Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 22, 2004

Scripture:

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.

Do you ever feel hopeless? I do. It’s easy enough to do these days. In our personal lives we sometimes feel overwhelmed. Sometimes we feel stuck in an uncomfortable situation. We want out, but we can’t see a way out. Maybe there are things we would like to be doing, or maybe even that we feel God calling us to do, but all we can see are the reasons why we just can’t do it. We lose hope. We give in to hope’s opposite, despair. Despair, or a lack of hope, can lead to even more severe spiritual disorders, depression for example. We can even get caught in a vicious circle. It happened to me once. A sense of hopelessness around a perceived inability to follow God’s call to us leads to feelings of depression. These in turn reflect a chemical imbalance in the brain caused initially by the spiritual condition of despair. The feelings of depression increase the despair, which aggravates the neurological chemical imbalance, which increases the depression, which increases the despair, etc. etc. etc.

The feeling of hopelessness for many of us today comes also, or perhaps primarily, not from our personal lives but from the state of the world. There is so much violence, poverty, illness, injustice, and oppression in the world. We’re despoiling God’s good creation, the earth, on which we all depend for life. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and only the rich get a hearing in the corridors of power. There seems to be no political will anywhere--and certainly not in either of our major political parties--to undertake the kind of radical social, economic, and political restructuring necessary really to deal with these issues. It can all look pretty hopeless.

Well, we aren’t alone. We aren’t the first people in history to be caught in the grasp of despair. As people of The Book, it should come as no surprise to us that the Bible also tells stories of people living in despair and that it gives some pretty good advice on how to deal with it. We heard one such passage this morning, the reading from Chapter 58 of Isaiah. Maybe it wasn’t apparent to you when you heard it that it is about hope and despair, but it is. Let me explain.

It should come as no surprise to those of you who know me that I’m going to start by giving you some of the historical background of this passage. Chapter 58 of Isaiah is from a part of the book of Isaiah that scholars call Third Isaiah. As I’ve explained here before, Isaiah is actually three separate books joined together by a later, unknown editor. Third Isaiah, that is, chapters 57 to 66 of the book of Isaiah, was written by an unknown prophet in the late sixth or early fifth century BCE, after the return to Jerusalem of the elite of Judean society from exile in Babylon. It was not a happy time in the life of God’s people. True, the leaders who had been marched off to foreign captivity fifty or more years earlier, or their descendants, has been allowed to return to the Promised Land; but conditions were far from good there. Judea was now a province, or a client state, of the mighty Persian Empire, which exacted obedience and treasure as the price of peace and religious autonomy. The country was still devastated from the destruction wreaked by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. In particular, Solomon’s great Temple, the heart and soul of the people’s faith, lay in ruins. On top of all that, there were profound divisions among the people. In particular, there was a great divide between the common people who had stayed behind and the leadership that had been in exile in Babylon. The Persians were bleeding the country dry, and there didn’t seem to be anything the people could do about it.

It was in this grim context that the prophet known as Third Isaiah spoke his word of hope. Significantly, he didn’t just exhort the people to have hope. You can’t cultivate hope just by telling people, or yourself, to have it. If we could just decide to have hope, we would. Isaiah knew that if he truly wanted to cultivate hope in the people, he had to tell them how to do it, and that’s what he did.

The passage in which he does that starts out rather cryptically: "If you will remove the yoke from among you...." What in heaven’s name does that mean? Well, two additional pieces of information may help us figure that out. The first is that in the Hebrew prophetic literature the yoke, literally a very useful device used for putting oxen to work pulling and plowing, is often used as a symbol of oppression. Most famously, in the time just before the Babylonian exile Jeremiah used to walk around with an ox’s yoke over his shoulders to symbolize the coming oppression of the Jewish people by the Babylonians. So, I think, Third Isaiah is saying in effect: Remove the oppression from among you.

