For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 12 – Isaiah 51:1-6 (Related)

One of the happiest periods of our life in ministry was the 19 months we spent in Jersey. We went to do a three month locum, but ended up staying much longer. We were offered a permanent job out there, which it felt right at the time to turn down, a decision I regret most days. One of the highlights of that year was the ‘Tennerfest’ in October, when all the restaurants, probably to thank the locals for putting up with the tourists all summer, served up incredible meals for £10 a pop. There was such a rich variety of different types of food available, and of course you have to cram in as many as you can while it lasts. It’s the law.

But the islanders have not always known such bounty. Many of our parishioners could still remember, first hand or in family tales, the period of occupation during WWII when it was hard to find anything at all to eat. Flower bulbs had to function as onions, and basically you had to grow what you ate or starve. Liberation Day, on May 9^th 1945, is still celebrated as an Island holiday each year.

The exiles from our passage had similarly been living through not occupation but deportation to Babylon, and, like the Islanders, almost certainly developed a ‘scarcity mindset’. People who have very little often cling desperately on to what they do have, and lose any imagination about things ever getting better. If imagination was a muscle, it had completely atrophied through lack of use. The prophet is trying here to get them to begin to flex their imagination muscles again, by painting a picture of the future which is so outrageously extravagant that it was way beyond what they could ever dream of. ‘Remember how it used to be?’ he asks. Take a look back to the golden age. God is still the same! He promises Eden instead of deserts, singing songs of thanksgiving instead of lament, and the influencing of the nations towards God rather than being under the oppression of foreigners. The call in v.6 to ‘lift up your eyes’ is a call to pump those imagination muscles so that they could begin to comprehend what good things God had in store for them.

Many in our churches today also have atrophied imaginations. We have seen the stats which tell us that Christianity is in decline, and the C of E perhaps in terminal decline. We are fed stories of child abuse, falling attendances and financial crises, and we have come to believe it. So we hang desperately on to what little we have got, and become functional atheists, losing any belief that things can ever get better. We refuse to change anything because after all, the devil you know … One parish I knew went into vacancy and asked their bishop for a new vicar who would be a hospice chaplain ‘to help us die as painlessly as possible’. We know our church can’t survive, but as long is it outlives us we’ll be OK. The prophet wants to speak words of hope into a completely discouraged people, and he does so by reminding them of what God is able to do, and encouraging them to life up their eyes to see it, and to make changes to prepare for it.

Now of course there is a tension here. The fact is that the C of E is in decline. The fact is that many tiny village churches will die, just has many urban ones already have. So isn’t this passage just a triumph of hope over reality, a massive game of ‘Let’s pretend’? The fact is that the Israelites did return to Jerusalem, but that doesn’t mean that 21^st century British churches will suddenly become full again. We have to face reality, not just hold out for unrealistic dreams to come true.

But as is so often the case, there is a dual focus in the prophet’s words. The 15 chapters which make up Deutero-Isaiah do give detailed accounts of what God is going to do in returning the exiles to their homeland, for example in v.11 of this chapter. We know from history that these words did come true. But there is another focus. V.6 describes a cosmic cataclysm when heaven and earth themselves will disappear, not a feature of Israel’s return with which we are familiar. The prophet’s telescope has zoomed out to the time when God will come in triumph and life as we know it will be replaced by a life of such abundance that even the Tennerfest will seem like subsistence rations. Our hopes for this life may or may not be fulfilled, but for God’s people exiled on this earth there is no doubt about the banquet to come.