the Pitt 23: Isaiah and Urban Possibility

As I mentioned last time, I have been looking into urban issues in seeking to exegete our community in Pittsburgh that we will be moving to in order to cultivate a spiritual and faith community.  I picked up my copy of Walter Brueggemann's Using God's Resources Wisely to review it again, because I remembered that it deeply dealt with Isaiah's vision of urban possibility.

I'm a big Brueggemann fanboy, so as usual, he's got some serious mojo with this insightful little book.  Anyway, I think there is so much that we can take hold of...so I wanted to share:

comments from Isaiah 58:9-12:
in verse 9b-12, the same "if-then" sequence is repeated one more time. The "if" sounds so conditional. "If you do...it will"; "if you don't...God won't":

• if you remove the yoke
• if you stop all derision and mocking
• if you practice neighborliness among those who seem least qualified to be neighbor...

...the "then" verse of 10-12 is again set up as cause and effect. The poet has discerned something as old as Moses, as passionate as the prophets, as sure as the wisdom teachers. The "if-then" is a rhetorical device to assert that things are indeed connected. What you want in your life is irrevocably connected to neighborliness: no private deals, no isolated benefits, no oases of private good. Then - only then - and the poet launches into Psalm 23. The Lord, the good shepherd, will guide, supply want, lead by living waters, sustain in an arid climate...it is simply astonishing that those who care and are not self-contained but notice the neighbor are permitted to live a life of unburdened freedom; now, only now, in verse 12, our theme of the rebuilt city emerges. So consider the city: Jerusalem, or Milwaukee, or Louisville or Atlanta [or Pittsburgh!]...if you remove the yoke, if you offer food to the hungry, if you deal with the humiliated and afflicted, if you practice a human infrastructure that redefines all the needy as legitimate, eligible neigbors: "if...then"

then commenting on Isaiah 58:13-14:
"if you refrain from tampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day..."If you do not trample the sabbath." "To tample the sabbath," I take to mean to reduce all life to an operation of production and consumption and to reduce the yoked poor to a useless commodity. Verse 13b sounds like Amos, when the human barrier or sabbath is overridden by the profit motive (Amos 8:4-6). The "if" is reiterated in the second and third lines of verse 13, insisting that sabbath is a barrier against exploitative self-interest. Sabbath and self-interest constitute a dramatic and sharp either/or. The "then" of verse 14 gives the promise and prospect of prosperity, abundance, and communion, the quinessential of a good life, lived fully as God intends. In these concluding verses, the poet reverts to the word pattern of verse 1-3. Again the term 'hps' is used twice in verse 13 for "interest," but this time "delight" in verses 13-14 is a different word ('ng) bespeaking an unutterable orgy of well-being, almost sexual in its sheer delight, pointing to the life-evoking blessing of God, all because of the enacted "if." Some "then."


I remind you...because the text comes up in this prospectus on urban rehabilitation given by Isaiah...these conclusions may seem obvious to you, but they are conclusions that belong to the core of our evangelical reflection:

• For people like us, it is seductively easy to confuse our self-interest with God's delight. Perhaps that is why in verses 1-3 the same word is used for both, but by verses 13-14 the poet uses two different words, in order to deepen the delight and to avoid any confusion between delight and interest. [note: to me, this is the heart of the heresy of the "prosperity gospel"!...that and they treat God like an idol, while teaching others to do the same!]
• The key issues of worship in the community are fundamentally economic. They are not liturgical, and they are not sexual, and they are not even racial. When the poet talks of the future of the city, the key issue is deployment of economic resources. That...is what the church must talk about. I dare suggest that all the smoke screens of other issues are alternative versions of religious posturing that are deceptive acts of disobediance and avoidance.
• At the core of evangelical faith are linkages in reality structured by God...the linkage is in the very fabric of creation, and there is no way out or around it.
• The core connection in the linkage is the poor, destitute neighbor without whom the city cannot rebuild. God's delight is the care that the poor neighbor receives. God's precondition for a safe city and functioning economy, moreover, is the care of that neighbor. I tell you this because it is in the text. I have no liberal ax to grind. It is the irreducible condition of the new city....

...Let me tell you what in fact this text is about. The future of the city, Jerusalem and our own town, hinges on the religious either/or: either redeploy resources according to God's large passion for the hungry, homeless and naked - or endless self-serving that yields no communion, no light, no vindication, no healing, no water, no feeding, no delight, no nothing. I am not a scare preacher. But I remind you of what we know most and best: God is not mocked. One acute mode of mocking is self-serving technological consumerism. Another mocking is self-serving religion, which traffics in vested interests. We know better. The future hangs on a slice of bread, a welcoming bed, a shared coat. The words play against these better words (Matt. 6:25,33):

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you wear...But strive first for the kingdom of God and God's righteouesness [justice], and all these things will be given to you as well."


At the beginning of Isaiah, the poet outlines what God intends for "the city" and what it has become:

• The city as intended by God is for faithfulness, justice and righteousness, for social relations and structures that work for the good of all; in other words, it is a place of rightly deployed resources.
• But the city runs amok, becoming a whore, forasking justice and righteousness, and then comes murder and bribes, disregard of orphans and widows.