The Sound of Silence
Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.
In 1964, Paul Simon wrote The Sound of Silence, and in that song he writes, "Fools said I, you do not know, silence like a cancer grows." And when asked about the meaning of that song, Art Garfunkel said that it was a song about people being unable to love each other. And I feel that's what we're experiencing in this moment right now. A deafening silence in the face of injustice. A refusal to acknowledge the harm that's being done to human beings made in the image of God.
I mentioned this two weeks ago, but it's far too easy for some of us to ignore what's going on around us and throw our hands in the air and say that there's really nothing we can do. But our lectionary text for this morning calls that mindset into question and reminds us that in times like these, our silence is a form of injustice. Injustice obviously takes place when we are actively harming a neighbor, but it also takes place when we're passively complicit in that harm. When our comfort keeps us quiet, systems of harm will go unchecked, and that is also an injustice.
So, I want you to hear these words from the prophet Isaiah who declares in Isaiah 58 verses 1-10:
Shout loudly, don't hold back, raise your voice like a trumpet, announce to my people their crime, to the house of Jacob their sins. They seek me day after day desiring knowledge of my ways like a nation that acted righteously, that didn't abandon their God. They ask me for righteous judgments, wanting to be close to God. Why do you fast and you don't see? Why do we afflict ourselves and you don't notice? Yet on your fast day you do whatever you want and oppress all your workers. You quarrel and brawl and then you fast. You hit each other violently with your fist. You shouldn't fast as you're doing today if you want to make your voice hurt on high.
Is this the kind of fast I choose, a day of self affliction, of bending one's head like a reed and of lying down in morning cloths and ashes? Is this what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Isn't this the fast I choose? Releasing wicked restraints, untying the yoke, setting free the mistreated, and breaking every yoke? Isn't it sharing your bread with the hungry and bringing the homeless poor into your house, covering the naked when you see them and not hiding from your own family?
Then your light will break out like the dawn and you will be healed quickly. Your own righteousness will walk before you and the Lord's glory will be your rear guard. Then you will call and the Lord will answer. You will cry for help and God will say, "I'm here." If you remove the yoke from among you, the finger pointing, the wicked speech, if you open your heart to the hungry and provide abundantly for those who are afflicted, your light will shine in the darkness and your gloom will be like the noon.
So right at the outset, we see God calling Isaiah to speak out about the hypocrisy of the Judeans. And it's important for us to note that these are his people. Sometimes in the Old Testament you'll have a southern prophet speaking to a northern prophet, but Isaiah is a Judean prophet speaking to Judeans. And that matters because Isaiah has skin in the game. He is part of this culture. He benefits from the systems in place and God is calling him to speak up on his home turf. And I think that's so relevant for us because a large portion of the church is either remaining silent or worse, applauding and justifying some of the horrific activity that we're seeing take place in our streets. The call is coming from inside the house. So this conversation we're having today is a family conversation.
There will be plenty more opportunities for us to grapple with the sins of our government and the hypocrisy of organizations and corporations that won't take a stand. But today we're calling the American church to account because every single Sunday Christians in the United States come down to the altar to receive the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus Christ and then return to a suffering world without having allowed Christ's sacrifice to reshape how they view the immigrant or advocate for the vulnerable. It's as if the cross is only good for shaping our worship music, but not our ethics.
And that's a shame because if the church would actually put Jesus back in his rightful place as the head of this body, we would see more welcoming of the stranger and less policing of our compassion and empathy. We would see more crosses being carried and less comforts being chased. We would see more tables of injustice being flipped and less peace being made with oppressive systems. And we would see more defense of human lives and less protection of our own power. But that is not what we're seeing right now. And I believe that God has something to say to us about it. And I believe that God wants you and I to be a part of the solution.
And so we're going to take a deeper look at this passage to see what God has to say. And then we'll talk about our prophetic role in all of this, because I believe that God could use a few more Isaiah's out there who are willing to use their voices to call the church back to Christ. And so as I mentioned, God is speaking to Isaiah and he's telling him to go announce to his own people that they're in rebellion. And if they want to encounter God's goodness, they're going to need to make some changes. And they're confused by that because they feel like they have been seeking God.
