Tag: work

A Hope of Woe

(c) Katherine E. Brown

And I said, ‘Woe to me! I am lost! For a man of unclean lips am I, and in the midst of a people of unclean lips I dwell, yet the King, the LORD of Hosts, my eyes have seen!’

Isaiah 6:5 [see Isaiah 6:1-13, NRSVUE]

In this season of headlines blaring crises and woe, I am avoiding Isaiah 6. It is unnerving to read of cities laid waste and houses uninhabited and the ground (‘adamah’) itself desolate, burned-over, bereft of its God-banished humans (‘adam’). It is unnerving to read of this expected destruction when the headlines seem to report so much of the same: not thoughtful husbandry of resources, careful culling of dead trees or pruning of unhealthy growth, but the slash and burn of an entire forest, heedless of where trees and branches fall, uncaring that the damage ripples beyond the immediate crash. Is there no good to nurture? In our time? In Isaiah’s? Where is the end? What is the goal?

To my ear, God’s tone is implacable. The LORD does not bluster but aims straight towards God’s end. Calls for someone to go, to proclaim, and thereby to accomplish, the hardening of people’s hearts and eyes and ears, lest they should see and hear and understand and turn again to the LORD (Isa 6:9-10), the LORD who is source of healing (Exod 15:26).

How is it that God should want to prevent this? Should call for one willing to be the agent of this hardening? Does the prophet know what he is volunteering for? He cried ‘Woe!’ in seeing his sin — starkly visible in the light of God’s holiness — and, reading, I realize the prophet’s cry is not undone by the touch of that hot coal, seraph-carried to his lips. The coal comes with the word that his sin is covered over, his iniquity turned away, but not that there is no more “woe!’ For when the prophet, purified and emboldened to speak in divine counsel, hears the task for which he has just offered himself, he cries out again: ‘Until when?’ (Isa 6:10). And learns that the work is longer than his lifetime, is a work that he himself will not accomplish, nor see accomplished. It is a work larger than human possibility.

Is this why the LORD reserves it to God-self, forecloses the possibility of premature return? Lest the people, turning, imagine that they have cleansed themselves, healed themselves, can be trusted with total control? Those who join house to house and field to field (Isa 5:8), who “acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of his right” (Isa 5:23) — these may share a portion of what they call their own, may make edits around the edges and imagine it is their righteousness working. As if individual acts of compassion are sufficient substitute for just society. Not them. We, us. For this, too, is part of the passage: the prophet does not cry his first woe in repudiation of others’ sin but in recognition of his own, and in kinship with his people. Isaiah’s glimpse of God gave him truer sight of himself: not one set apart from his nation’s sinfulness but one who has a part in it. Isaiah is convicted to speak of himself and people as one, and seemingly stricken with equal parts horror and awe, Isaiah cries Woe! That recognition — not ‘them’ but ‘we ourselves’ — begins the process of cleansing, allows Isaiah to speak to God, and after that, to speak for God. Even as hard word spoken judged Isaiah as much as the earth’s kings to whom he was subject.

We cannot save ourselves. God knows this. Isaiah learns this. In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw The King, the LORD of hosts. Isaiah has seen and spoken with The King, yet Isaiah cannot prevent Uzziah’s grandson Ahaz from right-sizing his foreign policy, piously refusing to rely on God (Isa 7), sending to the foreign empire Assyria for aid. Isaiah cannot keep Judah’s king, who should have been as ‘son’ to God (Psalm 2), submitting to be ‘son and servant’ to Assyria’s king (2 Kings 16:7), setting a foreign altar in God’s own sanctuary (2 Kings 16:10-16).

Isaiah cannot prevent any of this. Isaiah’s work, it turns out, is not to prevent it (lest Isaiah imagine that his work was effective to save?) but to prophesy nonetheless. To proclaim what fidelity looks like, to decry injustice and evil and oppression — even to write a record of the protest, of the call, of the need for God, and to seal that writing as a sign to the future (Isa 8). That seal signs both that the people did not, could not, save themselves, and the seal signs that there will be salvation.

Our burning-over is destruction. God’s burning-over leads to new seeds opening. The proclamation meanwhile is part of the work. I am not expected accomplish it; I am not excused from proclaiming it. It is my work to acknowledge my sinful part in the larger human ‘we’ (not us/them, but only us, all of us ‘like God,’ but not ourselves God). Recognize that kinship, cry out the Woe!, then attest to the possibilities that God intends.

