The Earth's Witness - A Sermon on Isaiah 1
Over a hundred years ago, Canada and the United States began setting aside large tracts of land as parks. The parks movement was largely inspired by the writings of American transcendentalist conservationists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Particularly in the work of John Muir, the “pristine, untrammelled” wilderness of the Sierra Mountains represented a cathedral of nature. A place where, due to its supposed distance from the effects of fallen humankind, shards of edenic innocence had been preserved. The first national park was created at Yellowstone in 1872.
Soon there came to be a philosophical divide in this burgeoning ecological movement. Some believed, as Muir did, that the land set aside in the parks should be “preserved” for their transcendent and aesthetic, as well as their ecological value. Others believed that careful, limited resource management could be attempted within the parks including allowing grazing animals, limited forestry, and in some cases, limited mining operations. The two camps ended up dividing, becoming known as the preservationists and the conservationists respectively.
Canada’s parks policy inherited both streams of thought. Following the preservationist mindset, national parks were set aside from human use, meaning, functionally, that the indigenous peoples who had lived and worked in those landscapes were displaced - a policy that only began to be reversed in the 1980s. However, the preservationist impulse seemingly only applied to indigenous peoples, in many parks, forestry, grazing, and mining have all been allowed at various times.
This dual heritage has created a rather bizarre legacy. In a failed attempt to save Eden, we’ve displaced the very people whose lives shaped those landscapes. Far from protecting the land from human trammelling, the forced removal of indigenous peoples has opened up the land to the rape of extractive industry, leaving portions of the parks and other crown lands polluted and poisoned, even as the people of those landscapes are kept in poverty on poisoned soil under boil-water advisories.
A week ago, I was travelling through these northern landscapes with Rachel. Upon our return I shared my experience with my spiritual director, an indigenous priest in this diocese, who helped me to make sense of some of these connections. The legacy of conservation efforts tragically mimics the more general colonial approach to the land in this country. Even in our best attempts to do something different, to set aside little Edens here and there as a reminder of innocence, we nevertheless cannot help but displace people, convert the earth’s bounty into capital, and leave poisoned and blasted terrain in our wake.
Human conflict with the earth is the ancient story of all nations. Hear the word of the Lord that Isaiah pronounced to our spiritual forebearers, the people of Israel and Judah:
Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth;
for the Lord has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.
Ah, sinful nation,
people laden with iniquity,
offspring who do evil,
children who deal corruptly,
who have forsaken the Lord,
who have despised the Holy One of Israel,
who are utterly estranged!
Attentive listeners may have noticed that the passage I just read is not part of our reading appointed for today. In its selection for today, the Revised Common Lectionary has let us down. In the interest of brevity, Isaiah’s oracle has been neutered, trimming verses from both ends for some reason that one can only hope was clear to the committee at the time. What is left is a text, bereft of context, which, as the old saying goes, is not much more than a pretext for a proof text!
The passage we have been left with, read on its own, sounds like a conveniently protestant indictment of our liturgical life. “Enough with your ceremonies! The Lord demands justice!” But this reading is too abstract. The opening verses of the oracle is of utmost importance for context here:
Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth;
for the Lord has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.
Isaiah calls upon the witness of the heavens and the earth in his message to Israel. Older commentators used to portray this as an example of calling cosmic witnesses in a lawsuit against Israel. More recently, however, eco-critical exegetes like Hilary Marlow have observed that, rather than personified witnesses in an imagined court-room, the witness of the heavens and the earth is a witness of a rightly ordered life. Thus, the contrast in verse 3 between the ox and donkey who know their master and the people of Israel who do not know their God is there to demonstrate that the divine ordering of creation is contrasted with the rebellious chaos of the people.
As the oracle unfolds we discover that the rebellion of Israel against the divine order of creation has left the land desolate and burned with fire. This is why Yahweh despises the new moon and sabbath ceremonies of the Israelites. The worship of Israel is supposed to arise from the natural rhythms of the world God has made, observing the seasons and appropriate times of rest in harmony with all living things. But Israel has disrupted this ordering, oppressing the poor and blasting the land. How can the rhythms of worship, rhythms that are to arise from the ordinary rhythms of livestock husbandry and agrarian life, possibly be anything other than an abominable lie when the soil is desolate and the fumes of imperial pollution reach the heavens.
This, then, is the witness of the heavens and the earth:
the faithful city
has become a whore!
She that was full of justice,
righteousness lodged in her—
but now murderers!
Israel in its socio-political life had failed to be the land of promise - Eden had not been restored. The covenant promises were coming to naught. But right at the point of failure and destruction is where God reveals his magisterial Yes to our self-abnegating No. The prophet, Isaiah, calls upon the orderly forms of life bound up in the creaturely realities of heaven and earth and offers Israel a renewed hope:
Zion shall be redeemed by justice,
and those in her who repent, by righteousness.
