Archived Sermon

This is the Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity -- July 1, 2012 at

Shaped by the Cross Lutheran Church
Laurie, Missouri

“Is this not the fast which I choose, to loosen the bonds of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke? Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into the house; when you see the naked, to cover him; and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? Then your light will break out like the dawn, and your recovery will speedily spring forth; and your righteousness will go before you; the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry, and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness, and your gloom will become like midday. And the LORD will continually guide you, and satisfy your desire in scorched places, and give strength to your bones; and you will be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. And those from among you will rebuild the ancient ruins; you will raise up the age-old foundations; and you will be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of the streets in which to dwell.”

“Fasting and bodily preparation are indeed a fine, outward training.” So says Luther in the Small Catechism when answering the question about who receives the Sacrament of the Altar worthily. We don’t fast much in modern America. When people do, it is usually not a religious exercise, but a diet or digestive cleansing thing. Some people still do fast as a religious discipline, but it is growing less common. Our religion no longer requires it of us.

But our text speaks about fasting. God describes what He looks for in a fast, and it is clear that what He is talking about, through Isaiah, is not going without food, in particular, but worship, religious devotion and discipline. With that thought in mind, we are going to take a look at our text and consider the fast which God chooses.

First, there is a right way and there is a wrong way to worship. The so-called “worship wars” try to litigate in the court of public opinion whether that is true and, if it is, which way is the right way. In Old Testament time it was a lot clearer, at least initially. Take the example of Nadab and Abihu. They were the sons of Aaron that died for offering what the book of Leviticus called “strange fire” before the Lord. What they did was offer a religious service which God had not commanded. They did not do anything obscene or bizarre. They simply took it upon themselves to decide what their religious practice should be, and how worship ought to work. They invented a service to God that He had not commanded. The price of their creativity was instant death at the hands of the Lord. Over the centuries, even in Israel, God stopped killing priests for doing the wrong things or doing what He had forbidden. They ultimately even practiced gross idolatry within the Temple itself. Nevertheless, this is a cautionary tale for us. Worship is not just whatever we make it, even when God is not busy striking us down on the spot for inventing strange rituals.

My purpose, this morning, is not to tell you how worship should be done, when it is done properly. The truth is, our worship service receives from God - through Word and Sacrament - and equips us to be His holy people wherever it is that He has placed us to serve Him. Our text makes the point rather directly, I think, that the true worship of God is not what we do in that hour on Sunday, but what we do with our lives in those hours between what we call “worship services.”

The text can be easily divided into two sections: “if” and “then”. The “if” section is law, commands, or descriptions of behaviors of the sorts of things which reflect the life of one whose religion is God-pleasing. The “then” sections tell us how God will bless those whose religion is pleasing to Him. What it is describing is religion as it works itself out in one’s life. The entire section begins with the words, Is this not the fast which I choose? These verses follow a short section where God deplores the religious practices of Israel. He mocks their self-perception as a faithful people who follow their religion carefully and then wonder aloud why their God does not answer their prayers and why He permits them to be troubled by the world around them. He points out that they do their religion in church, more or less, but they hold fast to ungodly practices and behaviors in their daily lives at the very same time.

He describes the people as those who delight in God’s nearness – as witnessed by the temple in Jerusalem – and who seek justice from God against their neighbors, believing that they have been righteous, but that they do all that religious stuff so that they can continue with grasping greed and cruelty towards others. He mocks their bowing down and wearing sack-cloth and ashes and fasting and other such religious behaviors, and then He says, where our text begins, “is this not the fast that I choose?”, and speaks of a very different sort of religion: a religion of sincerity and consistent humility before God.

Real, God-pleasing religion is religion that works itself out in the life of the worshiper. The problem the Old Testament people had was that they were all good and religious in church and in front of others, but it did not change their way of living. They did their worship, in fact, to be able to continue to live ungodly lives. Through the prophet, God was saying that the reason their religion did not seem to be working for them was that it was not working in them either. They did not see God answering them because they were trying to use God’s blessings to do wrong and be cruel. They were doing their religion as though God could not see them anywhere except in the Temple, at worship.

Obviously, we have to ask ourselves if our religion is like that. Do we ask God to bless us so that we might be able to continue lives that are selfish, self-centered, or simply not the kind of life that we know that God would have us live? The “if” list, the sorts of things that mark the God-pleasing religion, included “To loosen the bonds of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke, to divide your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into the house, when you see the naked, to cover him, not to hide yourself from your own flesh, to remove the yoke from your midst, to stop the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, to give yourself to the hungry, and to satisfy the desire of the afflicted.”

Now there is a certain amount of repetition there, but you get the drift. God is watching your daily life. Loosening the bonds of wickedness, undoing the bands of the yoke, and letting the oppressed go free seem to have to do with injustice in their society, injustice that often bound the poor in conditions not unlike slavery. It featured the rich taking advantage of the poor and powerful abusing the powerless. We don’t have debtor’s prisons anymore, but we still see people being manipulated and abused by virtue of their poverty by governments, and by employers who take cruel advantage of the need of the poor to make a living of some sort.

The second group of things we notice in the emphasis on feeding those who need food, clothing the naked, and bringing the homeless into your house. In modern America, it is difficult to draw a one-to-one relationship to these words. The poor in the days of the prophet had nothing - not less than the average man, NOTHING. Most people in those days and in that society lived a day or two away from hunger, and they had only one set of clothes back then. The homeless in those days were often homeless because they sold their home - an ancestral property, for the money they needed to live, and when that ran out, they were simply without home or food. Orphans had no one to look out for their welfare – no orphanages, and widows were without providers, so they often sold what little they possessed to continue eating, and when the money ran out, they would beg, or sell themselves into slavery for food – you remember the story of the Prodigal Son, for example.

