What God Wants

What God Wants

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 30, 2016

Scripture: Isaiah 1:10-18; Luke 19:1-10

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Earlier this past week Jane and I went to breakfast at the Mountain View Diner in Gold Bar, something we do most every Tuesday morning. Recently they’d had a white board in their little entry way with sayings written on it. Last Tuesday there was one they identified as a Japanese proverb. It read: “Vision without action is a day dream, action without vision is a nightmare.” Now, that’s not a specifically Christian saying, but it points to a question that is an issue for all faith traditions, not just our Christian one. What is the proper relationship between religious belief and actions? To put it in more traditional Christian language, what is the proper relationship between faith and works? Are we saved only through God’s grace which we access through faith, as Paul, Martin Luther, and John Calvin contended? Or is faith without works dead, as the New Testament’s Letter of James contends? To put the question yet another way, what does God want from us? Does God want our faith in God and Jesus Christ? Or does God care more about how we live our lives, what we do and don’t do? To go back to the language of that Japanese saying I saw last week, does God want us to have vision, or does God want us to undertake good actions? That truly is a central question of the Christian faith.

I think our two scripture readings this morning shed a good deal of light on that question. I’ll start with the Isaiah. There the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, claiming to speak for God, condemns the people of Israel in very harsh terms, especially the leaders and rulers of the people. He calls them rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, two notoriously sinful cities of Hebrew scripture, sinful mostly for how they abused strangers among them. Then he soundly rejects the people’s religious practices. In these passages God condemns and rejects their sacrifices, offerings, incense, religious holidays and festivals, even their prayer. Now, some people today may think that God is rejecting those things not because they worship but because they are the wrong kind of worship. After all, we don’t worship God by sacrificing, that is, ritually killing, animals. No Christians do, and I wouldn’t be a Christian minister if being meant I had to do that. We don’t use incense in our worship, although some Christians do. We don’t celebrate “New Moons.” So maybe we think that all those things that Isaiah lists and condemns are just the wrong kind of worship. But see, everybody in Israel in Isaiah’s time, including the prophet himself, was sure that all of those things were precisely the right kind of worship. This ancient Hebrew text is not saying that the people need better worship. It is far more radical than that. It is saying that God doesn’t want even the right kind of worship from them. God doesn’t even want their prayers, and surely prayers are appropriate from people of faith. God doesn’t want their worship or even their prayers because, the text says, their “hands are full of blood.” Because of the people’s “evil deeds.” Because they are “doing wrong” rather than doing right.

OK, but what’s wrong and what’s right? Our text from Isaiah certainly poses that question, and it answers it too. Immediately after it tells the people to “learn to do right” it says: “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” That’s what right. Directly or indirectly Isaiah here raises the three types of people the Hebrew prophets typically called the people to protect and take care of. They are first of all the stranger, that is alien in their midst. Isaiah doesn’t mention this group explicitly, but he does indirectly when he calls out people he calls the rulers of Sodom. In the story in Genesis of Sodom a mob of supposedly straight men want to gang rape men who were staying temporarily in that city. The sin of Sodom is hostility toward the stranger, and Isaiah mentions it in our text. The other two groups the prophets typically call out for defense are the widow and the orphan. Isaiah here says the fatherless not the orphan, but in that strongly androcentric culture being without a father made you an orphan even if you still had your mother. Isaiah specifically mentions the widow. In that society a woman without a man to protect and take care of her was in a terrible state. These are the groups the prophets typically lift up because they were the most vulnerable people in those days, the ones who couldn’t care for themselves and had no one else to care for them either. So that’s what’s right. To care for the vulnerable. To lift up the oppressed.

Then there’s our reading from Luke about Jesus and Zacchaeus. Perhaps we miss the story’s point that Zacchaeus is a really bad dude. See, he wasn’t just a tax collector, which would have been bad enough. He was a “chief” tax collector. That’s a sort of wholesale tax collector. He paid assessed taxes to the Romans in advance, then hired others to go collect taxes from the people. They had to get enough to pay the chief tax collector back what he had already paid to the Romans plus profit for themselves and for him. Zacchaeus was so good at it that he’d gotten rich. The original audience for this story would have hated Zacchaeus with a passion as soon as they heard that he was a chief tax collector. Jesus saying that he was going to stay with Zacchaeus made the people angry with Jesus, and understandably so.

Yet in our story Zacchaeus apparently gets religion. He says he gives half of all he has to the poor. He says he will repay anyone he has cheated plus what in US law we call treble damages. Whereupon Jesus praises him highly. He says “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” It is perhaps an odd way of praising Zacchaeus. What does he mean calling Zacchaeus a “son of Abraham?” Does that mean only that Zacchaeus was a Jew? Probably not, because Zacchaeus was always a Jew even when he was extorting excessive amounts of money from people. What Jesus means here, I think, is that Zacchaeus has finally figured out what being a person of faith, in his case the Jewish faith and in our case the Christian faith, is really about. It is about doing justice. The kind of justice Isaiah was taking about more than 700 years earlier. Justice as care for the poor and vulnerable. Justice as respecting all other people as children of God regardless of their life circumstances. Justice as honoring especially those society and culture dishonor. Lifting up those human society and human culture trod down. Lifting up those society and culture oppress. Affording equal dignity to those against whom society and culture discriminate. Supporting people and movements that advocate and do all of those things and opposing people and movements that don’t or that even advocate perpetuating society’s ills. That’s what Jesus is saying when he honors Zacchaeus, the former sinner, calling him a child of Abraham.

Now of course, we’re all at different stages of life. We all have different abilities and different resources. Of course God know that, and God doesn’t expect precisely the same things from all of us. Most of us come to a time in life when we are the ones who need care and aren’t in much of position to give care. God knows that. God respects us and is with us when we come to that point in life. There is grace in receiving care as much as there is grace in giving care. That’s all true. It is indeed divine truth. It is truth too many of us too easily forget. We want to be the care givers not the care receivers. Well, if what God wants from us is caring for those in need, then God cares for those in need. God cares for us when we are ill. God cares for us when we are poor. God cares for us when we are weak. God cares for us as we near the end of our lives on earth. Nothing in God’s desire that we do justice means that we are not also to receive justice, to receive care, when we need it.

That being said and truly meant, I am convinced that we Christians badly need to remember a truth that our faith tradition so easily forgets. Yes, God wants our faith. God wants our belief. God wants us to trust God and to rely on God. God wants us to see Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. But God also wants that faith of ours to change us. To transform us. To make us people of divine justice, the kind of justice Isaiah demanded. The kind of justice Zacchaeus demonstrated once he repented, once he turned around. I disagree with Isaiah here a bit. I think God does want our worship, but God wants our worship not because God needs it but because we do. God wants our worship because God wants us to repent, to turn around, to be transformed the way Isaiah wanted the people of ancient Israel to be transformed. The way Zacchaeus was transformed. That’s what God wants. Are we ready to hear? Are we ready to follow? May it be so. Amen.