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1/24/08 07:11 pm - Isaiah and the Gulf Coast
This is a paper that I am currently working on for an Isaiah class I am taking at McCormick. This is extremely rough and unedited but I wanted to throw it out there and test the waters: The actual paper I wrote was 20 some pages long (I took the class three years ago but failed to complete it...)but the professor changed the project quite a bit and ended up asking for three seperate and distinct papers. Grrrr. So, I divided up the body of the text and tried to create three seperate papers. The first two are basically just the same old paper but with the a little bit of filler added. The third paper ended up being a whole new creation, though and I kinda like where it is headed. Here it is:
My church has taken the prophet Isaiah prisoner. They keep him in the basement and parade him out for certain special occasions. Isaiah uses images that are too fantastical, and language that is too alien while delivering prophesy that is just too threatening. A man like that should not be allowed to simply wander, much less be free to preach at will. Still, in fairness, my church does frequently invite Isaiah to come upstairs and worship with us. For all of his alien qualities, we have not been able to argue that Isaiah is not an obvious man of real faith. We cannot simply ignore him, so we do the next best thing. We bring Isaiah into our sanctuaries as a way of co-opting the power of his message and sedating his polemics; we spiritualize his judgments and subvert his prophesy in ways that serve our needs. My church always finds a way of incorporating Isaiah into our worship that taps into the power of prophetic ministry but channels that power into Christian ritual. This is why 10 of the 17 times we invited Isaiah upstairs last year were during the Advent or Lenten seasons.
Isaiah 7: 1-17 is one of the sermons we ask Isaiah to deliver every year – filtered through the lens of Matthew’s birth narrative. The historical church bolstered their claims and tradition by seizing upon the rich metaphors and the very real messianic expectations in this very text. This kind of midrash is quite common in Israelite/Jewish history and the earliest Christians were simply taking their place in a long history of interpretation and re-interpretation. And yet, at what point is the original meaning of the text lost in this process? Do we Christians even know what an ancient Israelite reading of this text would look like? Is there more to Isaiah’s message than simply foreshadowing the birth of the one called Immanuel? I, for one, would like to fling open the doors to his prison and would like to hear Isaiah preach without the fetters, without the restraints, and outside of my home congregation. This is what drew me to this text.
The Book of Isaiah is a book of both judgment and hope. Within this specific text, there is both judgment and hope to be found but there is also an ambiguity that can make it difficult to discern which is being offering at any given moment. Indeed, represented in Isaiah’s sons Shear-jashub (a remnant shall return), and Immanuel (God is with us), it seems that Isaiah is simultaneously offering both judgment and hope to the people of Judah in the same breath. Isaiah offers a word of warning to the people of Judah that they will be punished and that only a remnant of their people will survive (and that this will come to pass even they return to faith) and yet Isaiah offers the sign of the young child who will lead Jerusalem to new glories. While Christians look at this sign of hope as a prediction (and validation) of Christ, the fact of the matter is that Isaiah was a realist looking into the face of a real threat from the outside world (in the form of Israel and Syria and Assyria) as well as the corruption of his beloved Davidic Monarchy. Isaiah was speaking to his contemporaries and his words did not speak of some time 700 years in the future but spoke of a punishment that was imminent and a hope that was already at hand. And yet, in the mysterious ways that God works, Isaiah’s words continue to resonate into the future and still manage to speak with integrity to a Christian audience in 2008.
There are few modern audiences that need to embrace the words of Isaiah more the victims of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The men and women of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the Louisiana lowlands and New Orleans have managed to condense the three acts of Isaiah (spanning hundreds of years of history) into three years of suffering, yearning and struggle. Though much of the coast has begun to heal, the city of New Orleans, in particular, still stands in need of Isaiah’s words of judgment and hope. As millions of volunteers pour into the coast to help in the rebuilding effort, they are left struggling with the reality that God either sent the killer storms that destroyed the coast or at least allowed those storms to do their worst without saving God’s people. Isaiah’s words in Chapter 7 provide some framework to addressing those questions and I so I would like to share my work with the 50 or so Presbyterian, long-term volunteers living and working on the coast in my monthly newsletter:
January 23, 2008
When Hurricane Katrina grinded ashore on August 29, 2005, the city of New Orleans was a poor – with some estimates that as many as 65% of all residents were on some type of public assistance. The city was violent – listed in FBI’s top ten list for most violent major cities in America, frequently topping the list for most per-capita murders in the country. And New Orleans was a corrupt city. The levies meant to protect the city were sabotaged through years of graft, no-bid contracts, out right theft and poor design. New Orleans politicians had a reputation for retiring from office only to begin a new life behind bars. In fact, the police department (which the FBI labeled “organized crime” just three decades ago) had grossly overstated the number of officers it employed in order to receive Homeland Security dollars in 2002. So when the storm hit, this was a city groaning from injustice; a city that could rightly claim that its leaders were “rebels and companions of thieves,” and that in New Orleans, “Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them” (Isa 1.23).
