Isaiah 55:10-13
You would think that if your Mama co-wrote Elvis Presley’s first number one hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” you’d go into some other profession, given that impossibly high bar. But Hoyt Axton, in addition to a successful career as an actor, was a respectable singer-songwriter.
His greatest songwriting credit appeared on Three Dog Night’s 1970 album, “Naturally.” Sometimes known by the opening line, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog,” it is properly titled “Joy to the World.” It promised “joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea. Joy to you and me.” It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, making Hoyt Axton and his mother Mae the first mother and son to write number one hits, albeit a generation apart.
Folks could use some joy in 1970. The multiple crises of 1968, including the Tet Offensive, the assassination of King, the chaos of a presidential race that included the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, these were all still very fresh. Young men were still being drafted for a war we were losing, and just months before the album came out, the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State University, killing four people.
The single release of “Joy to the World” went gold, and the song was nominated for a Grammy. It didn’t fix the world. The Pentagon Papers were about to come out, and Watergate was just around the corner. But a little joy, a little hope, were good. It should come as no surprise that John Lennon’s “Imagine” was a top hit that same year.
They needed a little joy, a little hope, in the 6th Century Before the Common Era, the context that gave us today’s reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. It was not written by Isaiah, the original son of Amoz, long dead at the point. It wasn’t even written in the same country. So let’s wrestle a bit with where they were and what it meant.
The Jewish people understood themselves to be a chosen people, their kingdom and their king recipients of a divine promise. But they had not been truly independent for a while, caught between shifting regional powers. Then came the armies of Babylon, their own wishy-washy king, and utter defeat. Jerusalem lay in ruins, the Temple of Solomon and the city walls destroyed.
Skilled craftsmen and the elite had been hauled off in a couple of deportations to Babylon, and while they were safe and even economically successful, some were concerned that they were becoming assimilated, would cease to exist as a separate chosen people. Those left behind in Judah, those of no special value to Babylon, not only had to live in amid the ruins of their nation, but they faced raids and banditry from neighboring regions like Edom, eager to despoil their powerless former enemies.
Even those who wanted to remain faithful were starting to ask themselves if they had been wrong all along. Maybe Yahweh wasn’t that powerful. Maybe they weren’t actually chosen. Maybe the House of David was not forever.
What do you do when the story you tell yourself, the story that justifies your hubris, turns out to be a lie? When your nation is not specially chosen? When your leaders prove unremarkable, or worse?
The prophets, those with stand-alone texts like Jeremiah, and those woven into the histories like Elijah, played several roles, and despite later Christian interpretation, they were not all about Jesus.
They chastised and warned of the consequence of injustice and infidelity, that consequence being drought and famine and defeat at the hands of the enemy.
Or we can look at that the other way around… The prophets looked at disaster and defeat at the hands of the enemy and crafted theologies that made it make sense. Specifically, they wrote theologies that made the looming threats and subsequent defeats God’s will, divine punishment for those sins of injustice and infidelity.
The prophets were constructive theologians, revising the system of belief to match the realities of the world in which they lived. Some of these changes were productive, conducive to thriving, some not so much. A critical one is Jeremiah’s shift from multi-generational guilt to individual guilt, though the collective guilt of the nation, and the collective punishment, remained.
Finally, the prophets, even those who chastised and reformed, offered a word of hope. We see it in today’s reading from Isaiah, in so many books, in which the prophet declares that God is ultimately good, ultimately forgiving, that the Jewish people will be restored, and not as a nation under constant threat, but as a light to all nations, with pilgrims streaming to Jerusalem from all nations, which is half true, the pilgrimage part if not the light.
We see this in most psalms. While some few, like the 23rd, starts with confidence, they mostly have that prophetic pivot, beginning in despair like the 22nd, My Lord! My Lord! Why have you forsaken me? Sometimes framed as a prayer of the individual, sometimes as collective, just like the hymns we sing here, for this was the hymn book of the ancients… “I once was blind,” “We would be building…”
And I’d like to suggest as we enter the 251st year of this nation, that we might learn from the prophets, from the songwriters who crafted the psalms, from these men and women who promised joy to the world, all the boys and girls, and maybe even to fishes and bullfrogs. To learn even from the founders of this congregation.
