Sunday Worship 17 August | Lectionary Proper 15: A Cord of Faith

Isaiah 5:1-7

I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.

“Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad? Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briers and thorns will grow there. I will command the clouds not to rain on it.”

The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the nation of Israel, and the people of Judah are the vines he delighted in. And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress

I did warn you last week that Isaiah does not pull his punches, and here we have another fairly bruising passage. The impact may be softened a little if we get lost between the different voices, so let's make sure we're clear on what we've heard. We begin with the prophet's voice, singing a song of his beloved's vineyard, which he puts great effort into without success. And then in verse three we switch to the beloved's voice, asking what more they could have done for the vineyard, and promising to let it go to ruin. And finally in verse seven we seem to be back to the prophet's voice, explaining that this is all about the Lord's vineyard which is the house of Israel and the people of Judah.

As I said last week, we need to hold together what these words meant when Isaiah was first delivering them, and what they might mean for us receiving them now. Isaiah was speaking to the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah in the eighth century BC, and we cannot automatically assume that these words apply to the Israel of the twenty-first century. It would be deeply wrong to suppose that criticism three thousand years ago is criticism forever, as if an entire people could be inherently wicked, so we must be careful not to fall into bias against Israel or the Jewish people on account of prophecies such as these. And yet current events mean that right now there is a clear contemporary relevance to Isaiah’s words. The final verse which declares "he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry" could be a word for Israel and its treatment of Palestine today, and perhaps part of our prayer for the Middle East should be that the voices of the prophets will once again speak truth to power.

But if Isaiah’s words can resonate outside of their historical context, they can resonate outside of their geographical context too. That is to say these words may not just be meaningful for Israel, but for all societies that have failed to live up to God's hopes for them, which is to say all societies. It has been said that if you point a finger at someone else, you point three fingers back at yourself, and Jesus told us to take the log from our own eye before attempting to remove the speck from the eye of another, so we need to be prepared to hear these words spoken to us too. We need to be willing to recognise the bad fruit we have yielded, whether that is as individuals or as a church or as a nation. And that’s not always easy. Sometimes because we don’t want to admit it, but sometimes because we just don’t see it. It’s an odd quirk that in Hebrew, justice/bloodshed and righteousness/cry are similar words. There can be fine lines between the two and we easily blur and cross them.

So with all of that in mind, let us look more closely at this passage. The owner of the vineyard is so confident that they have successfully cleared the land and planted the best vines that they have already built a winepress and a watchtower, and yet when the harvest comes they find only bad fruit. Other translations describe the grapes as bitter or stinky, and so we can imagine a visceral reaction to them, similar to the declaration that "your incense is detestable" in the passage we heard last week. This is not just a failure but a disappointment and a source of great distress.

Reflecting on what the metaphor of the vineyard has to say about God and about us, it seems that God does all that is possible to set us up for success, but cannot guarantee the result. We are not given an answer as to why the grapes were bad, but presumably there were external factors that affected their growth. Perhaps a storm damaged them or something contaminated the soil. For ourselves, there will be influences on our lives that do not come directly from God, and there is the additional complication of our own free will, both of which we have to take seriously in any understanding of divine power. Some versions of omnipotence insist that God can all do things, but that is difficult to reconcile with the many things God is clearly not doing, like bringing about world peace, and passages like this lead me to think it is right to say that God does all the things God can, within the boundaries that are necessary in order to maintain a free universe. The rest is up to us.

The owner of the vineyard is so disheartened by their yield that they decide to break down its walls and stop cultivating it, leaving it to become trampled and overgrown. It sounds like a harsh judgement, but I’m reminded of some of our reflections on the Book of Revelation, when we wondered if the disaster being wrought on the earth was truly divine punishment, or God revealing the natural consequences of the way we are living. Let’s be honest, we don’t need avenging angels to destroy the planet with war or fire, we’re doing quite well at that by ourselves. There is a strong scriptural basis for believing this is how God works, given that much of the narrative of the Old Testament is driven by the people’s insistence on having a king, despite God warning against it in the strongest terms. Just like any parent, God recognises that sometimes we will only learn the hard way, and so sometimes we must be left to make our own mistakes, even though it causes God much grief.

The main track of the lectionary only gives us two weeks in Isaiah at this point, so before we move on I want to offer some more hopeful passages, because his message is not entirely one of condemnation. In Isaiah 44:3-4, God promises: I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants. They will spring up like grass in a meadow, like poplar trees by flowing streams. And in Isaiah 61:1-2 the prophet declares: The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

Jesus read those final verses in the synagogue in Nazareth and announced that they had been fulfilled, setting the tone for his ministry of liberation and redemption, so it seems to me that it is these prophecies of release and healing that are what God really wants for all of us, and has done from the very beginning. Sometimes God will step back and sometimes we must learn from our own mistakes, but destruction and desolation will not have the final word, because God will be there to help us mop up the mess and pick up the pieces. We are meant for freedom and abundance, and God has already cleared the ground and planted the choicest vines. The rest - or at least what happens next - is up to us.

