2/9/20 “Ritual or Right Relationship” by Nancy E. Petty

Isaiah 58:1-9a, 12

For many of us, it has been a hard and discouraging week. Those of us who have a certain perspective and understanding of our American democracy are wrestling with feelings of despair, disbelief, and anger. We listened Tuesday night to a State of the Union address that was more like a reality TV show than the time-honored ritual of our political institution. On Wednesday, we watched as our nations’ elected leaders acquitted the president of impeachment charges–charges that were proven to be true, charges that clearly violated the oath of the office of the president of the United States. Even by admission, those voting to acquit the president didn’t deny that he pressured a foreign country, withholding aid for his own political gain. And before the events of Tuesday and Wednesday, on Monday we watched with disbelief as the Iowa Caucus was thrown into a crisis over errors and inconsistences in the results of the Iowa primary.

While we are distracted with these headlines, states all across the nation are enacting regressive policies on voting rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and basic human rights. Legislative sessions all over the country are weakening public education, food assistant programs for the poor, and environmental protections for our earth. Just this week it was reported that the temperature in Antarctica hit 64.9 degrees, the highest temperature ever recorded on the Continent. The record is startling because the last one was set just five years ago, and the new one is almost 1 degree higher. Our planet is in crisis.

Yesterday, as I marched with others in the annual HKonJ People’s Assembly Moral March a few folks commented to me that it was hard for them to get up and show up on a cold February morning to march for justice when justice doesn’t seem to matter in our nation right now. They expressed a deep feeling of fatigue and frustration that no matter what they do and how hard they advocate for a just and moral society it doesn’t seem to change the direction of our country. I understand that feeling. One person asked me: How do you do it? How do you keep showing up and keeping hope? What rapidly went through my mind when asked that question was something my mentor taught me. Mahan Siler used to say to me, “Nancy, the most important thing in life is to show up. If you show up, that’s half the work.” My second thought was, “We don’t think our way into having hope. We act our way into keeping hope.” The truth is that sometimes I lose hope. Not as much as I used to—I think that comes with age. I’m more able these days to keep the big picture in mind, even as I understand the grave damage that is being done in our country by a political party that is living and dying by racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, white privilege and the severe abuse of power. I hold to an image of hope that my brother William Barber gave me: that a dying mule kicks it’s hardest right before it dies. I hold to the hope that something new is being birthed; and I understand that birthing something new is painful and messy. I am more able these days to rely on a hope that is not dependent on external circumstances, but rather a hope that is lived out by faithful people who choose to rise early on a cold winter morning to march for justice. A hope that is lived out by a community that shows up on a Saturday evening for a talent show put on by kids in that community. A hope that is practiced in rituals of right relationship—of people taking care of one another, of young families inviting elders into their home for a meal, of a church that celebrates people living out their best and true lives as the gender they identify with rather than feeling like they have to conform to a false norm in order to come to church. I hold to hope that is practiced in rituals of right relationship—of a people who want to do more than just hand out food baggies and bus tickets but who want to sit around a table with food insecure and housing insecure human beings and hear their stories of struggle and discomfort, of a people who give of their time to tutor children who need a little extra help with school work, a people who see the value in gathering in sacred space to still pray and hold sacred space for God’s nudging instead of rituals that are simply routine, proper, sanitized, empty of meaning, expected, and require nothing of us.

Which brings me to our text from Isaiah 58. In this pericope, the prophet is called upon to speak to the people about their rituals. Having survived exile, the Israelites now find themselves in a time of rebuilding their lives and community. As they go about reestablishing their homeland, the people seem to believe that while they are doing all the right things, especially when it comes to keeping faith, it is God who has not been keeping faith. They think that by fasting they will please God and, in turn, God will bless them with prosperity. We can’t really judge them for this understanding, for they have been formed in this ancient practice, and shaped by the rituals of fasting and humbling oneself before God. Surely they must have thought if I show up on Sunday morning for worship, give my offering, listen to the prayers, amen the preacher ever once in a while, and take communion once a month I have fulfilled my duties as one of the faithful. So it must have been a shock to hear the prophet’s strong rebuke of these faithful acts. How could God not be pleased?

But it appears that God is not pleased, and God calls upon Isaiah to deliver that hard word. God doesn’t tell the prophet to go sit down with the people and have a quite conversation about their rituals. God doesn’t instruct the prophet to conduct a series of listening sessions or send out a survey or establish a task group to study their rituals. No, this is not a time for coddling, no time for sensitive speech. God tells the prophet with words plain and clear, “Shout! A full-throated shout! Hold nothing back—a trumpet-blast shout? Tell my people what’s wrong with their lives…”  Tell them that…

They’re busy, busy, busy at worship, and love studying all about me. To all appearances they’re a nation of right-living people—law-abiding, God-honoring. They ask me, “What’s the right thing to do?” and love having me on their side. But they also complain, “Why do we fast and you don’t look our way? Why do we humble ourselves and you don’t even notice?”