Israel’s rejection of justice was deeply tied to its destruction of the land of promise. From being a people placed in a promised land according to the divine ordering of creaturely life, Israel had become waste-land, a non-place for a displaced people. But it would be supremely unfitting for God’s covenant purposes to come to naught; no sooner has Isaiah pronounced the word of judgement upon a failed people does he offer the word of grace - Zion will be redeemed, it will be a place, and it will be a place filled with justice and righteousness.
Praise be to God that Isaiah’s word of hope for Israel is not just a word for Israel. For we, the gentile nations are also implicated in Israel’s condemnation:
Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom!
Listen to the teaching of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!
Soon there came to be a philosophical divide in this burgeoning ecological movement. Some believed, as Muir did, that the land set aside in the parks should be “preserved” for their transcendent and aesthetic, as well as their ecological value. Others believed that careful, limited resource management could be attempted within the parks including allowing grazing animals, limited forestry, and in some cases, limited mining operations. The two camps ended up dividing, becoming known as the preservationists and the conservationists respectively.
Canada’s parks policy inherited both streams of thought. Following the preservationist mindset, national parks were set aside from human use, meaning, functionally, that the indigenous peoples who had lived and worked in those landscapes were displaced - a policy that only began to be reversed in the 1980s. However, the preservationist impulse seemingly only applied to indigenous peoples, in many parks, forestry, grazing, and mining have all been allowed at various times.
This dual heritage has created a rather bizarre legacy. In a failed attempt to save Eden, we’ve displaced the very people whose lives shaped those landscapes. Far from protecting the land from human trammelling, the forced removal of indigenous peoples has opened up the land to the rape of extractive industry, leaving portions of the parks and other crown lands polluted and poisoned, even as the people of those landscapes are kept in poverty on poisoned soil under boil-water advisories.
A week ago, I was travelling through these northern landscapes with Rachel. Upon our return I shared my experience with my spiritual director, an indigenous priest in this diocese, who helped me to make sense of some of these connections. The legacy of conservation efforts tragically mimics the more general colonial approach to the land in this country. Even in our best attempts to do something different, to set aside little Edens here and there as a reminder of innocence, we nevertheless cannot help but displace people, convert the earth’s bounty into capital, and leave poisoned and blasted terrain in our wake.
Human conflict with the earth is the ancient story of all nations. Hear the word of the Lord that Isaiah pronounced to our spiritual forebearers, the people of Israel and Judah:
Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth;
for the Lord has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.
Ah, sinful nation,
people laden with iniquity,
offspring who do evil,
children who deal corruptly,
who have forsaken the Lord,
who have despised the Holy One of Israel,
who are utterly estranged!
Attentive listeners may have noticed that the passage I just read is not part of our reading appointed for today. In its selection for today, the Revised Common Lectionary has let us down. In the interest of brevity, Isaiah’s oracle has been neutered, trimming verses from both ends for some reason that one can only hope was clear to the committee at the time. What is left is a text, bereft of context, which, as the old saying goes, is not much more than a pretext for a proof text!
The passage we have been left with, read on its own, sounds like a conveniently protestant indictment of our liturgical life. “Enough with your ceremonies! The Lord demands justice!” But this reading is too abstract. The opening verses of the oracle is of utmost importance for context here:
Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth;
for the Lord has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.
Isaiah calls upon the witness of the heavens and the earth in his message to Israel. Older commentators used to portray this as an example of calling cosmic witnesses in a lawsuit against Israel. More recently, however, eco-critical exegetes like Hilary Marlow have observed that, rather than personified witnesses in an imagined court-room, the witness of the heavens and the earth is a witness of a rightly ordered life. Thus, the contrast in verse 3 between the ox and donkey who know their master and the people of Israel who do not know their God is there to demonstrate that the divine ordering of creation is contrasted with the rebellious chaos of the people.
As the oracle unfolds we discover that the rebellion of Israel against the divine order of creation has left the land desolate and burned with fire. This is why Yahweh despises the new moon and sabbath ceremonies of the Israelites. The worship of Israel is supposed to arise from the natural rhythms of the world God has made, observing the seasons and appropriate times of rest in harmony with all living things. But Israel has disrupted this ordering, oppressing the poor and blasting the land. How can the rhythms of worship, rhythms that are to arise from the ordinary rhythms of livestock husbandry and agrarian life, possibly be anything other than an abominable lie when the soil is desolate and the fumes of imperial pollution reach the heavens.
This, then, is the witness of the heavens and the earth:
the faithful city
has become a whore!
She that was full of justice,
righteousness lodged in her—
but now murderers!
Israel in its socio-political life had failed to be the land of promise - Eden had not been restored. The covenant promises were coming to naught. But right at the point of failure and destruction is where God reveals his magisterial Yes to our self-abnegating No. The prophet, Isaiah, calls upon the orderly forms of life bound up in the creaturely realities of heaven and earth and offers Israel a renewed hope:
Zion shall be redeemed by justice,
and those in her who repent, by righteousness.