These are people who have been through a tumultuous era of oppression under the Babylonian Empire. Once the Persian Empire takes control, the Judeans are allowed to go back home, rebuild, worship the way they want, even reform their own culture. So this is supposed to be a joyful season of faithfulness for them. Yet God doesn't seem to be very active and they're wondering where God is. And then to hear from Isaiah that they need to repent of their sins has them dumbfounded because they're thinking, "What do you mean, God? We're fasting like you told us to do. We're mourning in sackcloth and ashes. We're observing Sabbath and delighting in your teachings. Isn't this kind of worship what you've commanded of us?" But then they let slip the heart of the problem. They ask, "Why should we humble ourselves if you're not going to notice?" And there it is. Isaiah tells them that this is all for their own self-interest and it isn't full in God.
Martin Luther used a Latin phrase to describe this sort of selfish sin in "cervatus in sea." And you can hear the word "curve" in that term and it means to curve in on oneself. Luther said that a selfish heart curves in on itself and bends the best gifts of God for its own sake. That's what's happening here. The people in our text are seeking the blessings of faith without the responsibility of faith. And the logic here is that if people were truly practicing their faith, the rituals and the law-keeping and the expressions of worship would move the people beyond themselves and into their community. But that's not what's happening. Instead, they're oppressing workers. They're getting into fights. They're not looking out for the poor and the hungry around them. They're acting as though they are the victims when in fact they are the victimizers. They're wondering why God has been so silent and God is wondering why they're silent in the face of such suffering.
And I can imagine what Isaiah might be saying to the church today. How can you raise your hands in praise on a Sunday but not raise your hands in protest on Friday to stand against the injustice around you? How can you use your breath to sing out about the goodness of God but not use your breath to blow your whistle when you see someone being beaten and thrown into the back of a van? How can you pick up bread with your fingers at the communion table and then go home and use those very fingers to sit at your laptop and post nasty stuff on Facebook about immigrants? That kind of behavior didn't add up then and it doesn't add up now.
The weekend before last, I picked Debbie up and we headed down to the Whipple building for a clergy protest and the director of the faith organization ISAIAH, JaNae Bates, she was speaking and she said most Christians are familiar with John 3:16 but we also need to start memorizing 1 John 3.16 too, which says, "Here is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters." The church is supposed to be the conduit through which God's presence breaks through into our world. It was the feminist theologian Sallie McFague who said, "If God is absent from the world, it's because we are."
That's what God wants the people of Judah to understand. God wants them to put their faith into practice not just through ritual but through acts of justice. God wants the people to understand that if they really want to do something impressive, then they don't need to deprive themselves of food. They need to stop depriving other people of food. God kind of switches up here what it means to fast. Isaiah tells them that a true fast is loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing the straps of the yoke, and letting the oppressed go free. But God's people seem to forget that a lot and here we are again at a critical moment not only in the history of our country but in the history of the church.
This is an Isaiah moment. It's a prophetic moment where we have the opportunity to help the church, our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, course correct and get back to the heart of our faith. Because if anyone should be uniquely positioned to speak into this moment and do something, it's the church. I mean we are following an oppressed Jewish man that was executed by the state and our claim is that this man was God in the flesh and he was raised back to life to break the chains of sin that hold all of us back from abundant life. But now the majority of the church just conveniently has nothing to say about what's taking place in our streets.
I mean I've never met a Christian who doesn't have something to say. We have plenty to say about the Super Bowl halftime show. We'll start a culture war over that. You know why? Because Bad Bunny doesn't actually cost us anything to get angry about. But what we're seeing happen to human beings right now on our streets, that can and will cost us something to say something about, to do something about. So a huge portion of the church has gone quiet.
And look, I know The Table is not perfect by any means but I do want you to know how proud I am of you. I know that you're calling our senators and representatives. I know many of you keep that whistle on you 24-7 and you stay ready to observe and report. And some of you are going above and beyond in ways that I'm not even going to say out loud because this is going to get posted online. You are representing Jesus so well out there and I couldn't be more grateful that we're in this fight for justice together.
