Arise | "Shine with Goodness" - Christina Baik

A reading from the prophet Isaiah.

Cry aloud, Do not hold back. Lift up your voice like a

trumpet. Declare to My people their

transgression to the House of Jacob, their sins.

Yet they seek Me daily and delight to know My ways, as if

they were a nation that did righteousness and did not

forsake the judgment of their God.

They ask of Me righteous judgments.

They delight to draw near to God.

Why have we fasted and you see it not?

Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?

Behold, in the day of your fast, you seek your own pleasure, and

oppress all your workers. Behold, you fast only to

quarrel, and to fight, and to hit with the wicked fists.

Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard

on high. Is such the fast that I choose a

day for a person to humble himself?

Is it to bow down his head like a Reed, and to spread sackcloth

and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast and a

day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I

choose to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps

of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, To break

every yoke? Is it not to share your bread

with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house

when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself

from your own flesh. Then shall your light break

forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up

speedily. Your righteousness shall go

before you. The glory of the Lord shall be

your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the

Lord will answer, you shall cry, and he will say, Here I am.

If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the

finger and speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the

hungry, and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall

your light rise in the darkness, and your gloom be as the

noonday. And the Lord will guide you

continually, and satisfy your desire in scorched places, and

make your bones strong. And you shall be like a watered

garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.

And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt.

You shall rise up the foundations of many generations.

You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of

streets to dwell in, if you turn your back your foot from the

Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and

call the Sabbath a delight, and the holy day of the Lord

honorable. If you honor it, not going your

own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly, then

you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride

on the heights of the earth. I will feed you with the

heritage of Jacob, your father, for the mouth of the Lord has

spoken the word of the Lord. Please pray with me.

Loving God, I pray that He may settle deeply within each and

every one of us in this moment. I pray that your presence, your

love for for each and every one of us may be unmistakable.

It may be your words to speak today.

Your name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. Hi everybody, I want to open

with a story that some of you may know.

In 1983, a 23 year old law student was sent alone during an

internship to a maximum security prison in Georgia to deliver a

message to a man on death row. No lawyer with him, no legal

help to offer, just a message. Your execution will not be this

year. You have another year, he

writes. I wasn't prepared to meet a

condemned man. I was eager and inexperienced

and worried. I was in over my head.

He had gone to law school because like many of us, he

wanted to do something about injustice.

And like many of us, he grew disillusioned.

Right the coursework. Like, how relevant is this?

He felt he was disillusioned by the inequities in our systems,

by his own inadequacy. But here he was.

Henry the prisoner arrived in chains into that little room.

Our speaker stuttered through his message, and Henry broke

open into relief. Another year he could see his

wife and kids. They ended up talking for three

hours, laughing, getting to know each other, becoming quick

friends until the guards abruptly tore them apart.

As Henry is cuffed and shoved out, he planted his feet and

sang a hymn. I'm pressing on the upward way.

New heights I'm gaining every day, Still praying as I'm

onward, bound. Lord, plant my feet on higher

ground. And our speaker was absolutely

stunned. He writes.

I had come into the prison with such anxiety about my

inadequacy. I had no right to expect

anything from a condemned man on death row.

Yet he gave me an astonishing measure of his humanity,

proximity to the condemned may the question of each person's

humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own.

His grandmother had always told him, you can't understand most

of the important things from a distance, Brian, you have to get

close. That law student was Bryan

Stevenson. Six years later, he founded the

Equal Justice Initiative, which has provided legal

representation to hundreds of people illegally convicted or

unfairly sentenced, the central thesis of his book?

Just Mercy and of his life's work is that we are not defined

by the worst thing we've ever done.

He attributes this to the Christian gospel.

I've had the pleasure of meeting him.

He radiates calm, purpose and warmth.