Israel’s rejection of justice was deeply tied to its destruction of the land of promise. From being a people placed in a promised land according to the divine ordering of creaturely life, Israel had become waste-land, a non-place for a displaced people. But it would be supremely unfitting for God’s covenant purposes to come to naught; no sooner has Isaiah pronounced the word of judgement upon a failed people does he offer the word of grace - Zion will be redeemed, it will be a place, and it will be a place filled with justice and righteousness.
Praise be to God that Isaiah’s word of hope for Israel is not just a word for Israel. For we, the gentile nations are also implicated in Israel’s condemnation:
Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom!
Listen to the teaching of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!
Though the Lord speaks to and through his people in Zion, he is not locked up in this small strip of Mediteranean hill-country. The God of Israel is the Lord of Heaven and Earth and his voice goes out to all the world, through the words of Israel's prophets - “Hear the word of the Lord!”
If, as I’ve suggested, Isaiah’s opening oracle to Israel is a condemnation of the destructive and displacing forces of disordered human life in Israel and beyond, his next oracle reaffirms the covenant loyalty of the God who’s nature is to be for his people. Isaiah chapter 2 begins thus:
The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
Israel is not unique among the nations in its own self-destruction, but it is through Israel that God has decisively acted to establish the place to which the nations will stream for instruction in the ways of righteous patterns of creaturely life that give truth to the rhythms of our worship. Israel is therefore the privileged place from which we learn what it means to indwell our respective places as creatures. Canada’s sins of colonial displacement and extractive land management are nothing new - they are Israel’s sins too. But Israel’s life in the land has been guaranteed by the one who, uniquely, can call upon the witness of the well ordered patterns of creaturely life - the witness of the heavens and the earth - as a testament to a covenant faithfulness that refuses us our own self-destruction. It is on the basis of God’s covenant loyalty to Israel in the establishment of a particular place for that chosen particular people that we gentiles have been given a form of creaturely life in our various and sundry places.
Our world, quite literally, bears the wounds of our many and grievous sins. The prophets of old may, today, be silent, but their words continue to describe the landscapes in which we live. Our waterways are poisoned, our lakes are choked with the runoff of our disordered and highly consumptive lives, our forests are cleared and our mountains are levelled; but Isaiah’s invocation of the earth’s witness has not been voided - Gaia’s voice continues to echo the ancient prophetic oracles of doom and promise. Try as we might to establish a place of the skull, there remains one who has pronounced a sovereign No to our self-destruction. At Calvary, the Lord of Heaven and Earth was displaced from glory for a time that in his resurrection, the place of the skull might become the holy mountain to and from which the nations might flow, establishing places of justice and creaturely flourishing around the world. Try as we might to destroy our planet and displace the peoples and creatures that dwell therein, the good news is that God, in the Messiah of Israel, has established a place for his chosen people, and as a result, offers lives of justice lived in all the particular places of this good earth.
And so we worship. We take bread and wine, creatures of God’s good earth, and “we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee. And although we are unworthy, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.”
If, as I’ve suggested, Isaiah’s opening oracle to Israel is a condemnation of the destructive and displacing forces of disordered human life in Israel and beyond, his next oracle reaffirms the covenant loyalty of the God who’s nature is to be for his people. Isaiah chapter 2 begins thus:
The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
Israel is not unique among the nations in its own self-destruction, but it is through Israel that God has decisively acted to establish the place to which the nations will stream for instruction in the ways of righteous patterns of creaturely life that give truth to the rhythms of our worship. Israel is therefore the privileged place from which we learn what it means to indwell our respective places as creatures. Canada’s sins of colonial displacement and extractive land management are nothing new - they are Israel’s sins too. But Israel’s life in the land has been guaranteed by the one who, uniquely, can call upon the witness of the well ordered patterns of creaturely life - the witness of the heavens and the earth - as a testament to a covenant faithfulness that refuses us our own self-destruction. It is on the basis of God’s covenant loyalty to Israel in the establishment of a particular place for that chosen particular people that we gentiles have been given a form of creaturely life in our various and sundry places.
Our world, quite literally, bears the wounds of our many and grievous sins. The prophets of old may, today, be silent, but their words continue to describe the landscapes in which we live. Our waterways are poisoned, our lakes are choked with the runoff of our disordered and highly consumptive lives, our forests are cleared and our mountains are levelled; but Isaiah’s invocation of the earth’s witness has not been voided - Gaia’s voice continues to echo the ancient prophetic oracles of doom and promise. Try as we might to establish a place of the skull, there remains one who has pronounced a sovereign No to our self-destruction. At Calvary, the Lord of Heaven and Earth was displaced from glory for a time that in his resurrection, the place of the skull might become the holy mountain to and from which the nations might flow, establishing places of justice and creaturely flourishing around the world. Try as we might to destroy our planet and displace the peoples and creatures that dwell therein, the good news is that God, in the Messiah of Israel, has established a place for his chosen people, and as a result, offers lives of justice lived in all the particular places of this good earth.
And so we worship. We take bread and wine, creatures of God’s good earth, and “we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee. And although we are unworthy, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.”
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