Today’s poor often have government subsidies. There are clothing and food distributions places for them to get the basic necessities. Housing is often provided, and the typical poor have the basic necessities of life, they just cannot afford the luxuries of the society around them. Of course, some have the luxuries, the toys, but fail to use their meager resources to provide themselves with the necessities. Some of the poor sell themselves into trouble, especially in the cities, but the distinctions are different today, and harder to draw, and knowing what to do to be helpful and not simply enabling, can be very challenging, particularly in a society where this sort of charity has been commandeered by the government – and we are taxed to provide it. But each of us can do something, particularly when we confront the immediate and urgent need of a fellow human being.

The third and final category of the “if” group is the “pointing of the finger”, and the “speaking of wickedness”. I cannot be absolutely certain what these words are referring to, but it seems to me that they are about gossip or bearing false witness in legal matters. It could refer to blasphemy or something like that, but I suspect it is about the sorts of things we see all of the time, dishonesty, blaming others, speaking evil of others — gossip and general lying about things for personal advantage. This would be aimed particularly at what we call the news media today, I suspect, although the gossip part points at most all of us.

God is calling His people to live honest and sincere lives, caring about one another, and worshiping Him with holy lives, rather than with empty formalism and ‘just going through the motions’. The fast God chooses for His people is doing the right thing, standing up against wickedness wherever we may encounter it, and helping those around us who are in need of the very basics of life. It is, in a word, the life St. Paul urges in Romans 12, verses 1and 2, “I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

Worship which is merely acted out to fulfil a formula, without the sincere faith of a believer behind it, does not worship God or attract His favorable attention. It is not God-pleasing. The only worship that does please God is the worship of those who truly believe. That single point answers the absurd doctrinal position that our worship should be aimed at the unchurched and unbelieving as some sort of evangelism program. Any kind of “worship” other than that of a believer coming before God to receive His gifts turns worship into a scam and hypocrisy. It might fool those around you, but it does not fool God. It does not matter why you do it or what you do if it does not flow from a heart of genuine faith and love.

Our reason for gathering is not the liturgy, the liturgy is merely the form of our worship, in which we speak back to God what He has already spoken to us. We do that from hearts filled with thanksgiving for the salvation He has purchased and won for us in Christ and through His suffering, death, and resurrection. We come to God in this service to receive from Him, not to serve Him or give Him something, as though He needed us. We come for forgiveness and strength and blessing – and Praise the Lord! – that is what He give us, richly and abundantly on account of Jesus Christ!

But our true worship is in the life we live when we leave this place and return to the things and the people God has filled our lives with, to do the work He sets before us to do. We serve God, and worship Him, when we serve our neighbor in his or her need. Our neighbor includes our immediate family, and those who live around us, and everyone with whom we come in contact. Our work is our job, or our chores at home, or taking an interest in those around us. It is interesting to note that God points our particularly not withholding ourselves from our families – saying “not to hide yourself from your own flesh”. It is so easy to think about the service of the Lord as “out there” or “in church” and forget that husband and wife are gifts from God, and our first place of service appointed by Him as part of the fast which God chooses. The world outside of our homes counts too, but it comes second, because we encounter it second. We cannot forget our own flesh and blood, our parents and our children. That is part of our work for the Lord - and a very important part.

Our lives are to echo our Lord’s life: filled with compassion and concern for those who need, honest and faithful, full of the knowledge that Jesus Christ has done everything we need done for our salvation, and that He gives us everything we need for life – both this life on earth, and our eternal life in glory, and so our business is to look out for others and serve our neighbors with our faithfulness, our compassion, and our consistent honesty and holiness. Oh yeah, and thanksgiving! Lots of thanksgiving! The fast which God chooses is not about big things (as we judge them) and big movements and big programs, it is about the little things, the daily things, and our faithfulness and honesty and compassion and dependability in doing the things God gives us to do, trusting in Him that it will all work out and make sense in His great order. And it is also about our thanksgiving- our gratitude for the things God does and has done for us and those we love.

I am almost out of time for a typical sermon and I haven’t even gotten to the “then” group of statements: “Then your light will break out like the dawn, And your recovery will speedily spring forth; And your righteousness will go before you; The glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.”

“Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; You will cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’ Then your light will rise in darkness, And your gloom will become like midday. And the LORD will continually guide you, And satisfy your desire in scorched places, And give strength to your bones; And you will be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. And those from among you will rebuild the ancient ruins; You will raise up the age-old foundations; And you will be called the repairer of the breach, The restorer of the streets in which to dwell.”

The meaning of these promises is pretty clear. If you are sincere and your religion is the God-pleasing sort, God will hear you when you pray, He will answer you in your troubles, He will bless you and guide you and strengthen you. These are the promises of the Gospel, that the Lord will hear your prayer, bless you, and guide you, and you will enjoy all of the promises of God. Isaiah doesn’t explicitly name forgiveness, but what else do we pray for, and what else do we see before us on the cross and on the altar? The promise of God through the Prophet Isaiah is that those who are truly His will enjoy the promised good. As Jesus put it in Mark 16, He that believes and is baptized shall be saved.

Since all these things are beyond our powers, we pray that the Lord would fill us with his Holy Spirit through His Word preached and heard, and grant to each of us that we may faithfully observe the fast which God chooses!