More (and more) on the Prophets: God as passionate

 Sermon. 10 August 2025. St George’s, Saham Toney.

Trinity 8 (Year C. Continuous Reading for Old Testament)

 

Isaiah 1.1; 10-20

Luke 12.32-40

 

Let us reflect on today’s first reading, from the Old Testament. I’ll just remind you why there’s a strong case for doing this. We are now in the long Green season of Sundays after Trinity (also called Ordinary Time), a season which extends all the way to All Saints (to keep it simple). And this year one of the things we are doing in this long season is working our way through edited highlights of certain Old Testament books. Concretely, edited highlights of the Prophets. Today, we begin our look at Isaiah. This is an in-depth study of the longest book of prophecy in the Old Testament (by some distance), and this deep dive is going to take us all of… two weeks. (To be fair, we do pretty much rely on Isaiah in important seasons of the Church year.)

 

Isaiah helpfully tells us when he was active. We’ve just heard. It was from the reign of King Uzziah to the reign of King Hezekiah. These are kings of the Southern Kingdom, of Judah, and Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, is Isaiah’s focus. Later Isaiah clarifies that he had his dramatic vision and commissioning in the year that Uzziah died (see chapter 6 for details). Uzziah came to the throne somewhere around 790-780 BCE and died about 750-740.  Hezekiah died in 687. That gives us a span of some 60 years or so when Isaiah prophesied. Is that possible?... I say it is. It’s true some historians say that average life expectancy in the ancient world was around 35. But that’s the average, the arithmetic mean. We get that figure because so many people died in childhood. A significant proportion did live to a ripe old age.

 

You may have noticed that all this means that Isaiah is a younger contemporary of our old friend… our old friend, Amos (and also of Hosea, who we have also been looking at in our cycle of readings). You may also have noticed that Isaiah’s message is remarkably similar to Amos’s. For all Amos was speaking to the Northern Kingdom (Israel), and Isaiah is speaking to the Southern Kingdom, Judah, the core message here is the same. It is and remains a challenging, a sharp message. So, brace yourselves all over again.

 

The message:

¹² When you come to appear before me,
    who asked this from your hand?
    Trample my courts no more!
¹³ Bringing offerings is futile;
    incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation—
    I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
¹⁴ Your new moons and your appointed festivals
    my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me;
    I am weary of bearing them.
¹⁵ When you stretch out your hands,
    I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
    I will not listen…

… ^16b cease to do evil;
¹⁷     learn to do good;
seek justice;
    rescue the oppressed;
defend the orphan;
    plead for the widow.

 

In other words:

You, the people of the covenant, the people of my choosing, are good at coming to do what you think is worshipping me. You positively enjoy doing the very things I have set out for you to do, as worship of me. I have no complaints about your enthusiasm, your religious enthusiasm, your religious commitment. You love calling upon me. You love prayer. But, however much you relish it, and however much you think you are addressing me and pleasing me, I say you are frauds. The whole thing is a lie. And I haven’t hidden from you why it’s a lie. I will spell it out again: you have to care about justice. You have to live care-fully. You have to care about the people who you push out.

 

Do you remember Amos saying just this a few weeks ago? Also like Amos, Isaiah has God say both

·        on the one hand: I am judging you for this, and condemning you, and you have lost it, and

·        on the other hand: all you have to do is change your ways, and I will forgive you, and we will be reconciled.  

 

Remember also that the point is not that the people who come to worship come as sinners. We all do that. That’s something like the human condition, this side of Kingdom Come. The point is that the people had become blind to their own sins. They were so convinced they were pleasing God by being the people who did the religious things with fervour, that they’d stopped thinking about how they live their lives. They shut God out of all of that. That truly is a warning to all of us.

 

In general, I do not like to repeat myself. Well, maybe I do indulge in repetition too often, over the years. But not normally every four weeks. I’d understand if you feel there is little new in what I have said here, given what I said about Amos, four weeks ago. But in my defence, sometimes the texts over different weeks mesh so closely together, that it would be simply wrong to say they differ in their import. (But notice one difference, for all that: I am not – I am not - suggesting you sit down this afternoon and read the whole of Isaiah. That’s a rather different task from reading the whole of Amos.)