First, you must admit, as did the prophets, that your belief does not match your reality.
The Jewish people, consolidated into a kingdom under the warlord Saul and successful in conquering surrounding territory under the usurper David, constructed for itself a form of nationalism, an ethnic exceptionalism in which those who were native to the land were driven out. The nation’s founding myth is a genocide in the Book of Joshua. No wonder those who take that story literally are willing to commit those crimes against humanity all over again in Gaza and the West Bank!
This kingdom of blood had God’s blessing, the ruling family especially blessed, kingdom and king forever. Until it wasn’t.
Until the kingdom split in an ugly civil war. Until some kings turned out to be evil. Until Assyria came, until Canaan became a battle field in the contest between other regional powers, until Babylon took the elite, then destroyed Jerusalem altogether, deposing the last king of the House of David.
Story and reality did not cohere.
European settlers, carrying Christ’s special message, civilized, arrived in a largely empty land, their destiny manifested in westward expansion, the indigenous people not only damned for not knowing Christ, but uncivilized as well, the Africans bought and kidnapped into chattel slavery no better, barely more than beasts. Both the Black African and North American First Peoples were part of other races, cursed by scripture, descendants of Noah’s bad son, anything to justify white exceptionalism, white exploitation, white violence.
The founders of this church recognized that system of belief as morally bankrupt, and moved to the next phase, and were part of the small victory of emancipation, but the pernicious and evil beliefs of white supremacy did not vanish. They simply evolved, ironically taking in the idea of evolution itself, first as the pseudo-science of eugenics, then in the form of a capitalist social Darwinism that convinced itself that the poor were poor because they were less adapted for economic success, were lazy or stupid or corrupt, and that story has not died, though more and more of us admit every day that it is a lie, that the system is rigged, the economy and political oligarchy.
Admit that the story you tell, your system of belief, does not match the world in which you live. That can be hard. We cling to our stories however toxic, from the Lost Cause of the Confederacy to the myth of a meritocracy.
This is the first step, opening the door for the work of the prophet, who imagines a better world guided by better beliefs, who is difficult, causes good trouble, and if effective, draws people in to an alternative way of being and believing, who changes lives, communities, nations, and in some rare cases, the trajectory of human history.
In this gap between belief and reality, you can be an agent instead of a victim, changing your own life, learning from others, engage in the prophetic speech that is honest about the Emperor’s clothing or lack thereof, all with great humility, for certainty is the enemy of growth, the enemy of justice, the enemy of grace.
The prophetic work of bringing belief and behavior together is exhausting and is never finished, for all too often we wrap our role as co-authors of our lives in fear and invent all new ways to exploit and harm. It takes forever to regulate, little time for evil to innovate.
And that brings us to Isaiah, more accurately Deutero-Isaiah, the unknown prophet in the tradition of Isaiah writing from the exile, envisioning a divine highway through the wilderness, from Babylon to Jerusalem. These are the final words in this second of three portions of the prophetic work. You shall go out with joy, come back with peace. There will be song and clapping of hands.
I do not care if you believe Moses parted the Red Sea, or the walls of Jericho came down. I do not care if you believe David killed the Philistine giant, or he was killed by that other dude named in scripture. I do not care if you believe Mary was a virgin and Jesus walked on water. But I absolutely care whether you believe in the possibility of a better world, a better us, a better you.
We are not defined by dogma. We are marked by hope.
Recognize the gap between constructed belief and the real world.
Get about the business of closing that gap, changing behavior and belief.
Know that this is possible, a thing you can do, a thing we can do together.
Then take a sabbath, and do it all over again. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
God Beyond Borders,
of All People and All Creatures,
we pray this morning for the family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo,
murdered by Nationalist forces in Houston.
We pray for transparency and accountability
for the masked men pulling the triggers
and the criminals commanding the ethnic cleansing.
We pray for those who are American by choice,
not by the happenstance of birth,
who do not take opportunity for granted,
who thought they had found safety,
and for the faithful witnesses who resist,
who dare to film,
to protest and to obstruct.
Jesus, too, was murdered by regime forces,
like Lorenzo, like Renee, like Alex,
meant as a warning for others.
He lives as they live in our memories,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father…