November 2, 2007
St Isaiah
All Saints Sunday 2007
Somehow, come All Saints Day and its ambiance (we once kept it as an octave, remember?), I feel a sort of twinge for the Old Testament prophets. I wish they got more attention any time, but especially this time of the liturgical year.
I know God-in-Her-heaven easily includes them among the calendar of saints, but somehow, I never hear of the church following suit. There’re lots of St Whosits and St Whatsits and the like, but whoever heard of the Church of St Isaiah?
There’s a kind of imposed holiness we ladle all over the common calendar saints that is somehow always missing from the prophets. I don’t want to be misunderstood, and I know the saints probably make better dinner companions, but I think we should include more prophets in our celebrations, especially during these days. Indeed, the New Covenant says we’re all saints. I’d just like to hear us show a bit more appreciation for the prophets.
It’s not fair to the saints, of course, that we tend to stereotype them like Dorothy Sayers said we stereotype Jesus as household pets for little old ladies and pale curates. For my money, the saints are all spiritual major hitters in their own way, some, borderline if not downright pungently prophetic. But it’s those brass plate prophets that jerked Old Testament satraps around that I miss. Where are they when we need them most?
There’s plenty of work for them to do. Take civil disobedience, for example. Methodist theologian Walter Wink suggests that present-day civil disobedience when true to its form is a modern form of exorcising daemons. And he has a special name for them. Instead of St Paul’s “principalities and powers” and the “mighty” the Virgin Mary would have cast from their thrones, he calls them “domination systems.”
You’ll recognize the type. The war-makers. We know them as the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against. The desert-makers, those whose greed disregards our stewardship for the earth. The hunger-makers who disdain the poor and in doing so forget that it is God’s grace not our merit that redeems us. And of course, the sexists who put down women at every turn. All these, according to Wink, are functioning and devastating systems of domination that literally force us to cry out.
Jesus took that famous text from Isaiah when he preached about these systems: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,” he said, “because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn… ” (Is 61.1f). Our new Presiding Bishop frequently reminds us how these words define and shape the church’s ministry for these times.
Maybe we don’t recall such indictments so readily when we celebrate the season of All Saints. There’s a sweetness-and-light avoidance of risk-taking when we conjure up the saints and rarely give a thought to corporate welfare or the devastating military-industrial budgets or the over 40 million of us who have no health insurance. Maybe we might. Maybe we churchers could reach deeper into our tradition and call up the prophets, indeed, call out the prophets of our time not to predict our future, but to indict our present, and what-is-more to join with our Lord in his first sermon from Isaiah. Then we could truly include and celebrate ALL the saints.
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