"Is this not the fast that I choose:
to unloose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
to break every yoke?" (Is 58.6)

The poetry of Is 58 sounds out the most elemental claim of faith:

true faith is neighbour care;
true faith is not self-indulgent worship;
true faith is justice for the little ones;
true faith is the transformation of the public world for the sake of the neighbour.

This is God's word! It keeps ringing in the ears of Israel all the way into Judaism: true faith is the transformation of the world for the sake of the neighbour!

The point keeps ringing in the ears of Judaism that they must care about the world, until it arrives on the lips of Jesus.

He said, "The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." (Lk 10.27) And they asked him, "Who is my neighbour?" (Lk 10.29) And he said, "The one who shows mercy." (Lk 10.37)

The one who needs mercy.

Neighbours are those engaging each other in mercy.

The point is on the lips of Jesus, and it rings in the ears of the church...even until now. It rings in Reformed ears among people who in concrete ways know about neighbour love and about injustice and about emancipation from oppression and hunger and homelessness and poverty and nakedness. It rings in Reformed ears among people who are comfortable and complacent and reduced, reminding us of our true faith and our true life. The ringing in our ears all the way back to Is 58 is an assertion of who God is...this neighbour God, and who we are, this neighbour people.

But the utterance in Is 58 is not a cosmic statement in a vacuum. It is a concrete summons in a crisis situation. I thought the best service I could do on this occasion is to lift out the context of crisis in which we have been given this biting, healing word of identity.

I shall do so in four themes:

collapse of what is old,
vision of what is new,
dispute about the future,
action for newness

These four themes are all around this text. And, I will suggest, they are all around us, so that the summons made then is made now to us.

The ancient world of utterance

We must first understand this live word from God in its ancient utterance.

The collapse

This live word from God giving us a neighbour destiny is set in a context of radical, social collapse when the known world had fallen apart. It is collapse that produces imagination. The collapse first of all comes when Jerusalem is destroyed in 587 BC. The temple was burned, and the great certitudes of Israel's faith were no longer certain. Our mothers and fathers were deeply dislocated, taken far from home into a strange land. They wept bitter tears for the loss of a world of certainty.

But then the collapse came in a second wave of a very different kind. They had been taken to Babylon, a strange land indeed, that great, arrogant superpower. It was Babylon that exploited and oppressed and abused, Babylon that seemed to be forever. And then, in the twinkling of an eye, it was gone! The world became unglued. Everything became possible, but everything was uncertain. The Jews were deeply confused and upset, because they had lost the great superpower that had given focus and order, and invited resistance and alternative. Now it is gone, and they did not know about their future with God.

So we are given a community with no fixed reference points, not even with sure enemies, with no public context in which to celebrate a faith identity. They were driven back to basics, to reconsider the elemental claims of faith, no longer given in institutional form, no longer braced by resistance.

The vision

It is amazing that there arose in the collapse of exile and displacement a poet powered by God's spirit. Exile tends to produce poets. And so we say secondly, the live word from God gives us a neighbour destiny. It is set in a context of radical public vision.

The vision is on the lips of the poet of Is 40-55. The remarkable thing about this poet is that his hopes are not derived from his circumstance. He knows that circumstance, but in some inscrutable way, God's spirit seized him in freedom and in imagination to hope a future for this community in despair, to conjure a future well beyond the hopelessness of exile, to evoke a grand, glorious homecoming when

"Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low...
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." (Is 40.4-5)

The lips of the poet veto the despair of collapse, and move the heart and life and pulse of this people toward a new home, a new shalom, a new Jerusalem. This is the poet who heard God say:

"Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins." (Is 40.1-2).

This is the poet who heard God say:

"Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name,
you are mine.
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and the rivers,
they shall not overwhelm you (Is 43.1-2).

This is the poet who heard God say:

"Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
Now it springs forth,
do you not perceive it?" (Is 43.18-19)

They had not thought to perceive a newness. They thought that they had only a choice between nostalgia for a faith that could be no more or despair, for faith seemed now hardly possible.