When the waters of the Gulf of Mexico mingled with the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi river, the wiped away New Orleans as surely as the Babylonians wiped away Zion – and in doing so, washed away the facade that served to disguise these ugly truths. Just as the Assyrians had wiped out the surrounding towns during the time of Hezekiah, so did Hurricane Katrina wipe out Slidell, Chalmette, Houma, Metairie, Kenner, Algiers Point, The Westbank and so on. The waters poured through the levies and into the city for less than 72 hours. The rebuilding will take ten or twenty years; New Orleans needs to rebuild the physical structures, but they also need to rebuild the institutions and culture that allow a city to live. The local court houses lost all of their records – from court convictions, to birth certificates, to wedding licenses, to property deeds. The weak government evacuation attempts, the horrors of an unprepared shelter of last resort (the superdome) the botched rescue operation followed by three years of criminal FEMA programs (such as the formaldehyde tainted trailers) have eroded the last vestiges of trust much of the population has for the government and, really, for society at large.
Given these realities, it would seem that the people of New Orleans have passed out of exile and are now living in 3 Isaiah – living amidst the ashes of Zion and realizing the promises made have not yet been kept. Given that the punishment of Katrina is in the past, it seems cruel to speak the words of the original Isaiah to these people. And yet, I would argue that everything that happens in 2 Isaiah and 3 Isaiah starts with this passage in chapter 7. The punishment that followed and the hope that ultimately sustained the Israelites was first spoken here in chapter 7 and the future built by the exiles in 3 Isaiah will (to use a future tense) rise and fall depending on what they learned regarding the words of the prophet in Chapter 7. Likewise, the future of New Orleans depends on whether they can come to terms with the truths spoken by the original prophet.
As Presbyterians, we claim that God is absolutely sovereign and that nothing in the world comes into being except through the will of God. So, as difficult as it may be to come to grips with, we must accept that the Hurricanes were from God; the suffering of the people occurred through the will of God (or at allowed least through God’s inaction). This begs the question: Were these people being punished? This is a claim that has been lifted up by fundamentalists and evangelicals throughout the country. While I easily dismiss the idea that God punished the coast for personal immorality (Jerry Falwell famously stated that Hurricane Katrina was punishment for Ellen DeGeneres, a New Orleans native, hosting the Oscars!), I struggle with the deeper implications of this question. The collective sins of New Orleans would seem enough to make even that prostitute, Jerusalem, blush and if there was ever a place that cried out for Isaiah’s message it was surely New Orleans. The answer to this question of theodicy lies in Isaiah’s treatment of the punishment he predicts in chapter 7.
As I have often pointed out, Isaiah’s message in chapter 7 did not end with punishment: the punishment he predicted was a sure thing but just as surely was the birth of a new king who would be charged to lead the remnant. Our society today sees restoration as a reaction to punishment and suffering; I argue that Isaiah saw the punishment as the means to restoration. Only when the corruption had been purged, only after the faithless princes had been removed, only after the people remembered the cause of the orphan and the widow would the people be restored to wholeness. And for Isaiah, those benchmarks were only achievable through suffering. The French writer Proust argued that the times in our lives in which we are happy are wasted – that it is through suffering that we become the people we are meant to be and Isaiah would probably have strongly resonated with this idea. As I wrestle with the text, it becomes more and more clear to me that God was not acting as a vengeful king punishing the disobedience of his vassals. God was acting as heartbroken parent trying to shape his children and provide spiritual formation for them. In this case, their own actions put them in the way of suffering and choose not to remove them from that situation in order that they may learn from their mistakes. But God gave them all of the tools they needed to survive the suffering and come out the other side stronger and wiser. The prophet spoke to Ahaz and told him If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all (v 9b). Though, to a community whose worship life revolved around the cult-sacrifices of the temple, this probably sounded like nothing more than a pithy truism, this short phrase contained everything the community needed to survive. Standing firm in faith gave the people the means to replace the temple (sacrifice for faith), to maintain identity in a strange land, to brave the wilderness and return to Jerusalem and finally to persevere even when the rebuilding took longer than ever imagined. And seen in this light, one can see that the punishment was part and parcel of the restoration.
