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Sermon on Isaiah 58 Embrace AIDS
Glowing in the Darkness
Page 1: Israel’s failure to do justice
Page 2: Our failure to see the need to do justice globally
Page 3: God hates the injustice but moves people to act justly through Christ.
Page 4: By God’s grace we can be more intentional about our stewardship.
Sermon in Oral Style:
Congregation,
“I want to give you the gift of a sleepless night or two.
I’d like to ruin your appetite, but mostly I want to wreck your heart.
Not in a sappy, sentimental way, but in a hearty, Christian manner.
Why?
Because when our hearts break for the people of the world, God can piece us back together into a new mosaic of compassion.”
Those are the words Rev. Phil Reinders used to grip peoples attention as he began writing about the ongoing horror of the HIV~/AIDS pandemic in Africa and around the world.[1]
Today, the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee and deacons around North America are encouraging the followers of Christ to face one of the biggest and most complex issues of injustice in our day.
HIV~/AIDS.
Because it is a sexually transmitted disease, it’s a problem that many Christians get a little squeamish talking about.
It leaves many Christians in a lurch morally.
Isn’t their own sin that made them that way? Isn’t that God’s punishment against their immorality?
Israel knew what it was like to have people in their society that became kind of the social outcasts.
Like Africa tends to be the continent that we might as well just forget about a lot of time, there were people in their society that just weren’t cared for.
That were avoided.
Leprosy was a big one.
The people with leprosy were often shunned completely.
Not allowed to be around the other people because they were afraid it would spread to others.
So instead of being nurtured through their illness, they were thrown aside.
The others that you could find in Israel’s societal garbage bin were the widows and the orphans.
God fights for the cause of the oppressed.
As much as that might sound like a mantra of a civil rights activists group, you can’t help but notice throughout the Bible Old Testament and New, in the words of Moses, the Prophets, Jesus, Paul, whoever.
God wages war for the forgotten against the ones who are doing the forgetting.
A widow could not survive in Israel.
The bread winner of the family was the husband.
The wives took care of the family.
If a womans husband died, she would have to find a new husband very quickly, or she would face the reality of having no one winning bread for her.
She would be reduced to a beggar, a scavenger, or one who turned to prostitution just to survive.
Orphans were in the same situation.
With no father, no one would just take tahem in.
Another gaping mouth.
Less food for ones own children.
Orphans were dehumanized into animals on the street or sold as slaves.
Should a nation of God’s people be noticeably different in the way they treat each other compared to other nations?
But they are remarkably similar.
In fact they are as wicked and as unjust as all the other nations.
God hates this!
In the passage we read he is angry with Israel for allowing widows and orphans to be forgotten.
He is angry that Israel comes to him with their pious prayers and fasts.
The good believing people want his help, but God hates that people created in his image are ignored and treated like the scum of the earth.
God hates it.
Is it possible that God still hates it- it’s a strong word, I know- but don’t you think it is possible that God still hates it when his people ignore the widow, and the orphan.
Would it be too big of a stretch to say today God is not one bit impressed at the way his people today take advantage and ignore the people who are in the most need?
Isn’t that the way we should take a passage like this from Isaiah and use it for our own lives?
God can’t stand it when we act like the people of Israel and ignore the plight of orphans and widows in our world today.
Don’t you think God is still saddened by us and by the way we forget and even cause some people in our world.
As people who believe in the love and grace of Jesus Crhsti, we have to realize that world we live in makes it so that our neighborhood orphan and widow and leper are actually living an ocean away in Africa.
Our community orphans and widows, some may live close by, but our global economy has made it so we are taking advantage of the figurative widows and orphans on other continents.
But let’s not be to figurative.
One of the reasons why AIDS has become a pandemic in Africa and not anywhere else is because has become the continent of slaves.
Historically we kidnappeds its able bodied men women and children to slaves.
Today we buy things dirt cheap.
I know I have done it all the time.
You find a deal and can’t resist.
“a dollar for thirty pounds of sugar, yeah dollar store.”
Many times our greatest savings are at the expense of supporting some sort of slavery or unjust labor in another land.
And in supporting the poverty we support the cycle of poverty, including the spread of AIDS.
This summer two kids on your road set up lemonade stands.
Your family loves the lemonade so you are going to be repeat customers.
You have the choice of spending a dollar on a cup of lemonade where the big brother sits around and does nothing until he kicks his sister around until she makes the next pitcher full of lemonade.
Or are you going to spend the 2 dollars a cup to buy it from the neighbor girl who gives a cut to her brother if he will help her mix a some of the pitchers.
Buying it for 1 dollar is cheap, but ever dollar is ruining that little sisters life just a little bit more.
The two bucks is giving a fair cut to the brother who is working hard for his sister.
Our neighborhood big bully brothers in our world, shouldn’t we consider these to be the companies who support unjust labor practices?
CRWRC tells us that cheap sugar, coffee, chocolate and diamonds are the main products that come from unjust employers in Africa.
But it also includes produce like fruit and vegetables.
It is all over.
To tell you the truth.
I feel totally trapped, by this.
My wife Angela and I talked about how trapped we feel because we don’t know where our food comes from.
We don’t know the people who produced it.
We don’t know how it got to our local stores.
It doesn’t usually say it on the packaging.
Product of an unjust company.
Buy this if you like to spread poverty and ruin Africa with disease and hunger.
Oh, I guess I better put that down.
How can we help it but buy something that actually funds poverty in Africa and in turn funds the spread of AIDS, the spread of orphanhood, widowhood, and the spread of death before a persons time.
It makes me sad that that is the culture and system that we are stuck in.
What can we do about it?
Well, first I think we need to look at the encouragement from Scripture.
The greatest message from Scripture that we need to be aware of is that we are saved by the love of Jesus Christ and our trust that he saved us.
Funding a child labor ring in Trenton would be unjust and sinful.
Funding a group that steals food from the hungry would be sinful.
Isn`t it a damnable sin when we support businesses whose operations in other countries actually destroy lives by keeping them in poverty and not stopping the cycle of sickness and hunger and death?
Isn’t it so important to us then that we are saved completely by Jesus Christ?
That’s the heart of Christianity isn’t it?
By Jesus’ blood we are saved from the things that we didn’t even know we were contributing to.
The passage that we read tell us how things could be so much better for the people of Israel in this situation where the nation was being unjust.
Verse
The reason why Israel was supposed to act justly is because that is really the kind of devotion that he wants from his people.
The people of Israel have it in their mind that God wanted them to just obey some of the basic commands like fasting at the appropriate times.
They believed that fasting and depriving themselves of food was the way to make there requests before God even more acceptable.
But the passage says, truly living a life of justice will be one that glows brightly in the dark world.
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