But the poet broke the grip of the backward look. In this moment of utterance, they turned, in their hearts and piety, to imagine another Jerusalem, no longer sordid and shameful, no longer impure and ignoble, no longer organized into the powerless and the exploitative. The poet looks to the horizon and sees a shadow of newness:

"Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights.
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations...
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his Torah". (Is 42.1-4)

The theme of the coming one is justice, justice, justice... justice for a bruised reed, justice for a dim wick, because the coast lands wait for the Torah that will now be freshly obeyed.

The poet must find new words for new vision, for new social possibility, and so he invents, for the first time, the term "gospel":

"Lift up your voice with strength,
herald of gospel tidings,
lift it up, do not fear." (Is 40.9)

"...who brings gospel news,
who says to Zion, 'Your God rules'." (Is 52.7)

The vision is of a changed governance, a changed loyalty, a changed social possibility. The work of the poet is to invite the faithful to move out of Babylonian despair and into gospel possibility. It is an exodus; it is leaving Pharaoh and all conventional modes of social reality into the neighbouring reality of God. To enter this new governance, they must leave:

"Depart, depart, go out from there...
For you shall not go out in haste,
and you shall not go out in flight." (Is 52.11)

"For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace." (Is 55.12)

The vision is for people on their way rejoicing into the new world of God's goodness.

The dispute

Then they came home to Jerusalem. The Persians let them go free. When they arrived home after the old superpower had failed, they faced the reality of the war ruin. Jerusalem was still in shambles as the Babylonians had left it. The vision had been an overstatement from Isaiah in exile. Now decisions had to be made on the ground, concretely. And as often happens when committees in the church meet to make concrete plans, there is an argument.

So I say, third, the live word of God giving us a neighbour destiny is given in deep conflict and dispute. There is an argument here about who will control the future, who will have authority to state orthodoxy, who can say what is legitimate, who can say what is possible. Early Judaism was a deeply fractured community with factions and parties who are grim and determined and humourless. This is an old-fashioned scene of church quarrels, for church quarrels may be the oldest mark of the church, older than catholic and apostolic.

The dispute, that sounds a little like formulation of orthodoxy and orthopraxis, that sounds a little like Reformation and Counter-Reformation, is an argument about the community, its character and its mandate. One option is to create a community of purity, guarded at its borders, sure of its membership, under tight discipline, punctilious in its ethics, certain in its worship, clear, managed, beyond debate.

That was, in early Judaism a strong proposal with powerful, persuasive advocates. But there is an alternative notion to which we are heirs. It is given us in Is 56-66, by a daring poet who had no patience with his punctilious colleagues. The problem, said he, with that vision of a faithful future, is that it is turned inward and is too full of self. This poet understood from the outset that serious faith in Yahweh is an open faith reaching out for the wellbeing of the world. This side of the dispute urges a different community with a different mandate. It begins in 56.1:

"Maintain justice, and do what is right,
for soon my salvation will come,
and my deliverance be revealed."

Justice is the by-word of this alternative vision to which we pledged. This is not the justice of retribution. This is the restorative justice of community solidarity in which the strong and the weak are bound in a common future together, whereby the strong must yield and give up and share for the sake of the weak, because we are all members of each other. This is the justice that is on the road to Paul's glorious affirmation about Jesus: "Though he was rich, yet for our sake he became poor so that by his poverty you might become rich" (2 Cor 8.9).

The common issues of wealth and poverty, power and weakness, have and have not are on the table. They are on the lips of the poet; they are in the heart of God; they are central to the character of Jesus. And his people must attend to the claim.

