A Wearied God--August 27, 2020

 A Wearied God--August 27, 2020

"Your new moons and your appointed festivals
    my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,

    I am weary of bearing them.

When you stretch out your hands,

    I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

    I will not listen;

    your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

    remove the evil of your doings

    from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

    learn to do good;

seek justice,

    rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan,

    plead for the widow.

Come now, let us argue it out,

    says the LORD;

though your sins are like scarlet,

    they shall be like snow;

though they are red like crimson,

    they shall become like wool."  [Isaiah 1:14-18]

All the volumes of systematic theology, all the seminary classes, and all the years of Bible study insist that God can't get tired--and yet here through the words of the prophet Isaiah God confesses to being worn out by shows of Respectable Religion that ignore the needs of the neighbor.

"The One who watches over Israel will neither slumber, nor sleep," says the psalmist, and that is true--and yet, look here, God has gotten tired and worn down from putting up with our empty shows of piety when they come without a commitment to doing justice.

Creating the universe?  God does it with mere words: "Let there be..."  No trouble.

Saving the enslaved from the clutches of the murderous, greedy, and cruel hand of Pharaoh?  No sweat, not a problem.

Bearing the sins of the world, enduring a torturous death at the hands of the empire, and entering into the gloom of the grave?  God does that, too, without complaint.

But what makes the God of the Scriptures weary... is religious people who ignore the needs of the vulnerable and who aren't bothered by the blood on their hands.  That, the prophet says, is a burden more than God will bear.  As someone whose job is often described as "religious professional," those are difficult words to read--but there they are, staring back at me from my Bible, no matter how much I wish they weren't there.

And maybe that's the real tragedy Isaiah is getting at here.  It's not that God is opposed to prayer, or sabbath, or even religious festivals and solemn assemblies.  It's that we have a way of thinking that if we do those things rightly (or frequently enough?), we can stop paying attention to the suffering going on outside the stained glass windows.  We think that as long as we talk the religious talk, as long as we make a show of our prayers in public, and work to give our organized religion a more powerful perch in society, then we are given a pass when it comes to caring about the people who were gunned down in the street last night... or who will go to sleep with empty bellies tonight... or who don't know where they'll find shelter for their kids tomorrow night.

But when you yourself are comfortable, it's easy to think you don't have to worry about "those people" and "their problems."  It's easy to believe that they must all deserve whatever happened to them, or that they should have just made better life choices, or that they must be lazy... or criminal... or just "bad people."  We pile up reasons not to have to care about our neighbors, and we layer them on top of excuses not to have to do anything about their situations, because, well, after all, it doesn't directly affect me.  And the weight of all that rationalizing is just too much burden for God to bear.  Here in the opening chapter of Isaiah, God just up and says, "I'm not going to carry these any more for you, and I'm not going to lug around the pious posturing you've been putting on me.  I'm just done with it all."

You'll note, I hope, that what God is finished with is all of that empty religious talk--not the people who suffer... and not even with us, even in our complacency.  God is definitely done with our attempts to hold up shows of religiosity like a prop, but God is not done with those whose sufferings we have been ignoring.  Neither has God given up on us, even if that's what we deserve.

And this is the miracle of grace.  Despite the fact that all of us Respectable Religious folk have spent some effort in our lives ignoring the needs of our neighbors and pretending injustices weren't there, God is willing yet to start over with us.  "Though your sins are like scarlet," says the prophet in that famous line, "they shall be white as snow."  God is willing to forgive, to begin again, and to bring us to life again, when surely it is more than we deserve.  But it will mean facing up to the things we have been ignoring.  It will mean no longer hiding behind talk about "maintaining our religious heritage" as a way of avoiding having to deal with the victims of violence, the pull of our greed, and the sufferings of our neighbors.  We will have to face both the people we have ignored and our own past patterns of shrugging them off. We will have to hash it all out with God and own that indifference as sin.  And that may be an especially difficult price to pay, because we have a tendency to think that as long as I haven't directly harmed someone else, I haven't "sinned," whereas the thing God is so upset about is our numb complacency while others die or starve or go without.  Indifference is sin, too.  Apathy requires repentance.  Saying, "It's not my problem," is in fact what makes us part of the problem.

The wonder of grace is that despite all those sins we have tried to hide behind public displays of religion, God offers us the hope of beginning again.

Let us not waste it.

Maybe we have to hear the brutal truth that we have wearied God with our attempts to look religious, in order to know what grace it is that God is willing yet again to carry us into a new future.

Lord God, bring to an end our shows of religion so that we can do the work that has mattered to you all along, to love our neighbors as you do.