The Prophet Heather

Isaiah 5:1-7

I will sing for my beloved
    my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones
    and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it
    and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
    but it yielded rotten grapes.

And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
    and people of Judah,
judge between me
    and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard
    that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
    why did it yield rotten grapes?

And now I will tell you
    what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
    and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
    and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a wasteland;
    it shall not be pruned or hoed,
    and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds
    that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
    is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
    are his cherished garden;
he expected justice
    but saw bloodshed;
righteousness
    but heard a cry!

Isaiah didn’t have a crystal ball.  He didn’t have a fortune cookie!  Why?  Because Biblical Prophets didn’t tell the future.  What Biblical Prophets did was much more powerful.  They opened their eyes and made connections.  Sometimes they thanked God for that gift.  Other times they yelled at God for it.  But what the Biblical Prophets did, was less like Miss. Cleo and more like Heather Cox Richardson.  

Dr. Richardson doesn’t tell the future either.  She opens her eyes, examines the past, and makes connections.  She has a gift to see the places in history where 2 + 2 have over and over again added up to 4 and then writes to us each day in her 21st century, academic style, telling us, “I see 2 and 2 being added together again in our time, and every time 2 has been added to 2 in history before… like it was here, here, and here… the result has always been 4.  It would be wise if we paid attention to the math happening around us right now!”  

That’s the way the Biblical Prophets worked too.  They didn’t use magic… they used memory.  They opened their eyes, examined the past, and made connections.  They saw where 2 was being added to 2 again and knew that had always added up to 4.  Then they wrote in their own theologically poetic style warning the people that, “it would be wise if we paid attention to the math happening around us right now.”  

Writing styles aside, the gift that Heather Cox Richardson shares with us now, is really not so different from the gift the Biblical Prophets shared with people in their time.  Nor are the themes on which they both write and the warnings both offer.  

Writing in his theologically poetic style, Isaiah told the people of Israel and Judah of the hard, back breaking work that God put into creating their nation.  It was like the work of a vineyard owner… clearing, tilling, planting, building, and carving a wine vat out of solid rock.  All by hand.  After putting in all that work, God had the not unreasonable expectation of getting some grapes.  

The vineyard we learn, is a poetic stand-in for the nation.  The grapes are a metaphor for justice and righteousness… two words that invoke the expansive notion that God expected the nation would build, grow, and develop that vineyard… a.k.a. their nation… into an interdependent people where everyone had enough (enough food, shelter, safety, dignity and purpose) and everyone would live free from abuse and exploitation. 

Writing in her Academic Historical style, Heather Cox Richardson tells us about the hard work that went into creating our nation.  She writes soberly about the arguments, fights, and wars.  She doesn’t sugar coat it.  It was a founding steeped in violence, genocide, and slavery, and she constantly forces us to look clear-eyed at our country’s still unrepentant history of racism, exploitation, and our ongoing mindless fear of the other.  

But the Prophet Heather also writes to us of the idealistic expectations that those admittedly flawed founders had for this nation.  She writes of the backbreaking and all too often deadly work others have done since the founding to move this nation toward the fulfillment of those ideals.  Work done by those who believed this nation could one day really become a nation of genuine equals.  It could, one day, become a nation where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would be available to all.  That we would eventually create, grow, and develop into a nation of interdependent people where everyone has enough… and we all would live in a community free from abuse and exploitation, with liberty and justice, not just for some… but for all.  

For the people to whom the Prophet Isaiah wrote, the failure of the nation to deliver justice and give only bloodshed… the failure of the nation to live in righteousness… the failure to live lives that cared for the widow and orphan, the stranger and the immigrant, the poor and the hungry… the least, the lost, and the last of the nation… that failure, Isaiah wrote, would add up, as the math always did across both time and geography, to the complete destruction of their nation.  

Isaiah wasn’t predicting that God would rain fire on them.  Isaiah was telling them they would be the victims of the natural consequences that had befallen EVERY nation in every time that became devoid of justice and righteousness.  2 + 2, Isaiah warned them, would once again come to equal 4.  

For the people to whom the Prophet Heather Cox Richardson writes, the failure of our nation to deliver justice and give only bloodshed… the failure of our nation to live in righteousness… the failure of our nation to genuinely provide liberty and justice for ALL, including the widow and orphan, the stranger and the immigrant, the sick and the dying, the hungry and huddled masses yearning to to be free… that failure, will, if not corrected, lead to the same natural consequences that has befallen EVERY nation, institution, and office that has ever abandoned living and working in justice and righteousness.  2 + 2, Heather warns us, will once again come to equal 4.  She reminds us herself that another Prophet, Abraham Lincoln, once told us clearly…  a house divided against itself, simply cannot stand.  

Biblical prophecy is not magic.  It is memory.  Biblical Prophecy doesn’t tell the future.  It does the math.  May we… as individuals, as a congregation, as the institutional church, and as a nation, hear the words of the Prophets, both old and new, and turn from our destructive ways of retribution and toward lives of genuine justice and honest righteousness, and walk the path which leads to liberty and justice for all, where “all” will one day, really and truly… mean ALL.  Amen.