The Fifth Gospel
Sermons from Isaiah
Downwardly Mobile
February 6, 2022 • Rev. Jason Micheli • Isaiah 43:16–25
What the sociologists label Moral Therapeutic Deism, the Bible calls idolatry. A distant, hands-off God who does nothing, says nothing, calls no new thing into existence is no different than an idol. To believe in a god who does not intervene in our world is to live a life of functional atheism. As the prophet Isaiah exclaims to God in astonishment, “Truly, you are a God who hides himself.” Who hides himself. In other words, even God’s apparent absence is the activity of God. Which means— God is never not intervening in the world. Of course, this should not be news to people who are used to hearing every Sunday, “This is my body, given for you.”
Happy are Those Who Know They Need God; Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
January 30, 2022 • Rev. Jason Micheli • Isaiah 43:1–7, Isaiah 43:10–11, Isaiah 43:22–25
As Walter Brueggemann observes of God calling blind and deaf Israel to bear witness on his behalf, the point is not that even though God’s people may be blind or deaf, they too nevertheless have some witness of their own to offer. The point is rather that disability— that is, our sin and our shortcomings, our HELPLESSNESS— is the necessary qualification to testify truthfully to the character of this God. Because above all else, this God is not just (THANK GOD). This God is gracious.: “I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.”
Guaranteed
January 23, 2022 • Rev. Peter Kwon • Isaiah 42:1–9
If there's one phrase that repeats most often in our scripture reading today, it's "He will." "He will bring forth justice," "he will not grow faint." As we wait for the spring to come with better days, Pastor Peter reminds us of the things which are "Guaranteed."
Theophobia
January 16, 2022 • Rev. Jason Micheli • Isaiah 41:1–13
Contemporary America is full of fear; fear is not a Christian habit of mind. It’s not merely that fear is incompatible with faith. According to God, fear is evidence that your faith is actually in something other than God. Fear is an indication that the god whom you allegedly trust is not the Living God. If it was just some dude named Isaiah preaching “Do not fear,” it should have no more effect on you than me preaching the very same message. It would have no power. My words— our words— lack the capacity to work what they say. “Do not fear” is groundless sentimentality if the one who utters the command is not also the powerful one, if God is not the Living God, himself the subject of the sentences that make up our lives. It makes all the difference, therefore, that “Do not fear” in Isaiah 41 comes couched in this five-fold “I” assertion, five promises in which we are the object of God’s every verb: I am with you. I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you.
Deus Dicit
January 9, 2022 • Rev. Jason Micheli • Isaiah 40:6–15, Isaiah 40:27–31
The scriptures are not the historical archive of what the once loquacious God said. In the past. The scriptures are the means through which the Living Lord elects to speak today. To us! Despite the ubiquity of such language in Church, the God of the Bible does not dream. The God of the Bible does. The God of the Bible speaks— his word is his doing in the world. The God of the Bible does not sit by, silent and idle, passively waiting for us to discover him at the center of a labyrinth or seek him at the end of our spiritual endeavors or accept him in answer to an altar call. The God of the Bible is the powerful, partisan deliverer of the poor and the oppressed, at work in the world— ahead of us, apart from us, often in spite of us, killing and making alive with his Word, calling into existence things that do not exist (things such as the prophet Isaiah) and, as the Book of Hebrews puts it, “upholding the universe by his word of power.”