SERVANT SONGS OF ISAIAH - 49:1-6
I make you a light to the nations
Liz McAlister: Kirkridge Retreat September 2008
It begins with the 1940 psychiatry triumph with the use of electric shock for severely stricken people to wipe the mind clean, reducing them to the state of children, giving them a fresh start; they shocked people into obedience.
In the 1950 the CIA got hold of the idea and authorized experiments with shock treatment. Those experiments led, in 1963, to the development of Interrogation manuals and a secret handbook on strategies to break down prisoners using shock treatment. The same idea prevailed - use shock to reduce adults to children. Those manuals remain in use in CIA interrogations all over the world. They were updated in 1983.
The techniques used (in use) include: sleep deprivation, abrasive and insistent noise, focusing on individual phobias (e.g. fear of dogs), imposing stress positions, isolation, simulated drowning, pain and electric shock. The techniques were intended to keep the prisoners in a state of sock. After the shock of their arrest, maintain it by hooding them, cuffing them, never allowing prisoners to speak to one another. Reduce them to the state of a child.
Then they learned that the same techniques work on individuals and on whole societies. A collective trauma - a war, a cop d'etat, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack - can put whole societies in a state of shock. And in consequence of that shock, people become childlike and inclined to follow leaders whom they/we come to see as protectors.
Milton Friedman, noted economist, understood this phenomenon and advised leaders to make full use of it. It was his belief that profit and the market drive every aspect of life. Governments should take advantage of societal shock. Natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks, etc. soften people up for radical change. He advised that governments immediately put all the painful policies into practice all at once. The results have been radical unemployment, deregulation of prices allowing them to soar out of reach of people in general. At the same time, cut or eliminate all government services and safeguards and abolish all trade protections so that life becomes more precarious. Governments should be prepared to push through all these painful policy changes before people can regain their footing.
Naomi Klein called this the SHOCK DOCTRINE. The free market was not born in freedom and democracy; it was born in shock. ONLY A CRISIS, REAL OR PERCEIVED, CAN BRING REAL CHANGE.
The film then went through some Fast Facts about Shocks and their Aftermath.
The Coup in Chile, 1973
• 50,000 tortured
• 80,000 imprisoned
• Public spending cut by 50%
• Incomes for the rich up 83%
• 45% of population in poverty
The Wars – Falklands War, 1982
• 910 people died
• Thatcher's popularity doubled
• Gas, steel, airlines, telephones were all privatized
• The government declared war on unions
• Thousands were injured
• Unemployment tripled
• Number of poor increases by 100%
Massacres - China 1989
• hundreds were killed
• Thousands were jailed and tortured
• China became a sweatshop to the world
• China embraced "free market" capitalism
• Factory wages: $1/day
Russia, 1993
• Yeltsin attacked parliament
• Hundreds were killed
• Parliament was burned
• Many in the opposition were arrested
• 72 million were impoverished
• 17 new billionaires were created
Terrorist Attacks – New York, 2001
• Attacks launched the "War on Terror." It is privatized.
• US spy agencies outsourced 70% of their budgets
• Pentagon increased its budget for contractors by $137 billion/year
• Department of Homeland Security spent $130 billion on private contractors
Invasions – Iraq, 2003
• The most privatized war in modern history
• US decreed 200 state companies will be privatized
• Hundreds of thousands were killed
• 4 million were displaced
Natural Disasters – Sri Lanka, 2004
• 35,000 dead
• Coastline handed over to hotels and industry
• Nearly 1 million displaced
• Fishing people forbidden to rebuild homes by the sea
I wondered what, if any, impact this internal process within our national leadership had on the choice of 'SHOCK AND AWE' as the name for the Iraq Invasion and Occupation. Now the best way to resist shock is to know what is happening and why. Information is shock resistance. Thus it is important to arm oneself with that information and in community; I think of Dan's emphasis last evening on what we have to hold on to - the Eucharist and one another.
The second servant song in Isaiah describes the status and role of the Servant. And it describes our place in God's sight and our task in the world. The passage opens with the Servant speaking to the Nations. 1 Hear me , O coastlands, listen , O peoples from afar. God called me from birth, from my mother's womb God named me. It reminds me of a Black preacher in sheep's meadow before one of the big anti-Vietnam war demos calling on us to listen up because what he had to say was really important. Isaiah is longing to be heard, longing that God's voice be heard. Pay attention. "Hear me!" and also "Listen!" Is this redundant? Is there a difference between listening and hearing? "You're not deaf, you're heedless!" None of us doubts that listening is important. The voice is calling us; we hear it in our gut, in our bones, in the news about us. This message is for all - near and afar. It underlines our connectedness... how deeply am I aware in my daily life that every thought, word and deed has cosmic import?