Well, here’s why: The bottom line on your ‘fast days’ is profit. You drive your employees much too hard. You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight. You fast, but you swing a mean fist. The kind of fasting you do won’t get your prayers off the ground. Do you think this is the kind of fast day I’m after: a day to show off humility? To put on a pious long face and parade around solemnly in black? Do you call that fasting, a fast day that I, God, would like?

This is the kind of fast day I’m after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families. Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The God of glory will secure your passage. Then when you pray, God will answer. You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’ (The Message Bible)

This is a God who is not messing around with empty rituals. This God is saying to us, “my fast is a whole new way of life and living.” It is a daily ritual of practicing right relationships, not a once a week ritual sitting in a sanctuary. God’s fast is no longer the periodic fast days that serve to punctuate the end of a week. Instead, fasting is a new set of relationships 7 days a week. The fasting that God is after is a daily fast from domination, blaming others, evil speech, ego-driven actions, entitlement to one’s privilege, and blindness to what harms others. It is a fasting to a daily life that practices building and nurturing right relationships for justice and equality, compassion, kindness, and generosity even when we are tired and frustrated and feel despair.

When the people choose this fast they experience light, healing, help and the presence of God. A just relationship with God requires a just relationship with each other. Our individual rituals of faith cannot be disconnected from our everyday lives and our relationships with one another. Only when our rituals nurture right relationships can we begin to repair the breach and restore the streets we live in and on. Isaiah 58 is calling us to such action, to repair the breaches around us and to restore the streets in our backyard. So this morning, I am sending out a call to action, a call to a ritual of right relationship with those who are our neighbors.

This week WRAL did a piece on students at North Carolina State University. The piece highlighted a recent study by a committee at NC State. Our own Sarah Bowen was on the committee. The study found that 14% of NCSU students experienced food insecurity at some point over the pervious month. It also found that 10% of NCSU students experienced homelessness at some point over the previous year. 14% food insecure. 10% housing insecure. These are our neighbors. These students, many of them coming from families of poverty, who are trying to lift themselves out of that poverty and make a better life from themselves and their families need our fast. These, my friends, are the literal streets we live in and on. Streets where college students—students who are at one of our elite universities—don’t have enough food to eat. Students who are couch surfing and living in cars. Is this not the fast God requires of us—to step out of our secure rituals and practice new rituals of right relationship with these students? Is this not the breach that God is asking us to repair in this moment? Surely God doesn’t need us to appoint a task committee or have listening sessions to decide how we want to respond in this moment. Is not the ritual we need to observe to go to the grocery store and buy every can of tuna, every jar of peanut butter, every pack of cheese in stock and donate it to the student grocery store where students can go and get the nourishment they need to excel in their studies? Is not the ritual we need to practice one of making a phone call to the university and asking for the person in charge of the new program to connect housing insure students with families who can host a student in their home for a semester? Do we not have a responsibility to help repair this breach and to restore these streets we live on? Now is not the time to hold back. Now is the time to shout, with a loud shout and with the sound of a trumpet, that God’s people at Pullen Memorial are ready to practice rituals that build right relationships with students at the university whose literal landscape we share.

This call to action is not about choosing who we support and who we don’t. This call to action is not suggesting that we stop helping one group of food and housing insecure people to help another group of food and housing insecure people. And this call to action is not naïve – I don’t believe that our jars of peanut butter are going to solve the undergraduate food insecurity problems at NC State, and if it did, we’d still have Shaw and Peace and Central and Wake Tech and Meredith and hundreds and thousands of more. What we need is right systems – to solve these problems as a larger people who cares for our larger society. But I can’t get that fix on a shelf today, and I can get peanut butter. Sometimes, we start with the problem in front of us. We start with the opportunity that is given to us. We start with the door that opens that may not lead to the grand prize, but gets us in proximity to the problems. We never lose sight of the big, systemic solutions, but we don’t wait on them either. 

This call to action is about a fast that understands that until that day when all of us have enough to eat and a safe place to live, none of us are secure, even though we might have out bellies full. And as long as there is a breach in our human relationships, there is repair work we must do. This, my friends, is ritual of hope. This is ritual that keeps us getting up on cold mornings to march for justice when the previous days have left us feeling despair. Our way of the mess we are in is to keep practicing rituals of right relationship with God and our neighbors. Today and in the days to come we are being called not be a people who despair but a people who hope. No doubt there will be days when hope seems dim, when you and we tire from our efforts because they seem not make any difference. Don’t give up. Keep practicing your rituals of building right relationships and I can promise you that the light/your/our light will eventually break forth like the dawn and healing will spring up in the most unexpected places. The ruins of our democracy will be rebuilt and God’s faithful people will be called the repairers of the breach and the restorers of the streets we live in.

I have a dream. I have a dream that all throughout this week people will bring jars of peanut butter, cans of tuna, packs of cheese, and cans of soup and that when we gather for our ritual worship next Sunday this chancel will be so full of food that we won’t be able to see the floor. Our hope can’t fix everything, but our hope can make a difference. May it be so!