Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
At the start of this century, the World Health Organization declared measles eliminated in the United States.
This April, public health officials declared an end to a six-month long measles outbreak in South Carolina with 997 confirmed cases. The United States is now averaging more than 300 confirmed cases of measles a month. A case was confirmed in neighboring Tioga County on Thursday. So, you know, maybe not so much eliminated.
The anti-vaccination movement as we know it today didn’t originate in the United States. It started with Richard Barr, a British lawyer looking to gin-up a class action lawsuit. He hired a scientist named Andrew Wakefield, who then became the lead author on a fraudulent research paper published in “The Lancet,” a highly respected British medical journal. The study had only twelve subjects, but was emphatic in its claim that the measles vaccine caused colitis, and colitis caused autism.
Even if the sample size had been adequate and random, and it was not, even if Wakefield’s conflict of interest had been disclosed, and it was not, it still turned out on investigation that Wakefield had faked much of the data. The paper was eventually fully-retracted, and the organization that licenses medical practitioners in Britain found that Wakefield both violated scientific ethics and medically abused the twelve developmentally disabled children in the study.
I love the internet. I hate the internet. And it is absolutely true that nothing dies on the internet, though lots of things die because of the internet.
The fraudulent claim that the measles vaccine causes autism has metastasized, becoming hundreds of other false claims about all sorts of vaccines. Polio vaccination teams are routinely murdered in Pakistan, one of three countries that harbors the disease like the fugitive serial killer that it is.
Little lies can become big sins, and people die as a result.
This is all relevant, of course, timely with Anthony Fauci being scapegoated by Trump and his allies in Congress, by RFK Jr. and the anti-vaxxer lunatic fringe.
Just this week, a major study that fueled skepticism of the Covid-19 vaccine was retracted. One of the key authors of that retracted paper, Dutch pediatric oncologist Saskia Mostert, testified before a Congressional committee in June as part of the current witch hunt.
Physician and global health scientist Peter Hotez estimates that during the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccine misinformation and hesitancy was responsible for more than 200,000 deaths in the United States alone.
But measles also connects with a quote related to the core topic of our reading from Isaiah and of this sermon. In a 1929 profile in the Saturday Evening Post, Albert Einstein said:
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
Our reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah comes from the third portion of that work. The first portion, associated with Isaiah Bin Amoz, comes from the Kingdom of Judah during the 8th century B.C.E. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was expanding rapidly, destroying other kingdoms, including Israel, and making Judah a vassal state.
The second portion of the book, known as Deutero-Isaiah, was written two centuries later during the Babylonian Captivity. Judah, in turn, had been destroyed by the Babylonian Empire, the city walls and Solomon’s Temple left as ruins, the elite and skilled hauled off to Babylon. Deutero-Isaiah’s incredibly hopeful work was addressed to this hostage community at a moment when liberation seemed to be at hand. Babylon itself was threatened by the growing Persian Empire, and a mighty king the prophet thought of as a messiah, Cyrus the Great.
Trito-Isaiah, or Third Isaiah, was written after Persia had defeated Babylon and after Cyrus had allowed those captives who wished to return home to do so. It was written in Jerusalem, in the Isaiah tradition, and apparently by multiple authors. The hope of Deutero-Isaiah had worn thin in the face of life in the ruins, sectarian divisions, and delays in reconstruction. The hope of Second Isaiah is sometimes buried by Trito-Isaiah’s acrimony.
Still, the text begins with a promise, begins with hope. Today, we might call it a vision statement.
God promises, through the prophet, that the new Temple, yet to be constructed, will be a house of prayer for all people, at least all who follow the commandments. It describes a radical hospitality that should feel familiar to folks in the United Church of Christ.
We always read history backwards. It is the only way we can, but it is sometimes wrong. So let’s wrestle with this openness in the context of pre-Rabbinic Judaism.
In Diaspora, and especially after the three Jewish rebellions of the First and Second Century led to their expulsion from Palestine, the Jewish people feared they might disappear, assimilated into other cultures, so they doubled-down on practices that set them apart, leaned into their religion as identity. Before 66 C.E., the religion was actually evangelistic. You might even describe it as open. This passage from Trito-Isaiah reflects a universalism that would later be suppressed.