He was set apart for service and empowered by the creator to be the mouthpiece of God. Like a sharpened sword, a polished arrow, he is to proclaim God's truth - display the splendor of God to the nations, the Glory of God to all humankind. 2 God made of me a sharp-edged sword and concealed me in the shadow of his arm. He made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me. All through the Book of Revelation, the Christ figure carries a sword clearly identified as the word of God. This word is the only weapon allowed us. The only one. That's the gospel; that's nonviolence " Take ... the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Eph 6:17 The Sword of the Spirit is formed by speaking God's word - Logos and Rhema . Logos identifies the written scriptures. Jesus, the literal embodiment of God's logo, fulfilled this . Rhema is the word of God uttered by the living voice. Rhema applies to the specific context of our lives. For example, we may be wrestling with an issue in our life and we read or hear something that "speaks" directly to our hearts, our lives. That word becomes Rhema .
At present the servant is suffering, oppressed, " I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing ." Yet, God has this to say - not only will the Servant seek out the lost of Israel and gather them as a people, but the Gentiles will be gathered. God means to rescue humankind for oneness with Godself - all people - to the ends of the earth. 3 You are my servant, he said to me, Israel, through whom I show my glory.
4 Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, Yet my reward is with my God, my recompense is with my God. The servant is filled with frustration--he has labored in vain, he has not been heard. (And we are not heard by executive, legislative, judicial, not even the so called 4th estate - the media.) Despite all, he lodges his trust in God and so corrects Israel's earlier complaint: " My right is disregarded by my God ." (40:27)
And the story continues... 5 For now God has spoken who formed me as his servant from the womb, That Jacob may be brought back to him and Israel gathered to him; And I am made glorious in the sight of God, and my God is now my strength!
The servant's complaint about his mission to Israel is trumped - God gives him an even bigger mission. If he has had difficulty getting Israel to listen, well then God will make him a light to the nations! The very nations that despised Israel during exile will recognize and honor her because the Holy One of Israel has chosen her. 6 It is too little, he says, for you to be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations , that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth. Later, in Isaiah 59 there is much about the blindness of the nations and their need of light.
Isaiah is filled with beautiful pictures of God's mercy and love. We tend to associate words like redeemed, restored, and salvation with the realm of sin and forgiveness. In the culture of the time, a redeemer was one who paid off her sister's debt, married his brother's widow, or avenged a family member who has been killed. To designate Yahweh as redeemer makes God the best brother or sister we could have. God's love is so visible here. God keeps trying. OK that didn't work, let's try it this way. These Scriptures are full of God trying again and again to form us into a people, to create us anew.
Like a great fugue, the prophesy of Isaiah advances to fresh statements, at the same time returning to pick up and restate themes already sounded. ( The fugue image is why we can't stay with a passage without going back and forth to other passages in the text.) The pivotal point of Isaiah is in the unwritten, unspoken silence between verses 39:8 and 40:1. Chapters 1-39 come from an older prophetic source; chapter 40 begins a new theme in the Babylonian ascendency, a full two centuries later. In that gap Jerusalem was destroyed and the people deportated into exile. Chapters 1-39, replete with warnings, move toward that destruction and deportation; chapter 40 begins with hope for a new historic possibility - homecoming. Deportation and homecoming, loss and hope, the judgment of God on Jerusalem and the will of God for a new Jerusalem.
From its beginning, Israel was ruled by God; its well-being depended on obedience. It is the indictment of Isaiah 5:7 that Israel disobeyed God: God expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry! God's will is justice and righteousness — compassion toward all. Isaiah's "woe statements" in 5:8-23 details actions that are exploitative. Acquisitive land practices, economic practices that are a distortion of theological and ethical commitments.
The theme of judgment is massive and pervasive. There are, however, two other chords. One , a plea to embrace another way - which we may term the way of nonviolence: Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow (1:16-17).The accent falls on widows and orphans . Jerusalem's "chance" is to reorder its life, a chance not taken. A nd more importantly ( two) - Isaiah affirms that, beyond judgment, God will work newness, well-being. God's final word to the city is not destruction. This theme is voiced in the well-known poems of the promised Messiah in 9:2-7 and 11:1-11 and in the vision of disarmament in 2:1-4, so dear to our hearts.
Chapter 40 and following envisions homecoming in joy, exuberance, and right relationships. The poetry of chapters 40-55, made familiar to us in Handel's Messiah , is the most eloquent testimony to God's resolve to love and deliver Israel in the Hebrew Bible. The "gospel" of 40:9 (where the term " gospel " is used twice) is that God is at work in the history from which she had seemed to withdraw. God will show that the gods of empire are impotent and irrelevant. What counts is God's purpose, and that purpose is homecoming - unity, community.
