Scripture: Isaiah 7: 13-16; John 6: 56-69

“…and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel.”

-- Isaiah 7:14

Isaiah’s call in the year king Uzziah died (740BC) was a much more somber event than we have appreciated up this point in our reflection. I have not yet even mentioned that it was a call to pronounce the divine judgment on the people of Judah. Listen: “I answered, ‘Here am I send me.’ He said: ‘Go and say to this people, ‘Hear and hear again but do not understand; see and see again, but do not perceive’…Then I said, ‘Until when, Lord?’ He answered: ‘Until towns have been laid waste and deserted, houses left untenanted, countryside made desolate, and Yahweh drives the people out. There will be a great emptiness in the country and, though a tenth of the people remain, it will be stripped like a terebinth of which, once felled, only the stock remains. The stock is a holy seed (6:9-13).” Thus God calls the prophet to identify current historical misfortunes as divine judgment. All is despair, except for the righteous remnant, which survives like the stump of a cut down tree. “The stock is a holy seed.” In 11:1 Isaiah picks up this theme and sings, “A shoot springs from the stock of Jesse, a scion thrusts from his roots…” and so we are in the midst of what we call the “Immanuel” prophecies, which are prophecies of hope given in the midst of despair, of salvation in the midst of judgment.

It is important to hold the two convictions, of hope and despair, together, the conviction on the one hand that God is with us to support what we are doing, together with the conviction that, on the other hand, He is with us to condemn our willful sins and to expose our ignorance. God is with us in two ways, to afflict as well as to comfort, to condemn us in our sin and to rescue and restore us to righteousness.

This stands to reason both logically and psychologically. Logically if there were no condemnation there would be no redemption, no wrong acts, no forgiveness, no deformation no rectification. Logically speaking, meaning comes in binary opposites; for example, up is the opposite of down, light the opposite of darkness, and love the opposite of fear; you cannot have one without the other. Psychologically, we know the damage that children suffer when they never hear a ”No!” when there are no limits and boundaries set to their behavior, and everything they do receives parental support. You cannot have a “Yes” without a “No”. So why is this important?

For at least one cardinal reason, that the world is and always has been full of religious people who believe and act as if God were on their side willy-nilly and not on anyone else’s, that God says an unequivocal “Yes” to their project, and therefore, to persecute, prosecute and destroy those who disagree is not only permitted but required. So the world divides into “Yes” (we) and “No” (they). Last week was an especially bad week in this dismal history of religious warfare; the United Nations HQ in Baghdad and a busload of religious Jews in Jerusalem, were bombed. You can bet that the perpetrators, who committed suicide by these acts, believed they the one, true God says a resounding “Yes” to what they have done. These are the most shameful expressions of faith imaginable, and they make me ashamed to be identified with organized religion. They represent the satanic core of religion.

There are many wonderful things that the biblical prophets bring us, but none more wonderful than the scathing criticism of their own religion that comes from the heart of faith itself. The credibility of the Bible for me rests in large measure on the fact that it spends so much of its time and space criticizing its own claims. Take these claims made in the great Immanuel prophecies of Isaiah of Jerusalem, that God is with us (2:1-5; 7:10-17; 9:1-6; 11:1-9; 28:16-17). They recognize from the outset that God’s presence in judgment is so severe that the hope of restoration can only emerge as a tiny shoot of green from the stump of a shattered tree. In other passages Isaiah calls this tender shoot the “Remnant” (4:3; 7:3; 10:21-22; 28:16-17) and we shall return to it next week. Here we simply note that this renewed presence of God does not come unless there is a purifying judgment, that it comes not as a renewed human effort but like the sprouting of a stump, and that it is narrowly focused on one man and not on the nation. God is with the Messiah and only through the Messiah with the nation (but this is to anticipate next week). In any case it is absolutely important to accept and act on the fact that our God says “No!” to us almost as loudly as He says, “Yes!” God’s being with us is both a “No” and a “Yes” to our lives. The prophet speaks as much, in fact more, of the divine “No” than he does of the divine “Yes”. To ignore that is inevitably to fall victim to the plague of religion that is scourging the world today as it has for generations.

So, since we all want to hear God’s “Yes,” let us listen for His “No”, because we cannot hear the one without the other, and especially let us listen for that “No” to our own religion, before we condemn Islamist or Jewish fundamentalism. Here is an admittedly extreme item from a website called dutyisours.com/gwbush, “God defeated armies of Philistines and others with confusion. Dimpled and hanging chads may also be because of God’s intervention on those who were voting incorrectly. Why is GW Bush our president? It was God’s choice.” It makes no difference that GW Bush won Florida not at the ballot box but in the courts, because several thousand Jewish retirees in Miami were so confused by the voting machines that they voted for far right candidate Pat Buchanan when they thought they were voting for Al Gore. So reactionary Buchanan got the best showing of his whole campaign in the most liberal section of Florida, and the courts refused to take that into account. This shameful, if not criminal event, is judged by the website in question to be an act of God, like the confusing of the Philistines in the battles of the old Israelite Holy Wars. I bet you that this is the voice of sincere, utterly committed, Bible-believing Christians. In this regard they are the mirror image of Osama bin Laden, believing as he does that God is on their side and that extraordinary misfortunes that befall their enemies are acts of the divine power.

One could shrug this off as the voice of the extreme right, not easily but conceivably, did GWB not believe essentially the same thing, namely, that he was elevated to office by an extraordinary providence because he is the one chosen by God to defend us against the evildoers of an envious and corrupt form of Islamic culture. For this reason it is for these Christians not only unpatriotic to call him to account for lying to the nation in order to take us to war in pursuit of evidently defective policy goals, it is impious. Impious even to ask why our young people have to die every day in Iraq (their names now appear on only the third page of the NYT). Alas, millions of Christians believe that God put Bush in office, that his dubious war is God’s will, and stand uncritically behind the President. (By the way, 83% of the same electorate, according to recent Pew Foundation polls, believes in the Virgin Birth of Jesus and only 28% accepts the theory of evolution – we are in a deeper cultural trouble than most of us care to know). God is with us to be sure, but to judge as much as to support.

So where is hope? It is in the promise of God to be with us when we pursue righteousness and against us when we pursue the lie. To despair is to lose hope for a better future. To hope is to have confidence in God’s promise to deliver us into the perfect future of what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. Isaiah promises that the Kingdom will come with the advent of one who shall burn the weapons and disband the armies, whose name shall be Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, the Prince of peace (9:5-7). “A shoot springs from the stock of Jesse, a scion thrusts up from his roots: on him the spirit of Yahweh rests, a spirit of wisdom and insight, a spirit of counsel and power, a spirit of knowledge and the fear of Yahweh (11:1-2).” “The virgin in with child and will soon give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel (7:14)”.

It is absolutely essential that this Messianic mantle not fall on the shoulders of any earthly ruler. Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler claimed it, and see what damage they did. The Bible says a resounding “No!” to any identification of any human being as the Messiah, or more to the point, any subliminal attribution of Messianic power and authority to a human being. God is with us, both to criticize and to control, and no human being is beyond the reach of criticism and judgment. Anyone who claims to be doing God’s will, must be judged before the bar of Christ, because he alone is Immanuel, and in him alone is God unquestionably with us. He is the remnant of faithful humanity, the cornerstone God laid in Zion. Jesus Christ and no other!  Next week we turn to the remnant and the Messiah.