Biblical Reflection—The Current Disaster

Isaiah 58:6-12
James 2:1-7; 5:1-6

Ken Whitt           September 11, 2005

Isaiah 58:6-12

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicatora shall go before you,
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The LORD will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of broken walls,
the restorer of streets with dwellings.

(As a preliminary thought, consider thinking about verse 12, the last verse I just read, in the context of what goes on around here, on South Fountain Ave. Do feeding the hungry and breaking the yoke of oppression go hand in hand with the restoration of our avenue more than we may have imagined? In God’s sight, are we restorers of streets with dwellings both because of the houses that are built and the architecture that is saved AND because of the lives that are built and the people who are saved? The Prophet Isaiah says that it is certain they are connected. Think about it.)

James 2:1-7

2 My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?

(Again, as a preliminary thought, note how James is verse one connects a right relationship with the poor with a right relationship with Jesus. You can’t have one without the other—that is the position of James the Apostle of Jesus.)

Introduction:

Does the staggering destruction of Hurricane Katrina
The desolation, including foul death, that blew in upon thousands and hundreds of thousands…
The far-reaching and very long term catastrophe, lives that will never be the same, lives that may never recover…
The flight of the homeless and the helpless and the shocked and the despairing that occurs often on our planet in third world countries…
The decisions and the indecisions of leaders and many things that were done before this disaster and many things that will be done after…

Does all of this require Biblical Reflection?

The Bible speaks volumes on suffering and tragedy and devastation on an apocalyptic scale. Of course we must reflect Biblically on these terrible matters, if for no other reason than to provide solace to the victims who have survived, who have lost their possessions and their memories and their homes and their peace of mind and maybe even their faith and their hope.

As well as reflecting Biblically we must act morally and sacrificially and extend material aid. Moving stories of rescue and survival and acts of great sacrifice and generosity are breaking forth from this gut wrenching trauma like oil poured out on the feet of Jesus as a sacrifice of love. It is good, it is healing, to hear how people are taking care of each other. I was moved by the photograph of a young black girl walking hand with a very old white woman in a wheel chair, both of them seeking safety. Unfortunately, I was also moved to great sorrow by the story of a nursing home outside of New Orleans. The employees all fled, leaving 30 residents bound to their beds for days.

What would I have done? But more to the point, what will I do now? There will be many opportunities and many ways and many days to be involved. However, Hurricane Katrina raises larger issues of oppression and justice that I believe demand Biblical reflection. We, our entire country, does not easily or willingly see these issues but they are glaringly present in the midst of and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They are just below the surface of everything we have been reading and hearing since Katrina unleashed its fury upon Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The Bible will help us to see what we do not want to see.

Reflection on Isaiah:

So we begin reflecting Biblically, seeing the current tragedy in the light of scripture; the scripture being like a searchlight that reveals all things.

Isaiah 58 is a powerful prophetic passage. Unlike other Powerful Prophetic Passages on the same subject, such as Matthew 25:31-46, Isaiah does not talk about the terrible consequences that befall those who oppress the poor, those who do not feed the hungry. Jesus says in Matthew 25 that those who neglect acts of kindness are doomed. Jesus says, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Doom, punishment, does not get any more drastic than this. God destroys, eternally, those who oppress the poor. That is straight from Jesus.

I don’t know what Isaiah thought about the people who do not feed the hungry. Would they be punished? Maybe he has something to say about that in another passage. What I do know is that in Isaiah 58 we are told what happens to those who do feet the hungry and do loose the bonds of injustice. For them it is rewards time, big time.

People have a lot of ideas about why people are poor. Most people think that people are poor because of bad choices they have made, because they choose to be poor by not lifting themselves up, because they have character defects like laziness or dishonesty, because they have addictions. The Bible sees it differently. There are a few, very few, Biblical passages that suggest that the poor are responsible for their own plight. But what the Bible says, over and over and over and over and over and over again, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, is that people are poor because they are oppressed by the rich, by people with power.

