Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
August 10, 2025

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Senior Associate Pastor

Psalm 50:1–8, 22–23
Isaiah 1:1, 10–20

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The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, is a particular kind of thing. 

It’s a lot of things at once. 

It is scripture, of course. It is, as we say in here, “The Word of God for the people of God.” It has an authority for our faith and our life, because it is not just any ancient text you might read from, but scripture. Isaiah has been a part of Christian scriptures from the church’s very beginnings, and the Gospel accounts of Jesus draw heavily on parts of Isaiah’s vision to interpret Jesus’ life and ministry, his death and resurrection. 

The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, is also history. Kind of. 

The history books of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, as well as 1 and 2 Chronicles, relate the history of the establishment of the kingdom of Israel, its division in civil war, its conflicts with its neighbors, and its eventual defeat and exile. 

Isaiah’s vision concerns the times of specific kings, and he’s focused only on the southern half of the divided kingdom, Judah, and its capital, Jerusalem. 

Obviously, the vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah is also prophecy, because Isaiah is a prophet.

In the Hebrew scriptures, Isaiah is the first of the “latter” prophets, the first of the three “major” prophets along with Jeremiah and Ezekiel. 

Prophets talk funny. They speak of visions — valleys full of dry bones that all come alive; six-winged seraphs that touch the mouth with live coals — symbolic, metaphorical descriptions of the state of things that startle the imagination.

But prophets also speak more broadly of vision. The vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah is more than a collection of wild visions. 

The prophet gives us a vision — God’s vision — of the world, both present and future. One scholar cautions us that this vision “may not accommodate itself to any conventional notion of historical reality or political possibility.”

And that is good news, because political possibility is a second-rate friend to begin with, and vibrant faith has always been fueled more by vision than by practical politics. 

We need vision. 

The Black American theologian James Cone reminds us that many people, past and present, have relied on a vision of the future to survive a present that is unbearable.

Indeed, the wisdom of the biblical Proverb can hardly be doubted that (in the old King James translation) “Where there is no vision the people perish.”

Faith needs vision. 

Jesus’ faith was driven by a vision he called the kingdom of God. It’s an upside-down kind of arrangement that is already emerging if only we have eyes to see it: the hungry are filled with good things, those who are poor and ignored are actually blessed, the least are the greatest, and the last are first. 

Jesus’ vision shaped his entire ministry; he told people in a synagogue that he was sent to “bring good news to the poor ... to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed.”

Jesus had vision. It’s a vision he preached and taught but also one he lived, as he shared table fellowship with outcasts and ne’er-do-wells and healed those with stigmatized illnesses. 

This vision founds the church, and the church depends on it for its faithfulness far more than any creed. Yet the church must discover and rediscover the vision anew for every time in which we find ourselves. 

In some times the vision is made clear by prophets who can describe it so we can almost touch it: a nation where children are judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But in other times it feels like vision is faint, even nonexistent. So we cling to those words of God to another prophet, Habakkuk: “there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.”

Faith needs vision to live. 

I think we know this, and so vision is something we expect and hope for from our leaders. We want our leaders to “cast” a vision for us, a compelling picture of where we’re going and what we’re all about. 

But a word of warning: we should be careful what we hope for in this regard, because we won’t always like what the vision suggests, especially what it suggests about us. 

Isaiah’s vision casts his people as Sodom and Gomorrah. 

His hearers have no trouble taking his meaning: they had become as bad as those ancient mythical cities from Genesis whose victims cried out against God so greatly that God destroyed them in a storm of sulfur and fire. 

Further, Isaiah’s vision casts worship as useless because of the “iniquity” among them. It casts God as fed up with it: “I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.”

Here it is imperative to explain — because a history of interpretation has done great harm to people on this point and continues to — that the evil of Sodom has to do with its failure to care for the needy.

As per the prophet Ezekiel, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy.”

This is the evil of Sodom and Gomorrah, and this is clearly the kind of evil Isaiah’s vision of himself and his people has in view. 

How uncomfortable. 

It must be uncomfortable, because I think Isaiah is teaching us that if our vision doesn’t account for our contributions to the ills we see around us, we aren’t making them better. Jesus teaches something similar, that before we would presume to remove a speck from our neighbor’s eye, we should attend to the plank in our own.  

And if our vision of the world’s problems is that they would all be made better if only we were put in charge — our political party, our religion, our economic theory — then we’re more a part of the problem than we realize. 

Faithful vision accounts for our own complicity in evil. It is honest about the compact we make with injustice; the way images of oppression make us change the channel or browse to a different website; the way we routinely leave vulnerable people to defend themselves and plead their own cases. 