Even my most skeptical non Christian colleagues and friends

that I met him with have been really moved by the way that his

faith empowers him to do such hard, costly work with such

energy and joy. We're really drawn to people

like that, aren't we? People who shine with goodness

and know what they're about. As Christians, we're also to,

we're also called to be that. Our current series on being a

Spiritual Beacon Church for the city of Chicago invites us to

consider various ways to shine the light of Christ for people

to draw them into the joyful, purposeful peace that comes from

knowing who we are in Christ. Fully known, fully loved, fully

renewed. This vision and promise is so

good. The call for how to get there,

as modelled for us in today's passage in Isaiah, is urgent and

very practical. Actually, as we turn to Isaiah

58, I want to name an important note about the particular versus

universal. The text was written for a very

particular community, in a very particular context.

The Judeans had returned from their home after a really long

exile in Babylon, only to be beset by fractured community,

economic equality, inequality, political subjugation again, and

the disorienting gap between the glorious restoration they have

been promised and the difficult reality they actually came home

too. We can relate to these

disappointments in general, for sure, as such hardships cycle

through history. But it's still important to

acknowledge that the Judeans are not us, and their situation

isn't ours. And yet this passage still

speaks to us because it addresses things that do not

change, The human tendency to perform faith without embodying

it, God's call to express our faith in concrete, proximate

care for those in need, and the reliability of God's promises to

the community that takes that seriously.

Like the Judeans, many of us may be engaging in some sincere

religious practice. Right?

We're here. Maybe particularly so during

this Lenten season, while feeling disconnected from God

and perhaps paralyzed in the face of social suffering.

The passage is something to say about why, and it's actually

more freeing than we might expect.

Thankfully, it's also urgent, as expressed by God's call for the

prophet to be loud and declarative with his message in

the opening verse. Cry aloud.

Do not hold back. Lift up your voice like a

trumpet. Declare to my people their

transgression to the House of Jacob, their sins.

While God's people are verse 2, seeking Him daily and even

delighting to know God's ways, they're doing so with hypocrisy.

As we enter into verses 3 through 5, I want to lovingly

carry us through some honest and potentially uncomfortable self

examination as we hold this passage up to ourselves as a

mirror. God anticipates the people's

questions in verse 3. Why are we fascinating?

You see it not. Why have we humbled ourselves

and you take no knowledge of it? They seem genuinely confused.

They've been dutiful, and God responds notably, not with

comfort per SE, but with a diagnosis.

Behold, in the day of your fast, you seek your own pleasure and

oppress all your workers. So let's see with how this can

be true of us. First, you seek your own

pleasure. On the very day we're performing

devotion, our primary focus may still be on our own interests

and our own comforts. And this doesn't have to be

dramatic, right? Maybe we're being faithful in

many ways, but we haven't had a real conversation across

difference in a while. Our bubble is very intact.

Some of us live and work and worship in spaces that are for

honest, pretty uniform. Similar educational backgrounds,

similar political assumptions, similar income brackets, similar

cultural references. The default posture of some of

these spaces towards Christian faith might be a kind of polite

skepticism, right? The assumption that serious,

educated people have moved past that, and many of us have

quietly absorbed some of that skepticism, perhaps while

sitting in a Pew. Others of us have lived their

whole lives inside the church, Christian School, Christian

friendships, Christian workplace, Christian everything.

We're fluent in the language, comfortable in the culture, and

the world outside that culture can feel genuinely foreign and

maybe even a little threatening. Both of those are bubbles.

Bubbles that limit the reach of God's light, the verse

continues. And oppress all your workers.

The word for a press here, nagas, is the same word used for

Pharaoh's task makers in Egypt. So it's a pretty strong word.

So consider the people with less power than you and any social,

professional or economic relationship both seen and

unseen. And I'm not only talking to

working folks here. This is very relevant to student

life too. The people we have some kind of

power over and know it, The people we have power over.

And I haven't actually thought about them very much, right?

Or the people whose labor we benefit from without much

consideration. And it's not about guilt.

This is about sight. The text is asking who has less

power than you and how are you considering them?

How are you treating them? God continues in verse 4.

Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a

wicked fist. Fasting like yours to stay will

not make your voice be heard on high.

And maybe we aren't literally hitting anyone, but where does

strife live in your life right now?

Again, it doesn't necessarily have to be very dramatic.

It might be like the chronic low grade tension with someone that

you refuse to address. Like too awkward, like you know,

the relationship where you hold power and you wield it.

The person you consistently make smaller, their quiet remarks,

small gestures. And then verse 5, the image that

looks so right, the head bowed like a Reed sackcloth ashes, all

the correct postures of humility and penitence performed over a

life that remains fundamentally unchanged.

Christian virtue signalling, like posting about a social

issue without actually changing anything about our life to move

the needle towards change. Or even if we don't use social

media, lamenting injustice in the right company while our

actual life remains sealed off from anyone affected by it.

Or feeling deeply about things and letting the feeling

substitute for the doing. Or the Lenten practice that's

entirely oriented inward. What it does for us, our body,

our habits, our health, with no outward tort, turn towards

anyone else. God is not critiquing this

devotion. God is asking, who are you

actually doing this for? When the devotion is correctly

directed at God rather than at ourselves, it doesn't just look

good, it does good and God wants us to be faithful.

God is incredibly clear and direct about what that looks

like, and it communicates them in rhetorical questions here to

engage our minds to reflect before answering.

Yes. Verse 6.

Is this not the fast that I choose to loose the bonds of

wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the

oppressed go free and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the

homeless poor into your house when you see the naked, to cover

him and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Verse 6 is about releasing people from bondage, burden, and

oppression. This can be literal.

Perhaps you're a lawyer, a social worker, a therapist, a

doctor, a teacher, a policy maker, someone whose

professional life puts you in direct proximity to people who

are trapped in a need of an advocate.

Let's use that. But bondage also takes forms

that don't require a professional license, right?

Maybe someone in your life is trapped in a story about

themselves that is not true and you're in a position to tell

them otherwise. Please do so.

It's always been so life changing when people have done

that for me. Or maybe someone is in a

relationship or a situation that they cannot see their way out of

you, Right? Like we get so mired up in it

and you can speak truth to them. You're in that position.

Help them to expand their perspective and shake off false

narratives. Persist in being there for them

as they work through all the tangles.

If you feel trapped somehow today, loosen the bonds and seek

prayer during service Today they will be prayer ministers on

either side during communion. Go up to them.

Bondage is anywhere a person is stuck and carrying something

that they were meant never meant to carry alone.

Liberation begins with whoever is close enough to notice.

So we must notice. As Christians, we must notice.

Verse 7 is what hits me hardest in some ways because it's so

direct and personal and I can't, like, intellectualize my way out

of it. Is it not to share your bread

with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house

when you see the naked to cover him and not to hide yourself

from your own flesh. We are to feed, house, and

clothe people. Food, housing and clothing are

so fundamental. They're so immediately

practical. So when we see the need, we are

to provide. And the Hebrew here is second

person singular. So God is speaking to each of us

individually here. And when God tells us not to

hide ourselves from our own flesh, God prohibits us from

deliberate social blindness. We cannot pretend that like we

don't see the physical body of our fellow human being in need.

We are to look upon their humanity as our own.

And this is really powerful because it's so physical, right?

It invites us to think about Jesus physical body on the

cross. On the cross, Jesus literally

embodied the bonds, the straps, the breaking, the not holding

himself from his fellow human being so that all the wickedness

and oppression can die with his physical body to be resurrected

in a new form and a new life, right?

That's the good news, that's the gospel.

And the gospel message is that through Jesus's life,

resurrection or death and resurrection, we are fully

forgiven for all the ways that we've fallen short, fully freed

from any need to prove ourselves to be good enough, fully

accepted into God's promise of perfect justice and peace.

And while we're on this earth in this human condition, right,

we're called to be beacons of this good news by choosing to

walk and talk like Jesus as best we can.

