Outside the Containers--March 6, 2025

Outside the Containers--March 6, 2025

Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins. Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (Isaiah 58:1-7)

If there is one thing the prophets are crystal clear on, it is that we cannot separate our love of God from our love of neighbors. 

No matter how much we might wish to keep a hard and fast line between them, prophets like Isaiah do not offer that option.  That is, you might say, one of the ways that love goes beyond boundaries--our love for God cannot help but spill over into the ways we treat other human beings.  And there is no possibility of telling God we don't want to have to love our neighbors and are willing to do extra shifts of loving God to make up the difference.  No, the Scriptures insist that love is ultimately of one piece--the degree to which I love God is inseparable from the degree to which I love other people.

That probably comes through pretty clearly here in this passage from what we know as the 58th chapter of Isaiah, words that many of us heard quite recently on Ash Wednesday.  The situation is this: the people are complaining to God that God doesn't seem to be taking note of all their religious rituals and displays of public piety.  "Why are we fasting, but you're not paying attention, God?"  "Why are we going through the motions of humbling ourselves, but you don't seem impressed?" The people think that God is like a celestial vending machine, and if they do a little ritual or mumble the right words, then God is obligated to shower them with favor and do their bidding.  And on this point, the prophet speaks for God and calls them out on their bad theology and even worse devotion.

In the prophet's telling it, God answers back to the people, "How about you correct the injustices that you've been comfortably ignoring instead--how about that can be your 'fasting'?"  God says, "Isn't the kind of 'fasting' I really want that you set people free who are oppressed, that you welcome people to your table who are hungry, and to open your doors to the ones without homes?"  The assumed answer, of course, is that this is what God really wants.  God tells the people, in other words, that they cannot separate their relationship with God from their relationships with other people.  They might have wished that they could keep these two in hermetically sealed compartments in their lives--one for God, and one for other people--so that they don't have to deal with caring for others.  But God won't let them off the hook that way.  God insists that the way to show love for God is to show love for other people, because love, like watercolor paint bleeding across the fibers of the paper, won't stay within the lines we have drawn.  And as Isaiah 58 tells it, there is no option for loving God that stays confined to the ritualized practice of prayers while we turn away from those who are hungry, seeking refuge, or suffering from injustice. Love for God--if it is the real deal--cannot stay put within the confines of a Sunday morning service, an Ash Wednesday liturgy, a daily devotional time, or a fish bumper sticker on your car.  Genuine love goes beyond the boundaries of organized religion or public displays of piety to show up as actions of care and habits of empathy for other people, precisely because they are beloved of God.

The old line of Martin Luther's goes something like this: "God doesn't need your good works, but your neighbor does."  Luther is saying the same thing as the prophet did twenty centuries before he was born: if you want to show love for God, you do it by caring for the people whom God loves (which is everybody, in particular those who are suffering) because there is nothing you can do for God directly that God needs.   God isn't powered by our prayers, and God's ego does not need stroking from our hymns of praise.  God doesn't require our offerings, and God will not be impressed by our ability to go without food or chocolate or what-have-you for any length of God.  God is not an audience needing to be entertained or wowed by our feats of religious fervor, and God is not some sort of deal-maker looking to trade prayers for divine favor in return.  But God does care about other human beings, and so if you want to show God the depth of your love, the way to do it is to love your neighbors (which includes strangers and enemies, according to Jesus).  In other words, the way to love God is to allow that love to move outside the containers we would have tried to hold it inside of, and to spill outward to include people in whatever their situations or needs are.

Today, maybe that's the question to reflect on for us:  what are the places in our lives we've been trying to silo off our religious selves from the rest of our lives, and what might it look like to let our love for God flow outward across those lines and boundaries to include other people?  What might it look like for us today to love God by loving other people?  And what empty motions that we had been going through for the sake of appearances might we be able to leave by the wayside in order to go where Jesus leads us?

Since God has already told us what would express our love best, the only question is whether we will dare to do what God has asked for: to care for those who suffer as our way of showing our love for God.  What do you think--do we dare?

Lord God, pull us out of empty performances of piety that you never needed in the first place to love the people you have placed in our lives as our way of loving you deeply and fully.