 

Throughout these weeks, these weeks of the Prophets, we have to come to know how prophetic rhetoric works. It tends to be:

judgment; condemnation; judgment; condemnation; judgment, condemnation; promise, mercy, restoration, feasting.

All together. No intervening stage. Rather, hand-break turns.

The Prophets were not what we might call “systematic”; they did not have a system of how God is. They did not even seek consistency, not even from God. They make us do the work of looking for the golden thread among all their messages. It is we who have to see how it might all cohere.

 

I am confident that the golden thread is that promise, that mercy, that restoration, and that feasting, which I have just mentioned. I see it this way. Even when the Prophets say God is angry, they are saying that, if it ever comes to it, God would rather be thought of as angry, than be thought of as cool, cold, indifferent, or uninterested.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I accept that this in itself is hard. Some of us here will have been hurt by people saying: “I only got so angry with you, because I care”, and that can be abuse (let’s name it). But here remember it is rhetorical anger, from God, at one remove, and addressed to the whole people. Nowhere does God say: “I am so angry with you, and I want you to be angry in the same way with those you care for.” The Prophetic word just does not have that sort of consequence. This doesn’t make anger safe or easy, and questions remain. But I say again that the emphasis is that, if it ever comes to it, God would rather be thought of as angry, than be thought of as cool, cold, indifferent or uninterested. God is always close to us, involved with us, tied up with us. God does not want to have it any other way. God feels deeply about God’s people. When it comes down to it, God desires God’s people. God desires us.

 

This is something we also see in today’s Gospel. I am referring to the very opening:

“Do not be afraid, little flock,

for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

This is a reassurance only Luke has Jesus give us.

Some details. The word for “flock” here (poímnion) is a diminutive of the normal word for flock. So some would say – though others would say it’s not as big a deal as this – some would say it means something like “flock-let” in English. In itself, it may mean “little flock”. But to this Luke has Jesus add the word for “small” (mikrón – as in mikro-skope or microscope). If I were to translate: “my dear little bunch of lambkins” I am doubtless exaggerating, to make the point. But it is undoubtedly a term of tenderness, of endearment.

 

Then we come to “good pleasure”. That’s a slightly staid expression in modern English. It is close to the original, especially if we think about etymology, about how the word is made up. The Greek (eudókesen) might mean something like “the Father has thought it proper, and seemly, and good, and right”. But I say in context it is closer to: “the Father desires you and delights” in giving you all good things.

 

Can we hear that? Can we hear this, as the message of the Prophets, if we seek out that golden thread from all the other threads?

 

Dear little lambkins, the Father desires you, delights in you, and longs to give you good things.

 

Amen.

Jesus, Fire, Conflict and Apathy (Not Really)

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 18 August 2019

Trinity 9

Jeremiah 23.23-29

Luke 12.49-56

Rabbi Lionel Blue of Blessed and Righteous Memory used to say: Any synagogue that isn’t trying to get rid of its rabbi, isn’t really Jewish, and any rabbi that lets them get away with it, isn’t really a rabbi.

You get the point? It’s a call for some godly realism. Yes, we may think that any faith community will be always only sweetness and light. All will be united in the faith, committed to the common good, each deferring to the other. But in the real world, it is not quite like that. Conflict - disagreement, even radical disagreement, and, with that, yes, even people not liking other people who are just too different from them – conflict is a natural part of life. It is part of what happens when human beings gather together for some serious purpose.

It is strange for me to say this precisely here. As, of all the church communities I have known, you (we/you) are among the most harmonious. You are not a community riddled with conflict. Anything but. Heavens, PCC meetings can even be enjoyable here, as they are (at least sometimes) about the shared task of working out the best thing for our community and parish and wider Church. Conflict is something of an alien theme for this time and place. And yet it is today’s theme.