Because when we do, the light of God's goodness breaks forth like

the dawn and obliterates the darkness that plagues us all the

time, whether it's in your own mind or just like surrounding

you when you're like reading the news or just, you know what I

mean? That like darkness that we're

just like so overwhelmed by sometimes as Christians, we're

called not to just wait it out until that final day, until

God's long term vision is fulfilled.

This lice until that end is not just twiddling our thumbs and

like waiting in this malaise, God granted each of us free will

because our day-to-day decisions are a key part of that vision.

God shapes us through our choices and he didn't even have

to include us in his work, but he did.

And while it can be challenging to follow through at times, for

sure, the light, the healing, the goodness that we get to

witness. And I know many of them in here

have witnessed this right. It's so beautiful, it's so

empowering. And God has our fronts and

backs. Your righteousness shall go

before you. The glory of the Lord shall be a

rear guard. And as I read through the rest

of God's promise, I want you to receive it as His promise to you

personally. Verse 9 Then you shall call, and

the Lord will answer you. You shall cry, and he will say,

here I am. Do you believe that that God

will answer your call? Maybe you'll hear God's voice

audibly, but more likely you'll feel it right.

Something settled and known deep in you that's worth wanting, is

worth pursuing. If you take away the yoke from

your mist, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness,

if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of

the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and

your gloom be as a noonday. So much of our malaise comes

from feeling helpless, aimless and paralyzed.

And God's answer is not for us to wallow in it, as sometimes

I'm tempted to do. It is to act specifically,

outwardly, on behalf of someone else.

And that's what moves us from gloom to light.

But I want to pause here 'cause I know many of you are already

doing this work, and you are tired.

God sees you, and God's promise is liberating for you too.

Because we are not the light source.

God is. And a candle doesn't generate

its own flame. You know that.

It carries 1. And when we try to be the source

rather than the carrier, we burn out, we burn our own reserves.

That's striving, fixing, doing in our own strength.

So self-care is not selfish. Rest is not lazy.

Sabbath is not optional. I'm still working on that one.

Being in community with people who nurture you, allowing

yourself to be cared for in addition to doing the caring.

Those are not indulgent. They are how the candle stays

lit and the text asks us to pour ourselves out for the hungry.

It doesn't ask us to fix world hunger, right?

It asks us to satisfy the desire of the afflicted person in front

of you. Not every afflicted person

everywhere. And that distinction is not a

loophole, it's a mercy. So let's lessen each other's

burdens, put down the finger pointing the bitterness, the

words that diminish despite seeing that all the world

everywhere, and trust that the God who makes his promise is

already ahead of us and behind us in the doing of it.

And the promise continues verse 11 and the Lord will guide you

continually and satisfy your desire in scorched, also

translated as in drought places and make your bones strong and

you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water

whose waters do not fail. For those of us who have been

living inside the bubble, the Christian bubble, the comfort

bubble, the bubble of people who look and think like us, it's

worth considering how these bubbles can be places of

drought, right? And like, in what ways have

these bubbles limited our growth?

We know that growth comes from struggle, not complacency and

ease, right? We need to challenge ourselves

in order to grow as Christians. We need to burst that bubble of

comfort and familiarity in order to let the light free to shine.

And God promises to guide us and satisfy us, to strengthen us in

that. So for those of us paralysed and

overwhelmed, when we scroll the news, when we feel the weight of

the city, this country and things that are happening in the

world, hear this. And your ancient ruins, verse

12, shall be rebuilt, and you shall raise up the foundations

of many generations. You shall be called the repair

of the breach, the restore of streets.

To dwell in this is beautiful because it's a promise of

restoration. As we burst our bubbles and get

proximate. We are rebuilding God's Kingdom

along with him, and we as a church can do that together.

How amazing it would be if we can invite people in and they

can dwell and sit here and feel loved and known.

So let's do it. Let's shine God's light, get

proximate, maybe get a little uncomfortable and push ourselves

to get out of this bubble that we're in.

Amen.