what will be. Humans can change the nature of the world for the better, but we cannot seem to change human nature for the better, or at least not consistently. Overly ecstatic religion still prevails in certain places and among certain kinds of people. Religious assemblies can send people into hyperactive orbits. In the opposite direction, drug dealers kill one another with impunity. Large gangs of late teenagers and young men in their twenties suddenly burst into large stores, smashing display cases and stealing jewelry and other expensive items, causing major merchandisers to abandon those urban areas forever. And on Saturday, October 14, 2023, hundreds of Hamas terrorists stormed through a demolished barrier in Gaza, and the greatest number of Israelis were killed in a single day since the War of Independence in 1948. Two hundred more were taken hostage. In comparable percentages of population, in America that would have equated to over sixty thousand killed in one day, and five thousand taken hostage. A war quickly erupted, in which thousands of innocent lives have been snuffed out.
“How the faithful city has become a harlot, she that was full of justice! Righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water. Your princes are rebels, and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them” said Isaiah (1:21-23).
Seldom did Isaiah write happy words. Usually he was raking someone or something over the coals. He was a surgeon, using his quill as his scalpel to try to cut out the cancer, so that the sinful being might survive.
But he was not always severe. “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths” (2:2-3). This is not to be understood literally, but poetically. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, shall never be among the world’s highest mountains. But spiritually and mentally, in our minds, that can happen, if we stay the course and keep ourselves pointed in the right direction. Being faithful requires constant attention, and it does not come naturally to us. It must be learned, and re-learned, and learned yet again.
So what was Isaiah, an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist? Either, or both? Sometimes the one and another time the other? If so, all of us are probably like him. But these days, it feels very hard to be a pessimistic optimist. Pessimistic pessimism is far easier to come by. In turbulent times, God help us.