Sermon: Healing Spiritual Amnesia

 Isaiah 40:21-31
Healing Spiritual Amnesia
James Sledge                                                                            February 4, 2024 

It is not uncommon to hear 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 the ruling class for policies that benefited the wealthy and injured the poor. They blasted 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 them about 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 destroyed. These exiles have struggled 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 longer pays any attention to their prayers.

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, to 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 a 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, we tend to 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. And I wonder if his is not a prophetic call for us to shake off our own spiritual amnesia.

Over the past decades, 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 church responses to issues like racism. I think of our own DRT or Dismantling Racism Team.

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. And 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 Jesus in the process. We progressive sorts seem to have created a faith that is more philosophy and vague spirituality than something centered on the person of Jesus, on 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.

Recently 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. Jesus gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless, and those who wait for and trust in him shall renew their strength.

And so we will hope and pray for God’s kingdom, for God’s new day. We will pray for 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.