Hilton Head Island, SC – February 26, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 5:8-9,18-21;25-30
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! - Isaiah 5:20
There is a tendency in politics, any kind of politics in any kind of country or political system, for politicians to value power for its own sake at the expense of using power for the benefit of the people whom politics is supposed to serve. In other words, staying in office becomes more important than using offices on behalf of the electorate.
Thus politicians of every stripe may engage in a verbal reversal of reality, in putting the opposite "spin" on what is by trying to convince people that it is not, or by insisting that what is not, is. The prophet Isaiah encountered the same phenomenon in the eighth century BCE. "Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land!" (5:8) Have you ever heard of two or three houses being torn down to be replaced by one huge house? Maybe somewhere else, but not on Hilton Head Island. Have you ever heard of family farms being swallowed up by enormous agri-corporations? "Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" (5:20) Have you ever heard the idea that if you concentrate wealth in the hands of the rich, eventually it will trickle down to the poor? Both political parties and every voter must be vigilant, lest, as G.K. Chesterton warned, we are seduced by "all that terror teaches, from lies of tongue and pen/ From all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men."
Isaiah darkly concluded that when goodness is de-valued, those who are the most natural leaders might refuse to lead. "Someone will even seize a relative, a member of the clan, saying, 'You have a cloak; you shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule.' But the other will cry out that day, saying, 'I will not be a healer; in my house there is neither bread nor cloak; you shall not make me leader of the people'" (3:6-7). God's word, spoken through scripture by patriarchs and prophets and preachers, is timeless.
In the United States of America, there has been a gradual erosion of the value of certain segments of American life. Life in the poorest neighborhoods is cheap, as when zoning laws are changed to obliterate entire neighborhoods of the poor, or when those who most need medical assistance during the pandemic were the last to receive it. The prophet Jeremiah spoke of such times when he sarcastically wrote, "Then I said, 'These are only the poor, they have no sense; for they do not know the way of the Lord, the law of their God. Let me go to the rich and speak to them; surely they know the way of the Lord, the law of their God.' But they all alike had broken the yoke," Jeremiah observed; "they had burst the bonds" (Jeremiah 5:4-5).
Across the sociological spectrum, life can become gravely undervalued in the kind of society toward which we are headed. Katherine Newman, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, wrote a book called Falling From Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. She chronicled the declining economic circumstances of young and middle-aged people whom she calls "dumpies": downwardly mobile professionals. The current economy is severely damaging the future prospects of millions of middle Americans. Their net worth is being de-valued at the same time that the net worth of the very wealthy is soaring upward. Probably there has always been a tendency for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, but now the super- rich, who are declining as a percentage of the population, are getting much richer, while everybody else, who represent the tremendous majority of the population, are getting relatively much poorer. The pandemic resulted in many people losing their jobs, and many of them have not yet been re-employed.
Gunfire is now the second-leading killer of teenagers, after traffic accidents. What does life mean when a fifteen-year-old can calmly gun down a momentary adversary in a playground altercation? How can youngsters learn to place incalculable value on human life when they can and do snuff it out in an instant of unchecked anger?
Early last week a player on the No. 1 University of Alabama basketball team gave a gun to a friend. The friend used the gun to kill someone. The player was not detained or arrested, and he went on to play in another game three days ago. The behavior of the Tuscaloosa police devalued the young man who was killed, and over-valued the life of the basketball star, who is one of the thousands of professional-amateur college athletes who are joining house to house and field to field with their newfound wealth from selling their names and images, while getting away with figurative murder.
At the same time we have been de-valuing individual lives in our nation, we have also been de-valuing the ideals we have represented throughout our history. For example, both Japan and Germany now considerably outdistance us in the actual amount of funds which are expended for foreign aid, and many countries give a higher percentage of their budgets for the benefit of third-world countries than we give. Further, we spend a much higher percentage of the national budget for defense than any other nation, and we seem more eager to get into wars than many others. Our concerns for ourselves and our own wellbeing have overshadowed our traditional concern for the whole world and its wellbeing.