The word of God through the prophet is that the people have blood on their hands, and we must say in response, yes. Yes, we do. 

There’s a widely circulated anecdote about the English author G.K. Chesterton, that he once responded to a solicitation from the Times of London for essays in answer to the question “What’s wrong with the world,” and that the entire text of his submission was this: “Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.”

That’s not all Chesterton wrote, of course. There’s a longer version of it in a letter to the Daily News in 1905: “In one sense, and that the eternal sense, the thing is plain. The answer to the question ‘What is Wrong?’ is, or should be, I am wrong.’ Until a [person] can give that answer [their] idealism is only a hobby.”

My point is that “I am wrong” is not the last word. A lament over our complicity in oppression is not the last word — cannot be the last word. 

Because just as it is unfaithful to ignore the ways in which we contribute to evil in the world, it is also unfaithful to own our role in all of it and then stop — as if there’s nothing more to say, as if there’s nothing more for us to do than to recite a litany of our failings and then give it all up as a lost cause. 

Listen to the way the word of God changes from accusation to instruction in verse 16: “cease to do evil, learn to do good.” 

God’s love and purpose for us does not give up on the possibility that we can be better. 

We can start to repair some of the harm we lament we’ve taken part in, individually and collectively. But wallowing in guilt and shame won’t get us there. 

If you will permit a parental analogy for this, I’ll tell you about the time I egged my neighbor’s house. It must have been my brother’s idea. We were bored on a summer afternoon, and chucking a dozen eggs over our back fence onto the roof of our neighbor’s trilevel seemed like just the thing to add some adventure to the day. We even tossed an egg on our own roof to throw any suspecting parents off the scent. 

Of course we didn’t get away with it. And of course we lied when confronted about it. My mother was not fooled, and soon enough she wore us down. We sat in our living room then awaiting the judgment: How long would we be grounded for? What privileges would be taken away?

Instead of announcing a sentence, though, she just sent us to our respective rooms and said, “Get out of my sight. I don’t even want to look at you two right now.”

I’m sure you know that felt worse than any punishment. But it wasn’t the last word. 

After some time (an hour? an afternoon?), she called us out of our rooms and instructed us to gather rags, a bucket, and a ladder and to walk to the neighbor’s house, apologize, and then get on the roof and clean up our mess. 

I think she had a vision that in cleaning up the roof we would be cleaning up ourselves a bit. I never threw another egg again, I’ll tell you that much. 

It took me some time to realize that making us wash that roof clean was the shape my mother’s love took for us that day. The expectation and the opportunity to learn to do good did more for us than any strict punishment could have done. 

The love of God never abandons us to a lament over the blood that’s on our hands, and God’s love will never stop reaching to us with rags and buckets and time to scrub away some of the blood and muck caused by things we know we’re a part of. 

We can voice that lament, though, and we can get to washing, because we know ourselves to have been washed first. God’s love cleanses us before we even know we need it, and when you’ve been bathed by God’s acceptance and grace, there’s no mess in the world you won’t want to help clean. 

I’m talking about baptism, of course. Baptism is the sign of our having been made spotless and new by a love that wasn’t waiting for us to realize our need of it. 

This is the power we proclaim when babies are baptized in here: the power of a love that claims us even before we’re able to do or say anything about it. 

And this is the power we claim when adults are baptized: the power of a love that makes space for us to respond in gratitude with a changed life. 

“We love,” the scripture says, “because God first loved us.” I’ve relied a lot in my life on the second half of that verse, the “God first loved us” half. But Isaiah’s vision of God’s call to seek justice and rescue the oppressed and defend the orphan and plead the case of the widow lifts up the first half, the “We love” half. 

When we know ourselves to be loved, we can truly love. And though baptism is only once, there’s no limit to the times we can remember and reclaim the promise of baptism, that we are joined to Christ’s ministry of love and there is nothing that we or anyone else might do to separate us from it. 

Though we still have a choice to make as people of faith and as a community of vision, and that choice is before us today and every day: commit ourselves to the good — seeking justice, rescuing the oppressed, defending and speaking up for the vulnerable — or follow our own way and get whatever we can for ourselves.

The consequences are stark: eat the good of the land or be devoured by the sword. 

Living for ourselves is its own punishment, while living for others is its own reward. 

We can choose the prophet’s vision. We can choose Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God. We can choose that vision and commit in our life together to learning it every day. We can. 

We already are. May God’s Spirit give us strength and courage to choose that vision anew today and every day. 

Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church