In this conflict, after the great vision of Is 40-55, the community always disputes who is in the vision and who is out. In his ancient Torah teaching, Moses had excluded foreigners from the community; he excluded all those whose lives were compromised sexually (Deut 23.1-8). And now, says the poet, to the point of conflict, it is time to move beyond the Torah of Moses:

"to the eunuch who keeps my sabbaths
and who chooses the things that please me,
and holds fast to my covenant"(Is 56.3-7).
You are welcome!

"The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,
to minister to him.
to love the name of the Lord...
all who keep the sabbath and do not profane it,
and hold fast my covenant" (Is 56.6).
You are welcome!

And then, in the final committee meeting that debated the notion of proper worship and liturgical renewal, this liberated poet dared to say, "You want to talk about piety and religious disciplines and self-sacrifice and spiritual seriousness? Is not this the proper fast? Is this not the key act of discipline? Is not this the core religious duty, to deal with starvation and injustice and practices of oppression and power arrangements and tax credits and debt management and market manipulation and monopoly, all of which produce hunger, poverty, nakedness and homelessness...not as an accident, but as the sure and certain outcome of such policy? That is what faith is about." And so we are left with this old and urgent conflict, still ringing in our ears about true faith and about neighbours, and about the shape of our future in the world. And the ringing persists!

And then action

Finally, after the collapse, after the vision, after the dispute, comes action. In emerging Judaism, it came as Ezra and Nehemiah took concrete policy decisions. The live word of God giving us a neighbour destiny. It finally becomes available and concrete in policy actions that commit public policy and public power and public money to different practices...not practices that divide the strong and weak, the rich and poor. The new policies make it possible for rich and poor to be neighbours one of another. Ezra and Nehemiah are determined and hard-nosed. They do public work in the wake of the vision. They understand that theological talk does not count for much if there is no implementation. I will notice three such acts of theirs:

1. They recovered the sabbath: "If the peoples of the land bring in merchandise or any grain on the sabbath day to sell, we will not buy it from them on the sabbath or on a holy day; and we will forego the crops of the seventh year and the exaction of every debt." (Neh 10.31)

"In those days I saw in Judah people trading wine presses on the sabbath, and bringing in heaps of grain and loading them on donkeys; and also wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens, which they brought in to Jerusalem on the sabbath day; and I warned them at that time against selling food... Then I remonstrated with the nobles of Judah and said to them, 'What is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the sabbath day? Did not your ancestors act in this way, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city.' Yet you bring more wrath on Israel by profaning the sabbath."(Neh 13.15-18)

The sabbath is not just a pious church day. It is a rest day. It is a day when the production machine is shut down. It is the day when appetites of consumerism are curbed. It is the day when Torah and cross turn out to be more powerful symbols than Nike and Coca-Cola. It is the slow-down, the shut-down day when neighbours become more valuable than commodities. It is a time to live free of the killing demands of the money economy.

2. Nehemiah institutes a most remarkable economic reform driven by the vision of Is 40-55, and fed by the dispute of Is 56, 58. The problem is exploitative tax policy whereby the poor are being eaten alive by economic arrangements:

"There were also those who said, 'We are having to pledge our fields, our vineyards and our houses in order to get grain during the famine.' And there were those who said, 'We are having to borrow money on our fields and vineyards to pay the king's tax.' (Neh 5.4-5)

Nehemiah, who knows about justice and about neighbours, is angry. He said to the exploiters:

"'You are all taking interest from your own people.' And I called a great assembly to deal with them, and said to them, 'As far as we were able, we have bought back our Jewish kindred who had been sold to other nations; but now you are selling your own kin, who must then be bought back by us!' They were silent and could not find a word to say. So I said, 'The thing that you are doing is not good. Should you not walk in the fear of our God, to prevent the taunts of the nations our enemies? Moreover I and my brothers and my servants are lending them money and grain. Let us stop this taking of interest. Restore to them, this very day, their fields, their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the interest on money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them.'" (Neh 5.5-11)

And they answered:

"'We will restore everything and demand nothing more from them. We will do as you say.'" (Neh 5.12)

Faith moved economic arrangements into covenant community. It took a policy of firmness and anger and courage. It was rooted in deep memory and made a sharp insistence.

