Words (7/10/05)
Dr. Gary Cox
-- Wichita, Kansas
University Congregational Church
Today’s scripture reading is from
the 55th chapter of Isaiah, verses 6-11. Before we turn to that passage, I want to spend
a little time talking about Isaiah. The
Book of Isaiah is one of the more studied books of the Old Testament. It is filled with passages that Christians
interpret as prophecies regarding the coming of Christ into the world. And at first glance it appears to have been
written by a single prophet named Isaiah.
But the reason scholars love this book so much is because it is actually
a composite work, written by three different authors at three specific times
over the course of Israel’s history.
There certainly was a Judean prophet
named Isaiah. He lived in one of
Israel’s most exciting and eventful eras—the 8th century B.C. We learn a great deal about Israel’s history
from Isaiah, because he prophesied in Jerusalem during the reign of four
kings—Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.
A lot happened over the course of
those years. You may recall that in the
year 922 B.C., after the death of King Solomon, Israel divided into two
nations. The northern kingdom was called
Israel, and was composed of ten of the original twelve tribes of Israel; and
the southern kingdom was called Judea, and consisted of two of the original
tribes—the tribes of Judah and Benjamin.
Two hundred years later, when Isaiah
lived, things got really crazy.
Israel—the northern kingdom—joined forces with Syria in 735 B.C. and
attacked Judah—the southern kingdom. But
Israel got its payback. In the year 722
B.C., the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and that was the
end of that nation. The Assyrians
dispersed the people of Israel, and to this day those people are referred to as
the ten lost tribes of Israel. To make matters really confusing, most people
started referring to the southern kingdom of Judea as “Israel” after that.
Okay, that may be more than you
wanted to know about the history of 8th century B.C. Israel, but
here’s the thing that makes the book of Isaiah so intriguing. It is a long book—66 chapters. But the writings of the original prophet
Isaiah are found only in chapters 1 thru 39!
There is no indication in the book itself that the author changes, but
it clearly does, because starting with chapter 40 the whole setting of the book
changes. We are no longer in 8th
century B.C. Israel. We are suddenly in
Babylon, sometime near the end of the Babylonian exile.
This period is perhaps the most significant
era in Jewish history. Early in the 6th
century B.C.—the date is usually named as 587 B.C.—King Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon conquered Israel, or Judah, and took into captivity the Jewish
people. Some Jews who were considered
insignificant and powerless were left behind in Israel, but most Jews—and all
the Jews with positions of power—were exiled to Babylon. About fifty years later, King Cyrus of Persia
defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jewish people to return to Israel.
The reason the Babylonian exile is
so important is this: prior to that time, the Jews had always associated their
God, Yahweh, as somehow being tied to the land of Israel, and to the Temple in
Jerusalem. Israel, the Promised Land,
belonged to the Jewish God Yahweh. Yahweh’s
home was in the Jerusalem Temple. But Nebuchadnezzar
not only removed the Jews from their land, he destroyed the Temple—turned it
into a pile of broken stones.
How could this be? How could an earthly king destroy God’s house
and exile God’s people from their promised land? Some scholars say that true monotheism was
born during the Babylonian exile, because it was then that the Hebrew
theologians truly conceived of a God who was the God of all creation, of all
people, and who was not bound to a particular piece of land. It was also then that the early writings of
the Jewish people, later collected as a part of the Hebrew Bible, or Old
Testament, took on their present significance.
The Jews were no longer a people tied to a piece of land. They were people of the book. Where the Torah was—where the law and word of
God was—the Jewish faith was also.
As I mentioned, the Book of Isaiah
is 66 chapters long. Chapters 40 thru 55
were written by somebody toward the end of the Babylonian exile. Scholars call this author Second Isaiah, or Deutero-Isaiah,
even though the Bible does not indicate any change in authorship. So we have two of Israel’s most significant
historical periods found in this single book—the Book of Isaiah—written by two
different authors.
That would be enough to have any
Bible scholar salivating, but there’s more!
After King Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Israel, another amazing
period of Hebrew history came about. For
one thing, the temple was rebuilt. This
is what is called the Second Temple.
This is the temple at which Jesus would turn over the money-changers’
tables over 500 years later, and which Rome would destroy in the year 70
A.D. The Western Wall of that temple is
all that remains. It is the wall you see
on television today with devout Jews sticking their written prayers into the
cracks in the walls.
This was an exciting and promising
time in Israel’s history. Many of the
Jews did not return from Babylon. They
had become a part of that culture. The
Jews who did return were obsessed with purity—with keeping the Jewish nation
and the Jewish race alive. Intermarrying
with non-Jews was considered a horrible crime.
But guess what these returning Jews discovered when they returned to
Israel. Those Jews who had been left behind—the
ones who had not been taken into exile in Babylon—had intermarried with the
native people of that region. Many were
worshipping the gods of the ancient Middle East. They had made the Jewish race, and the Jewish
faith, impure.
If this interests you the Old
Testament books of Ezra and Nehemiah tell the story in detail, but the bottom
line is this: The Jews who had intermarried were ordered to leave their wives
and disown their children. Needless to
say this was an interesting period in the history of Israel. And chapters 56 thru 66 of the Book of Isaiah
were written during this period—probably around 520 B.C., by an unknown author scholars
refer to as Third Isaiah.
Okay, that’s a lot to absorb, but I
think you can see why scholars are so enamored of this book. Add to its interesting history the fact that
it has some of the most memorable passages in the whole Bible, and you have a
book worth examining. Consider just a
few of the famous passages from Isaiah: The
wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid… They
will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of
the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea… All we like sheep have
gone astray, we have turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the
iniquity of us all… he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the
transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many…
And then there is today’s passage,
from the 55th chapter of Isaiah.
