The Peripatetic Preacher
I have doing a good bit of thinking over this election season about leadership. The utter and nearly complete lack of leadership during the monstrous and growing COVID- 19 pandemic from those we look to for help, namely from the president and his administration, has been so egregious that some have claimed that many thousands who have died from the virus did so needlessly due to the void to be found in Washington, D.C. While the virus raged, Mr. Trump has been spending his time spouting baseless rumors about his election loss, claiming vast ballot dumps, voting machine tinkering, even implicating his own intelligence community and judicial departments of aiding a huge conspiracy to deprive him of a second term. When he is not bloviating, he is golfing. Meanwhile, many US Americans continue to sicken and many to die. Trump’s lack of leadership has been nothing less than deadly.
How is that for a gloomy word as we begin the season of Christmas, that is the liturgical season of Christmas? I imagine many of you have already pulped your tree and boxed the decorations. Yet, liturgically we are in the season of Christmas. And Trump is still president, offering few signs of leadership to a hurting nation. For many of us, indeed a majority, if the votes were correctly tabulated, and they were, Jan.20 cannot come soon enough, as Mr. Trump and his minions return from whence they came.
How different are the joyous glad shouts of the prophet Isaiah, or at least a prophet who is given the name Isaiah, perhaps writing in the 5th century BCE. He announces the grand deliverance of YHWH, a deliverance wrought by YHWH’s servant (Is.61:1-3) as we saw in the third Sunday of Advent. Of course, for early Christians, this servant is none other than the Christ child who will grow to be the man Jesus who has come seeking to make the world whole once again. Isaiah’s poetry is rich and descriptive of a joy that only genuine leadership can engender.
Using a late Hebrew word for “rejoicing,” Isaiah begins by shouting, “I will joyfully rejoice in YHWH” (Is.61:10a). The fun is somewhat blunted by the English translation, since the Hebrew sounds like rejoicing: “sos a’sos,” hymns the poet, his sibilants singing to his God. “My entire life will exult in my God” (Is.61:10b). This is one time when the NRSV translators dare to avoid that older reading of nephesh as “soul,” in the attempt to capture the ultimate praise of God with one’s “whole being.” The reason for this glad praise is given in the next line: “Because God has clothed me with garments of deliverance, has covered me with a righteous robe” (Is.61:10c). That is to say that the God of Israel has offered to the servant clothes of salvation and righteousness, and as a result of that gift the servant is led to praise those gifts with unrestrained joy.
These gifts of salvation (deliverance) and righteousness are precisely what the coronation hymn Psalm 72 urges that God give to the new king of Israel. Israel was not finally interested in a king of glory and majesty, one who gloried in fine garments, huge palaces and fine temples. The people expected from their king what they believed their God had in abundance, namely righteousness and justice, a deep concern for the poor, a never-ending desire for the well being of the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. In short, what the people desired from their leaders was care for the whole community, for all those who made up the nation of Israel. Genuine leaders, they believed, wanted what was best for all the people, not just for the few, and gave their very lives for the welfare of others. Unfortunately, just as in our modern world, such kings were rarely forthcoming. Instead what they received were handsome disappointments like Saul, murderers and adulterers like David, potentates and idolaters like Solomon, and a string of poor and selfish and self-possessed rulers down through their entire history. They knew what leaders needed to be; they only on a few occasions glimpsed such leaders in reality.
Yet, even here late in the history of the land, almost certainly after the wrenching exile to Babylon and the disappointing return to the shattered land of Judah and the ruined city of Jerusalem, hope for true leadership remained alive within them. “Just as the earth brings forth its shoots, just as a garden causes its seeds to spring up, so will the Lord YHWH cause righteousness and praise to sprout before all nations” (Is.61:11). Despite the shattering chaos of Israel’s destruction, exile, and ragged return, yet Isaiah is convinced that the coming of God’s righteousness and its accompanying praise is as certain as the coming of the spring’s plants, as sure as the garden’s flowers.
Despite the nonsense and prevarications of the past four years, the revolving White House doors for a succession of poorly equipped and sycophantic members of the cabinet and advisors to the president, and despite the continuing refusal of that president to face the fact of his election loss, an election called by his own appointee “among the fairest in all of our history,” we US Americans continue to believe that righteousness’ appearance is as sure as grass in the spring, that our future can still be a better one, a hopeful one.
This fateful year of 2020 is about to end, but its ending holds within its trembling bosom a few signs of hope, several signs of the coming of righteousness. President-elect Biden and his history-shattering Vice-President, Kamala Harris, have begun to form a cabinet and those who will advise them. They are a fantastically diverse lot, including many women, many persons of color, all of whom have long and great and appropriate experience in the inner workings of government, who promise to bring fresh perspectives and new insights into the huge problems that our nation and world face. There is no guarantee that with them will come the promised “righteousness” that Isaiah hymned, but seeing their faces and histories, I am filled with hope. Isaiah’s glad poetry is for me a sign of my own heart’s lifting toward the future.
It is the Christmas season, and along with my hope in God, I sense a hope in my future that has been dampened over the past four years. Like Isaiah, I want to lift my praise to God, and to be grateful for the hope of a better future. For the sake of that future, like Isaiah, “I will not keep silent” (Is. 62:1), but will ring my praise to God who has not left me alone and adrift, but has offered to me deliverance and salvation. May your Christmas season likewise be filled with the hope of God whose light once again has broken over the world like the dawn.
(Images from Wikimedia Commons)
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