The Bible teaches again and again and again that people are poor because of injustice that is perpetuated by seemingly inalterable systems in a society, tax systems, discrimination systems, employment and wage systems, political power systems, legal systems, racist and sexist systems. What causes poverty? Well, for example, how many hours do you think a mother of three children in Denver, Colorado would have to work at minimum wage to pay the rent for herself and two children? The answer is 144 hours. Do the math. She would have to have four full time jobs just to pay the rent. Think about it. Multiply this example thousands and even millions of times and you begin to understand why people are desperately poor in America. And nobody in the political system, neither Republicans nor Democrats, is doing anything substantial about it

Isaiah 58:6-12. I already shared with you that Isaiah emphasizes the rewards that flow to those who feed the hungry rather than the punishment that goes to those who do not. I also shared my interpretation that these rewards are big, very big, like Christmas every day of the year. Listen to Isaiah’s catalog of rewards:

your vindicatora shall go before you—that is like saying you will have a lawyer or even a redeemer sticking up for you before God, no matter what you do. Does that sound like Jesus to you?

you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.—no matter what trouble you get in, God will be with you. You know those vans that go around rescuing stranded motorists? You’ve got one, two if you need them, for any kind of rescue you can imagine.

the LORD will guide you continually—all your life long the hand of God will show you your way. What are those new fangled things called on the dash boards of many cars to day? You can’t get lost with one of those in your car. Well, you’ve got one.

and satisfy your needs in parched places—this is a very big deal promise to people living in the desert. Your reward? A solar powered refrigerator freezer that makes its own ice, without being attached to any water supply.

Now things get very interesting. What do the following lines mean? What is this gift that Isaiah unwraps for those who feed the hungry and break the yoke of oppression?

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of broken walls,
the restorer of streets with dwellings.

I think they mean that if we feed the hungry, if we end the oppression of the poor, God will give us the resources and the power and the ability to build community in this place and time, right here and right now, a Beloved Community of which all of us can be a part, a place of harmony and unity and peace and abundance that the world cannot know. As a gift of God we will build a physical and a spiritual dwelling place that is safe and prosperous and filled with well being and love.

Reflection on James 2:1-7:

We turn our attention now to reflection on our scripture lesson from James. James looks at poverty from a different point of view--in chapter 2 he addresses a problem in the church. That problem is that the rich members are treated with favoritism over the poor members. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that is that the poor members bring a gift of faith to the community that the church deeply needs. You’d think that James would at leas acknowledge that they bring their money. But he is not interested in this. What do the rich members bring? They bring oppression. They drag the church members into court. That’s how James sees it.

And that’s important, but there is something even more important in this account. The church that James wrote to had rich and poor members. The church attracted rich and poor members. They were located in a community where it was possible for rich and poor members to belong to the same church. They could be challenged by James to end favoritism among the rich and poor because the rich and the poor were there together. There was a chance, James believed, for the rich and the poor to know each other. There was a chance for the church to learn what James was teaching and to change and in changing to grow together and in growing together grow closer to God. There was a chance for the barriers and discriminations present in the rest of their society to be broken down. There was a chance for the rich, knowing the poor as sisters and brothers in Christ, to lift the yoke of oppression and build community. I don’t know if they did it, but they could have done it. They could have then been in line for all the blessings of God declared by Isaiah.

Do you have an idea where I am taking this? Where are the churches today that have a chance to build the Beloved Community; to receive all the blessings of God presented by the Prophet Isaiah, to be repairers of walls and builders of streets with dwellings? Where are the churches that will follow Jesus in obedience to His mission statement in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus declared himself, his mission, in the synagogue in Nazareth:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Where are the churches that are close enough to the poor such that they can feel first hand how poverty is sucking energy and spirit out of people’s lives; can know that the working poor are good people, hard working people who need our help, our friendship, and our willingness to accept their gifts of faith and their help in building community? According to Isaiah, we can not build community without them, we can not be God’s people without them—with them we will be blessed beyond our wildest imaginations. This is not Ken Whitt speaking. It is Isaiah and it is Jesus.

I have to say here that what we are talking about, a church that brings the rich and the poor together and builds community, a church that joins Jesus in opposing the oppression of the poor, a church that doesn’t just stand against racism but becomes non-racist itself, in its flesh and blood, such a church is so counter to our culture as to be almost unimaginable. This is, I think, the number one reason why such churches have a difficult time growing. The vast majority of people want nothing to do with what we are committed to do. I think that racism permeates our culture like sewage water flooding the streets of New Orleans. I think that our society has firmly set a course wherein the rich become obscenely rich and the poor become obscenely poor. I think that these deplorable realities are getting worse. I think that the separation of the rich from the poor bears stark resemblance to the ship Titanic where the lower class passengers were blocked by locked gates from getting to the upper decks. I also believe that what happened in New Orleans, Louisiana is the moral equivalent to what happened on the Titanic—with the exception that in New Orleans a lot less rich people died.

