Doom to those who drag guilt along with cords of fraud, and haul sin as if with cart ropes, 19 who say, “God should hurry and work faster so we can see; let the plan of Israel’s holy one come quickly, so we can understand it.” 20 Doom to those who call evil good and good evil, who present darkness as light and light as darkness, who make bitterness sweet and sweetness bitter. 21 Doom to those who consider themselves wise, who think of themselves as clever. 22 Doom to the wine-swigging warriors, mighty at mixing drinks, 23 who spare the guilty for bribes, and rob the innocent of their rights. (CEB)
“How
Much is Enough? Hungering for God in an
Affluent Culture,” Week Two
The
child had been born for a mission, his parents said, to be engaging and bright
and entertaining, so that he might, as they put it, “go up and down, winning
lost humanity with the message of the Master.”
Programmed from birth by his parents, he traveled the country,
performing—that’s the word they used.
Not preaching. But performing,
like a circus animal. As he put it, “As
a child, I would want to go ut and play but we would spend hours and hours
memorizing” instead.
As
the writer Karen Spears Zacharias put it, the boy “enjoyed all the attention
and adoration of adults twice as big as him.
But he did not, at any point, believe in any of it. How could he?” When, many years later, they made a
documentary about his life, the boy-turned man, Marjoe, said, “I can’t think of
a time when I believed in God. Or I
thought it was a miracle of God that I preached. I knew I could do it well. My parents had trained me. But I never thought I was some miracle child
of any kind.”
It
is a terrifying, troubling, and ultimately preventable story of what can, and
will, happen when we reach for God not out of authenticity and honesty, but out
of a need for shallow entertainment and, above all else, a need for filling a
void that could not be filled by ourselves.
Far from winning people with the message of God, it turned a boy,
perhaps permanently, away from God. And
we do the same to ourselves, sometimes without even realizing or thinking about
it.
This
is a new sermon series for us as a church, as well as a new year. This Sunday marks the first Sunday of the new
church year, which doesn’t quite adhere to our January-through-December
calendar—it usually runs November-through-November, and it begins with this
first season that we call Advent. It is
a time of, as John the Baptist preached to us, preparing the way for the Lord
who is to come to us on Christmas Day.
And we’ll be doing so this Christmas season by reading together one of
the great forerunners in the Old Testament to Jesus, the prophet Isaiah. He is the one who prophesied the coming of a
virgin who would give birth to a child called Emmanuel, but Isaiah has so much
more to share with us than that. And
we’ll be looking at what he had to say early in his prophetic career in light
of the book “How Much is Enough?
Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture,” by Arthur Simon, who founded
the Christian nonprofit organization Bread for the World. We’ll be juxtaposing a passage from Isaiah
with a chapter from “How Much Is Enough?” each Sunday, beginning last Sunday
with the chapter entitled, “Fat Wallets, Empty Lives.” This Sunday, we turn to a chapter entitled, “Rushing
to Nowhere.”
I
didn’t quite preach the sermon I had originally planned to last week, so this
is sort of a second chance to gain some traction in the overall arc of this
series as it was originally written. Put
simply, this series was created by me as a spiritual sequel of sorts to last
year’s Advent sermon series, “The Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change
the World?” That series was all about
how we, as the church, as the body of Christ, can still live the Christmas
spirit. This series is perhaps a little
more…Grinch-like—it tries to ask why we don’t always actually do so!
Arthur
Simon writes:
We may feel harried, with too much to do
and not enough time to do it. Yet studies
reveal that most of us are making poor use of our leisure time; we are also
frequently bored, and may try to buy our way out of boredom with the latest
distraction…Not knowing what to do with their free time (when they have it) or
feeling too tired for active recreation, most people resort to passive leisure
that tends to leave them feeling weaker, more irritable, and less happy. The baffling combination of activity-related
stress and poor use of leisure adds to the evidence that burnout often stems
not from doing too much, but from the impression that no matter how much we do,
we are not getting anywhere.
We
are, in a sentence, rushing to nowhere.
We
don’t need to do a show of hands, but I am willing to bet that a lot of you may
well like to have fewer moving parts in your lives right about this time of
year. If so, it is to you that Isaiah is
offering these particular words.
It
is important to remember that unlike many—perhaps most—of the Old Testament
prophets, Isaiah is not prone to theatrics.
