[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy. This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Good morning.
For those of you who don't know, my name is Jason Coker. I'm one of the co lead ministers here along with Janelle. We have been working through a series called the Prophetic Imagination. Lately. We've been doing this for a few weeks now where we have been looking at Hebrew scripture in particular. But we actually started out in Luke with a passage about John the Baptist. And Claire preached on the passage from Luke about John the Baptist and said that John the Baptist, sort of a stereotypical, kind of like the, the, the typical Hebrew prophet. And she said, one of the things we can learn from John the Baptist is that prophets, when they come, they tend to come from the wilderness. So we've been leaning into that sort of theme that the prophetic, whenever it's present in a religious community or in society, tends to come in from the outside, right? Tends to come in from the cold, tends to come in from the edges, the margins of society. That that's where critique and observations about how our society is doing and where it's going tend to come from. And that's an important thing for us to lean into because those margins, those edges of society tend to be occupied by the people who are harmed by the centers. They tend to be occupied by the people who have been oppressed or disregarded or marginalized by those in power. And so prophets, we see, tend to come from there. And we saw that that was true last week when I told you that in addition to sort of coming from the wilderness, that prophets also tend to exhibit a kind of courageous imagination. And I put forward the idea that Moses, sort of the greatest prophet in all of Judaism because as my rabbi friend in San Diego says, because Moses was willing to say no to God, because on the mountaintop when God said, let's be done with these idol worshiping people, just you and I go and start over again, I'll slaughter them and eradicate them. Moses said no.
Now actually he was more tactful than that, right?
Sort of convinced and cajoled God. And I said that this passage demonstrates that religion at its best, certainly Judaism and Christianity at their best, are traditions that don't teach us to be Automatons to just obey authority no matter what, but rather teach us when it's right to obey and when it's wrong to obey, when we need to stand up to authority. And because Moses was willing to stand up to God, that that is part of our tradition. And so I said, the courageous imagination is a. Or, excuse me, the prophetic imagination is a courageous imagination.
Today I want to skip from Moses ahead to Isaiah. Take a look at Isaiah, chapter two, and we're going to learn, hopefully a little something else about what the prophetic imagination looks like. Before we do, I wonder if you would pray with me just briefly. God, we thank you for today, for this time in this space.
We thank you that in the midst of busyness and anxiety and uncertainty about the future of our communities and our. Our jobs, our faith and even our nation, that you have afforded us this time and space to slow down and to lift our voices, to offer our prayers, to give our hearts and minds to be shaped by you. We pray that you would accomplish that work in us today in a fresh way. In Jesus name, amen.
Isaiah, chapter 2, verses 1 through 5 is our passage for today. If you don't have your Bible, we'll have it up there on the screen. It says this. The word of Isaiah, son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in days to come. The mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills, and all the nations shall stream to it. Now, this is Isaiah's great vision of what's possible. It's the second chapter. The first chapter of Isaiah unpacks a bit more doom and gloom and frankly, the entire book of Isaiah, which is probably composed of three. Three long books stitched together later by interpreters. That entire book is a pretty grim prophetic book, but it does contain these bits and pieces, these images of a better future. And I think this 1, Isaiah, chapter 2, verses 1 through 5, is a particularly powerful example of the prophetic imagination. So what we see happening here is Isaiah's sort of poetic construction of this image of the future that he foresees.
Picking it up again in verse three, says, many people shall come to this mountain. He means many people shall come and say, come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.
For out of Zion shall go forth instructions and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war anymore.
This is, I think, a powerful and provocative sort of poetic utterance by the prophet Isaiah. And it's important to understand, I think, what's happening here and why. This is a great example of what we're calling prophetic imagination. What's happening in this time and place in history is that the Assyrians, which are a neighboring kingdom, have grown very powerful and they're beginning to move west. They're starting to conquer all the people in their path and assimilate them. And this is new territory for the Israelites. Since leaving Egypt, since making that migration towards their homeland, since establishing their promised land, they have, for the most part, enjoyed relative success. Now, there are, of course, lots of battles for them along the way, lots of problems along the way, and. And we see, you know, lots of that unpacked in other passages of Scripture. But up to this point, they haven't faced the kind of threat that they're facing in the Assyrian kingdom.