This are the final words from Second Isaiah, probably written just
before Israel’s return from the Babylonian exile. You heard part of the passage read from the
lectern this morning. I’ll read all six
verses:
Seek
the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked
forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the
LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly
pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says
the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher
than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow
come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the
earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to
the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return
to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the
thing for which I sent it.
That is a great, rich passage, and
it gains more meaning when you consider when it was written—just as the exiled
Hebrew people were about to return to their native land. It is filled with hope, and humility; with
faith and with awe.
But it is most important because of
the way it speaks to us across the ages.
There are two parts of that short passage that really speak to us
today. First, Isaiah’s (actually Second Isaiah’s) words, speaking for
God: “My thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than
your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
We can turn that around and make it
more personal, speaking for ourselves instead of for God. Our
thoughts are not God’s thoughts, even on our best days. We all need to remember this, and nobody
needs to accept this fact—that our thoughts are not God’s thoughts—more than
preachers.
We preachers feel that we are called
to do what we do. We feel that there is
something beyond ourselves that drives us to do what we do and say what we
say. Or course, the things I say are the
opposite, in many ways, of what the people in the pews down the road are
hearing week after week. And the one
thing that the fundamentalist preachers and I have in common is that we are
both pretty darn sure we are saying what God wants us to say!
I know I have to be careful about
this. How can I really know what God
wants me to say from this pulpit? I have
this nightmare that I arrive at the pearly gates and Saint Peter says to me,
“Gary, remember that sermon you delivered in July of 2005? God is really hacked off about that one. What were you thinking?”
So preachers, and I am no exception,
need to always remember that however inspired we may think we are, and however called
to the ministry we may think we are, the will of God is being filtered through
our very human minds. And in spite of
our best intentions, our thoughts are not God’s thoughts, even on our best
days.
The second insight of Isaiah in this
little passage is also very important.
Speaking of the word that comes from his mouth, he says, “it shall not return to me empty, but it
shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I
sent it.
Now, Isaiah is talking about the
word of God as he speaks to the people of Israel. But there is a lesson here for all of us: our words do not come back empty. Robin Meyers, my dear friend and the person
who encouraged me as I was entering the ministry, used to say that to me: our words do not come back empty.
It would be years before I really
understood what he meant. But the fact
is, one of the greatest joys of the ministry is having somebody reveal some
positive aspect of their lives, and say they were influenced by something I
said in a sermon. Sometimes I can barely
remember having said it. It says a lot
about the power of words. I have also
become aware of how words, especially those spoken from the pulpit, can do
damage and cause pain. We send our words
out over the congregation, but they do not come back empty. They return to us, having had an effect on
people.
But it is not just preachers who
have the power of language. We all have
the amazing power of language, and none of our words come back empty. We should have a clue about how powerful
words are by the way the Bible begins.
God speaks the universe into
being. God says, “Let there be light,
and there was light.” In Christian
theology, “the word” is the logic, the truth that holds all of creation
together. And we say “the word” became
flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus is the
“word of God.” I like to think that each
and every one of us is a word of God, a unique, special, once-in-the-universe
spoken word of God.
Words. Those are powerful things. The biggest lie we teach our children is the
little saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt
me.” Nonsense! Sticks and stones may break my bones, but
words…words can absolutely devastate me.
Words can destroy something much more important than my bones—they can
poison my soul, my spirit. Words can
make me wish I had never been born.
Poets have often compared the tongue
to a sword, and with good reason. We can
cut a person to pieces with the right—or wrong—words. A parent casually and thoughtlessly says
something they think will motivate their child who is perhaps struggling with
math. “Maybe you’re not smart enough to
figure this out.”
It’s a throw-away remark. The parent forgets it five seconds after it
is spoken. But those words do not come back
empty. Twenty years later they still
echo in the recesses of that child’s mind, who is now trying to learn some
aspect of a new job. “Maybe you’re not
smart enough.” At least a physical scar
would have healed in that time. But the
scars left by words—those are the worst kind of scars—the scars that are hidden
beneath the surface, which are never acknowledged and thus never heal.
It’s strange. We need a license to carry a deadly weapon,
but we can shoot our mouth off anytime and anywhere we want. We all have these horrible weapons—these
tongue-shaped swords—we carry through life, and we never acknowledge how
dangerous they are. We wave them around
without a care in the world, seldom realizing the damage we are doing.
Of course, there is the other side
of the equation. We can use our words
for wonderful purposes. After all,
that’s what God did, according to our beautiful creation myths. God spoke this amazing and wondrous creation
into being. God brought forth everything
that is, and it was good. That same
creation story tells us that we are created in the image of God. I wonder if that is because we too have the
power of words?
And in so many ways, we really do create our own worlds with the way we
use words. We all know people who are chronically
negative. They will find something to
complain about in every situation. They
seem to go through life with this little cloud over their heads, and they leave
a little piece of that cloud with everybody they talk to. But we also know people who seem to carry
sunshine with them everywhere they go.
They light up the room when they enter.
And you can bet that when they speak, it will not be to find fault, or
to create division, or to share the latest gossip about some mutual
acquaintance.
Perhaps Swami Vivekananda said it
best, when he said, “Our thoughts, words and deeds are the threads of the
reality we sew around ourselves.” “Our
thoughts, words and deeds are the threads of the reality we sew around ourselves.” How true!
But then again, Isaiah said it pretty well too, when he said, “...my word shall not return to me empty, but
it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I
sent it.
May we always send our words forth
with the best of intentions, so the world we weave around ourselves is filled
with peace, and faith, and love. Amen.