"Love Song, Interrupted" (Isaiah 5:1-7; Proper 15C; August 18, 2013)

Love Song, Interrupted

Isaiah 5:1-7
Proper 15C
August 18, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
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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