And what Isaiah does is comes along and says, hey, yeah, there's this conquering force coming from your east, and you really should be concerned because you're going to be conquered.
And this is where our story begins to stray a bit into divine judgment, which I know, I know this is a progressive church. We don't talk about judgments, but Isaiah is about judgment.
And so how we make sense of that is partly through this utterance in chapter two.
But zooming back for a moment again, without getting into a very quick Bible study on the entire book of Isaiah, it's important to understand that God is bringing judgment against God's people here. And the judgment is this, you're going to be conquered by Assyria. It's going to happen, and it's going to be terrible.
In fact, most of the book of Isaiah is about predicting just how terrible it's going to be.
That's the judgment. The crime, if you read the rest of Isaiah, is have worshiped the wrong thing.
Now, it's important, I think, to understand that the biblical concept of worship, the. The ancient Hebrew concept of worship, and even the Christian concept of worship early on at least, is this idea of what we most highly value, what we most care about, what we hold up to be most good and true and worthy of giving our lives to, of devoting ourselves to God's judgment says that because you have worshiped the wrong thing, you are Suffering under judgment.
Now, God is not saying that they have decided to worship for, say, the wrong religious team. And this is often what we make of worship today.
They're like religious teams, right? There's, like, you know, the Jews over here and the Christians over here, and there's the Muslims over here. And now we've got to, like, throw in the atheists, too. They're like a whole nother, like, religious team. And we're all, like, competing against each other for, like, who's got the best team and who's going to win. In the cosmic battle of religions on the world.
And in Christianity, we tend to say, you got to join our team, otherwise you're going to burn in hell, you're going to suffer under the judgment of God, and all kinds of terrible things are going to happen to you. And we come up with all kinds of innovative ways of enticing you to join our team, like telling you that if you join our churches or give us money or wear our T shirts or download our apps, then you will be blessed by God and you'll get lots of money. Or at least we'll give you a free iPad if you visit us for the first time and fill out a connection card.
I'm sorry to tell you there are no free iPads at the Oceanside Sanctuary.
I think it's important to understand that when God in Isaiah is bringing judgment to God's people, it's not because they have worshiped the wrong brand.
It's not because they aren't wearing the right T shirt.
It's not because they aren't reading the right translation of the Bible. It's not because they haven't ascribed to the right set of doctrines.
Well, actually, kind of. It is that what God is saying is that you have failed to live into your vocation, your purpose as my people.
So we have the judgment, we have the crime, and we have the evidence. The evidence in the book of Isaiah that they are worshiping the wrong thing is this. It's that they have oppressed the poor.
They've oppressed the poor.
If you want to know if you're worshiping the wrong God, just look to how you treat the poor.
I love. You know, Gustavo Gutierrez was a liberation theologian and a Catholic priest, and for most of his life, hated by the Catholic Church for being a liberation theologian and all kinds of reasons for that. And some of you know perfectly well who Gustavo Gutierrez is. He died just last year.
But one of his famous sayings is, oh, you say you love the poor, Then tell Me, what are their names?
His point, of course, is that to be the people of God, to be followers of Jesus, and very much so, to be Jewish, to be Hebrew, to be a part of the people of God, meant that the God you serve orients you to a life of caring for the least in your community.
And that is what it means to worship the right God.
It doesn't mean to be baptized in the right denomination. It doesn't mean to ascribe to the right kinds of doctrinal statements. And you sign your name on it doesn't mean any of these things. What it means is that you exhibit a life that demonstrates that you are committed to helping those who have been oppressed and marginalized and exploited.
And so this is ultimately Isaiah's judgment on behalf of God for the people of God is that they have failed to be the people of God. And the evidence is that they oppress the poor.
And because of that, because they've failed to care for the poor, they're being conquered. There's a very interesting thing to explore there, like, if you're a society or a culture or a church or a city, the idea that if you fail to help and care for and take care of the people who are hurting the most in your community, that you're weakening your society to the point where it's vulnerable to being conquered.
