Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 14: Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24;
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:32-40
Isaiah’s vision is dramatic: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord; / I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams / and the fat of fed beasts”. The rituals of the Hebrews are not effective: prayers, assemblies, incense, you name it, God has no use for it. Instead, God wants action.
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.
Form without content, God says in Isaiah’s vision, is of no use. The people of Israel have to change. Change is hard. Those in power in particular will suffer. But this is what is necessary. If they are “willing and obedient”, they will “eat the good of the land”. The warning is stark however: “If you refuse and rebel,/ you shall be devoured by the sword”.
This tension between form and action, faith and works, articulated by Isaiah, is one that has remained in the Christian tradition. It is a tension, though, not a battle: we need both faith and action. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century focused to some extent on this tension: Martin Luther thought that the ceremonies of the Church were not the path to salvation. But Protestants expected faith to lead to action. In the early 1600s, the very Puritan town of Dorchester in England provided education for children, health care, and housing for the elderly and infirm: they showed their faith in action.
Paul emphasizes this. Faith, he tells us in the familiar line, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. But he goes on to tell the story of Abraham, who did not just have faith, but followed commands: he left home, he lived in tents. He did all this in the hope of “a better country, a heavenly one”. We may have faith in things unseen, but the results of faith are (or should be) visible.
In the Gospel, Jesus promises his followers the kingdom. But first, they are to-in an echo of Isaiah-sell their possessions and give alms. As he said in last week’s Gospel, we put our energy where we put our treasure. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
None of this is easy. Isaiah makes that clear. The people of Israel are following the rules. Paul reminds us that Abraham took huge risks with his faith. Jesus knows that selling your possessions is not exactly what we are taught to do. most of us do not do it. But we can ask about how we live, and how we balance the world and our faith. Where is our heart? Where is our treasure?