Please watch the video HERE before watching the sermon below. This is the anthem the HMC choir was scheduled to perform today.
A performance by MELISMA of Philip Stopford’s Do not be afraid. Words by Gerard Markland. Commissioned in 2010 by Andrew and Kathryn Radley on the occasion of the baptism of their daughter Sophia Elizabeth on 24th October 2010 at St Peter and St Paul’s Church, Uplyme
Speaking Truth to Power
Isaiah 43:1-7
Home Moravian Church, January 12, 2025
“The job of a prophet is to speak truth to power.” I first heard this about twenty years ago, on a radio program called “Speaking of Faith.” I didn’t know that I would hear it again and again in divinity school; at the time, I didn’t even know I was headed for divinity school. But hearing those words for the first time was what I call a tuning-fork moment, when you hear a pitch so true that you vibrate all over.
This is the gift of the Hebrew prophets in what we call the Old Testament. Given the complexity of both their historical context and their poetry, we tend to just nod our heads at familiar passages like, “he will be called wonderful counselor” and “Let justice roll down like waters,” and then skip ahead to the gospels. But isn’t it worth time and effort to hear the prophets who inspired Jesus? And don’t we want to be in the room where someone is speaking truth to power? Wouldn’t you like to speak some truth to power?
Now, the Bible also has some stories of false prophets, and some stories where prophets were speaking entirely for themselves—Ezekiel and Jonah, among others, threw some epic tantrums; so it’s good to know when a prophet is on the up and up. In the Hebrew Bible, the signal that a prophet was speaking for God was Thus says the Lord. For example, from Jeremiah: “Thus says the Lord: The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness” (31:2). From Zechariah: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem” (8:4). And you’ll hear the words in today’s text. But now…
Before he gets to “Thus says the Lord,” Isaiah says, “But now….” “But now” means we are entering at a crucial point in the story. When you walk into a room and someone is saying, “But now,” you gotta ask: What was then? What is about to change?
For Israel—the audience of the prophet Isaiah—then was despair and devastation, destruction by the forces of Assyria. Then was also the chilling prophecy of capture by Babylon. Then was loss; then was suffering; then was when, as it says in chapter 42, Israel was given up to robbers, and felt the heat of their own sins consuming them like fire. That was then; but now, it’s about to be different. Thus says the Lord.
Thus says who?
If you don’t know, read on; because the first thing God says is who God is. “Thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob; he who formed you, O Israel.” God names Godself: creator. Former. And when God goes on to name God’s actions, these are still ways of naming God: to say I have redeemed you is to say I am redeemer. For God to speak of being present when Israel passes through waters or fire is for God to say I am protector. God names Godself Lord, holy one, savior. God, who according to Psalm 147 “determines the number of the stars and gives to all of them their names,” has also called Israel by name: God is knower and holder of names. And God is gatherer, who will bring the people together. The whole point of God’s speaking here is to tell the desperate people of Israel who God is; because when they know who God is, they will know they have nothing to fear. In all places, in all times, in all circumstances, they are in the hand of their creator, their protector, their savior. Do not be afraid.
God, through the prophet Isaiah, is speaking the truth of God’s character. The truth of God’s presence with and love for God’s people. The truth that God’s care will draw all God’s people into one embrace. God wants to tell the truth about who God is, because when people know the truth about who God is, they know that there is nothing to fear. The message, repeated over and over through the Bible, of “Do not be afraid,” grows out of another oft-repeated message: “I am who I am.” This is truth.
But to what power is it spoken?
Ever since I learned that the job of a prophet is to speak truth to power, I have reveled in the words of Micah: “Woe to those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds!” (2:1). And Amos: “For I know how many are your transgressions… you who afflict the righteous, and take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate!” (5:12.) And Isaiah: “The tyrant shall be no more, and … all those alert to do evil shall be cut off—those who cause a person to lose a lawsuit, who set a trap for the arbiter in the gate, and without grounds deny justice to the one in the right!” (29:20.) Truth! Truth spoken to wicked kings, greedy merchants, unscrupulous leaders of nations.
But in today’s text, the prophet brings God’s word to Israel—a nation given up to the spoiler, given up to robbers, overwhelmed by foreign forces, desperate, devastated, powerless. If prophets speak truth to power, Isaiah needs another audience.