There's a very memorable way of describing how this works, how, like, you know, if you live the kind of life that treats people terribly, then you are vulnerable to being conquered. Later, if you create a culture in which the poor are not cared for, then you're vulnerable to being conquered. And that phrase is, the chickens have come home to roost.
Right now, Tindo is like, not the chickens again, Pastor Jason. The chickens. I know, like, 20. In 20, 24, we got backyard chickens for the first time in, like, you know, 15 years after wanting to do it. And here's the thing. I've learned all kinds of things about these sayings that actually are true. Like, the chickens actually come home to roost, you guys.
And this is like a baffling mystery to me. How do they know? How do they know that at the same time, every night they go back to their little chicken house? And here's what's so incredible about it. In our very fancy chicken house, we have an automatic door. So when the sun reaches a certain point on the horizon, the door automatically shuts. It shuts. The chickens don't shut it. And yet somehow they all make it back into the house before the automatic DOOR SHUTS how do they know how to do this? I have spent afternoons watching through the window and looking at the time, trying to figure out, do they go back in at the same time? No, they don't. Sometime around late afternoon, they start to, like, accumulate on the steps because, you know, there's like, a ladder. That's another mystery. How do chickens climb ladders?
I don't know, but they do. And next thing you know, like, around 5:00, there's like four rungs to the ladder. And every ladder is occupied by a chicken because we have, you know, five chickens. Yeah, I double check over here, we have five chickens. And so they're always jockeying for that bottom rung on the ladder.
That saying that, you know, chickens have come to roost originated in a poem in 1805 by an English poet named Richard Southby, who wrote an epic poem that borrows heavily from Hinduism, actually.
And the saying goes like this. Curses are like baby chickens. They always come home to roost.
What the saying means, of course, is whatever you put out into the world comes back.
I'll bet you've found that to be true, that however you treat people, that that has something to do at some point in the future with how they treat you.
Well, it turns out that the people of God had failed in their vocation because instead of blessing those who needed to be blessed, they cursed them.
And those curses were coming back in the form of the Assyrians.
I just love how Pope Francis lately, yes, this is a Protestant church, but Pope Francis is pretty good, as Catholic popes go.
And he's taken for the last couple years to describing the kingdom of God like this. He says, the kingdom of God, when it comes, is a revolution of tenderness.
And I just love the way that he characterizes that, because we tend to think of kingdoms not as tenderness, but as coercion, as force, as violence. And of course, Jesus was using that phrase ironically, the kingdom of God, because God's kingdom is utterly unlike other kingdoms. It's not coercive, it doesn't have a standing army. It is a kingdom whose power is tenderness.
And so in the midst of that, Isaiah imagines that when the kingdom of God comes, that it will be an utterly different kind of society, that it will be a society of education, a society of information sharing, that it will be a society where people sow peace instead of violence, that it will be a society that this is the one that gets me. Beats its swords into plowshares and its spears into pruning hooks.
And this I think is the incredible act of prophetic imagination.
And not just because this is like a beautifully structured poetic statement. Like in those days, all nations will stream to this center of education and knowledge and learning, and they will learn from each other and they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Like that is not just an incredible poetic construction. It's not just like this vivid idea that's easily stuck in our imaginations. It actually conveys something incredible.
That a good society is one that's willing to take its weapons of war and convert them into weapons of agriculture.
That it's willing to take its implements of death and destruction and turn them into tools for growing food to feed people.
That is an amazing act of imagination.
And the reason I think it's amazing is because this isn't how we live. Our society is not built on an idea of peace. We are stuck in a binary, especially in the United States. I think we are stuck in a binary of conflict.
Competition is our highest value. It's what we worship in this country.
We actually think competition makes us better. We have an entire economic system built on the idea we do everything according to the God of competition. Our politics are built on it. Our religions are built on it. Our economics is famously built on the notion that competition makes everybody and everything better. And we raise our children in it.
Most of us, when we have young children or had young children, whatever stage of life you're in, spent enormous amounts of time shuttling them from one sports competition to the next.
And I'm aware that today of all days is the day that we revel in the glory of sports competition.
