Isaiah 65:17-25
Most of you know I care about available, affordable, and accessible housing. It is a primary focus of my other job. I have this crazy idea that an able-bodied person of working age who has a full-time job should be able to afford a roof over their head. Crazy, right? Next thing you know, I’ll go all Zohran Mamdani on the good people of Elmira, and suggest something totally Communist like affordable childcare, or lifesaving healthcare that doesn’t force people into bankruptcy.
Given that, you would think I’d love today’s reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. After all, what isn’t to love about people enjoying the fruit of their own work, literally in the case of vineyards, figuratively when it comes to living in the house you built. And that would be the easy way out for a sleep-deprived pastor with a new puppy in the house. Deliver some Sunday morning fluff, and let everyone head to coffee hour.
There is only problem with that plan. That problem is me.
Because there is another story, one that is important. One that involves context.
There are three distinct historic periods represented in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, maybe better titled the Book of the Isaiah School of Prophecy. The earliest, a slight majority of the book, likely comes from the time of the original prophet, Isaiah bin Amoz, which is to say Isaiah the son of Amoz, because surnames were not a thing. You were known by your tribe, village, and father.
Isaiah lived and preached in the 8th century B.C.E. The age of the divided kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel (sometimes called Samaria) and the southern kingdom of Judah, was coming to a close, not because the two tribal groups decided to play nice, but because Neo-Assyria wiped the northern kingdom off the map. Judah was caught between Neo-Assyria and Egypt, with changing kings resulting in changing alliances. Much of the original Isaiah’s prophetic speech is related to the geopolitical situation, something we will see again with Jeremiah. Prophetic speech about what some call “politics” has been around as long as there has been a Judeo-Christian trajectory.
Hezekiah was on the Judahite throne. We actually know quite a bit about Hezekiah. He lead a religious reform that laid the foundation for an ethical monotheism, belief in one God who was essentially good. Unfortunately, he also joined a regional rebellion against Neo-Assyrian rule. The Neo-Assyrian king, Sennacherib, invaded, and conquered almost all of the region, all except Jerusalem itself. Biblical and Neo-Assyrian accounts differ on what happened next, but what seems most likely is that some sort of devastating plague struck the Neo-Assyrian forces. God or nature? Who knows? We do know the result. Sennacherib offered a settlement, Hezekiah paid tribute, and Judah came out smaller and weaker. The Davidic Kingdom, supposedly stretching from the Tigris-Euphrates to Egypt at its peak, was reduced to a tiny client state.
For the next portion of Isaiah, we have to skip ahead a couple of centuries, to Babylon, where the Judahite elite are held captive. Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple have been destroyed. Deutero-Isaiah, Second Isaiah if you will, predicts the downfall of Babylon, something that soon happens. And lest you think this is all ancient history and irrelevant, in modern terms, Iraq conquered Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, then Iran conquered Iraq, so same old, same old. The region has been the site of national, colonial, and sectarian violence for all of recorded history.
The Persians, then, conquerors of Babylon, send all of the captives back to their respective homes, and encourage them to rebuild their cities. They have a very different policy of conquest from the Neo-Assyrians and Babylonians. They believe they do best when their colonies thrive. You can find an account of the reconstruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
And this is where Trito-Isaiah, or Third Isaiah, comes in. Read on one level, it is a lovely hopeful text that talks about religious and cultural restoration. Pilgrims from all nation’s come to Jerusalem, recognizing Yahweh as king.
Monotheism? Polytheism? Sacrificial and Temple based? There are so many theological questions! Then there are the facts on the ground.
You see, the artisans and the elite were captive in Babylon for a generation. But there were plenty of folks left behind who had to get on with life, maybe 10% of the original population that did not die in the invasions, weren’t worth taking hostage, and managed to survive famine and plague. They worked the land. They got married. They lived in houses. And sometimes, those houses were the ones left behind when the previous occupants were taken captive.
In other words, some of them lived in houses they did not build.
When the captives got home, looking to reclaim their family land, there was conflict. One strategy the former captives used, the upper classes if you will, was to declare that those who had been left behind had married non-Jews, polluting the people. It became a question of identity, who was in, who was out.
From this point on, tribal solidarity fades into the background. The only tribe we really here about is the Levites, the priestly tribe. Everything else is about class conflict.
This emphasis on racial purity is an ironic precursor to things like the “one-drop rule” of American racism and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the latter aimed at Jews to maintain Aryan purity in Nazi Germany.
Post-Babylon, Jews use a new alphabet, based on Imperial Aramaic. The months are called by Babylonian names. While identity was being used as a weapon against the poor in Judea, many Jews never even returned, beginning what we now think of as the Jewish Diaspora. Among the sacred texts of Rabbinic Judaism is the Talmud, a written record of the Oral Torah. There are, in fact, two collections, one composed in Galilee and called the Palestinian Talmud, and the second and more authoritative called, revealingly, the Babylonian Talmud. Judaism goes international, eventually becoming the vector that allows Christianity to go international.
You cannot separate anything we think of as Judaism from the experience of the Jewish captives in Babylon. Identity is tangled up in history. And Judaism in never just Judea after the captivity.
Today, we celebrate the life of a powerful feminist voice, also a powerful voice for anyone fighting cancer. St. Audre Lorde was a poet and an essayist. She was also a Black-identified person of color, of Caribbean descent, and a lesbian. You cannot pull those things apart. Oh, and a librarian, which is a sort of warrior, which explains the African name she took for herself as she was dying, Gamba Adisa, which means Warrior Who Makes Her Meaning Known.
Scholars would call this idea of overlapping identities, especially overlapping marginalized identities, intersectionality. I just think of it as being human in a world where fear drives division, where humans put labels on other humans to justify taking more while giving less.
The triumphant return to Jerusalem was not so triumphant for everyone, even if the walls and the Temple were re-constructed, even if those still deemed acceptable joined in a renewed covenant in a post-Captivity Judaism, for the nation was still a client state, and the most vulnerable, the least among them, were thrown away.
Trito-Isaiah’s dream is not practical in an advanced society. The time spent completing medical school and a residency so you can treat and comfort folks like a cancer-stricken Audre Lorde is time not spent learning to fell trees, mill lumber, and frame a house. Human knowledge was too advanced for someone to be a Jill-of-all-trades even when the Exiles returned, infinitely more so today. If you could afford a new house, there would still be many hands that went into the assembly of that new dwelling, countless more that went into the components. And of course, with the depredations of end-stage Neo-Liberal capitalism, fewer can afford a new house.
That doesn’t mean the social justice message isn’t still there. It absolutely is. And it is about housing, just not in the way the unknown authors of Trito-Isaiah intended. Because every box we call identity is ultimately a lie. Every one of us is actually an improbability. Every one of us is actually temporary. And in the framework of that Holy Mystery we name as God, every single one of us is actually worthy, of justice, of love.
May we build houses for others. May we plant vineyards that will yield long after we are gone. May we rebuild a nation, not for the elite, but for all people. Amen.