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Isaiah 58:1-12
Ash Wednesday 2010

My five year-old son, Aiden and I had a really rough day on Monday. 

He spent a good deal of time in his room in time out, and I spent a good deal of time reminding myself that I don’t believe in corporal punishment. 

I forced him to apologize to me and to his sister probably fifteen times that day.  It always looked and sounded something like (downturned grumbling face… “sorry.”)  So heartfelt.  I have a friend who doesn’t make her child apologize when he clearly isn’t sorry, but I take a different tactic because of something I learned in my public worship class in seminary.  Strange place to pick up parenting strategies, I know. 

My professor, Don Saliers taught us that ritual is something we do with our bodies and voices until we can do it with our hearts in ways that are meaningful and redemptive and perhaps even life-changing.  This is the approach I take with Aiden.  He will apologize with his grumbly voice and down-turned, scowling face until he can understand with his heart the impact his actions have on the people and the world around him.  I hope that he will eventually learn the power of apology and setting things right and how crucial it is to repair and uphold relationship for everyone’s well-being, including his own.
   
Perhaps this is the parenting strategy the prophet Isaiah has been taking with the Israelites in our scripture passage for today.  But, Isaiah, and God, are getting impatient with the Israelites’ progress.  They can say and do all the “right things” with their voices and bodies, but they cannot seem to get that righteousness is more a transforming state of heart than a series of empty rituals.  They don’t get that it’s possible to be religious without being righteous. 

Their fasting and their piety are about appearance and personal salvation, not about transformed hearts.  Their religiosity is self-serving and misses what Rabbi Abraham Heschel says that the faithful know deep within their hearts, that justice and righteousness are not attributes, but the essence of God.

The Israelites don’t seem to get that what God demands of God’s people is not what they conveniently offer to uphold appearances.  They have missed the central fact that God cares about healing the whole creation.  They have missed God’s message through Isaiah that their salvation is intricately and inextricably tangled up with the salvation of their whole human family.

So Isaiah puts aside quiet diplomacy and uses his outdoor voice.  Maybe I will have to do the same with Aiden.  Isaiah hollers, “Shout out, do not hold back!  Lift up your voice like a trumpet!”  All this inward reflection must lead you to outward action.  Your piety must not keep you from doing God’s work and loving God’s people.  The fast, or the act of faithfulness that God chooses describes a whole new vision of humanity. 

Presbyterian minister Thomas Currie describes this vision when he writes, “In the presence of this One, we are saved from the loneliness of our self-justifying ways, even as we are forbidden to give ultimate loyalty to our own agendas, however pious or political.  Instead, we are invited to receive ourselves and others as gifts, discovering in God’s engagement with us a life that can only be a life together.”

A life that can only be life together.

That is why Isaiah tells us that God’s guidance and strength and provision and help and light will be ours when we do things like fight for and free the oppressed, share what we have with those in need, house the homeless, clothe the naked, and really connect in healthy and life-giving ways with our loved ones.  Because our lives are one, our salvation is also one.  Because we are one body, light cannot break through for one until it shines on all.  Because we are one human family, healing and help will never truly find us as individuals until we heal and attend to the needs of the downtrodden and the forgotten.

This is not to say that the inward work shouldn’t happen.  There is room for personal repentance, for individual change and growth, for learning to understand ourselves as beautiful, and gifted, and good.  These are essential inward moves to make if we’re going to live as one Body and seek justice and peaceful living together.  Isaiah is asking the Israelites and us as God’s beloved today to do both.  He is teaching us that the pieces are one—that the personal and the social overlap and intertwine.  When we realize this, God’s redemptive love and healing power can be revealed and experienced in our personal lives and for the whole of creation.

This, I think is the essence of the season we enter together today.  Lent, when it does what Lent should do, will move us closer to being the resurrected body of Christ in the world.  Lent ends with Easter, with the resurrection and the victory of Love over all that brings death. 

Wouldn’t it be something if that was where we ended up too?  What if we spent this season drawing together into the one resurrected body?  What might that mean for our lives and for the world?  What if our fast was to address the communal breakdown around us that we see when people go hungry or homeless or without healthcare or without life-giving community?  What if our fast was to work for worker justice and to walk with those coming out of incarceration, so that all might thrive and the Body might know healing and wholeness?  What if our fast was to simplify our living, to give more generously, so that all could have what they need? 

Then our acts of faithfulness would truly draw us to each other and the One whose essence is justice.  Then our light would rise in the darkness and our gloom would be like high noon.  Then God’s guidance would be clear to us always and our thirst would finally be satisfied.  Then we would be strong and know the abundance of a watered garden, of the stream that rushes on.  Then our cities would come alive again, our streets would be safe and welcoming, and the people would have Life, the Life that can only be when we choose to live it together. 

May this be our fast, our act of faithfulness this season.  May we draw nearer to the essence of our just God, and so may we bring Life and healing and light to ourselves and to all.