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January 24, 2020 - January 12, 2021
would not be in a hurry. There is a leisurely quality to this first page of Genesis, a lot of repetition—God as subject (thirty-five times), God in action (created, said, made, called, saw, set, blessed, finished, rested, let there be, and it was so). And then the verdict, the final stamp of approval placed on every item of creation: good (eight times) and the final good given the emphasis very good. The numbered days, one through seven, provide a rhythmic, ordered structure: everything in order, nothing haphazard, nothing unintentional.
But both beauty and holiness are perpetually in short supply. Beauty is commonly trivialized in our culture, reduced to decoration, equated with the insipidities of pretty or nice. But beauty is not an add-on. It is not an extra. It is not what we attend to when we have a break from necessity. Beauty is fundamental. It is the evidence of and witness to the inherent wholeness and goodness of things. It is life in excess of what we can manage or make on our own.
When our senses dull and our attention wavers, writers and singers and artists grab us by the ears and say, “Look, listen, feel. Embrace and respond to Life within and around you!” That is what the praying poet of Psalm 29 is doing.
Friends, this is going on all the time. Mostly all we need to do is look and listen, touch and taste. Not infrequently our senses dull; we get distracted and need apostolic help. If we are lucky, an artist or writer or singer or child or pastor shows up with the image or word or song that connects us with the life right before us. If we’re very lucky, this apostle will be at home with both the outside and inside of life, the beauty and the holiness, and before we know it, we are again in on it, worshiping—worshiping the Lord in the beauty of holiness.
Preaching in the company of Isaiah we develop a comprehensive imagination. A new term, globalization, has been coined to account for the interconnection of everything and everyone. We are now required “to realize that who ‘we’ are is nothing less than everyone.”* I prefer the more explicit term of Jesus—“kingdom of God”—an imagination that includes all under the rule of God, all nations and peoples and times in this together.
In fresh ways we are learning to enter into the interconnectedness of everything and not just as disparate things but into the primacy of relations. Preaching in the company of Isaiah puts us in good company. Prophets expand our imaginations beyond our sectarian identities. Wendell Berry, one of our better contemporary prophets, continues to insist how important it is to have a sense of including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water and air, the stones and humans. All ultimately are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in
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But—now listen to me carefully—Jesus, by healing the blind and deaf and dumb and lame, makes sure we do not misinterpret Isaiah 35 by spiritualizing it, making poetic figures of it, symbolizing defects in our character. But Jesus also, by not healing all the blind and deaf and dumb and lame, makes sure we will not misinterpret Isaiah 35 by secularizing it, short-cutting God’s purposes by trying to fix in our own strength all that ails the world and us. The wholeness will be the wholeness of the entire new creation brought to a redeemed finish. Every hour of every day we live is a word or
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Eliphaz is the first friend. He begins his speech with a ghost story: “A spirit glided past my face; the hair of my flesh stood up” (4:15). Out of this came a message, supposedly with the authority of the supernatural behind it. Eliphaz finds that the source of Job’s trouble is obviously sin. His reasoning goes like this: sin causes suffering, Job is suffering, therefore Job is a sinner.
