Return to the Lord
Isaiah 1:12-20
Ash Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Rev. Stephen Aram
We live in a time when the church really emphasizes the mercy and grace of God. How many times have you heard it said that God loves us just the way we are and that he will be there any time we call? And God’s mercy and grace are wonderful dimensions of God’s character. They should be celebrated. We should walk in amazement at how merciful God is.
This evening we are starting a series of sermons from the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah. He wrote some of the most beautiful statements of God’s grace in the whole Bible. He was an amazing poet, with a wonderful skill with words. We’ll talk about that more on Sundays coming up.
Isaiah also reminds us that mercy and grace are not the whole story with God. God is holy. He really, really cares about the way we treat one another. Precisely because God loves us so much he is determined that we be the best we can be, that we experience the joy he knows that comes from holy living.
Our text for this evening came as a shock for some of Isaiah’s listeners and it may come as a shock for us, too. Because Isaiah tells us there are times when we can call out to God, even physically stretching out our hands to him, and he won’t even listen. He will hide himself from us. He is a holy God. And he demands holy lives from us. And that’s because he loves us so much. And we’ll be really confused if we don’t understand that. Now hear the word of God from the prophet Isaiah 1:12-20.
12 When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; 13 bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation -- I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. 14 Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.
15 When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. 16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17 learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. 18 Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. 19 If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; 20 but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.
How can this be? How can God turn his back on his children? How can he close his ears to us? How can God refuse to listen?
I know very well. I’m a parent. We raised four kids. They were good kids, but we did have our moments. Parents, did you ever have a day when your daughter was supposed to clean her room and she didn’t do it and she didn’t do it, and the layer of clothes was getting deeper and deeper on the floor. And finally you said, “All right. You’re grounded. You stay in your room until you get it picked up. I want the clothes in the hamper or the closet. I want your bed made. I want that trash picked up.”
And then you walk away. And you might hear yelling, screaming, crying, tantrums, but the best thing you can do as a parent is just go to the other end of the house and ignore it. Right? Do you still love her? Of course. But there are times when you can’t give in to what she asks.
Did you ever have a son whose grades were slipping, who wanted the car keys to go out with his friends on a school night, and he had a paper due and he was running out of time to finish it? And did you smile and give him the keys and cash to spend with his friends? Not if you were a good parent. You stood your ground. You said, no car keys for you until I see that paper done, and I’m gonna read it and make sure you did a good job. I want you to get the education you need. I want you to do well in school. And I’m not going to argue about this. If you need help, I’ll be here. But you need to go right now and write your paper. Then we’ll talk.
And did you do those things because you hated your kids? Was it because you’re just plain a mean person or you didn’t care? No, it was because you loved them. It was because you wanted the very best for them. It was because you had great dreams and high hopes for them. And you may have taken a lot of heat to stand in there. I know there were a few times when I did. Thankfully, there weren’t too many of those times.
So what was God’s problem with the Israelites when Isaiah wrote? God had given the Israelites tons of grace. He had brought them out of slavery in Egypt. He had given them laws to follow that would help them live together harmoniously and if one of them had bad luck and was having trouble making ends meet, they would help each other out. He had really committed himself to be there for them. He had defended them against their enemies time and again. He had given them land of their own and some really good years of prosperity.
And how did they respond? They took those blessings for granted. God had told them in no uncertain terms that they needed to watch out for the orphans and widows in their towns. But they forgot about that and even allowed some people to cheat orphans and widows out of their inheritances.
They started looking over the fence at the gods of other peoples, gods who encouraged sexual orgies, gods who weren’t so picky about things like social justice. And they started following those other gods.
And at the same time that they were worshipping those other gods they went through the motions of worshipping the God of their ancestors, the Holy One of Israel. So they would cheat in their business practices on Wednesday, then go and offer incense in the temple to the living God. They would go to the parties for the pagan gods and participate in the orgies. And then they would come to the temple of the living God for the Israelites feasts.
Now, thinking about children again, lots of children think they can pull fast ones on their parents. There was a day when I knew I was going to get a spanking, so I put a book in my pants. That didn’t work. Sometimes kids get away with staying up after bed time and reading under their covers with a flashlight and the parents don’t see. Sometimes they clean up their room by throwing everything in a mess in the bottom of the closet and closing the door and the parents don’t think to look.
But how stupid is it to think you can pull one over on God? There is no place on earth he doesn’t see. There is no time when he is sleeping. You might be able to fool your parents with a lie, but God always knows the truth.
How stupid was it to think they could worship other gods and the living God wouldn’t know the difference? What an insult that was to God! How dumb did they think he was? Did they realize who they were messing around with?
And this was a personal thing to God. For God this was like he was married to Israel, but they were cheating with other gods. This was personal.
They thought that as long as they went through the motions of good Jewish religion, they would be OK. Going through the motions in the temple would make up for any evil they did on the other days of the week.
And it was a terrible insult to the God who had done so much for them.
And it was really dangerous for them; because the fabric of their society was unraveling more and more the farther they strayed from God’s laws. And God hated it.
So I hope you found that at least a little interesting as a history lesson. But there’s something about Isaiah, about all of the Bible, that as we pay attention to those ancient stories we start to see ourselves in them. They are often our stories, too. We’ll find a lot of that in Isaiah.