And if you're a part of our community here at the table and you can't do any of those things right now because you're in a vulnerable population, please be safe. The scripture for today is about God's defense of you and is not compelling you to put yourself in any harm. If you're listening to this from Spotify on Monday because it's not safe for you to come out in person right now, you do whatever you need to do to protect yourself and your family and your spiritual family here at The Table will do what we can to serve you to the best of our abilities. And so again, I am so proud of how we are individually and collectively meeting this moment, loving our neighbors, supporting each other and seeking justice.
But the prophetic call on us is not just to love our neighbor. It's also to love the church enough to call her back to faithfulness. And so what I want to do is offer just some practical guidance as you discern what an Isaiah moment might look like in your life. And I'm going to be pretty broad here because we don't all have the same role to play. Like how God needs Delaney to speak up is probably not how God needs Jordan to speak up.
What is true for all of us is the spiritual obligation to confront systems that claim Jesus as Lord while actively exploiting and oppressing the marginalized, the very ones that Jesus stands with. So the first thing that I think we can all do is start with awareness. If we're going to speak up against injustice, we have to be willing to see it and we have to be willing to ask ourselves why it's happening. I've heard people say things before like, well, I just, I can't go to that domestic violence shelter because it just breaks my heart. And I completely understand that, but it's supposed to break our hearts because it's wrong and we'll never do anything about injustice. We aren't willing to acknowledge, but once we do become aware, we need to ask some fundamental questions about why it's happening in the first place. Like it's one thing to create hygiene kits for unhoused people, but it's another thing to ask, why did the city close down those three shelters without offering housing support? So we need to be aware not only of the needs around us, but also the systemic injustice that causes those needs in the first place.
The second thing that I think we can all do is not cave to hypocrisy. In order for our prophetic witness to carry any real weight, we have to be people who practice what we preach. And it really is that simple. When our lives contradict our message, the message loses authority and integrity matters when we're speaking out. So we want to make sure that what we say we believe is how we're actually living.
Third is I think that we can all use our voice wisely. When we speak out against complicit Christianity, it's important for us to remember that our allegiance isn't to a political platform. It's to the kingdom of God. Our ethics as followers of Jesus should be Christ shaped. And a Christ shaped ethic necessarily leads us to ask, what's my responsibility as a disciple?
And nothing is never the answer because you're following Jesus and that dude does not know how to mind his own business. He is always meddling. He's always getting involved. And that's why they killed him. And we can't leave him for dead with our silence. The living Christ must speak and act through us. So there's a boldness that we bring to these conversations as well. We are standing on business because a Christianity that attempts to remain neutral while human beings are actively harmed is not Christianity.
And so we show up grounded in faith. We show up bold in truth, but we also show up in love. We're not trying to attack enemies here. We're trying to have a conversation with the Christian family about the heart of God and what it looks like for us to be faithful in the face of injustice.
So I want to encourage you this week to sit down at your computer or grab a pen and paper and spend some time discerning what it means for you to have a kingdom of God ethic. Like what are the biblical stories or passages of scripture or experiences with God that you've had that have shaped you? Write that down. Ask yourself, what is the responsibility of a Jesus follower in the face of injustice? What do I believe it looks like to be faithful? And then write that down. Knowing the answer to those types of questions will help you step boldly, truthfully, and lovingly into your spheres of influence as you begin to speak up.
And then finally, I think we can all refuse to give up hope. Our scripture passage ends on a positive note this morning. When the people start worshipping God with their actions and not just their rituals, light begins to break forth and gloom turns to healing. And at the end of the day, that's the message we carry with us. That's what sustains us in this work. There's hope because light is dawning and there are hurts that are healing. There's hope because God is not silent.
Simon and Garfunkel had this restless dream that there would be no one who dared disturb the sound of silence. And as people of faith, let's make sure that stays a dream and doesn't become a reality. I hope you'll lift up your voice like a trumpet because the church needs your prophetic witness in these difficult days. And as we speak up, we will walk in hope and we will move towards brighter days together. Amen.