Isaiah 25: 1-9 (New Jerusalem Bible)
Isaiah chapters 24-27 were believed to have been written during the 6th Century BC. This was the time the educated class of the Jewish people were returning to Jerusalem from their 70 year exile in Babylon. The reading today was written as a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. God alone is worthy of praise because of the wholeness that God creates for God’s people around the world. Today our world revels in cheap praise and cheap grace. Today’s media elevates persons simply because they are famous and we worship the cult of wealth, success, beauty or athletic prowess. Verse one of chapter 25 challenges us to imagine what it means to praise God for God’s acts of healing on behalf of people desperate for what only a God as great as Yahweh has accomplished.
God has no plans to enrich the already wealthy or to support the already powerful. This reading is good news for the downtrodden and the poor. Isaiah challenges both the Church and the world to rethink the standards used for success and failure. It calls for a critique of any use of power that merely blesses the most powerful nation. It should remind the people of God to be critical of any status-quo system that marginalizes and suffocates the oppressed in the name of a false peace. There is no peace without justice.
Exceptionalism is often used as a moral justification when empires then and nations now claim the global ethic codes such as the Hague Agreement, do not apply to them. Some Christians within the United States see America as the New Israel. Such a mindset is not only wrong, but dangerous.
What does it mean for the Church today to be composed of the exceptionable or so-called “chosen?” It has nothing to do with the size of the church or so-called “American Exceptionalism.” But it has everything to do with those people inside or even outside the Church who want to create a society of peace, justice and compassion. Those are the chosen, regardless of their religious beliefs.
How does one imitate God in the struggle for justice? The prophet Isaiah in chapter 25, verse four, shows an example and I quote, “For you have been a refuge for the weak, a shelter from the storm, shade from the heat: for the breath of the pitiless is like a winter storm.” The Church is called to seek justice for the marginalized as a sign of being converted to the Universal Christ.
If our God is a refuge for the poor, then religious songs should reflect that. If our God is a refuge to the marginalized, then the prayers of Christians who support cutting social-services are in vain. Christians who ignore the cry of the poor do so, at their own peril.
When choosiness or exceptionalism are claimed to increase the power of a particular people, moral and ethical rules are suspended. When exceptionalism becomes militant, those who claim it, put all those who are racially or ethnically different to the margins of their society. The society then begins to normalize atrocities against those whom they consider inferior.
Whether it’s people of the ancient era and those even today, exceptionalism leads to creating gods in one’s own image. The leadership of any religion, especially Christianity, should be called to hold people accountable to the concepts of justice and not to coronate any group as God’s chosen.
Those who bow their names to the golden calf of placing nation first, of returning their nation to a supposed glorious past, are the spiritual descendants of those who ate, drank and partied around the Golden Calf before Mt. Sinai. True worship has less to do with what occurs in a building that is called sacred, but what we do in secular places, demanding that justice comes down like a river.
Since the foundation of nation-building, exceptionalism and chosenness have reigned supreme, justifying invasion, genocide and the suppression of its original population. The victims have names like the Canaanites, Hittites and Amorites from the ancient past. More familiar and closer to home are victims like the Cherokees, Hopi and the Sioux. American greatness became possible because of the Pilgrim’s supposed right to steal the winter’s provisions of the Indigenous people around them. The Pilgrims even gave thanks to God for that successful theft. I’m sure the God of Jesus did not approve that act.
Are the majority of Churches in America really standing with the oppressed? Calves of gold such as hedge funds and gated communities may temporarily provide the structure of maintaining power, privilege and wealth, but that is no more eternal than shifting sand. Only faith and love is eternal.
The activist God we worship shapes both history and politics. Isaiah chapters 13-23 is known as the “Oracles Against Foreign Nations.” It criticizes imperial power in the empires such as Assyria, Babylon and Egypt. God condemns those empires on one hand but provides shelter for the vulnerable on the other. The writer of Isaiah uses a parallel comparison on what God values. The power of God is a force of mercy through God’s followers in challenging these systems of oppression.
Today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible invites us to live in a vision of hope for the present and future. In our day when many churches are in decline and congregations lose hope, Isaiah’s bold vision calls us to remain faithful because the Word of Christ is eternal beyond time, space, nation or Cosmos.
AMEN