Jesus says: "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.”

And the Greek of the Gospel is even stronger than the English. The Greek does not say Jesus is to “bring” fire, but to “cast down” fire, to “throw” fire onto the earth; there is violence in the rhetoric.

Now, some of us were doubtless brought up singing

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

Look upon a little child;

Pity my simplicity;

Suffer me to come to thee.

And I don’t say that’s wrong. We do have reason to think that Jesus was at times gentle, and in particular in his exceptional welcome for children, for the little ones. But! But clearly it is not enough; it doesn’t say all that we need to say about Jesus. What, then, are we to make of this, not-so-gentle Jesus? Some have called him “Angry Jesus Bleak and Wild”.

Well, in the first place, notice that at no point does Jesus bring literal fire. Just as when he says elsewhere he came to bring not peace but a sword [Matt 10.34], he never does anything with a sword. It’s more like when Mary is told that a sword is to pierce her own heart [Luke 2.35], and this does not happen. So we can confidently and truthfully say that all of these images are metaphorical. This isn’t about actual violence. Fire and sword stand for something else.

Fire and sword stand for the truth that, while Jesus may be gentle, meek and mild in the ways he treats us as persons, he is fierce and ready for conflict when it comes to ideas, to things that are not true. Against untruths and lies, he can be fierce, and oppositional.

To speak plainly, in the gospels, there is something about how people respond to Jesus which makes all the difference. Respond freely and well, and you will hear “your faith has saved you” [passim]. Respond freely and badly, and you may have to walk away shocked and grieving, like the rich young man attached to his many possessions [Mark 10.22]. How you are in an encounter with Jesus will be a way of you judging yourself. There will be a moment of crisis. I mean this in the original Greek sense: a “krisis”, a time of decision-making. We may as well say this.

Jesus does not come to make us comfortable as we are, but to help us chose to be more ourselves.

If Jesus is ready for conflict, then the Church must be as well. We must be prepared to speak words which will not please everybody. We must stand for what is good and wholesome and true and generous and merciful in the world, and against the opposite of these things.

The problem is that the “signs of the times” are surely clear about this: there is going to be more conflict and anger in our society, not less, in the time ahead. Nationalism versus internationalism. More versus less immigration. More celebration of difference versus less. Economic growth (and how to get it) versus modest living for the sake of the environment. Different ideas about how to deal with crime. And, yes, whether and how to be involved in wars. And more. All of these debates are going to be raw, more fierce. Fiercer, both because that is the way leading politicians are taking things (they are less and less into rational debate), and also because that strange new creature, social media, evidently somehow encourages us to be angry and rude.

So I say this. Jesus was not afraid of conflict when conflict was called for. When peace is false, is built on lies and oppression, Jesus does not call it “peace”, any more than the prophet Jeremiah did before him. The Church also must be unafraid of conflict, when it can speak with godly clarity into a situation. But! But, here and now, in these raw days, the Church has first to model a different, a better way of handling its own conflicts than the world. Angry words alone will just make for more angry words in the world.

So, in a world were anger and conflict abound, I am going to propose a virtue you may not have heard of. A monastic virtue. It is apatheia. Apatheia. You may recoil from the very word; indeed you will do, if you think it means apathy. It does not mean apathy. It means rather detachment, detachment from your own passions, in particular (in this context) detachment from your own anger. If conflicts in the Church or world are making us angry, we must be disciplined, and be able to take a step back from our own anger, to be, yes, a little bit suspicious of it, to interrogate it. What use is this anger? – is a good question to ask. Then, if we do this, if we are in the habit of doing this (it is, I say, a discipline, and I don’t say I am advanced in it), then we may well be able to speak the words which count, into the conflict, words which have the power of fire, the power of a sword.

I pray that we go on, getting on with each other as well as we do, and I am confident about that. May it never be with apathy (for there is nothing Christian about apathy), but always with the discipline of apatheia.

Amen.