If Israel had been blessed as a nation, how much more have we Americans been blessed? Sure, we like to complain, but most of us are very well fed, we have warm homes, we have amazing medical care, most of us live long lives. We can get anxious, but right now there is no other country that can really threaten us with serious harm. We are really blessed.
And, by world standards, at least, we are a Christian nation. Compared to most other countries, there are a whole lot of Americans in church most Sundays. In the US it might be 40% in church on any given Sunday, but 3% in England or France.
But do we face the same danger that the Israelites had, of taking our blessings for granted; of just assuming we’ll enjoy all these blessings forever?
For even good church folks, is there a danger that we go to church on Sunday, go through the motions of piety, then go home and say we did our bit and through the week commit things that are displeasing to God? Jesus was always battling this with the Pharisees in his time. They did a few pious things to the nth degree, but were often really rotten people.
Do we honor our God in our hearts and our actions on every day of the week? Do our lives match our words? Do we join in the immorality of our culture in the TV and movies we watch, the novels we read? God sees our bodies as temples of his Holy Spirit. Do we give our bodies the rest and the good diet and exercise that they deserve? When relationships get difficult, do we allow conflicts to fester or even feed the conflicts in anger, or do we give our very best to make peace with those around us?
Those are questions to ask ourselves every day. But Ash Wednesday is a special time to take moral inventory, to take measures against the temptations to insult our God by the lives we live. I hope that you are listening to the Holy Spirit as we have gone through the service and made your own notes to God of the sins you want to confess and clean out of your life. That’s the first step, to at least acknowledge the problem.
In verse 16 of our text, God tells the people of Israel, and he tells us to clear away the destructive things. “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil,” Maybe you found a Lenten discipline on the glass in the narthex that puts a finger on something negative that you need to deal with in your life. Maybe God will bring something to your mind during this service, something he’s been trying to whisper to you for some time.
But pleasing God isn’t just running away from the bad stuff. It’s also doing good. And Isaiah spells out some examples in verse 17. “Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
Do you know a widow or a widower who is struggling today? Do you know a fatherless child who is struggling today? Do you know someone who has gotten a raw deal in the economic downturn that has hit our country? Do you know someone who is really weighed down by the grief of losing a loved one? God calls us to be there for them. Have we made room in our schedules to be there for those who are vulnerable? When we talk politics with friends, are we standing up for the needs of the poor? Maybe in this season of Lent you can build a new habit for doing good.
So far we’ve met the stereotype of the Old Testament as law, rules. Obey and you’ll be blessed. Disobey and you’ll be sorry. And law and consequences have an important place and we ignore them to our peril.
But hear the wonderful grace in verse 18. “Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”
It is God’s will for sinful people like us, even really sinful people whose sins are as bright as scarlet, to be white as snow. One commentary I read said that of the dyes that were available in ancient times, scarlet was the brightest and the most permanent. But even if our sins are like that, flagrant and stubborn, God can make us as white as snow. And that is amazing grace. And I don’t think Isaiah knew all the details of what God was going to do in the atonement, with Jesus dying on the cross to take away our sins. But he knew the heart of God. He recognized the grace in the very heart of God.
Think about God’s offer to take sins as flagrant and stubborn as scarlet and turning them white as snow. Sometimes the winter roadsides can be pretty ugly. There’s slush. There may be trash that has been buried in the snow and comes visible when the snow melts. There may be pea gravel. There may be chunks of grass where the snow plow dug in. That picture can represent a lot of lives, filled with things that aren’t very pretty.
And then a fresh snow falls. It covers all the mess. It’s pure. It’s beautiful. It’s God’s goal to do that in your heart.
There’s a kind of Christianity that is afraid of verses like this, that doesn’t dare to hope that we will ever really be victorious over our sin. They feel they need to grovel before God all the time, to talk about their sinfulness all the time. They stay stuck in defeat. “Woe is me, a sinner.”
But I want you to hear the words of Isaiah. There is hope that we can be morally, spiritually as white as snow before God.
And that is a very Methodist emphasis, coming to God with high hopes that he will change us, make us new to the depths of our hearts.
Can you dare to hold that dream for Lent this year? Let that dream give you courage to face your sins, to name them out before God, even to weep for them. Let that dream give you courage to commit yourself to building the habits of righteousness that will mold a life that will be like Jesus. We don’t do good works to impress God, to earn merit. We do them to be like Jesus and to bring pleasure to his heart.
No change ever comes without an honest recognition of a problem that needs to be solved. Ash Wednesday is a time to confess our failures to God, our sins. The tradition is to come forward and receive a smudge of ashes on your forehead. The ashes are an ancient expression of mourning and it is only right for us to be deeply sad for our sins. That’s an essential beginning.
But deep change comes as we dare to look this wonderful holy and gracious God right in the face, to be totally honest about our sins, our fears, our hopes.
As we sing our hymn, page 387, I invite you to come forward in an outward act of repentance for your sin. And may the outward action help you feel the repentance deep in your heart.
And remember that as we confess to God, we humble our hearts before God with hope. We’re on our way to becoming white as snow in his presence. AMEN