We hear God's intent for Israel: Do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God (41:10). Do not fear..., I have called you by name, you are mine (43:1). Israel in exile is to give up fear, anxiety , the temptation to submit to imperial authority , (This is a big one for us. We must not be shocked into childishness.) and claim its identity as the beloved community. Even in exile do not trust or serve the empire. Go home to a restored Jerusalem : Depart, depart, go out from there... you shall not go out in haste, and you shall not go in flight; God will go before you. (52:11-12).
I think we all know this - there's a big difference between freedom from and freedom for . Homecoming is not to self-indulgence, any more than the Exodus was emancipation for autonomy. Liberated, Israel is given a mandate to be God's agent in the establishment of right relationships in the world. Restored, Jerusalem is to do precisely what, in chapters 1-39 she refused to do. The large issue is justice (as Dan has eloquently articulated in his reading of the first song).
The mandate is more specific in the verses that follow this second song: I have kept you and given you as a covenant for the people, to establish the land, to apportion the desolate heritages; saying to the prisoners, "Come out." The mandate is, on the one hand, to reach beyond Israel to the peoples of the world. On the other hand, it is to reach to the rejected, the blind, prisoners, the poor, so that they may know full dignity. It is a large ethic. But more crucial is the theological point. The gods of empire - Babylon to the USA - are gods of the powerful and do not attend to the disadvantaged or marginalized. The God of Israel is committed to the outsider; God's people must enact it.
Two questions face the re-established city. First , Who belongs ? Every community of faith and discipline faces restrictiveness vs inclusiveness. (1)Isaiah is on the side of inclusiveness. He takes the radical position that "foreigners" be admitted without pedigree if they keep covenant and practice Sabbath. This urging was really problematic in a community preoccupied with ethnic purity and pedigree.
Second - What constitutes true religious discipline ? There were the traditional - prayer and fasting. Chapter 58, however, observes that we can pray and fast while economic injustice and exploitation dominate our daily lives and, especially, our attitudes toward the poor. Such prayer and fasting are dishonest. "True fasting" consists in caring for the homeless, the marginalized and those without food or clothing. Indeed, care for these is the prerequisite for right relationship with God.
It is difficult to imagine a more sweeping alternative vision of the new Jerusalem than is offered in chapters 56 and 58. Here we find a radical ethic that leads to some of the most eloquent poetry in the Bible. Embracing justice, Jerusalem will receive God's blessing. That city, beloved of God, is deeply contrasted to the failed city of the earlier chapters under assault and finally abandoned. God's spirit is present in the city to transform all social relationships.
The sweep of Isaiah is unparalleled; he exposes layer upon layer of the history and destiny of Jerusalem, a history and destiny with deep fissures at the center. This is crucial for biblical faith, because Jerusalem is the sign of God's way in the world. God's way is always a way of fidelity, judgment, and healing. The history and destiny of that ancient city are remote from us, even though we continue to care about, mourn, wail, excoriate and pray for the present day Jerusalem. Isaiah invites an imaginative interpretation that does not stay confined to historical specificities.
We can extrapolate with reference to our own culture where we have to face the fact that, in its failure to do justice, white, male Western culture is deeply eroded. We do not know the new shapes of humanity, but we have reason to expect that either we'll face a world without us or the new forms will be marked by justice and peace in social, racial, ethnic, economic, and sexual relationships.
Clearly we are not anywhere near the buoyancy of chapters 40-55 or the imaginative settlements of chapters 56-66. We are between chapters 39 and 40, acknowledging loss, catching (if anything) but glimpses of the newness God promises in Isaiah. Everywhere in this drama of loss and restoration, it is justice that is at stake.
Who, today, is Servant to our broken world? When it comes to truth, believers opt for one of two different approaches. Some want to say the truth but, we must do the truth, live the example. We must strive to live as Kindom people even/ especially in this hostile land. So how do we live such a life?
That question has a precedent: Who or what informs us of the day's events? Is it the corporate media? Is it suffering people to whom that media never go? If we could walk down a street in Baghdad and ask there what people think of us, what would we hear? Would they speak about tyranny? Is that how the world sees us? But I do not want to lodge the problem out there as though it is not also closer and more personal. It goes on and on like this, with everything human and recognizable and well-anchored breaking up.
Reflecting on his second and final visit among the American churches in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote prophetically of his frustration with the shape of Christianity in the US. American Christianity, Bonhoeffer observed, had no central organization, no common creed, cult, history, ethical, social or political principles. This had profound political implications. In such an environment of religious tolerance, the dominion of God becomes synonymous with the freedom of the individual to follow his/her inner voice. That path is wide for the formation of denominations without creeds where tolerance becomes the basic principle of everything Christian.