And it is even more dramatic than the portion we read. If you look at the verse numbers, you will discover that the lectionary skips over part of the passage. In it, God also welcomes eunuchs into the covenant community, which is to say men who have been castrated.
The author here is directly contradicting Deuteronomy, the Law of Moses. In the Torah it says “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.”
Males with damaged genitals were not the only people excluded. The Law was very good at creating in-group and out-group status. The law contained a complex cleanliness code, as well as prohibitions on anything blemished. Disability, disease, and injury were all associated with divine will. It became a vicious cycle of division, the assumption that you deserved your brokenness and your brokenness then excluded you from the community of blessing.
Trito-Isaiah, a text that longs for the reconstruction of the physical walls for Jerusalem, the physical Temple on Mount Zion, opens by removing the spiritual walls that exclude non-Jews.
And here we are, with a government that wraps racism in nationalism, often Christian nationalism, that is all about building physical walls, declaring in-group and out-group, out because of the color of your skin, which is too brown. But race itself is a lie, and the line between us and them, Mexico or the United States, is arbitrary, an accident of history.
These are lies that kill.
When we think about Nazi Germany, we focus on Kristallnacht and death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, on the Holocaust, but the war itself began because Germans, imagining themselves to be Aryans, demanded more land, and felt entitled to take it from Eastern European Slavs, people they believed to be an inferior race. Pan-German nationalism took in ethnic enclaves in other nations, but the modern German state was not even formed until 1871. Germany, as understood in the Great War and the Second World War that followed was a fairly recent invention. Even the language accepted as definitively German is recent as these things go, heavily influenced by Martin Luther’s first Protestant Bible.
Most of us were alive to see an ethnically diverse Yugoslavia dissolve into ethno-states and uncivil wars, remember the genocide at Srebrenica, unmatched until Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza.
We draw lines, whip up notions of entitlement, my ethno-religious nationalist hogwash giving me the right to enact terror on those other people to drive them from their land, in Palestine, in India, in the United States.
The United States where three major populations collided, the remnants of an indigenous peoples almost extinct after a century of European disease against which they had no immunity, the second wave of European colonial invaders with their insane claim that you could own land, and the Africans they kidnapped and brutalized in the labor camps we euphemistically call plantations.
So I will be forgiven, I hope, if I have displayed some ambivalence during the Semequincentennial, ambivalence not solely due to the collapse of our democracy and the ashes of our Constitution. I am an American by birth. My people have been here so long, the first arriving in 1620, that we really can make no other claim. And so what?
I am no different than the government worker in Ghana, the factory worker in Bangladesh, the pensioner in Finland, the Muslim footballer from Spain with native African parents, though he is more talented, infinitely more wealthy, and far better looking.
That I am what I am today is random, as is the fact that I belong to the race and gender that has been most successful in violence, and therefore the most privileged.
Labels aside, I choose love and justice and humility and service and wonder, so much wonder.
Oh, and I choose every single vaccine my doctor recommends, so that this rambling sack of meat and electricity might ramble just a little bit longer. Inshallah, as our Muslim sisters and brother say, God willing. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
In recent weeks, the geological feature known as the Ring of Fire has produced earthquakes around the Pacific Rim. For once, we probably aren’t to blame. The most recent was in Indonesia.
Let us pray.
Divine Mystery we name as God,
catastrophe is a matter of perspective,
but that is what we perceive
from our location
relative to our finite and fragile lives
our efforts to construct and control.
We pray for the rescuers
flying from disaster to disaster,
the search dogs and cadaver dogs and handlers
for survivors who grieve
for those who are trapped.
Shifting foundations
and feeling trapped
are powerful and ancient metaphors.
We pray for those in the cognitive rubble
constructing new identity
new belief.
We pray for those who feel trapped
suffocating in abusive relationships.
Jesus offered a new foundation
a just and caring realm
where the least among us would be made whole.
We pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…