C, Post-Pentecost 11 Proper 16 - Isaiah 58:9b,13–14 Hebrews 12:22-25 "Pleasure"
Isaiah 58:9b,13–14 (ESV) If you
take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking
wickedness. If you turn back your foot
from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath
a delight and the holy day of the LORD honourable; if you honour it, not going
your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and
I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the
heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
Tina Arena wrote and released a
song called, It’s time to go to church,
on April 30, 2021[1]. In it she sings, “I forgive you for everything. For
all the nights I couldn't sleep. I
forgive you for surfacing. When I was
looking for what I need.
Now I tell you everything. Now I know my worth. It's time to go to church. It's time to go to church.”
Being a listener of her music, I
must say I was surprised by her song when it came out. After all, she sings, it’s time to go to church.
And being a pastor in a church, thought, “Okay! That’s a pretty good thing to sing!” I was tempted to justify it as a wholesome
song. But the lyrics are vague and unclear. Who is she addressing in the lines of the
song, and what is the church to which she believes it’s time to go?
Don’t get me wrong, I like the
song very much. But because I do, there’s
a strong desire within me seeking to justify the ambiguity, as I like both the
song and the artist.
She sings on, “Love forgive me for not listening. To myself and to my truth. I forgive you for questioning. I'm still breathing, that's my proof. Now I tell you everything. Now I know my worth. It's time to go to church. It's time to go to church.”
The “you” she addresses in this
verse reveals itself as “love”. She asks
love to forgives her for everything. Tina forgives love for the nights she couldn’t
sleep, for surfacing, for questioning, and now tells love everything. Because of love she now sings, “I know my worth. It’s time to go to church.”
What is one’s church? If you are thinking of a building or a
denomination, yes, these are what you could consider as a church! However, I invite you to think broader of
what church can be in one’s experience as well as what kind of church God is
seeking to bring you into.
In Tina Arena’s song, she addresses
love. Love here is still ambiguous, and
I believe it is most likely unclear for a deliberate reason. To make it pleasing to the ear, love is vague
so the listener can make love anything they want. Love could be a person, an object, an animal,
or even the self.
Love in our age is left unclear
so we can love whatever or wherever we find pleasure. One can go to a church, a creation within,
for worship of what one loves. Or, what pleases
the person.
On any given Sunday one can
drive around and see people attending to activities of pleasure. These activities of love don’t just happen on
a Sunday, but over the years have invaded our lives. Sundays have become increasingly busy, diverting
people from coming to rest in God’s presence, in his church.
All people find time to go to church! However, the church most seek, and most attend
is the place of their pleasures. This
actively involves turning one’s back on God because it requires one’s pleasure
to be above God.
One could say they, “find church
in themselves”. They stimulate their feelings
of pleasure by gathering around themselves things that give them pleasure.
The problem is these things kill.
Whereas, trusting God, letting him serve
you and bind himself to you, gives life.
All other pleasures in which we put our trust become yokes, burdening, and
binding us to unhappiness and uncertainty.
They make us anxious and eventually they lead to death.
Look what happens in humanity’s first
worship event without God, when they seek not to rest with him, in his pleasure.
“…when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a
delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she
took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with
her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both
were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made
themselves loincloths.” (Genesis
3:6–7 ESV)
In these two verses from Genesis
three, we see the extremes of desire and shame.
Knowledge of good and evil in the one event! What appeared to be good was also evil!
Eve sees the fruit is good, it
delights her, and the promise of wisdom also stimulates desire. Did it taste good? We’re not told! However, immediately there is knowledge, and
a wisdom that leads to shame of their nakedness.
Over the years humans have
continued to worship without God. In
these times our worship of the self, plays out in the same theatre of good and
evil. This is not without effect on our
conscience as conscience literally means, “with knowledge” or “knowing within”.
Like Eve, we look and delight in
what we see. A feel-good chemical is released,
and we want more. Ironically one of the
devices used to get the feel-good release is called an apple device. But it’s not smart phones that are the issue. No, it’s the yoked and bound individual who
can’t let go of the electronic apple.
Why? Because it gives the feel-good
hormone, leading one on the path of least resistance to pleasure.
It’s not just the phone that yokes
us in addiction to pleasure. We get something
new – we get the feel-good kick. We eat
chocolate or something else we like – we get the feel-good kick. Receive a phone or snap chat notification – there’s
the feel-good kick. Coveting in the
catalogue – O, it feels so good. Look at
porn or lust after someone you’ve seen in the street – and there’s an injection
of feel-good hormone that gives pleasure.
Tina Arena sings, “Something
within places I've been. Blood running
thin, I'm sorry. Somewhere between
Heaven and sin.”
So, the chocolate becomes guilty
weight. The pleasure of porn turns to
shame and hatred of self. The joy of the
app, computer game success, the social media message, a Facebook like, or a product
purchase; they don’t last, they don’t give the pleasure we sort from them. To get that feel-good buzz. You want more, more, more!
These things all act like drugs because
they produce a natural drug within you, called the dopamine hormone. Eventually
you’re yoked and addicted to the feeling this pleasure hormone gives, becoming no
longer an isolated want, but a need you can’t do without. Your worth is now reliant on the thing you
love, and one must worship what they love, even when one hates it and dislikes what
it’s doing.
The Israelites were God’s chosen
people and yet they, like Adam and Eve, and us, were always being drawn away from
God to other pleasures, and Isaiah was sent to proclaim God’s word to them.
He says, “If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger,
and speaking wickedness. If you turn
back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and
call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honourable; if you honour
it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking
idly; then you shall take delight in the
LORD, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will feed you
with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
( Isaiah 58:9b,13–14 ESV)
We live in a time when the pleasures
of this age have drawn our children away from God’s church. Also, many who are brought into God’s church, resist,
because they’re under the bondage of the pleasures to which they are yoked for
the other six days and eleven hours of the week.
How am I to break freed from
this bondage? How can my children be freed
too? How can we look on God once again as
the one and only true God?
We need to let our brains and
our bodies rest with God from busying ourselves from the pleasures we’ve become
addicted to. We need put aside our pride
and no longer be the rulers of our synagogues of sin, the creators of our own churches,
and let the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ deliver us into the holiness of God’s
Church. This only happens when the Holy
Spirit can lead you to the stillness of Jesus on the cross.
There is hope only in your Lord
Jesus Christ. It was his pleasure to
endure the cross for your victory. There
too is forgiveness, when you have perverted God’s church into a church of selfish
pleasure as did the ruler of the synagogue.
If Jesus can heal a woman bound
by Satan for eighteen years, Jesus can make you straight by the power of the
Holy Spirit and through the support of others whom he is healing too.
Are you coming to church but not
allowing the church of God to come to you.
Are the things you worship so powerful they are rewiring your brain,
away from resting in God, being busied pursuing pleasure and its deadly trap?
You have a pastor that struggles
to rest in God too. He along with all of
us are products of the fallen world in which we live. He will not condemn you in your struggle or
confession. But, in love for the Lord and
you, he will name God’s forgiveness in your confession and assist you to keep
your eyes on Jesus and what the Holy Spirit brings you into when you come to
God’s church.
“…you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the
heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are
enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the
righteous made perfect, and to Jesus,
the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better
word than the blood of Abel. See that
you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused
him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who
warns from heaven. (Hebrews 12:22–25
ESV)
Amen.
