God’s work. Our hands.

Is God paying attention to all the wrongs going on in the world?  Does God even notice when humans are suffering or in pain?  How can humans get God’s attention?  Hey!  Hey, God!  Fix this mess, why don’t ya?   

Guess what—this is what was going on in the time of Isaiah the prophet.  Open your Bible to Isaiah 58, because this is the backstory for the section we just read from Isaiah.  I’m gonna read some from the early part of chapter 58.   

It’s like the people are saying to God, “Why do we fast, but you do not see?  Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”  (Isaiah 58:3a)  So God answers back through the prophet Isaiah, “Look, you serve your own interests on your fast day, and oppress all your workers.  Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.” (Isaiah 58:3b-4a) 

God has been paying attention, not to the ones who are fasting for to the ones who are hungry because they’ve been oppressed: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (Isaiah 58:6-7) 

God very much notices the poor and the oppressed, much more than pious people who fast and follow all the religious rules but ignore the needs of their neighbors.  To be hungry and without resources, to be forced to work without rest, is to treat human beings like animals, specifically like cattle or donkeys or mules.  Imagine animals being harnessed to work in a field—they are fitted with a yoke, a kind of collar that goes over their shoulders so they can be connected to a plow that turns the soil for planting seeds to grow crops.   

To be a righteous community is to make injustice impossible.  Cory Driver, seminary professor and ELCA pastor, writes in an article about this lectionary passage that Isaiah instructs his listeners “to undo and break yokes that turn human bearers of the divine image into chattel beasts of burden. …the expectation is that the technology that enables dehumanizing, compelled work will not even be found among God’s people. …Humans are not allowed to say, “Your oppression is a price I am willing to pay for my comfort.”¹ 

And Pastor Driver continues:  

“In previous generations, Americans could look at chattel slavery in service to the southern cotton and tobacco industries and immediately hear Isaiah 58 speaking to their moral issue. Will we tolerate the yoke on others, or not? Without enslaved humans, the political economy of the Confederate states would collapse! Good! Are we willing to turn the same vision of moral clarity on ourselves today in considering how much of our technology is built from conflict minerals? Are we willing to examine how the AI [Artificial Intelligence] that increasingly becomes part of our daily lives is an environmental and energy disaster that is accelerating global climate change and making survival for humans on the margins even more difficult?”¹ 

Just to put this in a bit of perspective, senior research analyst Jesse Dodge, who studies how artificial intelligence consumes energy, said in an NPR interview over a year ago: “One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes.”²  So imagine every silly thing you command a machine to do for you, and how much electricity is used and how quickly that adds up when multiplied across millions of people.   

Isaiah’s words are still fresh for us, today, in a world of many modern conveniences and incredible technologies and wealth—for all that we have accomplished, humans still don’t have equal access to these amazing technologies and healthcare and wealth.  We still put yokes on our own neighbors.  We still yoke ourselves to work without taking time to rest in the grace of God, to savor God’s mercy.  This is not wisdom.  This is not righteousness.   

Isaiah calls out to whoever will listen: God still provides for everyone, even during hard times.  God has a vision of what the world will look like without injustice, where actions taken on behalf of neighbors will shine brighter than the sun, where parched gardens will be watered, where history is remembered and relationships are repaired.   

It’s not easy to imagine God’s vision, what the world could look like.  Isaiah prophesied many years before Jesus arrived on the earth, and Jesus was still trying to tell people a lot of the same things.  The healing story we’ve read today, about how Jesus sees and reaches out to a woman who is bent over, appears in a section of Luke’s Gospel where Jesus is talking about economics.  

A New Testament scholar, Duncan Derrett, notices how this healing story of the woman bent over functions as an object lesson—Ched Myers pointed this out in his book “Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy.”³  Jesus heals this woman on the Sabbath, and not in a secretive way but very publicly in the synagogue.   

And notice that when Jesus is criticized for doing work on the Sabbath, Jesus doesn’t give a lecture about how this is simply the right thing to do—Jesus points out that if you can have enough compassion for your animals, to make sure they’re fed and watered on the Sabbath, then you can have as much compassion for your fellow humans.  Healing this woman is not just about mercy—it’s about liberation.  Jesus comes to set people free.   

Ched Myers talks about how sometimes healing stories in the Gospels can be looked at as metaphors, that this woman’s body, bent over, can represent the bent-over population of people who are laboring under oppressive structures.  Myers writes:  

“Her political body was doubled over—and today we still routinely talk about ‘crippling debt,’ or how individuals, social groups, and whole nations ‘groan under debt burdens.’ Debt remains the most widespread symptom (and mechanism) of economic injustice.”⁴ 

Jesus sees this woman, who could easily have been ignored just as she was ignored in the society she lived in.  God sees the people living under oppression, people who are hungry, and says to the people who are faithful: you take the yoke from off your neighbor’s neck.  Let that be your act of worship.   

This is why we still celebrate “God’s work. Our hands.” Sunday.  This tradition started many years ago, when the ELCA invited congregations to find ways to show up in their communities, to let our acts of worship not be confined within the walls of our sanctuaries, but let us live our faith publicly.  That’s what the t-shirts are about—they’re gold and bright and noticeable.   

Sometimes Lutherans take for granted that we just help our neighbors because it’s the right thing to do, and that’s true, it is, but also because we know God’s love and mercy.  We know how God has saved us in our own experiences of being burdened, maybe even crippled by debt or anxiety.  We don’t want to lose our humanity by treating other humans like animals.  Perhaps we have felt, in some way, a yoke on our own necks, and how it feels for that yoke to be lifted away.  This is the freedom we desire for all people.   

And this is God’s desire too, God who notices and sees each one of us.  May our vision align with God’s will and God’s hope for creation. 

Amen.   

Pastor Cheryl