OK, but what does that mean. That’s where the second bit of additional information comes in. That’s where the second bit of additional information comes in. It doesn’t sound like it to us in English translation, but this passage is actually poetry not prose; and in Hebrew poetry isn’t about rhyming. Rather, it works through the use of parallels. A thematic statement is made, then one or more statements follow that restate the theme in other words or that develop its meaning by giving examples or consequences of the thematic statement. A famous example is: "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." The statement "I shall not want," and several other statements that follow in Psalm 23, develop the meaning of the thematic statement "The Lord is my shepherd." That’s Hebrew poetry. Thus, if the thematic statement is unclear, you can often decipher it by looking for a statement of specifics that often follows it. That’s what’s happening here. The statements that follow "If you remove the yoke from among you" tell us what that theme statement means. Those statements say that you remove the yoke from among you by not point your finger and speaking evil. You also do it by feeding the hungry and taking care of those who are in need.

We learn from all this what the yoke, the oppression, is that Isaiah is telling the people to remove from among themselves. It is first internal dissention among the people, pointing fingers and speaking evil. It is, in other words, blaming others for your problems and engaging in gossip and rumor mongering. Isaiah is teaching that we must not let the conditions that cause us despair turn us against those closest to us, against those who share the conditions that make for despair. When we let circumstances do that to us, we play into the hands of those who oppress us, or we perpetuate the damaged relationships that depress and vex us. We waste our energy on that which cannot bring us hope and that diverts from truly dealing with our problems.

But Isaiah tells us that the yoke, the cause of our despair, consists of other things as well. It consists of our own failure to do social justice, to feed the hungry and to satisfy the needs of the afflicted. The problem here, I think, is that when we feel hopeless we tend to close in on ourselves, to become self-absorbed. We neglect the Biblical imperative to care for the most vulnerable among us. That neglect causes us spiritual harm and reinforces our morbid preoccupation with our own problems, thereby making those problems worse. To cultivate hope, we must come out of our shells and care for others who are in need regardless of how much need we may feel ourselves.

We learn all these things from the few lines that follow "If you remove the yoke from among you." The promise of hope comes next. Third Isaiah puts that promise of hope in the form of a promise of the good things God will do for the people if they will take Isaiah’s advice. He uses several images, but the most beautiful one for me is: "You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail." We can have the hope of life, rich, full, abundant life. We can hope for that life because God has promised it. Yet we can’t just sit around waiting for it to happen. We must cultivate it, cultivate it the way Third Isaiah tells us.

Then Isaiah has one more directive for us if we wish to receive what God promises. Isaiah put that directive in the terms of the religious law of his time and his faith. It comes down to this: Keep the Sabbath. Honor the Sabbath. Devote it to the things of God and not to your own petty interests. That too you must do to have hope. Even understood rather narrowly, that’s pretty good advice. The Sabbath is supposed to be a regular day of rest, and we all need Sabbath time, quiet, restful time, to avoid burnout and to keep ourselves fresh and active.

But we can also take a broader meaning from Isaiah’s words about the Sabbath. For Isaiah and his audience, keeping the Sabbath meant following the practices and disciplines of their faith. It meant tending their spiritual life, their relationship with God; and that’s what Third Isaiah is teaching us too. He’s absolutely right. Nothing can cultivate hope better than spending time with God. Despair is a spiritual ailment. Anti-depressant medication can help break that vicious circle of depression that I talked about; but despair is a spiritual ailment, and it requires a spiritual cure. Hope comes from God. It is a gift of the Spirit. When our connection with God is strong, despair doesn’t have a chance.

So, we can cultivate hope. Third Isaiah tells us how, just as he told a dispirited, divided, and oppressed Jewish people 2,500 years ago. Don’t be diverted into bickering and infighting with those closest to you. Do justice for the poor and don’t become self-absorbed. Tend your spiritual life. Spend time with God. These things give hope. These things overcome despair. Do these, and you too can be like that watered garden, that spring whose waters never run dry. Amen.