Isaiah 40:21-31
Healing Spiritual Amnesia
James Sledge February
4, 2018
Over
the past year, I have heard numerous
calls for the Church to find its prophetic voice, to “speak truth to power.” At
a time when some Christians are willing to excuse the most hateful, misogynist,
racist behavior to gain or keep political power, it is incumbent on us
to proclaim the way of Christ, a way that has special concern for the weak, the
poor, the despised, the oppressed. Yes, we do need to speak God’s truth to
power.
The
biblical prophets often did exactly that, condemning kings and ruling class for
policies that benefited the wealthy and injured the poor, blasting outward
religious show that was uninterested in matters of justice and a rightly
ordered society. But there is more to prophetic speech than this.
Prophets
are about getting people aligned with God. Sometimes that means chastising them
or warning what will happen if they don’t straighten up. That explains why some
think that prophecy is about predicting the future, but such prophecy is rarely
meant to be predictive in an absolute sense. It is, rather, a call to change
and create a different future.
But
prophecy need not be warning. Such is the case in our reading today. Here the
prophet speaks to exiles in Babylon, people who’ve been defeated, Jerusalem and
its great Temple have been destroyed, and these exiles struggle to maintain
their religious traditions in a strange, foreign land. Some conclude that the Babylonian
gods are stronger than their God. Or perhaps God has simply abandoned them. If only
they had heeded the words of prophets in the past, but now it is too late. God
pays no attention to their prayers any longer.
In
this situation, the prophet’s job is not to call the people to straighten up.
Rather it is to call them out of their spiritual amnesia. They have forgotten
who this God called Yahweh is. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has
it not been told you from the beginning? Memory has failed them. They
cannot see beyond their loss and suffering, and so faith and hope evaporate. Is
such a moment, the prophet’s work is to help the people remember.
The
prophet reminds them that it is Yahweh who stretched out the heavens and filled
the cosmos with stars. To Yahweh, the most powerful Babylonian ruler is but
grass that withers and is blown away in the desert heat. Do they not remember
this God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt, brought them into a good and
fertile land?
Then the prophet addresses fears that God has
abandoned them, has rejected them, once again seeking to jar Israel’s memory. Why do
you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from Yahweh,
and my right is disregarded by my God”? Have you not known? Have you not
heard? Yahweh is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the
earth. who does not faint or grow weary; whose understanding is
unsearchable. God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.
If Israel will only trust in Yahweh, they shall renew their strength, they
shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they
shall walk and not faint.
If we continued reading, we would hear
the prophet assuring Israel that God is about to stir and rescue Israel. We
would hear the prophet continue trying to jar Israel into remembering, to shake
her from her spiritual amnesia.
____________________________________________________________________________
A
few years back, Brian McLaren wrote a book with the rather unwieldy title, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and
Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World. In it,
he suggests that many of us are suffering from something he calls Conflicted
Religious Identity Syndrome, or CRIS.
McLaren
says that Christian identity in America has traditionally operated on a
continuum. At one end strong, vigorous identity pairs with hostility toward
those outside the faith. People with a Strong/Hostile
identity can be kind and friendly to outsiders but only in hopes of
converting them.
At
the other end of this continuum, hostility is replaced by respect and tolerance
for the outsider, but this is typically accomplished by watering down identity.
Those with a Weak/Benign identity are
happy to engage in interfaith activities and all manner of faith exploration
and questioning, but exactly what they believe can get pretty fuzzy. Most
Mainline churches such as ours are on the Weak/Benign
end of the continuum, and if we can articulate our beliefs at all, profess a
generic god who fits easily into our political beliefs. Just don’t ask us to
give a lot of specifics about what this god expects or requires, how this god
is present, or what this god is likely to do in the world.
McLaren’s book is a call for the church
to find an identity that rejects the traditional continuum, to forge what he calls a Strong/Benevolent identity. He doesn’t use the term, but I wonder
if his is not a prophetic call for us to shake off our own spiritual amnesia.
____________________________________________________________________________
Over
the past year or so, a lot of Mainline and progressive Christians have struggled
with the state of things in this country. On the one hand, many have a strong
desire to do something, to effect change. Many progressive Christians have
participated in more secular events such as the Women’s March. And there have
been more explicitly religious responses to issues such as racism, including a
ministers’ march in DC last year.
But
at the same time, I’ve seen and heard a great deal of disbelief and despair.
Many are genuinely worried about the fate of the nation, as well as that of the
Church. In part because we progressive Christians have not had nearly as strong
an identity as our more conservative, evangelical cousins, they are much more
the public face of the Church.
I wonder if all of us, conservative and
progressive alike, aren’t suffering various forms of spiritual amnesia.
Evangelicals seem to be pursuing political power and forgetting the ways of God
in the process. We progressive sorts seem to have created a faith that is more
philosophy and vague spirituality than something anchored in the person of
Jesus, in the God to whom all human plans and schemes are passing fancy, who
brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
Often we either think it all depends on us fixing things ourselves, or we
despair that it’s all going to hell.
_____________________________________________________________________________
The other day I heard a progressive
colleague say, “I think I’ve preached Jesus more in this last year than I have
in all my years of ministry.” I wonder if that’s not the prophetic speech we
need right now, a call to remember. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has
it not been told you from the beginning? The Creator and ruler of the
cosmos has taken on flesh and come for our sakes. Christ gives power to the faint, and
strengthens the powerless, and those who wait for and trust the him shall
renew their strength.
And so we will hope and pray for God’s
kingdom, for God’s new day. We will pray and work for the day when God’s will
is done on earth. And we will not despair, for we know that the future belongs
to God who in Christ has broken the power of death itself. We remember; we
remember who God is and what God has done, and so we know that we shall mount
up with wings like eagles… shall run and not be weary… shall walk and not
faint.
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