‘Then’

‘Then’ February 28, 2023

The lectionary reading for Ash Wednesday included Isaiah 58, but the passage was already buzzing around for weeks before then. That was because of reports of a revival at a Christian college in Kentucky. Whenever some people start talking about revival, other people will start quoting Isaiah 58.

This passage returns to a theme introduced in the very first chapter of Isaiah: a critique not just of “revival,” but of religion itself.

Break every. (Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán via Pexels)

Isaiah 1 purports to be a verbatim record of the voice of God. “The Lord has spoken,” the prophet writes, and “Hear the word of the Lord … the instruction of our God.” And then God starts talking, complaining, commanding, and instructing. First off, God says, enough already with the sacrifices and worship and holy days and praying. God calls all of these things “meaningless” and “detestable,” “wearying” and “unbearable.”

In the first chapter of Isaiah, God speaks and God tells us to stop praying until and unless we first start seeking justice:

When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
I am not listening.
Your hands are full of blood!
Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.

We can guess, or assume, that once we do start seeking justice and defending the oppressed it will once again be acceptable for us to pray. That seems to be the logic of the argument, right? Injustice makes our prayers detestable and tiresome, but if we pursue justice then maybe our prayers will again be desired and accepted by God.

Well … probably? After all, there are many other books in our Bibles and many of them contain passages asserting that God wants and commands us to pray and to worship, that God relishes these things.

But God never tells us anything like that here in Isaiah 1. Here, God pleads with us to stop praying and to instead seek justice. We can maybe infer that seeking justice, defending the oppressed, and championing the marginalized might also result in our being granted permission to resume praying and worshipping without God viewing those things as odious. But God doesn’t say that here. All that God says here, according to Isaiah, is that God cares infinitely more about justice and injustice than about any amount of prayer and worship.

That, in a nutshell, is Isaiah’s critique of religion: Seek justice or else it’s all just a waste of time that infuriates God. Elsewhere in the book the prophet describes God as condemning false religion and idolatry, but never with quite the vehemence as these passages condemning prayer and worship mixed with an indifference to injustice. One gets the sense that God would actually prefer we pester those other gods with our prayers and worship than to dare to approach the true God, the God who brought you out of Egypt, while disregarding justice for the oppressed.*

Which brings us back to that Ash Wednesday reading from Isaiah 58. Here again, Isaiah tells us, we have God speaking to us directly:

Day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
“Why have we fasted,” they say,
“and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?”
Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.

The word “revival” is not a biblical word, but it refers to a biblical idea. The desire for “revival” is what God describes here in Isaiah 58: “They seek me out” and “seem eager to know my ways,” God says. And so they pray and they worship and they bow their heads and fast in sackcloth and ashes. But none of that matters because they remain glibly unconcerned with injustice, with feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless and the refugee.

This is why Isaiah 58 has become the standard go-to passage for progressive types in response to every discussion of “revival.” It seems like that classic modern, liberal, progressive move of flattening the vertical aspects of religion into the horizontal, of elevating the natural above the supernatural and immanentizing the transcendent. But this isn’t some modern liberal talking here — it’s God talking in a 2,500-or-so-year-old book of revered scripture. And the argument here in Isaiah is echoed throughout the prophets and in 1 John, and in James, and in the Gospels and in Paul’s epistles.

The book of Amos parallels Isaiah’s critique of religion as an odious, intolerable distraction from justice:

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

There again God is speaking and God is saying that prayer and worship are despicable. Stop babbling, shut up and get to work seeking justice for the poor. Otherwise you’re doomed and damned and all of your pious worship and prayer will be detestable to God. That’s what Isaiah and Amos are saying and that’s what Isaiah and Amos are saying that God is saying.

So this isn’t merely some “progressive” critique of revival, it is — according to the Bible — the divine critique of revival. It is God’s own explanation of God’s own evaluation of revival.

But there’s a trap here. We encounter this divine response through the lens of revivalism and that skews our perception. We read Isaiah and Amos as telling us that legitimate revival will bear fruit by leading us to “seek justice” and “defend the oppressed.” And so we think of justice as the fruit of revival and, therefore, seek justice by seeking revival. Day after day we seek it out, eager to know its ways. We bow our heads and fast and offer many prayers in the hopes that revival will come, bringing with it, at last, the justice that God desires and demands for the poor, the neglected, and the oppressed.

