Isaiah 6 – This
chapter tells us the story of Isaiah’s call. It happened c. 740 BC. Isaiah says
he “saw the Lord Yahweh seated on a high throne” (6:1). Two “seraphs” stood
above him, each with six wings (two covered its face, two its genitals – here
called feet – and two for flying). They cried out, “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh
Sabaoth [the Lord of Heaven’s Armies]” (6:3). “Their voices shook the Temple to
its foundations, and the entire building was filled with smoke” (6:4).
Isaiah feels he is doomed. He calls himself “wretched” for
being a “man of unclean lips” (6:5), a man who lives “among a people of unclean
lips” (6:5). One of the seraphim comes to him and touches his mouth with a live
coal to purge him of his sin. “Then I heard the Lord asking, ‘Whom should I send
as a messenger to this people? Who will go for us?’ I said, ‘Here I am. Send
me.’ And he said, ‘Yes, go, and say to this people, ‘Listen carefully, but do
not understand. Watch closely, but learn nothing.’ Harden the hearts of these
people. Plug their ears and shut their eyes, nor hear with their ears, not
understand with their hearts and turn to me for healing” (6:8-10).
Isaiah wonders how long this state of things will last. God
tells him they will remain unresponsive until “towns are empty, their houses
are deserted, and the whole country is a wasteland” (6:11). If even a remnant
remains, “it will be invaded again and burned” (6:13). The stump that remains
“will be a holy seed” (6:13).
Isaiah 7 – During
the reign of Ahaz, king of Judah, the king of Aram [Syria] plans to go against
Jerusalem with Pekah, son of the king of Israel; they will not take the city,
but the “hearts of the king and his people trembled with fear, like trees
shaking in a storm” (7:2).
Isaiah is instructed to take his own son and go to Ahaz and
tell him not to fear the assault. It will not succeed. And as for Israel,
“within sixty-five years it will be crushed and completely destroyed” (7:8). Don’t forget that at this time, Israel and Judah are
separate kingdoms; Israel will be the first to be conquered by the Assyrians.
A second message then is sent to Ahaz telling him to ask
Yahweh for a sign, but Ahaz says he will not “put Yahweh to the test” (7:12).
Then comes the famous prophecy: “The Lord himself will give you a sign. It is
this: the maiden is with child and will soon give birth to a son whom she will
call Immanuel” (7:14). This child will “know how to refuse evil and choose
good” (7:15).
According to Lawrence Boadt, no
book of the Old Testament was looked to as much as Isaiah in early Christian
attempts to understand Jesus’ importance to them.
The “army of southern Egypt and . . . the army of Assyria .
. . will swarm around you like flies and bees. They will come in vast hordes
and settle in the fertile areas and also in the desolate valleys, caves, and
thorny places” (7:18-19). But the Lord will also “hire a ‘razor’ from beyond
the Euphrates River – the king of Assyria – and use it to shave off everything:
your land, your crops, and your people” (7:20).
There will be little left to feed the people, but “few
people will be left in the land” (7:22). “The entire land will become a vast
expanse of briers and thorns, a hunting ground overrun by wildlife” (7:24).
From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through
Quakerism
Part 15
The peace that came to me in submitting to this call to
speak in Meeting was not lasting. We moved from Raleigh up to Asheville, North
Carolina. I toyed with the idea of joining the Unitarian Universalists because
they had a Sunday school program and more structure to their worship time –
singing, corporate prayer, things I felt I needed and that would be good for my
children. But the chaos that came with the breakup of my first marriage
ultimately brought me back to the Quakers.
I needed something different. I needed the quiet and intimate sense of support and comfort I knew I
would find among Friends. I needed to be able to pour my heart out and ask
people to “hold me in the light.” I needed to reflect on what I had done to get
myself into such a mess and ponder ways of getting out of it. Meeting gave me
opportunities to do all these things. At some point after starting back, a man
came up to me after Meeting and introduced himself to me. This man, who three
years later would become my second husband, would become for me in this moment
of my life an instrument of God’s grace. I didn’t realize it at first. We
talked about the situation I was in, how I was holding up. He told me that he
was also going through domestic turmoil. He said he was finding comfort in reading
the Scriptures for the first time, looking to God in a way he had not been
willing to do earlier in his life. He was excited about the prophets. They
“spoke to his condition.” as Friends said.
I started to go to the weekly Bible study he had at his
place. We got to know each other. We walked around his neighborhood or mine,
talking about our problems, sharing our thoughts about religion. He had been
raised a Catholic but had left the Catholic Church in college. He hadn’t lost
faith entirely though. He continued to feel the pull of the divine, just not in
terms of organized religion. Like many in the late sixties and early seventies,
he found a degree of spiritual satisfaction in the back-to-nature movement that
was big on American college campuses in those years. His hero was Henry David Thoreau. In the years since college,
however, with his marriage and entry into the world of private school teaching,
he had struggled with depression and felt the need to reattach himself to a
spiritual community of some kind. Through a Quaker friend of his wife’s, he
became interested in Friends and started attending a Meeting near the school
where he was teaching. As with many people attracted to Friends during this
period, the traditional Friends commitment to things like social justice,
peace, and environmental responsibility weighed heavily with him, but he also
loved the unadorned Christianity he met with there.
I was in a completely different place with respect to bother
religion and my marital troubles. I was pretty much a mess, spiritually and
psychologically. I had no sense of where I was going religiously at all. For
years I had wrestled with feelings of
nostalgia for the Church and what it represented to me, but my mind could not
seem to find a way back. It wasn’t enough to yearn for faith or have an
amorphous sense of a transcendent dimension to human life. These I could easily
attribute to my psychological neediness. I was morbidly preoccupied with the
state of my mind. I had separated, in
part, out of a fear that my mind would not hold up over time to the unhappiness
I experienced in that union, and what I was going through now made me even more
afraid. I kept thinking of something I had read about Virginia Woolf and
her descent into mental illness, about how it was like sensing sharks in the
waters around her mind—the fear of its inevitability, the inner awareness that
the attack was coming and that she was powerless to defend against it. I wanted
to believe—now more than ever—but I just couldn’t. I was willing to concede
that something “spiritual,” something we could not know distinctly but called
God, might exist; but the whole Christian thing—the man Jesus, the miracles,
his dying for our sins, the resurrection, the gospel, the church, the whole
array of doctrines and moral mandates—all of this was simply beyond me.
I particularly remember one conversation my friend and I had
about Jesus when he asked me what I thought about Jesus’ crucifixion. I said I
couldn’t understand making so much of this one death, terrible as it was, that
thousands of men had been crucified by the Romans and that people died all the time for love of others or for causes they thought
worthy or good. There was nothing in that story that compelled me
intellectually. It would be nice to be able to believe in it, but I couldn’t.
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