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land; but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell, after the army had marched around them for seven days. By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient.

And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and theprophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated—the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.

These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

So we're back with Hebrews, and we come to the end of the list of those who lived and died by faith that we began last week. As I said then, not only did these people not see the fulfilment of God’s promise, but they were all deeply flawed and troubled. In fact, Hebrews 11 has been described as a litany of failure and suffering, as well a hall of faith. I suspect this is deliberate, because there is some comfort to be found in knowing that we are not alone in our failings and our sufferings, and that we can persevere in faith in spite of them. The references to those who were tortured, probably intended to recall the Maccabean martyrs, seven Jewish brothers who were killed alongside their mother and teacher because they refused to deny or betray their faith, would have been especially poignant to those suffering persecution in the early church.

I do struggle with this list however, because of the way it seems to associate faith and violence. Was it really by faith that the Egyptians drowned and Jericho fell? Was Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter because of a reckless oath God neither asked for nor insisted he follow through, really a great example of faith? Did Samson really have to demonstrate his faith by collapsing a building onto a crowd? Should we really be using these people and these acts to encourage us in our faith? I believe that violence is always a tragedy and a failure, whatever the result. We just marked the eightieth anniversary of VJ Day, and the atomic bombs that precipitated it should never be seen as anything less than a tragic failing to find a better way, no matter that they ended six years of global war.

From the perspective of the writer of Hebrews, the successes that came from those acts of violence clearly made them causes for celebration, but I believe we can take a different view. The Letter to the Hebrews is essentially a sermon in written form, a first century equivalent of our church blog. Now of course I don't dare to suggest that my weekly reflections have the same standing as scripture, but what we are reading in this letter is one person trying to make sense of faith, and we should dissect it and discern it just as I encourage you to dissect and discern anything I say. (Even Paul admitted that some of what he wrote was just opinion!) If passages of scripture make us uncomfortable, we need to lean into that, and ask if it is because they are challenging us to change something about the way we think or act, or if it is because the Spirit is leading us to a different perspective on the text.

Sitting with this passage this week, I have come to the conclusion that the writer and I have very different attitudes towards violence, and so while I can still see faith at work in all those stories, I would tell them differently. Or perhaps I would tell different stories. Perhaps I would rather tell of Ruth, who by faith remained loyal to her mother in law. Or of Esau who by faith learned to forgive his brother. Or Job, who by faith rejected the false theology of his friends and took his pain straight to God.

Whatever disagreement I may have with the writer of Hebrews over the stories they chose or the way they told them, I do find their claim that “God had planned something better for us, so that only together with us would they be made perfect” quite extraordinary. Having shown us what Thomas Long calls a cord of faith, a long line of faithful people stretching back generations, what the writer seems to be saying is that not only are we also part of that cord, but that the whole cord will be redeemed together. In some way, Abraham and Moses and David depend as much on our faith as we do on theirs. Perhaps this was the writer's way of emphasising that God has no favourites, so that those of us who come later in time will not come later to the promise. Or perhaps we are meant to assume that Jesus is the something better, and this is an assertion that it is through him that all will be redeemed. I suspect there's a bit of both going on, but either way, I am quite moved by the sense of being part of this great cord of faith.

Chapter twelve gives us another picture, which we will end on. This is the great cloud of witnesses cheering us on as we “run with perseverance the race marked out for us”, living the life we are called to. I think the word perseverance, or patience in other translations, reminds us that this is a marathon not a sprint, which can be a helpful thing to remind ourselves of when we are frustrated with or exhausted by the pace. And the image of the crowd reminds us that we need encouragement, that while our lives are ours to live, we are not meant to live them in isolation or without support.

Rather than analysing these final verses, I want to invite us to take a more devotional approach to them, so I will read them again, and then offer some questions and some time for you to reflect on them: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

What encouragement do we need?

What things that hinder us do we need to throw off?

Do we need to pick up or slow down the pace?

Do we look enough to Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of faith?

God, thank you that we are part of this wonderful cord of faith, and that we can be encouraged by those who have gone before us, and now surround us as a great cloud of witnesses. Help us to cast off the things that entangle us, and set a pace that we can sustain, as we seek to run the race that is set before us. Amen.