New Orleans—it has been described as a bowl. A bowl. Low ground. High Ground. At the bottom of the bowl are…African Americans, some poor whites and some frail elderly. I think that when and if they finish the body count in New Orleans and if they tell us the race and age of the victims, the vast majority of the dead will be African Americans. The vast majority will be poor or old. Everyone else had long ago fled, either long before or just before the calamity, the vast majority of the middle class and the rich had fled to higher ground—maybe not high enough but higher none the less. Would new levees have been constructed had the rich of New Orleans lived at the bottom of the bowl? Would rescue have come more quickly if the middle class was perched on rooftops clinging for their lives? I don’t know, but I think so.

Back to our question about the churches: Where are the churches that are close enough to the poor such that they can feel first hand how poverty is sucking energy and spirit out of people’s lives; can know that the working poor are good people, hard working people who need our help, our friendship, and our willingness to accept their gifts of faith and their help in building community?

The churches of New Orleans long ago fled the bottom of the bowl for higher and more prosperous ground. Of course, when I say “the churches” I do not mean the black churches and the Hispanic churches. They have stayed in the city to be with their people. I mean the white churches. They too have stayed with their people. Looking down on the city.

I admit that I need to be less harsh. Sometimes white churches that have fled the cities of America have done so for good reasons. Maybe they struggled hard over this decision. Sometimes their members have struggled hard over their decisions to leave the city behind. Maybe they decided the cost was too great. Maybe they were concerned about the safety or the education of their children. Only God knows their hearts. However, what I know from the Prophet Isaiah and from Jesus and from James is that those who have left the city behind have also left great blessings and opportunities behind—blessings and opportunities that come only to those who stay or return to feed the hungry, to be friends with the poor and to suffer with them in their plight. Let me emphasize, you don’t have to live in the city to experience these blessings. You just have to come back.

Last week one of my neighbors told a story. His neighbor around the corner has become his friend. He knows her to be a good woman, a hard working woman, a spiritual woman. But government decisions are driving her deeper into poverty and into despair. My neighbor says he has tried to help, to cut through red tape, to use his contacts to get help. Nothing has worked. In the end all he could do was to suffer with her. And he could suffer with her only because he was close to her--in the neighborhood, in relationship and in spirit.

A few weeks ago I came out of the church at dusk. I tell you this story so that you will know how late I work. The moon was rising in the southern sky. The houses, especially those to my right, saturated my eyes with richness. Two girls we know were riding their bikes in circles in the parking lot, shouting joyfully. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude. Awe. Wonderment, that I lived and worked in this place. It seemed I was in heaven. (This is no exaggeration. That is how I felt.) I found my thoughts extending to the neighbors we visit on adopt a block. I felt gratitude for them. The other evening I was walking the streets and these new friends shouted at me and I shouted at them. I love this neighborhood. But then I thought of the poverty on these streets, the drugs, broken lives, sin, whatever else is hurtful and painful. Doesn’t seem like heaven now. But what if it is? What if Isaiah is telling us and Jesus is telling us that the closest we can get to heaven on this earth is to live in solidarity with the poor? What if that is how we participate in the suffering of Christ?

I have a question for you that I hope will bring all of this to a conclusion and free me to head for the Marriott for a great lunch. I think this question and the answer will say it all.

What if, and I know this is a highly unlikely scenario, but what if the flood waters—there must be a creek around here somewhere that could rise—what if the flood waters were to rise and disaster were to descend and lightning were to flash and the whirlwind were to spin and suddenly Springfield was buried by water and debris and chaos. What would happen to the children in this neighborhood? Would they be stuck and lost here in the center of the city, in the deluge, while the strong and those who had long ago fled to the rim of the city, who do not return to this neighborhood, at least not to know and to love and to be loved by the poor, would the children be trapped in he swirling madness? Would they be deserted and die?

No, of course not. Why not? They would escape with us. They are us. If we found a way out they would find a way out because they are our children. Do you understand what it means to say, “They are us. They are our children.” Do you have any idea how God feels about the fact that we say, “They are us. They are our children.” If the floods came, together we would make our way, just like we are already making our way together every day. Because as far as the poor are concerned there already is a flood. They are already living in the quagmire. They are already being buried by oppressive systems. Beloved people are dying. And our society does not care and most people on the rim of the bowl do not care about what they cannot see. They have fled not just the city. They have fled the blessings of God.

If you desire these blessings, the ones the Prophet Isaiah talks about, then you must feed the hungry and you must release the bonds of oppression and you must oppose the ignorance of racism and you must stand with the poor and the vulnerable. They must be your friends. You can do this no matter where you live. However, it is easier when they are your neighbors, or when you are part of a church where they are your neighbors, when the “they” is not really a “they” at all. There is only us.

So be it.

Amen.