New Orleans stands in the same place today. As the city rebuilds, it can embrace the truth of the prophets words about their own sorry state: can embrace that the punishment of God has fallen upon them because they have become an unjust place separated from God; can embrace the truth that the punishment was merely a means to bring forth restoration of a new, just, wonderful city that stands firm in faith. And we can accept that this punishment was allotted to us, as well, as a nation that ignored the problems of New Orleans for so long. We can accept that we are called to embrace the same lessons of faith and obedience. As we languish in our 3 Isaiah period, we can cling to this idea that faith in God replaces our old temple-sacrifices. We need to do a new thing – but if we do not understand what was wrong with the old way of doing things, we will never realize our dreams
My church has taken the prophet Isaiah prisoner. They keep him in the basement and parade him out for certain special occasions. Isaiah uses images that are too fantastical, and language that is too alien while delivering prophesy that is just too threatening. A man like that should not be allowed to simply wander, much less be free to preach at will. Still, in fairness, my church does frequently invite Isaiah to come upstairs and worship with us. For all of his alien qualities, we have not been able to argue that Isaiah is not an obvious man of real faith. We cannot simply ignore him, so we do the next best thing. We bring Isaiah into our sanctuaries as a way of co-opting the power of his message and sedating his polemics; we spiritualize his judgments and subvert his prophesy in ways that serve our needs. My church always finds a way of incorporating Isaiah into our worship that taps into the power of prophetic ministry but channels that power into Christian ritual. This is why 10 of the 17 times we invited Isaiah upstairs last year were during the Advent or Lenten seasons.
Isaiah 7: 1-17 is one of the sermons we ask Isaiah to deliver every year – filtered through the lens of Matthew’s birth narrative. The historical church bolstered their claims and tradition by seizing upon the rich metaphors and the very real messianic expectations in this very text. This kind of midrash is quite common in Israelite/Jewish history and the earliest Christians were simply taking their place in a long history of interpretation and re-interpretation. And yet, at what point is the original meaning of the text lost in this process? Do we Christians even know what an ancient Israelite reading of this text would look like? Is there more to Isaiah’s message than simply foreshadowing the birth of the one called Immanuel? I, for one, would like to fling open the doors to his prison and would like to hear Isaiah preach without the fetters, without the restraints, and outside of my home congregation. This is what drew me to this text.
The Book of Isaiah is a book of both judgment and hope. Within this specific text, there is both judgment and hope to be found but there is also an ambiguity that can make it difficult to discern which is being offering at any given moment. Indeed, represented in Isaiah’s sons Shear-jashub (a remnant shall return), and Immanuel (God is with us), it seems that Isaiah is simultaneously offering both judgment and hope to the people of Judah in the same breath. Isaiah offers a word of warning to the people of Judah that they will be punished and that only a remnant of their people will survive (and that this will come to pass even they return to faith) and yet Isaiah offers the sign of the young child who will lead Jerusalem to new glories. While Christians look at this sign of hope as a prediction (and validation) of Christ, the fact of the matter is that Isaiah was a realist looking into the face of a real threat from the outside world (in the form of Israel and Syria and Assyria) as well as the corruption of his beloved Davidic Monarchy. Isaiah was speaking to his contemporaries and his words did not speak of some time 700 years in the future but spoke of a punishment that was imminent and a hope that was already at hand. And yet, in the mysterious ways that God works, Isaiah’s words continue to resonate into the future and still manage to speak with integrity to a Christian audience in 2008.
There are few modern audiences that need to embrace the words of Isaiah more the victims of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The men and women of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the Louisiana lowlands and New Orleans have managed to condense the three acts of Isaiah (spanning hundreds of years of history) into three years of suffering, yearning and struggle. Though much of the coast has begun to heal, the city of New Orleans, in particular, still stands in need of Isaiah’s words of judgment and hope. As millions of volunteers pour into the coast to help in the rebuilding effort, they are left struggling with the reality that God either sent the killer storms that destroyed the coast or at least allowed those storms to do their worst without saving God’s people. Isaiah’s words in Chapter 7 provide some framework to addressing those questions and I so I would like to share my work with the 50 or so Presbyterian, long-term volunteers living and working on the coast in my monthly newsletter:
January 23, 2008
When Hurricane Katrina grinded ashore on August 29, 2005, the city of New Orleans was a poor – with some estimates that as many as 65% of all residents were on some type of public assistance. The city was violent – listed in FBI’s top ten list for most violent major cities in America, frequently topping the list for most per-capita murders in the country. And New Orleans was a corrupt city. The levies meant to protect the city were sabotaged through years of graft, no-bid contracts, out right theft and poor design. New Orleans politicians had a reputation for retiring from office only to begin a new life behind bars. In fact, the police department (which the FBI labeled “organized crime” just three decades ago) had grossly overstated the number of officers it employed in order to receive Homeland Security dollars in 2002. So when the storm hit, this was a city groaning from injustice; a city that could rightly claim that its leaders were “rebels and companions of thieves,” and that in New Orleans, “Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them” (Isa 1.23).
