A Two-Edged Sword

Midweek Worship, Eighth Week After Pentecost

Semicontinous Reading: Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The poets and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible often rail against the cultic Temple system in place at the royal city of Jerusalem. And this might come as a shock to someone reading through the Bible as though it were a single unified work.

Are there not whole books of Law delineating every conceivable sacrifice and ritual of the Temple, of the Cohens, of the Levites? Is not the Temple itself the very center of Israelite identity—the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace all rolled into one? How then can we hear verses like this from Isaiah: “I have had enough of burnt offerings … I do not delight in the blood … incense is an abomination to me”? Well, nuts.

Many commentaries are quick to assert that of course the prophets aren’t condemning all Temple sacrifice, merely that which has no heart—the hypocritical ceremonies of hierophants who get every jot and tittle of ritual right, whilst ignoring the orphan, the poor, and the widow, ignoring divine demands for justice and mercy. But I’m not so sure we should nerf it like that. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

These theologians and professors of religion often have a vested interest in portraying the Bible as though it were all of a piece, as though it descended from Heaven on golden plates, perfect and inerrant, in good King James English. But the Bible has never been one book; it is many, indeed an entire library spanning some thousand years. And some of those books disagree, even within themselves.

Look no further than the very first chapters of the very first book: Genesis 1 and 2. They contradict each other. There’s no serious way around it. And this proves to be a problem if we’re trying to make the Bible into something it is not: a science book, for instance, or a literal history in the way that we think of historiography today. But in fact it shouldn’t bother us, because it didn’t bother the compilers of the Bible.

Genesis consists of several sources edited together, and Jews and Christians for thousands of years have had no real problem with this, no problem with chapters 1 and 2 opening the grand narrative of Scripture with differing points of view. This, after all, is why we have four Gospels, rather than whittling them down to one. If you know anything about Judaism, you know that argumentation is understood to be a way of discerning the truth. And the books of the Bible argue.

If you don’t believe me, just read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes together. Tell me who makes the better argument. So, yes, the idea that parts of the Bible might defend the Temple system while other parts excoriate it is no great leap mentally to make. Scripture is the story of a people’s relationship to God, after all, not an individual’s.

Now, all of that said—what is it that the Prophet Isaiah has to speak to us, to our own situation, our own time and place? Rather more than we should like, I’d think. Hypocrisy is the perennial pitfall in religious undertakings of any kind. Acts of worship, of devotion, intended to draw us ever more deeply into love of God and neighbor, become instead ends in and of themselves. Good things made gods are idols.

Plenty of wicked men and women can quote the Bible verbatim. Hell, Satan knows the whole damn thing by heart. The trappings of religion replace true religion, and we are left instead with empty shells, with caricatures both of atheism and of belief. It’s a problem so old as to have devolved into cliché: all talk and no walk, right? Failing to practice what we preach. These days it’s politicians even more than pastors.

And this doesn’t only apply to Christians, or even to overtly religious people. Secular folks—if indeed there be such a species—are just as prone to hypocrisy, to playacting, as any of the rest of us. It’s a universally human flaw. We fail to live up to our own standards, let alone to God’s.

Think of “virtue signaling,” of sending out our thoughts and prayers and good intentions, of putting fashionable little flags on our online profile pictures, rather than rolling up our sleeves to help our neighbor in his need. All hat, no cattle. And so Right and Left we lift our pious hands in praise as though they were not full of other people’s blood. “Who asked this from your hand?” sayeth the Lord.

So—what then is to be done? Overturn the altars? Play MSNBC in the fellowship hall? Cancel Christmas? No. “Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.” Isaiah’s point is not that religion is bad. He’s a prophet of the Lord, first up. And second, there is no escaping from religion, only replacing one with another. Rather, we must not lose sight of the central tenets of our faith: forgiveness, mercy, justice, charity, grace, equity, equanimity, and universal love. God is bread for the poor.

We have to live these things, not to earn the salvation of God, but because these are the salvation of God—given to us freely and superabundantly that they might overflow from us into all the world around us. That’s faith. That’s religion. Doing away with tradition is pointless. Tradition is the price that we pay for community. And even if we swept it all off the table, we would only then replace it with some new anti-tradition, and there’s nothing more traditional than that.

Put the first things first, and the secondary will fall into place. Keep Christ at the heart of our vision, and the center will always hold. We have no real alternative. “If you are willing and obedient,” writes Isaiah, “you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

And I for one am sick of the sword. How about you?

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.