We've even turned our appeals of commercialism at the halftime of that event into its own kind of competition.
So this is why I think his imagination is amazing. Because Isaiah breaks out of the binary of win or lose, he finds a different way.
Shalom breaks out beyond the binary of win or lose. It imagines something bigger than simply the absence of conflict.
Shalom is not the Monday through Saturday between the big game, right? The moment of rest when we are neither winners nor losers. Like we're practicing to be winners or losers. Shalom imagines an entirely different kind of life. One where we are devoted and committed to the goodness, the life and the well being of everyone.
And this, I think, is harder than competition. I think it's harder than war.
I think it's easier to imagine that our problems can be solved by winning, by force, by violence. And it also satisfies that little. Itch we have inside of us to get a bit of vengeance.
War is easier than farming.
Domination is easier than cooperation. Condemnation is easier than compassion.
So I think what Isaiah teaches us, among many other things, is that the prophetic imagination, including being sort of from the wilderness and also being courageous because it's willing to defy authority when necessary. I think the prophetic imagination is a liberated imagination.
It's been cut loose from the constraints of the binaries that our culture always wants to trap us in.
The prophetic imagination says no. Winning or losing. Those are not the only options.
We can all thrive. We can all succeed. We can all have goodness.
And so I think that's our task. I think our task is to have liberated imaginations. This is the imagination of not just the prophet, but the poet and the artist.
Artists do this.
Artists tap into a divine inspiration that raises them above the binaries of our society and sees entirely new possibilities.
And so, on that note, I want to offer you some tips.
To be a prophet, to be a poet, to be an artist in this current cultural and historical moment, I think means at least four things. First, it means to retreat, get out of town, run from the centers of power, maybe literally or maybe figuratively, whatever it is that you have to do to put yourself on the margins, on the outskirts, in the wilderness of society, just like prophets. That's, I think, what we desperately need.
And so maybe, like Janelle and I, that means piling into your travel trailer and hitching it up to your, you know, your truck that has a very big carbon footprint and, you know, towing it out into the middle of the desert for a few days and just staring at the stars, which I hope is what we will be doing at some point in March, staring at lights that are not LEDs, finding some space from that madness.
And the good news is, number two, that means rest.
And I know this sounds counterintuitive, but at this moment.
And I won't get into this too much, because we'll unpack this more in future weeks, but at this moment, I know it's counterintuitive, but you need rest.
And it's okay to rest.
You probably feel exhausted, and that's half the point.
So rest is necessary. Rest is resistance.
And then in that space, I think, just like Isaiah, just like Moses, just like the other prophets that we will explore in this series, when you're in that space in the wilderness and you have time to breathe and to rest, it's time to dream.
You don't have to get on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok and engage in the battle.
You don't have to be stuck in the binary of winning or losing.
It's better, I think, to dream new possibilities, to have new possibilities to offer people, to say, yeah, yeah, I hear all of that, but what if.
What if we could turn our guns into spades and grow food for hungry people?
Because as we heard earlier today, like hunger is a form of intentional oppression and feeding the hungry is a form of liberation.
And then once you've dreamt that up, it's time to create.
Write a song, paint a picture, write a poem.
It doesn't have to be any good.
Cooperate with each other and collaborate with each other to make something beautiful, something that stands for a better world.
I think we all have that capacity, every one of us.
I believe that you have that capacity.
I believe this church has that capacity.
I believe people, humans have that capacity. We have the capacity to be good and imaginative and creative for the well being of everyone.
Starting with the poor, the least, the last and the lost.
Amen. Would you pray with me? God, we thank you for today, for this opportunity for us to visit these texts and be stretched and challenged by them, for our imaginations to be sparked. We pray by your grace and your goodness that you would fill our imaginations with good possibilities now, whether we are researchers or business owners or educators or elected officials, that you would liberate us and our imaginations from the binary of winning or losing and being stuck in that competition that leads us down a path where some just inevitably have to suffer.
We ask that you give us an imagination for shalom, for peace, for goodness, for all people in our communities.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in to learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
[email protected] We hope to see you again soon.