3. Or the most radical act in Neh 11.1-2. They cast lots and one tenth of the people moved back into the inner city, to care, to be subjected to the circumstances of the failed city, to be present with and to and for the poor. And newness could happen!

The sequence I trace for you is clear:
You shall love your neighbour...in the wake of the collapse.
You shall love your neighbour...in the freedom of new vision.
You shall love your neighbour...in the practice of deep dispute.
You shall love your neighbour...in concrete policy actions.

Collapse, vision, dispute, action! And it is all about neighbours, those in the second great commandment.

The contemporary world of utterance

Now of course I know that you know all of this in the sequence of Isaiah and Nehemiah. I say it to you once again, first, because we must return to these texts again and again, where our mothers and fathers recovered energy for their faith. But more than that, I propose that return to these texts gives us powerful clues for our own time. So consider:

The collapse

Ours is a time when neighbour destiny may arise in collapse, as dramatic as the collapse of beloved Jerusalem or hated Babylon. Sisters and brothers, we face collapse or at least we in the west face collapse after the failure of old certitudes and old privileges and old patterns of domination. The reason that these texts address us is that our time is that time.

We are now watching while our ancient, beloved cities collapse, we in the west. We are watching while our kind of church nearly goes under and in bewilderment we can situate ourselves somewhere between nostalgia for what is precious and despair in what is now impossible. The old advantage of the church in the west is completely gone and it makes us at least nervous.

But not only our beloved Jerusalem. We also watch the old patterns of superpowers expire, one superpower suddenly gone when we thought it was forever, the final superpower still strong, but increasingly turned inward, greedy, unstable and unreliable with its own human problems that cut so deep we are astonished. And with it the old western hegemony on which we have counted, assuming that it could dictate the terms of the world forever, and now in disarray. But counting on that hegemony is like counting too long on Babylon. We thought it was forever, but it carries no authority where the real human questions are asked.

And so Reformed people look reality in the face, to say that old configurations of power are mostly empty and not compelling. And now we ask about a new word in the face of the collapse; and the word we get back as our destiny is "neighbour". It is possible, in the face of the collapse, that the agenda of neighbour can become crucial as it has not been.

The vision

The collapse of old ways and modes of power is palpable. But exiles produce poets who imagine the world beyond present circumstance. As Jewish exile produced Is 40-55, conjure that ours is a time of vision in which there may be some among us who have lips and hearts and tongues to see beyond and hope beyond to another way in the world that God is now doing. There will be some poets who will say in astonishment, "Do you not perceive it?"

We may look in the normal places for the vision:
the normal places of people
who suffer and are unafraid,
who are oppressed but not defeated,
afflicted but not crushed,
perplexed but not driven to despair,
persecuted but not forsaken,
struck down, but not destroyed.

Every national church here could name some voices of vision...Mandela, King, Berrigan, Stringfellow...those who have refused to give up, but who hear the cadences of "comfort, comfort". I name some I think of but you surely will name others in your church context:

Justice for a dim wick and for a broken reed,
departing imperial perceptions for the new thing.

Such a poet asks, asks with impatience and with hope:
Can you not see it?
Can you not imagine it?
Can you not host God's newness as a way in the world?

Such vision comes not only among our most daring and most visible poets who stand on truth in the face of abuse and violence. Such vision comes in quite local ways among those who will not give in, but who trust fully in the promises rather than in the circumstances, and are unafraid. Reformed people are no strangers to vision. We stake our lives on the word of God, and that word of God does not return empty; it goes its own way, has its own say, does what it intends, so the vision comes among us when the word is treasured in the neighbourhood. There is no doubt that ours is a moment of collapse commensurate with the loss of Jerusalem. It is as sure that it is a moment of vision.

