Aye Eff Triple Tee

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 08.21.2016

Scripture Lesson:  Isaiah 58:9b-14

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I’ve always loved gadgets.  It’s just one of those American male things, I think, but few things warm the cockles of my heart more than a device that does something nifty.   Toy robots?  Oh, of course.   Tiny flying indoor helicopters?  I got one for my forty second birthday.  Oooh, look, there’s a helicopter flying in my house!  Cool.   If there’s a problem, having a gadget to solve it just seems so neat.  Like, say, the high tech mosquito trap I bought to handle our back yard bug problem just a couple of years back.  It was this propane powered device that used fans and nets and carbon dioxide emissions to lure in those little devils, and I was sure it’d be great.  Better living through engineering.  But when I actually did the math after it managed to catch fewer mosquitos than I’d swat on any given day, I realized I was paying about $15 per mosquito.  Fiddle.

That doesn’t stop me, though, and that means that another gadget has arrived in our household: an Echo.  It’s this little cylindrical object that sits in the living room and listens, permanently connected to the internet.  It’s like   Ask it something, and it answers.   Ask it to play music...almost any music...and it does.  “Play the soundtrack to the Broadway version of Evil Dead, The Musical!”  And lo and behold, that’s playing.  Ask it what Millard Fillmore’s birthday was.  Ask it who the prime minister of Bangladesh is.  It knows.  It knows the weather, and will tell you.  It’ll put things on your to do list, or update your calendar.  

It can also turn lights on and off in our entire upstairs with a simple command that works about eighty two percent of the time.  It’s all very much like something out of Star Trek.  It can learn new skills, like a one-minute-mindfulness app that turns it into a robotic guru...although, to be honest, that we imagine that a machine can guide us to a higher level of mindfulness in sixty seconds seems to indicate that that whole mindfulness movement has jumped the shark.

It also weirds out our dog, who I’ve watched either flee or wander over to the device and sniff curiously it after it speaks or turns off the lights.  This is, on the one hand, cute.  On the other, it’s started to remind me of that reaction the dogs had in the Terminator movies, which is possibly not a very good sign.

This hasn’t stopped us from exploring and expanding what this gadget to end all gadgets can do, though, and one of those things is something called IFTTT.  It’s a net-based protocol for controlling devices through what they call “recipes.”  

If This Then That, or so the acronym goes, and what it does, according to the website, is automate your life.  Want the lights in the house to come on whenever you get within a hundred yards after dark?  Just write the recipe that connects your phone GPS to your lights.  Want all of your dimmable lights to turn up to maximum whenever you say the words “Let there be light?”  You got it.  It’s a simple set of logical operators, one that lets you structure the world around you so that each of your actions triggers something else.  

It’s a strange analog of life, as the logic that defines the virtual world presses out into our actual existence.

From the Book of Isaiah today we hear a message of challenge, one that includes a surprising number of if/then statements.   This section of Isaiah comes from an interesting time in the history of the people of Israel.   Most Bible scholars worth their salt see the Book of Isaiah divided up into three clear sections, each of which has its own particular focus.  

Today’s section comes from what is known as Third Isaiah, which was written and preached perhaps 510-515 years before Christ by a prophet who followed the tradition of Isaiah.   Unlike First Isaiah, its visions and proclamations do not describe a Hebrew people comfortably ensconced in Jerusalem and the temple, as do the first thirty-nine chapters.  Unlike Second Isaiah, they do not assume that the Jewish people are shattered in the Babylonian exile, like chapters forty through fifty-five. The context of the last ten chapters is clear: the Hebrew people are back in their land.

They’d been given the opportunity to rebuild is their whole culture, after it was almost wiped from the face of the earth in by Babylonian Empire. After Babylon was defeated by Persia, the Hebrew people were encouraged by Cyrus of Persia to return to their ancestral lands. They were filled with hope at the prospect of return.  All they’d have to do is set up shop again, and all would be well.

The people returned thinking that things were going to be easy, and things were the farthest thing from easy. Life upon their return was a struggle from day to day. The bricks that had been smashed from the walls of Jerusalem did not leap up on their own and autonomously reassemble themselves into Zion Gardens Condos and Suites.

It was hard. It seemed hopeless. And there’s a funny thing about hopelessness.  It tends to bring out the worst in human beings.  Rather than pulling together, and working towards a common goal of rebuilding, we can begin to prey upon one another.  This, as evidenced by the prophet’s condemnation, is precisely what happened as they attempted to rebuild Judah.  For some, the time of rebuilding was a time to profit.  Whenever you find yourself rebuilding, when the system has been smashed and you’re trying to epoxy together a new way of life from the rubble, there are opportunities to do well.  For others?

Those who fell out on the margins of the society...the poor, the foreign, the different, well...things did not go so well for them.  Because, being weak and vulnerable, they became perfect targets for those who were in a position to take advantage.

Isaiah’s story of the rebuilding is full of evidence of this dark form of human relating.  Though the Torah and the heart of God’s covenant with the people of Israel was meant to hold people together.  It was meant to prevent the kind of wild devouring imbalance that turns the heart of any culture towards the bright suffocating blight of injustice.  That love of power is what had broken Judah in the first place, and here, with an opportunity to rebuild, human beings were making that same old pattern of mistakes again.

But the word from God that Isaiah proclaimed defied that despair, and challenged that cycle of oppression. It was a word of intense hope, a word that comes directly from the prophet’s sense of being anointed with the Spirit of the Living God. It’s a word of intense confidence in the power of God to work through his people to bring about restoration.

What is striking, though, is how that statement of hope is qualified.  If you do this, then this is likely to happen.  The Creator of the Universe isn’t saying through Isaiah: I will do this, guaranteed.  Instead, God is saying:  If you do this, I will likely do that.

The “recipe” for this?  The “program” for this?  As set out in this passage, it’s twofold:  1) care for those who are in need, and 2) take a sabbath from greed and self seeking.

If you are merciful, kind, gracious, and compassionate, your society will flourish.  Your just and gracious actions create the likelihood that the world around you will be bent towards both justice and graciousness.

It’s not precise, not mechanical, not quite as straightforward as we might hope.  

But in times when things seem broken, it is the place to begin.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.