Soul Force

Speak, Prophet!

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

December 14, 2008

Daniel Berrigan introduces his commentary on the prophet Isaiah this way:

The ultimate beginnings of this book can be traced to a group of homeless folk in New York City who were offered a weekend of retreat and relief away from life on the mean streets. Nuns north of the city invited us to the peace and plenty of their retreat house. On arrival we inquired of our guests, “What shall we reflect on?”

They answered, “The Bible.”

“And what part of the Bible?”

“Isaiah,” they said.

“Why Isaiah?”

“He speaks about justice!” ….

Isaiah lived in a time of whetted swords and rusted plowshares, of immense violence and social conflict and neglect of the poor. Then the oracle came to him – swords into plowshares! What does Isaiah have to say to us?[1]

This is the season of Handel’s Messiah, and it’s not surprising that our readings for today – drawn from the lectionary appointed for reading in churches last week and this – are found embedded in that great oratorio – oratory in music – sketched and scored by Handel in 1741 in just three weeks. The very first words we hear are from the beginning of today’s reading in Isaiah 40: “Comfort ye, comfort ye, says your God.” We remember also that Jesus chose the beginning of the second chapter we read, Isaiah 61, when he began his ministry as reported in Luke. He was asked to read in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth – the only time in the gospels we are told that he reads from the Hebrew Bible, though he quotes it often – and he read these words:

Luke 4:¹⁸ The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised,

¹⁹ To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

Our second hymn this morning, “We’ll Build a Land,” quotes from later lines in that same chapter of Isaiah:

We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken.

We’ll build a land where the captives go free,

Where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning….

We’ll be a land building up ancient cities,

Raising up devastations from old,

Restoring ruins of generations.[2]

The resonances of these words of Isaiah are deep and abiding, especially at this season. Most scholars now agree that oracles recorded in the book of Isaiah were probably made over several discrete periods of history. The first part of the book, up the chapter 39, seems to have been written during the period when the northern kingdom of Israel was teetering on the brink of destruction, about 150 years before the southern kingdom of Judah and its capital in Jerusalem were destroyed by the Babylonians from modern day Iraq in 586 BCE. The second set of oracles, starting with chapter 40, our first reading this morning, seem to be dated to about fifty years after that catastrophe, as the exiles from Jerusalem look forward to being set free by the decree of Cyrus, ruler of the Persians and conqueror of the Babylonians. Interestingly, Cyrus is referred to a few chapters later as the Lord’s “anointed” – “Moshiach” in the Hebrew, “Messiah” in English, “Christos” in Greek, “Christ” in English. In the Hebrew Bible, the term refers to a king anointed by God to rule over Israel – notably King David and his descendents. We see many references to this term in the Psalms as well as elsewhere; for example in Psalm 2: “²The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and his anointed;” or in Psalm 18: “⁵⁰Great triumphs he gives to his king, and shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his descendants forever.”

The third section of Isaiah, starting a few chapters before our second reading from Isaiah 61, seems to have been written to give encouragement to the exiles some years after they had returned from Babylon. But even centuries later, when Jesus read from this chapter, it did not seem that the oracle had been fulfilled yet; if as that chapter concludes “the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all nations,” the day on which that would occur did not yet seem to have dawned.

A few lines after the beginning of Handel’s Messiah, we hear of the oracle at Isaiah 7:14, which is repeated in the gospel of Matthew: “Behold! A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, God with us.” As with the previous reference to Isaiah, this prophecy also had an original context. In this case, Isaiah is giving reassurance to the king reigning in Jerusalem that his enemies will falter before him – this over seven centuries before the birth of Jesus. Here’s a broader context in a new translation:

¹⁴ Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman¹is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.² ¹⁵ He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. ¹⁶ For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.

Now, for this oracle to be of any use to the king to whom it is offered, it has to be fulfilled during his own time, not seven hundred years later! And, in fact, the king’s enemies are defeated within a few years – the span of the life of a child from gestation to six or seven years of age. Of course, this translation also uses the words “young woman” to translate what Handel and Matthew refer to as “a virgin;” we now understand that the Hebrew Bible was not asserting that the child would be born to a virgin but rather to a maiden – a young woman. However, the Greek translation from the Hebrew familiar to Matthew and to the translators of the King James Version – which Handel relied upon – used the term “virgin” instead.

In each of these cases, the prophesy recorded in Isaiah had a particular application to the time it was offered. The prophet speaks words of warning, of hope, of comfort for a better time, of rescue from danger. There is a particular, local context for these oracles. At the same time, there is also an excess of meaning in these oracles. They never seem to be quite completely fulfilled. We have not yet entered the time of peace and righteousness for the whole world, and so it is that both Jewish and Christian traditions among many others around the world look forward to a time of fulfillment when there will really be peace on earth, when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and both shall survive the encounter, when swords will be beaten into plowshares. The problem arises when a particular vision of that Messianic Era, that time of fulfillment, is taken to supersede all other such visions and to require sole adherence. Handel’s Messiah, for example, perpetuates some of the gospel writers’ animus against “the Jews” who rejected Jesus as the Messiah and who thereby incurred judgment from God. That line of reasoning, that Christianity superseded Judaism, leads inexorably to anti-Semitism. Martin Marty offers a cautionary note in light of the sources Handel used:

Handel's friend Charles Jennens, who did the libretto, picked biblical texts that he thought would help fight off deists. Bizarrely, he viewed deists as plotting with Jews to attack Christ's deity. Evidently he depended on a tome by Richard Kidder, A Demonstration of the Messias, In which the Truth of the Chnstian Religion is Proved, Against All the Enemies Thereof; but Especially Against the Jews.[3]

Some of the gospels were written in the heat of a polemic as the first Christians were beginning to distinguish themselves from their Jewish origins and they unfortunately carry forward words spoken in anger which have created animosity and persecution for generations – precisely the opposite of the messianic vision found in Isaiah. The prophet spoke words of caution, calling for righteous or ethical behavior and warning that failure to obey would result in catastrophe. A few weeks ago we sang “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing,” which includes the line “He chastens and hastens his will to make known;” that chastening – chastising with the intent of bringing back to good behavior – is precisely what the prophet is doing. We don’t have to assume some grand voice from on high wreaking inevitable destruction in some arbitrary manner – the consequences of wrongdoing are self-fulfilling. Here’s how Daniel Berrigan puts it:

The extreme penalty suffered by the people is enormously distressing if we think of it as punishment. Let us say rather that the Hebrew Bible often puts into God’s hands events or consequences that we would prefer to place in our own. It is something like this: when a people violates its sworn word, the sword is unsheathed. Misfortune follows in the very nature of things.

We have only to think of the fate of the nations left to their own devices and divagations. No vengeful God is required to bring a [102] woeful outcome to criminal activity. Consequence follows crime in the nature of the moral universe. If the nations go about their business as usual, through foreign war and domestic injustice they will pull themselves down. The nations are not only destructive to the world, they are self-destructive.[4]

I come from a religious upbringing which took prophecy very seriously and quite literally. I believed that we were living in the End Times to the point that once, when perhaps eight or nine, I stayed home from a Thursday evening prayer service because I had a cold; when my family was later than I expected in coming home, I began fantasizing about how I would manage to live if the Rapture had in fact occurred and my family had gone on to heaven without me. The belief that we are living in end times has come to fascinate many religious Americans these days; the Left Behind series, which warns of the imminent ending of this current age, is one of the best-selling series of all times. There seems to be a fascination with knowing for certain what is coming next, with understanding the fulfillment of prophesy before our very eyes, a fascination which the gospel writers draw upon as they note the fulfillment of prophesies from Isaiah in telling the story of the birth and ministry of Jesus.

I was once taken by this fascination; my problem was that there seemed to be too many anti-Christs, too many end-times possibilities which kept changing as the world changed. Among the earliest collections of prophetic writings in my grandfather’s collection, the Kaiser who ruled Germany during World War I was confidently identified with the anti-Christ and the soon return of Jesus. Hitler was a favorite for many years, followed by Stalin, other leaders of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev. Today the favorites are Islamic Fundamentalists. For Martin Luther, the anti-Christ who proved that the end times were rapidly approaching was the Pope in Rome.

When we try to grab on to ancient oracles like those of Isaiah and look for a literal fulfillment, they run through our fingers like sand. Worse, a belief in some literal fulfillment occurring inevitably without any action on our part drains us of agency, leads us to believe that we have no responsibility for the state and future of the world. In fact, I believe that it is our actions that matter, not some inevitable pattern of fulfillment over which we have no influence.

At the same time, we live in an age in which a dread of the future is widespread. In both secular and religious imaginations, we find a strong sense that something will succeed this age, that something is waiting to be fulfilled. A few years ago, the fear of nuclear winter was a prominent theme. More recently, we have become attuned to the possibility of ecological catastrophe, particularly as a result of climate change. We heard just this week of the potential catastrophic risks from acidification of the oceans. These sorts of premonition of doom resonate with the ideas of a messianic age which come down to us from Isaiah and the other prophets of Israel among many sources, and which inform Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Buddhist hopes for a different kind of future, one of peace and joy, brotherhood and sisterhood, prosperity without waste, harmony between nations as well as between humans and the natural world around us. If the lion of humanity could lie down peacefully with the lamb of nature, that would truly be a breakthrough!

The question before us at this season of the hope, peace, justice and joy symbolized by our Advent Candles is how we will act to bring about this promise of a better age, how we will conform ourselves to this vision, this possibility laid before us by the prophets. We impart meaning to the universe, and we humans are accountable for our actions. We need to choose to stand on the side of righteousness, of fulfillment, of justice, of love. Nothing is inevitable on this earth. We cannot lean back on the belief in inevitable and inexorable progress as did some of our Unitarian forebears, who believed in “the continuity of human development in all worlds, or the Progress of Mankind, onward and upward forever.”[5] Jesus put it better when he spoke, at the end of his life, of those who would be rewarded as those who fed, and clothed, and visited and cared for the least of these, his and our brothers and sisters.

The prophets bring hope because they paint a picture of possibilities. Each of us at this season and at all seasons has a responsibility to embody that hope, that expectancy of something better in the way we live our own lives. Each one of us with our own hands is here to bring that hope to pass. There is more meaning in these ancient oracles than has yet been completely understood. Our part is to bring about its fulfillment as best we can, humbly, faithfully, living as we say in our covenant “in the spirit of Jesus – for the worship of God and the service of our neighbors.”

Amen.