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Isaiah and his people that are at a time of transition. King Uzziah was king of the Southern Kingdom of Judea or Jerusalem was considered a good King, a stable King. He’d been there for decades but he knows are only as stable as their kinks and we find in our stories and in our culture and in our lives that a new King could be completely destabilizing could be completely different than any of the king. The king who had gone before. How would they go forward and move on?
Isaiah would be what we might call a central prophet. He had ins and connections with the King. But even before chapter 6 and those first five chapters, he was already a prophet. We already was speaking the word of God to the people. Not all of it was positive.
We might consider chapter 6 a call story but it seems he was already there already known already doing the work
Isaiah finds himself in the midst of a vision in the throne room of God that may or may not be the temple. God is so big. All Isaiah can see is the Hem of the robe that God is wearing. The six-winged Sarah’s are flying and singing praise of God to each other and in the midst of all of that, Isaiah hears God asked whom shall I say and who will go for us? And Isaiah answers in Hebrew Hineni. Means here I am but it is the yes before. The question is even really asked. It is answering absolutely when someone asks you to do a favor. Even though you don’t know what the favor is. It is responding yes to the relationship and not to the request.
And of course these were verses that we read give us some of our best or favorite songs hymns. But the what the calling is to Isaiah… there aren’t hymns about that.
9 God said, “Go and say to this people:
Listen intently, but don’t understand;
look carefully, but don’t comprehend.
10 Make the minds of this people dull.
Make their ears deaf and their eyes blind,
so they can’t see with their eyes
or hear with their ears,
or understand with their minds,
and turn, and be healed.”
11 I said, “How long, Lord?”
And God said, “Until cities lie ruined with no one living in them, until there are houses without people and the land is left devastated.” 12 The Lord will send the people far away, and the land will be completely abandoned. 13 Even if one-tenth remain there, they will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, which when it is cut down leaves a stump. Its stump is a holy seed.
Sounds both confusing and scary. When we talked about Jonah, if Jonah might have happened, it was 30 years before the northern Kingdom was conquered and destroyed by Assyria. And Isaiah was prophesying around the same time, maybe 5 years later. If Jonah knew what was coming, Isaiah maybe did as well. And Isaiah probably knew that if Assyria was coming for the northern kingdom, they would be on their way to Jerusalem shortly afterward, which they were.
One of the things that makes this text, and text like it, particularly difficult for us and our image and understanding of God, is that God is telling Isaiah that there is going to be judgment. Terrible things are going to befall Jerusalem and he’s not really supposed to do anything to stop it. Yes, he’s supposed to make the announcement but only in as much that people hear it and not as so much that they understand it that they change. This isn’t like Jonah where they will. It will only take five words and all of Nineveh changed all of their ways. Isaiah would speak for years and many people wouldn’t believe, understand, or change. If Isaiah was proclaiming to the powerful, to the wealthy, to the privileged, that destruction would befall them, I don’t know why they would want to believe it and there was no evidence to believe it.
But God the prophets over and over again would declare to the people to remind the people that they were not living into the covenant that they had made together, that they were not living in a way that cared for the widow and the orphan and the Foreigner in their midst. That they were not caring for the poor and the outcast and the marginalized. That was their calling. That was who they were supposed to be and how they were supposed to live in this world as a light in the dark places and an example to all the nations
Uzziah had been a good King but perhaps the feeling was that those glorious days were gone forever. There was no fixing it anymore which is what they’re going to see and believe in just a couple hundred years with King Josiah who tried to do the work of reforming and it was just too late. The systems had existed and made Judea function or already so corrupt, had already abandoned those for whom it was supposed to look out for, that there was no coming back.
Isaiah 6 tells us that sometimes things need to die before they can be Reborn. Because they will God speaking to Isaiah still ends with a little bit of Hope. There is a seed. It sees the trouble, it experienced the difficulties. The seed knows the pain of things ending, of things struggling, The seed holds on to hope, onto the covenant of love, onto mercy and justice, onto looking out for the full abundant living of all humanity.
Was the seed Those who had been faithful to the covenant all along? Was the seed those who were looking out for those on the margins? Was it those on the margins? Maybe the seed were those who lived like the seraphs: moving together, singing together, singing praise of God to each other. encouraging each other, speaking a word of hope, of love of God, and of what could be built, what could be new, what could be rebuilt in love, compassion, justice, mercy, abundance, and wholeness; little by little, movement by movement, song by song, building the beloved community.
Around 2010 theologian John Cobb, the premier and founder theologian of process theology and open and relational theology whom you may have never heard the terms, you would recognize the ideas because they’re ones I like. In 2010, John Cobb came to the leaders of Claremont College and said he wanted to put together the last conference of his life. He was already in his ’80s. He had asked his children if he could give their inheritance for this conference and, in their 50s, they agreed. 5 years later thousands of people gathered around, not the idea of climate change, not how to fix it but how to be a community that exists afterward. How to become an Ecological Community. They had breakout sessions on cooking and food and growing and fuel and banking and theology of who do we become.
It seems that many of the smartest people I can think of the people, those for whom climate change and care have become the focus of their work, no matter from what academic field they approach, do not believe that we will overt disaster. But they have not given up hope of a community of people that will continue to exist and learn to leave together in new ways.
And with that is their view of the future. It isn’t that we do nothing and wait. Instead, we begin to build the world that is going to have to exist after. We don’t ask the question what can I do as an individual in the face of this because the first thing we do is to stop acting like individuals. The first thing we do is to build community and then make some small changes together, that grow, that is seed, that grows and seeds and grows more.
And that way even the hard times the difficult times the seeming destruction of our institutions of the way we’ve always done things, particularly in the way we have always done things in our institutions have been at the expense of other people in that way. When they come to an end, we already know there’s hope as we’re already building the beloved community, you’re already the seed that’s growing.
That was the word of hope that God was giving Isaiah. And he said yes before he even heard the terms, before God even told him what he would be doing, Isaiah said yes. In Hebrew the word is Heneni: a yes based on the relationship. I wonder if we could do the same. Yes, we will build the Beloved Community. Yes, we will keep those on the margins safe. Yes, we will speak a word of hope. Even if we don’t know what that means yet, and then do it anyway, no matter, in love.