Isaiah 1:1, 10-20

Proper 14 (19) - Year C

Refraining from doing harm unto others is hard work. It is much easier to simply cover over a time we snuck a little piece away from someone else with some penitential act. And, wouldn’t you know it, we will bargain for the cheapest possible penance as though our wounding of another doesn’t send ripples through the community beyond an original sin. Cheap penance never fully redresses the issue at hand, just as cheap grace never fully addresses a needed healing. Compensation plus more is a discounted possibility and changes to any structures that cause as much difficulty as individual acts is removed as an option.

This is an habitual pattern within which each generation grows. As such it carries much power.

To break this habit will take more and more folks doing well unto others until several generations have come and gone and a new way becomes the norm.

This is not a matter of following some external rule book that turns us into willing and obedient servants of this theocracy or that.

We know what is good: be fair, kind, and grounded. If we refuse to acknowledge and learn from these three, we remain stuck and sundered from one another and ourselves. This doesn’t take any external authority to make it more real than a reflection on what we would want done for ourself. This requires an acknowledgement that others won’t know that without our telling them, and so heightens the importance of mutual listening for what another has to say about how they would know they are being welcomed, honored, cared for.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2013/08/isaiah-11-10-20.html

 

 

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 or Genesis 15:1-6

The Sodom and Gomorah story still needs understanding in today's world where wedge issues abound. Folks take one little aspect of something and begin to drive it where it no longer belongs. The issue of strengthening our communities and nations by honoring the covenant of healthy relationships is one of those wedges that takes the story of attempted rape of angels (and how does one do that, particularly those busy dancing on the head of a pin?) and in turn limits all relationships to their genital component.

In so focusing on a tree we miss the forest of issues that include but are not limited to sex.

-- First, do no harm
-- Second, do good
-- Third, seek justice (that elusive and every changing G*D quality)
-- Fourth, rescue, defend, and advocate for any who are oppressed or denied their place in the community

[United Methodists may want to look at John Wesley's General Rules again. You will have a built in three-point sermon here. To see the relevant portion you will need to go to two links (no, I have no idea why the denominational website split the General Rules they way they did and failed to link them together - arrrgh!!!) "do no harm" and first part of "do good" and the rest of "do good" and the "ordinances/life-style of God".]

When Isaiah is heard we get to the point of Abrahamic righteousness - raising our eyes from seeing what we don't have to the possibilities on the distant horizon, just arriving, that will stream forth for eons. This obviously won't keep us from being afraid or getting some things wrong, but it does keep us focused on the forest of trees and the sky of stars so we don't get distracted by an obsession with one tree or one star.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/august2004.html

 

 

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 or Genesis15:1-6

Imagine G*D satiated. G*D has had it up-to-here with what G*D had thought would be a good thing - sacrifice. Stop, already!

There is no covering up who we are with the fanciest of offerings. When some cosmic bottom-line is measured, it won't be a matter of how much blood is spilt - but how much evil was avoided and how much good was initiated.

If we are willing to make this shift, the good of the land will more than flow in to fill whatever good we have sent forth. If we are not willing to make this shift, that which we have not held back (evil) will be as garlic mustard, teasel, and emerald ash borer in the American mid-west - invasive and uncontrolled.

Time's up. Still trying to substitute something in place of seeking justice? Forget it, the argument is over, it's justice or nothing.

- - -

purell kimcare provon
were too late on the market
for Lady Macbeth and preemptive warriors
who wring bloodless bloody hands

a next entrepreneurial opportunity
is not covering up what is already there
but a preventive cleansing
to keep purell from being needed in the first place

pure-el calls forth a new desire
to be elseways than el has been
and in turn to have el's images
transformed in our lifetime

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

 

 

Right thinking is concerned with getting rituals correct.
Right action is concerned with getting justice correct.

There is nothing to keep these from working together. However, the witness of religious history is that religio/politico rituals keep trumping elementary justice, religious laws keep trampling lived experience. Were this not the case, the prophetic tradition, a third of the TaNaKh, would not have the continued presence and power it has.

In this adversarial setting, G*D has seen a larger picture, "though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow". And so a question: given this eventuality, to what are we called to attend and practice?

Do you want to participate in the "snow/wool" conclusion or the "scarlet/crimson" resistance? If the former, here's the agenda:

This is importantly different from other approaches such as the General Rules of the United Methodist Church:

Again, these can work together. However religious prohibitions/ordinances, in our day against Gay and Lesbian Christians, seem to keep tripping up that which is for the "good of the land", the commonwealth of G*D, and a healthy connection between thinking and action.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2010/08/isaiah-11-10-20.html