Revivalism teaches us to see an outbreak of fervent prayer and worship and to say, “We’ll see if this is really revival by whether or not it leads to greater justice.” It teaches us to seek revival and to hope that it will be the kind of true revival that results in seeking justice.

But that, according to Isaiah, is backwards. Justice is not the fruit of revival; revival is the fruit of justice.

Isaiah 58 describes a sequence, an order, a chronology of cause and effect. “Set the oppressed free … break every yoke” and then the revival you seek will come. Then, then, then, then — God says this four times. This and then that. If you do this, then that will follow. “Then you will call, and the Lord will answer.” But not before then. Not until then.

Our mythology of revivalism tricks us into reversing that if-then. It makes us imagine that the first thing we need to do is call and await the Lord’s answer, and that then — after our healing quickly appears and after our light rises in the darkness — we can begin, at last, to seek justice and to start to learn to do right. Backwards. Isaiah says it doesn’t work that way. Isaiah says that God says it doesn’t work that way.

So, OK, but does it really work the way Isaiah and God claim it does? Are there any real-world examples of the cause-and-effect sequence of justice-then-revival that they describe?

I think there are, although admittedly such examples are extremely rare.

Jamaica experienced an astonishing revival that bore all of the hallmarks of the great, sweeping phenomenon of spiritual renewal that Christians dream of when we use that word. During a seven-year stretch beginning in 1838, tens of thousands of new converts were baptized, churches doubled in size, and dozens of new churches sprang into being. One missionary alone, William Knibb, personally baptized more than 6,000 new believers. (For perspective, the entire population of Jamaica at the time was less than 400,000.)

And all of that revival was the consequence of precisely the kind of yoke-breaking, chain-loosing, hungry-feeding, homeless-sheltering seeking after justice that Isaiah 58 commands. Here’s how I described this Jamaican Great Awakening a few years ago:

The mass-conversions and explosive church growth of that revival began in 1838, but the whole thing started, really, in 1831.

That was the year of the Baptist Rebellion — the general strike turned into a slave uprising led by Knibb’s friend, the enslaved lay-preacher Samuel Sharpe, and organized in Baptist churches throughout Jamaica. It was brutally suppressed by the slave-holding white plantation owners, with Sharpe and hundreds of others slaughtered, followed by months of terroristic retribution in which the official slavery-supporting churches of the colony formed “Colonial Church Union” mobs that burned down Baptist churches across the island.

Knibb’s church was among those destroyed. The plantation owners hated him, blaming him for the uprising due to his years of preaching against slavery, his empowerment of black pastors and deacons, and his lawsuits against slave-owners who cruelly abused their workers. He was arrested and narrowly escaped a plot to murder him before he returned to England where he campaigned ferociously for the abolition of slavery in British colonies, rallying support for the Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833.

He returned to Jamaica and began rebuilding the Baptist churches there, commissioning formerly enslaved Jamaicans to serve as pastors and leaders. And that is when the great revival began — when thousands came to be baptized, when the Baptist churches of Jamaica grew by the thousands, spawning dozens more throughout the country. …

The revival wasn’t mainly the result of anything William Knibb did from 1838 through 1845. It was mainly the result of all that he had and so many others had done from 1824 through 1833.

Seek justice. And then.


* I read through the entire book of Isaiah, many times over, before understanding any of this. I read through the book several times over without ever seeing it there at all. If you’d asked me back then — back in church youth group, plowing through my third straight Read The Whole Bible In A Year excursion — what the book of Isaiah was about I would’ve talked about avoiding idol worship and rising up with wings as eagles and messianic prophecies I connected with the Christmas story. I’d have talked about Dallas Holm’s “I Saw the Lord” and the need to keep my lips and thoughts and heart purified as though by burning coals.

I didn’t seem capable of seeing what I was reading until years later, after some upstart liberal had suggested there was some meaning I’d been missing and I went back to the text angrily determined to prove them wrong.

Perhaps the best introduction to the book of Isaiah, at least for modern white Christian American readers, is Frederick Douglass’ great sermon centered around Isaiah 1: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Edit that title to read “What to the Slave is Your Revival?” and you’ll have a richer understanding of what that word does and doesn’t mean in the eyes of that great prophet. (I’ve lost track here of whether “that great prophet” refers back to Isaiah or to Douglass, but either way works.)

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