The content of God’s message, delivered through Isaiah, is God’s self-revelation of God’s character. The truth of who God is. To what power must the truth of who God is be spoken? Reading this passage over and over, I have come to think: maybe truth is spoken here to the power of falsehood.
Consider the power of the falsehood that God does not love God’s people in the midst of their suffering. The falsehood that God cannot and will not save God’s people. The falsehood that God does not exist. The falsehood that God’s people should live in fear. These are powerful falsehoods. These are lies.
A phrase that has become part of America’s daily discourse is The Big Lie. The fact that this phrase no longer has shock value is shocking in itself; we’ve become complacent in using it.And the peculiar power of falsehood in a divided culture is that everyone agrees there is a big lie out there, but we can’t agree on what it is, or who’s telling it. The result is roiling anxiety, deep and mutual mistrust, and fear.
I am here to tell you, once and for all, the truth about the big lie: who told it, and what it is. I believe that the big lie is what Adam and Eve told themselves in the Garden of Eden, after their eyes were opened to all the hurt in the world, and they looked down at their naked, defenseless bodies. I believe that at that moment, they looked at each other and said: “We have nothing to help us, and everything to fear.” That was the start of the big lie, whose power seeks to control this world every day.
But through God’s prophet, Isaiah, comes the truth, spoken right into the face of all the power the big lie can muster. The truth is that God created God’s people. That God knows God’s people by name. That God is their Lord. That God is the holy one. That God is savior. That God’s people are precious in God’s sight, and honored; God loves God’s people. That whatever their struggles, whatever their heartbreak, whatever the terrors of every given day, God is with God’s people. And because all of this is true, it is also true that God’s people need not, must not, be afraid.
But who are God’s people? Although in the historical context Isaiah is certainly talking to Israel, today we look for a broader embrace. So I stumble over the part where God says to Israel: “I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you…. I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life.”
Didn’t God, creator of the people of Israel, also create the people of Egypt, Cush, and Seba? If so, doesn’t God love them, too? If the character God speaks in this passage is truth, then God must behave consistently with that character; and God’s character is love.
If the text says that God gives Egypt, Cush, and Seba in exchange for Israel, does that mean God loves Israel more? How does God give up one beloved nation, or even one beloved soul, in return for another? If a soldier of Russia and a soldier of Ukraine fight one another on the battlefield, and one dies, did God give the one up to save the other, because God loved the one who lived more than the one who died? That cannot be true to the character of God.
In the Passover seder, which commemorates the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt, participants dip their fingers in their wine and remove sixteen drops from their cups as they remember the plagues and the death of Egyptians in the Exodus story. One interpretation of that custom is that removing the drops shows that the cup is not full; meaning the joy of the celebration is incomplete, because the Jews could not be saved except by the deaths of others. Interpreters cite Proverbs 24:17: “Do not rejoice when your enemies fall.” This interpretation, by the way, may go all the way back to an eighteenth-century rabbi in Triesch, a city in the Czech province of Moravia.[1]
Not rejoicing in any death: This is true to God’s character. But accepting loss: it seems that this, too, would be true; because in a world where every mortal creature dies, the acceptance of loss is the cost of risking to love. God’s surrender of every life is costly. The defeat of one nation and the escape of another are not some cold transaction, but a crushing cost God bears for loving mortals, who far too often seek to destroy one another. It is the cost God bore in the death of Jesus Christ, whom God gave in exchange for the lives of the people God created—which is all people. In the end, God is gatherer, bringing the people into one embrace.
The prophet speaks truth to the power of falsehood. Listen! He speaks truth to the falsehood that God loves one person, one group, one nation more than another. Truth to the falsehood that God cannot, will not act in the face of injustice. Truth to the falsehood that human suffering doesn’t matter, that we are without help, that everyone is alone, that we must live in fear. Listen! Listen closely. Listen with confidence. Listen to truth. And do not be afraid.
[1] Zvi Ron, “ ‘Our Own Joy is Lessened and Incomplete’: The History of an Interpretation of Sixteen Drops of Wine at the Seder,” in Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought (https://hakirah.org/Vol19Ron.pdf).