Isaiah sees the LORD’s presence filling the house, the LORD’s glory filling the earth, and writes the vision so that others too can be filled. Filled with awareness of God’s holiness, awareness of our lack, and awareness that there is work to which we are summoned beyond that first Woe! Work which may fill us with, and for, God.

Psalm as Snow Day

photo by Katherine Brown

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‘Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them….

‘The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy.’

Psalm 111:2, 7, from Psalm 111, lectionary psalm for Jan. 31, 2021

Every week, I read the text — whichever text it is — a first time.  I will read it again and I will do research and I will read it yet again, seeking the spark that arcs across from the ancient word to my own world.  Sometimes flame flares so swift and strong and bright that words flow without much effort.  Sometimes the spark catches but smolders; there is something there, but I struggle to know it.  Sometimes there seems no spark at all, and I think I’ve chosen the wrong text of the lectionary four.  I worry at the words like a dog worrying at a bone, working that a spark might fly, worrying that this time none will.

Every week — or two — I read the text a first time.  Looking to see a light to see by.

The week I read Psalm 111, I immediately knew v.7 was the intended spark:  ‘The works of his hands are faithful and just.’  The works of God’s hand.  This is a phrase I’ve studied much and know well.  Humans are God’s handiwork.  This is where I would spend the week:  pondering my identity as a made-creature, my calling to be faithful and just.  With a sigh of satisfaction, I read the rest of the psalm, turned out the light, and settled to sleep, secure that verse 7 would spark.  I would gather the tinder — translations and lexicons and what commentaries I have — strike the text, watch it flare, tend the flame, and write the fire.

The tinder didn’t catch.  Because the text did not spark.  Because in the Hebrew, the predicate in v.7 is a pair of nouns:  ’The works of his hands truth and justice.’  The meaning shifted in my mind.  Not that God’s handiwork — otherwise unnamed — has the quality of being faithful or just but that God makes truth, God makes justice.  Truth.  Justice. These themselves are the works of the LORD.  The lexical study surprised.  I checked multiple translations hoping one would give me back the adjectives of the NRSV.  None did.  I felt bereft.  I had thought myself spoken of, or to, reminded of being God-made; reminded to be faithful and just.  ‘The works of his hands truth and justice.’  I felt as if a door had closed and shut me out of the psalm entirely.  I circled the psalm again.  Noting the way ‘works’ ties it together:  ‘works’ are great, are studied and delighted in; ‘works’ have power, are shown; ‘works’ are truth and justice; God’s instructions are ‘worked’ in truth; those who ‘work’ them gain understanding.  ‘Works’ are a definite thread; but do they connect to me?

Sunday snow came.  Monday snow came.  The ground was covered over.  The air moved with the falling of the flakes.  The world was transformed.  I had a snow day — entirely unexpected.  Entirely unexpected as well was the way the snow drew me out and into it.  Crunching across the ice-glazed, snow-covered grass.  Wanting to see and hold in my mind’s eye a picture of just snow and sky and trees.  Shades of gray, white to near-black.  Wanting to go deeply in.  Apart.  No houses, no cars, no wires, none of the messy interconnectedness that is human life in this close-in suburb.  Wanting to see the world that is not-us — deep green holly, dark cool evergreen, bare tree branches stretched out and up — all overlaid by this grace of snow — its shape and shading at once stark and soft, striking and subtle.  Other.

Snow day as Sabbath unexpectedly imposed, unexpectedly allowed.  Snow shifting the quality of the light.  I’d been reading for a spark to summon me to examination of self and world, to whatever next-work is needed (and so much next-work is needed).  I’d been following the thread in search of a knot to keep it from pulling loose.  Snow shifted my sight to show psalm and snow day were the same gift.  Stop tugging at the thread, stop worrying for a word of exhortation.  Stop.  Experience a word of wonder.  This psalm is about the LORD.  It is a summons to sit and study honor and majesty and greatness and power and mercy and grace and truth and justice. Stand.  Snow cold underfoot.  Snow coming down.  Listen.  Snowfall has a sound of its own even as it makes all the other sounds different.  Look with open eyes, soft gaze.  Snow light changes sight. 

Look to see the LORD whose work I am.  Only then can I see the work I am made to be.

This is wisdom; this is delight: wonder in the LORD.