The dispute

And out of vision comes hard dispute. We Reformed people are no strangers to conflict; some think that is what we do best. So let us in prayer and in candour and in waiting enter into conflict in good grace and high hope. In Reformed churches where I live, the issue is joined, and the dispute is hard. And likely it is so in your church. The voices of priestly punctiliousness and purity are powerful, as powerful as they are frightened.

We are, however, determined to be in another place in another way in the dispute, because all the way back to Moses and all the way forward to Jesus, we hear the word of God in our ears, "neighbour, neighbour, neighbour". We are children of these texts and heirs of these visions, and so we are engaged in these disputes for the future of Christ's church.

The conflict is a church conflict. But the church lives in a world of conflict. It is clear now that corporate capitalism (that is, the "money government" of the world) aims to control all resources, to the damage of the earth, to the disregard of the poor, to the evaporation of the weak and the powerless. Our dispute is not finally with church brothers and sisters, but it is with the gods of the economy who want to obliterate the neighbour question for the wealth and domination of the few.

And when one looks about for allies in refusal, there are not many visible except the church. Our task is to be different because of our baptism. Our task is resistance as it has always been resistance. Our task is critical engagement that exposes sweet, pious, private religion as the handmaid of abusive economics. Of course the church round the world has so few resources for this work. But then the forces for life are always thin against the powers of death. It has ever been so and it is so now. But this fast to which we are summoned, the fast for the sake of the hungry, the poor, the homeless, the naked is an Easter fast. It is powered by the self-giving love of God and invites us to self-give as did the one who became obedient unto death.

There are no doubt many strategies and many logics, and they must be sorted out locally and nationally. But the decisive point is clear and unmistakable. It is from the courage of the poet that we are driven to dispute. It is in the cadences of the crucified that we can care about justice and about the injustice of the market economy. We now live in a world economy that will liquidate the poor neighbour in something like a "final solution".

Reformed people are equipped and inclined for the dispute. I understand that it is risky. I understand that church leaders cannot go far on this without church followers. And so our teaching office is crucial that the community of the baptized may be reimmersed in the nature of faith, in the power of vision, in the gravity of the command.

And then action

In the sequence of collapse as we watch a world coming to a close; vision as we catch God's newness; dispute as we contest for the newness that breaks free of old patterns, we are led to the fourth component of newness, that of action.

All this up until now is preparation for the act:
action like sabbath rest,
action like economic reform that binds creditors to debtors in neighbourliness,
action like rebirth in the midst of deep need.

And so the gospel bids for obedience. It requires strategic acts to break the chains of injustice. And it is our work in the community of the baptized.

They asked him about the great commandment, and he told them, "Love God wholly." And he said, before they could interrupt him, "A second like it is love of neighbour." And they said, "We only wanted one commandment, only the greatest." And he said, "You cannot have only one. You always get two. Love of God, love of neighbour."

"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say 'I love God' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also (1 Jn 4.18-21).

But that love of God is not empty piety. It is starchy resolve that moves into the world. Love of neighbour is not maudlin romanticism. It is a public act of letting the rich blessing of God be the offer of social goods that God has given, that we have no right to withhold. True economics goes like this:

"The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little." (2 Cor 8.15)

So welcome, Reformed brothers and sisters,
to the collapse, loss of city, loss of empire;

So welcome, Reformed sisters and brothers,
to the vision, a gospel beyond our possibilities;

So welcome, Reformed sisters and brothers,
to the dispute that moves love of God to concrete, policy-based love of neighbour;

So welcome, Reformed sisters and brothers,
to the act that breaks injustice and permits joyous abundance.

It is a question: Is not this the fast? It is a question that is a haunting summons to us, a question that must be answered. And we answer, "Yes". It is the fast, the fast that breaks patterns of injustice, the fast of good news that reaches out to the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the poor.

He said to our mothers and fathers:
"Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?"

And we answer, "Yes, yes, amen, and yes."