Unlike Ezekiel, he never eats a scroll to personify the consumption of
God’s word. Unlike Jonah, he never
spends time being digested by somebody else’s future sushi. Isaiah had more street cred than that—in the
words of our hipster neighbors down in Portland, Isaiah very rapidly goes
mainstream. His career is one of royalty—he
actually served in the royal courts.
Which isn’t that surprising, really—other Old Testament prophets
did. Saul had Samuel, David had Nathan,
and Solomon had Zadok.
But
as opposed to some of the other prophets, whom we may never know if they
actually gained a direct audience with the people of means and power they were trying
to convince, we know that Isaiah has the ears of the crown. He prophesies directly to kings like Ahaz and
Hezekiah. He’s prophesying to people
who, probably, like us, have their lives going in a million different
directions at once.
Which
is in direct contrast to the vast, vast majority of the population in Biblical
times. I’ve mentioned this before, but
there was no middle class in Biblical Israel—you were either wealthy, or you
were subsistence-level poor. Aside from
perhaps some of the merchants, there was very little in-between. Which meant that the idea of leisure time
would have been a fantasy, a non-existent notion, to the masses of
subsistence-level farmers and ranchers in Israel. They had to spend every hour of every day
simply raising enough food to feed their families, never mind saving up for
that Christmas ham that has become tradition at our dinner tables. That’s a luxury that they couldn’t afford, so
single-minded they had to be in order to make a living. Their’s was a one-track life, with one goal:
survival.
So
it is the rulers, the power that be, who juggle a wider breadth of tasks. They may work as equally hard, but the rulers
are concerned not just with survival, but with diplomacy, with keeping order,
and with appeasing whichever gods you happened to be worshiping at the time,
which, for ancient Israel, was not always God.
So
when Isaiah is shouting at them—the rulers of the land—“ah to you who are
heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink,” he’s talking to us as
well, the people who try to use what spare time we have to escape from the
variety of burdens we have built for ourselves.
But back then, King Uzziah didn’t have an Xbox 360, or a plasma TV, or
an iPad (wait…oops).
But
they had wine. Isaiah is calling them
heroes at their passive leisure pursuits.
It would be like God telling us today, “You who are heroes at watching
Real Housewives of Orange County, and are valiant at playing Grand Theft Auto!” That’s what’s going on here! It isn’t that the Bible is anti-alcohol—after
all, Jesus turned water into wine—it’s that the Bible is
anti-things-that-make-us-forget-what’s-really-important, important stuff like
fairness, justice, and equality.
Because
look at how this passage ends—a condemnation of people who, puffed up on their
misguided leisure, turn right into wrong, light into dark, and sweet into
bitter. All of which are way, way, more
important, but hey…we’re heroes at mixing a mean mojito, so, you know, go us.
Lest
I sound holier-than-thou here, this is another one of those messages directed
at me as well. Earlier this week, Salon
magazine published an article entitled, “Video Games are Designed to Get You
Hooked.” I immediately slapped it up on
my Facebook wall, with the caption of, “Well, this explains a lot.” I have to take the approach towards console
video games the same way many recovering addicts have to towards their drug of
choice—complete abstinence. Otherwise, I
would never get any work done, and all of my sermons would likely be about how
you can find God by beating Bowser in Super Mario.
And
if this is all making me sound like some sort of culture stickler, that isn’t
quite what I’m going for, nor is it what the Bible is going for. I truly do not care what music you listen
to. I may make fun of you for it, if the
music stinks, yet I won’t tell you not to listen to it.
But
I do care about when your leisure time isn’t actual leisure—when it isn’t doing
its job of actually relaxing you and restoring you so that you can return to
the great and unending work of actually living the Gospel out in your lives in
way that uplifts the people around you.
Marjoe, the child at the beginning of my message, his was no leisure time,
and it wounded him terribly.
And
this is a season that is supposed to be a vacation for many, but in fact
creates much more work as well. Stress
often gets worse during the holiday season, depression as well. Loneliness and despair and burnout often
follow.
None
of these things are what Christmas was ever meant to be about. Christmas is about community, because we are,
in fact, welcoming someone both old and new into our community for the very
first time. May our work be to making
that community we welcome the Christ Child into as inclusive and as loving as is
humanly possible.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington.
December
9, 2012
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