Some people want to live in Knollwood.  Others aspire to live in London or perhaps Paris or Rome.  But historically, there is no place quite so august as Jerusalem.  JERUSALEM--the very name is laden with the religious yearnings of God’s people, accumulated over 3 millenia.  JERUSALEM--Capitol of Israel, Zion, David’s Royal City, seat of the temple, God’s holy hill, site of Christ’s passion and resurrection, birthplace of the church.  JERUSALEM--focal point of Jewish Messianic hopes and Christian visions of the Second Coming.  I’d like you to put aside thoughts of the current political strife in Jerusalem and just imagine the exhiliration of living in such a blessed spot.••• The splendor of temple, the grandeur of the royal palace, the stately elegance of the homes of the royal court, the massiveness of the wall which surrounds the entire city.  •••  Very impressive.
How ironic then, that in today’s scripture passage we find the prophet Isaiah delivering God’s judgment upon his own holy city, a judgment fulfilled in 587 BC with the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of Israel’ s most prominent citizens to Babylon.  What went wrong?  How could this possibly be?

To understand why, let me take you on a prophet’s tour of 8th century Jerusalem.  As we walk the streets notice the many fine houses and splendid government buildings.  Not so fine as in Solomon’s time they say, but they still reak of money.  Take this neo-Assyrian two-story--belongs to the Royal Advisor Bel-shazar--built with rental money of his vineyards in the Bekka valley.  He’s up on the balcony eating grapes while the tenant’s children go hungry.  ••

Look there in that window.  See the wooden Idol?  You see a lot of them these days.  It seems that with our King paying tribute money to Ashu-banipal King of Assyria, people are hedging their bets and worshipping Assyrian gods as well as Yahweh.

One can never walk to far without at least seeing the Jerusalem wall.  Imposing structure, eh?  It surrounds the whole city--40 feet high in most places.  That’s what keeps the Egyptian and Assyrian armies out of Jerusalem.  Of course, it keeps the poor out as well.   Look out the sheep gate over there and you can see the mud huts of the tenant farmers.  Those are the people who sufferred most when King Sennacharib’s armies swept through the land.  No one in the city is terribly concerned, it just means fewer beggars at the gate.  •••

Speaking of beggars, notice how many of those beggars are women and children.  Widows and orphans they are.  They beg for food here during the day, then at sundown the guards round them up and send them outside the city.  Don’t ask me where they sleep.  How can a nation that follows Yahweh treat its most powerless citizens like this?  Ayyyy!  •••

Where was I?  Ah yes!  Before we finish our tour, I must show you the temple.  Isn’t it beautiful?  Now of course I can only take you as far as the court of the Gentiles.  But you can see the priests carrying in water for the purifications rites prior to the sacrifices.  (head drops) It looks like the rites of the old days, but it is so hollow.  Half the city has Assyrian idols in their windows and the other half is more focused on their allegiance to King Ahaz than to God.  The priests only talk about the Davidic covenant.  “David’s line will rule forever,” they say. Do they care about the Sinai and the law?  No!  They just tell Ahaz what he wants to hear.  Mark my words:  This city is ripe for judgment!

Back here in the 20th century it’s easy to feel removed from the failings of isaiah’s Israelite society. But the prophet’s critical eye could just as easily fall on us, for in many ways we, too, are living in Jerusalem.  First, just as the inhabitants of Jerusalem were the priveledged minority of Israelite society, we Americans belong to the priveledged minority of our global society.  Whether it is the insularity of our comfortable middle class existence or the distances wrought by great oceans and strange cultures, it is all too easy for us to turn the plight of the poor and suffering into an abstraction--a mere passing thought as we trim our lawns or head off to the Memorial Day Sales.  Our priveledge brings with it responsibility, which we too easily shirk.

Second, just as Jerusalem was a walled city, we too, live in a walled city.  We have simply replaced the great stone walls of Jerusalem with walls of Cruise missiles, B-2 bombers and warships to guard our borders, and we unashamedly use that military might to keep the balance of political and economic activity tipped in our favor.  The Kurdish shopkeeper whose livelihood was stripped away by looting soldiers, the Bengali communities whose houses, livestock and loved ones were swept away by the cyclone, the indians of Guatemala whose lives are threatened by the army and right-wing death squads--these and many, many more are the poor and suffering outside our city wall.

Third, just as Jerusalem’s religious establishment had become a socially irrelevant proponent of the status quo, American Christianity too often finds itself equally irrelevant.  The priests of Isaiah’s time practiced their rituals just as they always did.  But they turned a blind eye to the idolatry, callousness, and hypocrisy which permeated Jerusalem.  In facing the political storms of their day, they turned their backs on the promises and commands of God and relied instead on their on expedient solutions.

I remember clearly a cluster group meeting last February, a dozen or so of us sat around Homer and Betty Nissley’s dining room table discussing the gulf war, which appeared at that point to be heading toward a quick and decisive victory for “our side”.  The mood at the table was somber.  We wondered aloud whether our belief in non-violence had finally been exposed as naive in this politcally complex world.  The gulf war made so much sense.  Saddam was a ruthless and bloodthirsty tyrant, a violator of international law and human decency, he had to go.

Several months later, Saddam is in power, Iraq is in chaos, thousands of Kurds and Shiites who never went near a battlefield are dead, thousands more Iraqi children will die from disease and malnutrition, and the Kuwaiti whom we liberated suffer under a regime almost as onerous as the  one we drove out.  Now, it is very clear to me that what we as a group felt in our hearts was true.  There are things we do, not because they make sense at the moment, but because they are eternally right, and because God commands it to be so.   This is the voice of the prophet.  It is a small voice, but persistent in the face of throngs of religious yes-men who wave their flags and cheer on the troops.  It is the voice of advocacy for the poor, the weak and the oppressed.  It is the voice which exposes our petty idolatries and holds us accountable to our covenant with God.

The seductive powers which drew Isaiah’s ire in Jerusalem are powerfully at work in our own culture.  When we are tempted to acquiesce to them, we do well to remember that It is the voice of the prophet that endures from generation to generation.  Isaiah’s rivals are long forgotten, their facile teaching consigned to oblivion.  It is the voice of the prophet that keeps the church awake and alive, and prods her towards the faith which is so vulnerable to the swift currents of society.  Without that voice we would surely become like the Israelites of Isaiah’s Jerusalem who with dismay, asked God why their fasting had gone unnoticed.  God’s answer, given through Isaiah, for me embodies a distillation of what Jersualem needed to shake off that malaise that was at the root of her judgment.

Reading from chapter 58  vss6-9

ISA 58:6      "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
ISA 58:7      Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter--when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
ISA 58:8      Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
ISA 58:9      Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

May we heed the prophet’s voice, for we, too, are living in Jerusalem.