When the waters of the Gulf of Mexico mingled with the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi river, the wiped away New Orleans as surely as the Babylonians wiped away Zion – and in doing so, washed away the facade that served to disguise these ugly truths. Just as the Assyrians had wiped out the surrounding towns during the time of Hezekiah, so did Hurricane Katrina wipe out Slidell, Chalmette, Houma, Metairie, Kenner, Algiers Point, The Westbank and so on. The waters poured through the levies and into the city for less than 72 hours. The rebuilding will take ten or twenty years; New Orleans needs to rebuild the physical structures, but they also need to rebuild the institutions and culture that allow a city to live. The local court houses lost all of their records – from court convictions, to birth certificates, to wedding licenses, to property deeds. The weak government evacuation attempts, the horrors of an unprepared shelter of last resort (the superdome) the botched rescue operation followed by three years of criminal FEMA programs (such as the formaldehyde tainted trailers) have eroded the last vestiges of trust much of the population has for the government and, really, for society at large.
Given these realities, it would seem that the people of New Orleans have passed out of exile and are now living in 3 Isaiah – living amidst the ashes of Zion and realizing the promises made have not yet been kept. Given that the punishment of Katrina is in the past, it seems cruel to speak the words of the original Isaiah to these people. And yet, I would argue that everything that happens in 2 Isaiah and 3 Isaiah starts with this passage in chapter 7. The punishment that followed and the hope that ultimately sustained the Israelites was first spoken here in chapter 7 and the future built by the exiles in 3 Isaiah will (to use a future tense) rise and fall depending on what they learned regarding the words of the prophet in Chapter 7. Likewise, the future of New Orleans depends on whether they can come to terms with the truths spoken by the original prophet.
As Presbyterians, we claim that God is absolutely sovereign and that nothing in the world comes into being except through the will of God. So, as difficult as it may be to come to grips with, we must accept that the Hurricanes were from God; the suffering of the people occurred through the will of God (or at allowed least through God’s inaction). This begs the question: Were these people being punished? This is a claim that has been lifted up by fundamentalists and evangelicals throughout the country. While I easily dismiss the idea that God punished the coast for personal immorality (Jerry Falwell famously stated that Hurricane Katrina was punishment for Ellen DeGeneres, a New Orleans native, hosting the Oscars!), I struggle with the deeper implications of this question. The collective sins of New Orleans would seem enough to make even that prostitute, Jerusalem, blush and if there was ever a place that cried out for Isaiah’s message it was surely New Orleans. The answer to this question of theodicy lies in Isaiah’s treatment of the punishment he predicts in chapter 7.
As I have often pointed out, Isaiah’s message in chapter 7 did not end with punishment: the punishment he predicted was a sure thing but just as surely was the birth of a new king who would be charged to lead the remnant. Our society today sees restoration as a reaction to punishment and suffering; I argue that Isaiah saw the punishment as the means to restoration. Only when the corruption had been purged, only after the faithless princes had been removed, only after the people remembered the cause of the orphan and the widow would the people be restored to wholeness. And for Isaiah, those benchmarks were only achievable through suffering. The French writer Proust argued that the times in our lives in which we are happy are wasted – that it is through suffering that we become the people we are meant to be and Isaiah would probably have strongly resonated with this idea. As I wrestle with the text, it becomes more and more clear to me that God was not acting as a vengeful king punishing the disobedience of his vassals. God was acting as heartbroken parent trying to shape his children and provide spiritual formation for them. In this case, their own actions put them in the way of suffering and choose not to remove them from that situation in order that they may learn from their mistakes. But God gave them all of the tools they needed to survive the suffering and come out the other side stronger and wiser. The prophet spoke to Ahaz and told him If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all (v 9b). Though, to a community whose worship life revolved around the cult-sacrifices of the temple, this probably sounded like nothing more than a pithy truism, this short phrase contained everything the community needed to survive. Standing firm in faith gave the people the means to replace the temple (sacrifice for faith), to maintain identity in a strange land, to brave the wilderness and return to Jerusalem and finally to persevere even when the rebuilding took longer than ever imagined. And seen in this light, one can see that the punishment was part and parcel of the restoration.
New Orleans stands in the same place today. As the city rebuilds, it can embrace the truth of the prophets words about their own sorry state: can embrace that the punishment of God has fallen upon them because they have become an unjust place separated from God; can embrace the truth that the punishment was merely a means to bring forth restoration of a new, just, wonderful city that stands firm in faith. And we can accept that this punishment was allotted to us, as well, as a nation that ignored the problems of New Orleans for so long. We can accept that we are called to embrace the same lessons of faith and obedience. As we languish in our 3 Isaiah period, we can cling to this idea that faith in God replaces our old temple-sacrifices. We need to do a new thing – but if we do not understand what was wrong with the old way of doing things, we will never realize our dreams
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