Bonhoeffer stumbled across the religious and nationalistic faith which binds together the diverse constituencies of America's disparate faith traditions which are the building blocks of an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America. Harry Emerson Fosdick thundered from the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church against the encroaching, seductive influence of “civic idolatry.” Millions today are taking that attitude toward the absolute, nationalistic state as a religion. Unlike the churches, the state does have its dogmas, its rituals, its symbols and its sacraments. At its heart is the utter devotion of millions to the national god. Where do you think that substitute god will bring us? He will tear our world into bloody pieces and make our children's earth a hell.
Notwithstanding the perennial controversy about whether or not civil religion is an idolatrous counter-religion or merely a term employed to describe the confidence of American people in the democratic ideal, there is almost universal recognition that something exists which serves to unite the American people in spite of religious pluralism. That something is religious, if not a religion altogether.
The whole supposition of this kind of super power called Egypt or America is that it can act against human life and creation, without limitations and outside its borders, without domestic blowback or a shift in the winds of misfortune. None of this, they believe, will come back to haunt us. What a delusion this is. We learn it is so every day if we are learning anything at all. Everything that goes, comes back and takes this form of the breakup of friendships and relations and decency and compassion. It is happening here, against all the odds laid on faith by the powers. " They will ask their idols to help them." Oh my, do we ever ask our idols to help us. How useful might it be to consider the awful data about weaponry and to look at all that as a kind of massive socialized idolatry. These weapons are adored and are asked to "help" us —help us stay free of terror, help us stay free of consequence, help us stay free to be lovers of death as a social method, help us not to change. Isaiah in another passage calls idols "a nothing with a name." There is a telling passage in chapter 1:7-9 about super powers: The land is full of silver and gold and ... Their land is full of horses and there is no end to their chariots. The land is full of idols and they worship objects they have made with their own hands . This passage emphasizes two evidences of idolatry, one of money and one of violence —the land is full of silver and gold; the land is full of horses and chariots (money and violence); and then, the land is full of idols. The idols are in fact the chariots and the silver and gold!
Why do we praise a God of Power and Might? It makes perfect sense for the nations of the world to worship Power and Might. Those are the gods we want to imitate. It makes perfect sense that we build weapons of power and might at Lockheed, Northrup Grumann, Boeing, Los Alamos, and Livermore. It makes perfect sense to test them at Vandenberg AFB and that leaders become the misleaders and the led become the misled. Immediately after the description of the breakup of the super power at home, and without any introduction, in verse 5 we go into the ecological consequence of that kind of power. Isaiah links misleading and misspending to wasting and despising creation. All of that will follow. If you are living under that kind of power, this is what will happen, as in Isaiah 19:5: " The water will be low in the Nile and the river will gradually dry up and the channels of the river will stink as they slowly go dry. The reeds and rushes will wither and all the crops planted along the banks of the Nile will dry up and be blown away." Ecological consequences to misused power. Nonhuman creation cannot flourish if the human creation is corrupt.
Another transition is developed without introduction beginning in 19:8 about the economic consequences of ecological failure: " Everyone who earns a living by fishing in the Nile will groan and cry out. Their hooks and their nets will be useless. Those who make linen cloth will be in despair. The weavers and skilled workers will be broken and depressed. " How can the poor be sustained if the ecology is corrupted, polluted. So, with the lens of 19:11, we experience Isaiah crying out at the spectacle of the White House and the Pentagon: The leaders of the cities of are fools! Egypt's wisest ones give stupid advice. How do they dare to tell the king that they are successors of the ancient scholars and kings? King of Egypt, where are those clever nuclear test sites. And we arm our silos across the country and set the weapons out to sea on giant submarines.
What a tragic misreading of God. What a dramatic misstep this is; it propels us to do the opposite of what we are called to do. Could any nation be farther from what it means to follow the nonviolent Christ? To follow the compassionate one who hears the cries of the poor, breaks laws to meet their needs, disrupts religious and political leaders of his day. But we want to follow Jesus without changing our lifestyle, our job, without being the poor. This is true, in spite of the fact that we are called to practice self-emptying love and service to those who are broken. Sadly, we get better and better at holding the Biblical message at arms length.
God may be a God of Power and Might, but it is God alone who has (should have) that power. We are God's people, not God's equal. Our aspirations as the financial and military superpower of the world remind me of the tales about Lucifer's rivalry. Do we dare view Imperial America's financial and military machinations as anything less? All life is at stake; this is no time for justifications. So let God have the Power and Might, and let us embrace the way of nonviolence, confrontation with the lies of the powerful, direct service to those in need among us, hospitality and rejoicing. There isn't much time left.
(1) We could do this whole reflection based on our country's immigration policies.