A convenient phenomenon has arisen to excuse all our ills, however, and it is an excuse which more and more of us hastily seize. It is the "dysfunctional family." Wendy Kaminer wrote a book called I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, which has as its subtitle, The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions. With biting wit she attacks both the simplistic diagnoses of complex problems and the simplistic solutions of many of the plethora of self-help books flooding the shelves of bookstores. And while she agrees that some families are dysfunctional, she suspects that most of our problems are the results of individual willfulness and cussedness rather than fouled-up fathers or muddled mothers. Further, she is repelled by the lurid confessions which are elicited on the television talk shows. "Never have so many known so much about people for whom they cared so little," she writes in a pen dipped ever so deftly in therapeutic acid.
Patricia Raybon is a black woman who is a professor of journalism at the University of Colorado. In an article called Stolen Promise, she told of her anger at having a beautiful and eligible daughter, realizing that it is unlikely her daughter will ever marry a handsome, successful black man. And why? - Because – quote - "all the men are gone. Gone to jail. Gone to drugs. Gone to graves.... More black men in jail than in college. More dropping out of some schools than dropping in. Hundreds killed on mean streets every year. It is a war, but nobody with power is fighting it. It is the news, but no one with clout will explain it." What does life mean, when a highly intelligent and articulate black woman despairs that her daughter will ever find what the American Dream is supposed to promise every beautiful and talented girl?
If Yogi Berra actually said everything attributed to him, then Yogi is the all-time Master of the Malaprop. "When you come to a fork in the road," they say Yogi said, "take it." Well, it seems to me that perhaps our nation has finally understood that it is at a fork in the road, but are we going to take it?
Then there is the George Santos phenomenon. He is the young man who won a seat in Congress on the basis of a long litany of false claims about himself and his purported achievements. Does he illustrate an electorate who value values, or is it a sign of a people who have lost values, and who thus value no one, or who de-value everyone by having been so easily duped?
What DO we value? What really matters to us? Is there a sea change in the tide, or will we happily settle for more of the same? Are we part of the same old gullible electorate, or do we seek, -- no, do we demand -- something new?
Individuals may gravitate toward better values at any point in their lives or in the life of a culture, but a whole society seeks better values only when most people realize that the old way of life is hurting everyone, that the body politic is gravely endangered, and that reform is a necessity. The political palaver about family values indicates the vague awareness of a problem, but thus far we have not been overwhelmed by very many suggestions for a solution, especially from the ill-informed “family values” crowd..
But perhaps the perception that there is a problem is the first and necessary step in seeking the solution. A New Yorker cartoon showed a businessman showing a report to one of his colleagues. "Have you noticed ethics creeping into some of these deals lately?" he asks. That might be happening. Maybe we have already turned the corner. When you come to a fork in the road, for heaven's sake, take it. At last we may have perceived that we must not keep going in the direction we have been following, simply because we cannot. It is too perilous, too ruinous, too utterly without prospect of genuine hope.
We need to strive for an economy intended to benefit everyone, not just the chosen few; a health care system that is equitable and efficacious for everyone; an educational system which teaches and inspires instead of merely maintaining order while filling up youthful time; a military which is intended to insure peace rather than guarantee war; public works projects which build for the future without at the same time undermining its fiscal viability.
A couple of women met back on their college campus, after having not seen one another for several years. The first said to the other, "I've gotten married since we last met." "Oh, that's good," said the other. "Well, I don't know about that. My husband is four times as old as I am." "Oh, that's bad," said the other. "I don't know about that," said the first; "he's worth millions of dollars." "Oh, that's good!" said the other. "Well, I don't know about that," said the first; "he won't give me a cent." "Oh, that's bad," said the other. "I don't know about that. He built me a million-dollar house." "Oh, that's good!" "I don't know about that; it burned down last week." "Oh, that's bad!" said the other. "I don't know about that," said the first; "he was in it."
What's good? And what is bad? Our values are determined by our answers to such questions. And it is never too late to re-evaluate our values.
God seeks repentance and justice from every people at every period of history, and He is patient and long-suffering in His quest. I doubt that it is ever too late to turn around, as far as God is concerned, though sometimes it may appear too late as far as human events are concerned. As Isaiah hinted, it isn't too late for us - - - yet.