Love Song, Interrupted
Isaiah 5:1-7
Proper 15C
August 18, 2013
Proper 15C
August 18, 2013
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Every profession has
its special vocabulary, its words or ways of using words that communicate
perfectly to the people inside the profession and completely mystify everyone
else. Some of the words are a kind of
shorthand. People inside the profession—whether
they are hair stylists or astrophysicists—use this shorthand to save time and
prevent misunderstandings. Members of
the health care professions can refer to what the rest of us call “the little
thingy that hangs down from the soft part of the roof of the mouth at the back
of the mouth” by calling it the “uvula.”
Professionals also
use these words to mark and guard the boundaries of the profession. A nurse knows right away that someone who
says “I have a little sore on the little thingy that hangs down from the soft
part of the roof of the mouth at the back of the mouth,” is not a health care
professional. If you call it the uvula,
instead, and use medical language—and use it correctly—when you’re visiting a
nurse or physician, they will say something like, “You seem to know a lot about
medicine…” The unspoken question is,
“Are you one of us?”
A good deal of a
professional education is learning the special language of the profession. It’s a sort of credential in and of
itself. If you have graduated from an
auto mechanics program but still refer to a clutch throwout bearing as “the
little spinney thingamabob that presses up against the big flat round plate
thingy when you push the clutch pedal in,” you are unlikely to land your first
job as an auto mechanic no matter how well you can do the actual work.
As a profession,
ordained ministry is no different. We
get a professional education in seminary.
They call it the “formation of ministerial character,” but what they
mean is shaping habits and that includes habits of thought. They do this by teaching the technical
language of theology.
Like any technical
language, theology serves two different purposes. The first is to allow the members of the
profession—theologians—to talk to each other easily and clearly. This purpose has to do with competence. The second purpose is to mark anyone who does
not know the language as “not one of us.” It has to do with insiders and
outsiders. It has to do with power.
Now, those of us who
played the game of being a seminary student and learning the things that our
seminary wanted us to learn and who played the game as if it were not a game—and
I’m one of them—have a bit of a problem.
At some level I came to believe that the theological language that I
learned in seminary is the “right” language to use to describe God.
I suppose that’s
common among professionals of all sorts.
But it doesn’t really matter much that I don’t know the technical
language of hair stylists, auto mechanics or physicians. I just want a haircut that looks okay and is
easy to care for. I just want to know if
the new noise in my car is a problem that needs to be fixed or if it’s just
something I should get used to. I just
want to know a new ache or pain can be treated or at least that it is not the
first sign of something serious. Largely,
I can leave the language and even the things themselves to the
professionals.
But theology is
different for two reasons. First,
everyone has some notion about God, some image, some understanding. Everyone has their own experience of
God. Everyone has their own relationship
with God. These are not things that we
can let professionals take care of for us.
Theology is a handy
system for theologians to use to talk among themselves and theology can
certainly make the untrained feel like outsiders. The bottom line, though, is that there is no
such thing as a human language that is good enough, big enough, precise enough
to be able to describe God. At its very
best our language can only hint at God’s reality by using words the same way a
poet uses them. “My love is like a red,
red rose,” Robbie Burns wrote. What does
he mean to say? That love is red? or
doubly red (whatever that might mean)? Does
he mean to say that love has thorns? or that it will wilt quickly unless it’s
put in water and will wilt eventually in any event? Or does he mean that love is both sweet and
painful? Burns must use something we
know about—roses—to say something about love.
But we know something about love, too—well, at least the lucky ones
know, or maybe it’s the unlucky ones.
But what do we know
about God? The only way we can speak
about God at all is in the same poetic way that Burns speaks about love. All language about God is poetic. Even the technical language of theology is
poetry. It’s just not very good poetry, because
it is poetry pretending to be something else.
All those years I spent learning theology did not give me an inside
track when it comes to describing God. Imagine
my disappointment!
The Bible with its
stories in which God seems almost human, with its poetry that purrs one moment and
rages the next, with its biases and its archaic worldview and above all with
its unacceptable violence, is also human language. Its tries at telling about God are no better
than the learned discourse of theology, but they are no worse, either. In some ways a like Isaiah 5 is better than
theology because it embraces poetic language.
