Why Speak When Our Speech Goes Unheeded?

Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C
9 February 2025

Isaiah 6:1-8, (9-13)
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11

 

It’s been said not to talk about politics and religion, likely because both topics can ruin parties.
Common wisdom says not to mix politics and religion. It is said because the church is not to have power over the state. Yet in our time that is not a problem. Churches have been shrinking for a long time, including south of the border. It once was a problem but not now.
Yet the other way around is a problem, politics telling churches who to help and who not to help, what to preach and what not to preach, who to love and who not to love. This leads to a false identification of the state’s goals as God’s goals, and it therefore leads to a false allegiance, to idolatry. A couple of weeks ago Shane Claiborne wrote in a piece for Religion News Service, “The word ‘Christian’ means ‘Christ-like.’ If it doesn’t look like Jesus, and it doesn’t sound like Jesus … let’s not call it Christianity. If it’s not about love and mercy … let’s not call it Christianity. If it’s not good news to the poor … let’s not call it Christianity. If it’s not about welcoming the stranger … let’s not call it Christianity.”¹

Of course, we have long understood the death of Jesus to be for the forgiveness of our sins, for our atonement. But that does not mean that Jesus’ death was not political. Read the Gospels again and you will see that the powers conspired against Jesus and that it is the empire that killed him. In John 11, after Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, Caiphas, the high priest, says to his co-conspiritors, “You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” Yes, Jesus died for our sins but his death was a political execution. In Matthew 23 Jesus calls Jerusalem the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.

Our first reading recounts for us the calling Isaiah, son of Amoz, to be the Lord’s prophet. This occurred some time after 740 BC, dated by the death of King Uzziah (6:1). Other than the story of his call we know little about Isaiah. And the story of his call serves to lend authority to Isaiah’s prophesies. Isaiah’s oracles speak directly against the power politics of his day, much like those of Hosea and Amos in the Northern Kingdom.

In chapter three, before today’s passage, the Lord speaks as judge over the elders and the princes of the land,
“It is you who have devoured the vineyard;
the spoil of the poor is in your houses.
¹⁵What do you mean by crushing my people,
by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts.”

In chapter five we read,
“⁷For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness,
but heard a cry!”

And a little later we read,
“²⁰(…) you who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
(…)
²²Ah, you who are heroes in drinking wine
and valiant at mixing drink,
²³who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
and deprive the innocent of their rights!”

These are words directed at those who hold power. Isaiah never received the memo that our faith is to be apolitical, nor did anyone else in the Bible.²

Isaiah’s call narrative is often read at ordinations. Our hymn of the day paraphrases it because Isaiah’s calling is the calling of the church. The passage has two parts. The first part speaks of God’s holiness and Isaiah’s unworthiness. The experience of unworthiness is not particular to Isaiah. It is all we humans can muster when we stand in the presence of God. It is not to highlight our sinfulness but to highlight God’s holiness. “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

We are not people who emphasize religious experience. If we did we would move religious experience into the realm of experiences that can be produced, almost conjured, and thereby denying God’s sovereignty. If we did, we would give experience more importance than the revelation entrusted to us. And yet, the experience of Isaiah is valid. It is a mystical experience. It is a vision because it is beyond human comprehension, and the only possible response is the recognition of God’s holiness. This mystical experience of the presence of God marks the commissioning of Isaiah. At the end of this first section Isaiah answers the Lord’s question who to send with the exclamation, “Here I am; send me!”

That, it turns out, was the easy part. The next part is the difficult part. Not only is the message political, but it is without apparent response, without apparent success. Isaiah is to bear a message of emptiness, as one interpreter suggests.³ God tasks Isaiah to preach a word the people can’t hear, can’t see, and can’t understand (6.9), to preach a word that precludes hope and delays healing (6.10), and to keep preaching, until the cities are desolate, the houses are vacant, and the fields are fallow (6.11); in short, keep preaching until “vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.” (6.12)
When Ron read these verses for us earlier, perhaps you recalled Jesus saying in the Gospels, “You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive.”⁴
But what is the point of speech that will go unheeded?

It is to establish that God’s ways are not our ways, that our reasoning, as reasonable as it may seem, is not equivalent to God’s command or God’s being.
Again and again the prophets warn against relying on military strategies, power, and alliances instead of trusting in the Lord. Again and again the prophets warn against the oppression of the poor and the perversion of justice, because such breaks the covenant. On Mount Sinai God had spoken to the people, “you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy people.”⁵ Or in the words of Jesus, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”⁶ Anything other than the imitation of God our Father and Mother is a turning away from God.

In the very next chapter we get an idea of what it looks like to trust in one’s own designs rather than in God’s. The Northern Kingdom and Damascus seek to rebel against their Assyrian overlord and want Judah to join their coalition. As King Ahaz of Judah refuses to join this alliance, the would-be brothers-in-arms attack Judah first. In desperation, and against Isaiah’s urging, Ahaz appeals to Assyria to come to Judah’s rescue. The result is devastating: The division of Northern Israel into three Assyrian provinces, the destruction of Damascus, and Judah becoming a vassal of Assyria.

Before Ahaz had called on the Assyrian empire, Isaiah had spoken the word of the Lord to Ahaz,
“⁴ … Take heed, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two smouldering stumps of firebrands, because of the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and the son of Remaliah.
⁷therefore thus says the Lord God:
It shall not stand,
and it shall not come to pass.” (Is 7:4, 7)

The Jewish scholar Abraham Joshuah Heschel reflects on the fact that Isaiah’s proclamation had fallen on deaf ears: “No other ruler would have acted differently. The state was in peril, so he appealed to a great power for military aid. Isaiah offered words; Assyria had an army. (…) So Ahaz decided it was more expedient to be ‘son and servant’ to the king of Assyria than son and servant to the invisible God.”⁷
Isaiah preached yet the people did not hear and did not comprehend.

What is the point of preaching that is not heeded? Why should Isaiah bother and why should we bother?

Isaiah should bother because not all is lost. God’s people find it more expedient to be “son and servant” of earthly rulers (fill in whom you want), but God will remain our God. While the catastrophe is complete, there is hope in the stump. “The holy seed is in its stump.” Failure makes room for new beginnings.

Secondly, Isaiah, as lonely a figure as he is, is the embodiment of God’s hope for the world. For the word he proclaims has first penetrated him. He is not a loudspeaker, a mechanical device but God’s prophet who carries within him the trust in God’s faithfulness and future. He believes the word he proclaims. If we wonder about our witness today, we remember that God has called us in our baptism and that this call makes us, like Isaiah, to beacons of hope, even if no one sees and no one listens. It is not only about speaking but about embodying God’s reign. In Luke 17 Jesus says, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: ²¹Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (KJV)

The Jesuit Daniel Berrigan writes, “Isaiah becomes something other than an unattainable icon. He becomes the measure of our own possibility of seeing, hearing, understanding with the heart, of being healed. (…)
The coal is lifted from the fire and held to his lips. Thus the fire of godliness is passed on and on. A community, a circle about the fire, is not merely warmed by the fire, but touched by the fire, marked indelibly.”⁸

This is a costly calling, costly to those who bear it, for it stands against conventional wisdom as it knows God’s predisposition for peace, for justice, and for mercy. May Christ’s church bear this witness today.

Amen.