Isaiah 5 is a love
song. Or it tries to be. It begins as one. God has commissioned the prophet to write and
sing a love song to a vineyard. God
picked out a fertile hillside, dug out and hauled away the rocks, planted good
grape vines, built a tower at its edge from which it could be guarded and dug a
wine vat where the grapes could be crushed.
A horticulturalist
expects a harvest and, given all that God has done for the vineyard, it should
be a good harvest, but it is not. Even
before they are ripe, the grapes rot on the vine.
No sooner has Isaiah
begun his song than he must change roles.
Isaiah the singer-songwriter has to serve legal papers. God has filed a lawsuit against the beloved
vineyard and Isaiah is God’s attorney. The
people of Jerusalem and Judah are to serve as the jury.
God’s lawsuit
specifies all that God has done, God’s expectation of good grapes, God’s
disappointment, and God’s demand to recover damages. God will undo all that God has done, so that the
vineyard will become a place of thorns and thistles, a dry and barren place, a
place of ruins and dust.
Isaiah’s audience,
the people of Jerusalem, might have been wondering what this talk of vineyards
was about. Perhaps Isaiah, a priest of
the Jerusalem temple, a minor functionary in the bureaucracy of the little
kingdom with the extra large ego, was speaking about Israel, the kingdom just
to the north of Judah. Yes, that was
probably it. Those northerners never did
understand what it meant to live in covenant.
They were always chasing after foreign gods. Not like the people of Judah, with the Temple
of Yahweh, the holy place of God, the place where God’s name dwelled—and would
dwell—forever.
Isaiah finally let
the hammer fall: “The vineyard of the Lord of heavenly forces is the house of
Israel…” (Didn’t we guess? Those northerners!! You give ‘em what for, Isaiah!) But Isaiah was not finished: “and the people
of Judah are the plantings in which God delighted. God expected justice, but there was
bloodshed; righteousness, but there was a cry of distress!”
Judah itself is
named in this lawsuit. Judah will be the
jury in the trial in which it is also the defendant. This is how confidant God is in the suit God
has filed.
In the next few
verses we learn more about this lawsuit and the nature of the charges God is
bringing against Judah. We learn about
the vineyard’s rotten grapes. These
things are not easy for us to hear, because it is all too easy to see their
pattern reproduced in the world around us.
Doom is pronounced against real estate moguls, “those who acquire house
after house, who annex field to field, until there is no more space left.” Doom is pronounced against the passive
audiences who give themselves over to be amused by the media. Doom is pronounced against the spin-masters who
portray evil as good and good as evil. Doom
is pronounced against the national security complex that can’t win a war but can
and does harass the people instead.
While Isaiah is by
turns a singer-songwriter, process server, and attorney, the God of the text
moves from proud landscaper in love with his vineyard, to aggrieved covenant
partner, to plaintiff in a lawsuit. In
the meantime the people of Judah and Jerusalem are an audience at the debut of
a new love song, the jury in a lawsuit and finally the defendants in the same
lawsuit.
This is not the way
that theological language works. Theological
language wraps eternal truths in five syllable words. It avoids passion and aims for
clear-headedness and precision. Not so
the poetry of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah’s
God is a complex character who is not always predictable. Isaiah’s God is passionate about justice and
is inclined to take injustice as a personal insult. But above all, Isaiah’s God is alive.
Those of us who have
decided to be a part of this story, to make this story our story, are not so
much posed with a theological puzzle as we are caught up in a drama with
Isaiah’s living God. Our careful
attempts to fashion a language that can contain God, hold God still, and pin
God down like a butterfly tacked to a display board, are so many exercises in
futility. It is only when we hear or
tell these stories and others like them that we can get a quick glimpse of the
God of Isaiah, of Deborah, of Jesus, of Rosa Parks, of Monseñor Romero. And then, just like that, God has moved on and
we are left to pull up our tent stakes and follow. That is what it means to be caught up in a story
with a living God.
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