Renew Your Mind

Halfway through the Old Testament, the genre changes from narrative to....well, to a collection of books which are less easy to categorize. Sometimes we call them Prophets and Wisdom literature, and it is probably true that most of us are less familiar with them than we are with the stories and characters of Genesis, Exodus and Kings. Perhaps it is good to be reminded that journeys should provoke not just action, movement and progress, but also a time for reflection on where we are heading and what we are learning. Today's reflection come from the book of Isaiah- an often confusing book of prophecy, which sometimes seems to have little to say to us today: but spend some time with the emotions, longings and sorrow of Isaiah and you will meet a man who is seeking to communicate just how much God loves His people. In Isaiah chapter 35 we read this alluring vision of the future- is this a future that your journey is leading to? 'The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad...

For a child has been born for us, a son has been given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Today in The Netherlands it is grey and miserable. It has been raining on and off all day- but every so often, an unexpected break in the clouds lets a shaft of sunlight shine through. For a few moments, the mood lifts- colours wake up, the sopping flowers seem to lift their heads again, there is hope that it is not going to rain for ever. These few verses in the middle of Isaiah chapter 9 sound a bit like that- suddenly in the middle of all the judgement, pain, destruction and indifference to truth comes a shaft of light, and glimpse of something better, a sunshine ray of hope. These are once again familiar verses, they are sung and read at Christmas clearly prophesying the birth of Jesus, but even here in Isaiah's time when nobody could guess how the story turned out, they speak of innoce...

Why do people not read the Old Testament more? I imagine it's because of passages like this one- it's full of incomprehensible Hebrew names and places, which seem to have had some sort of significance to the first people to read them, but are off-putting to us today. Is the only way to read a passage like this to get out a concordance or commentary, and work out who all these people are? Or should we just ignore the stuff we don't understand, and skip straight to a verse or two that we can make sense of? One thing that reading through Isaiah one chapter at a time is showing me, is that the second option is not a valid one. the bits we might chose to pull out rarely mean what we might expect them to. It is worth pausing and asking what message they gave to the people of the time- even if that doesn't seem to be a message that is relevant to us today. This is a book that tells us about God, not offers us a quick fix for our problems and concerns. So in the middle of this ...

So here comes one of those bits of Isaiah that we all know, because we hear it every year at Christmas time: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. This is the NRSV translation- the NIV translates 'young woman' as virgin, which is of course how Matthew chooses to translate it in Matt 1:22, when he has the angel telling Joseph that Mary's immaculate conception fulfills what the Lord has spoken through the prophets. Reading this verse embedded in the rest of Isaiah makes me look at it quite differently. Here in Isaiah the child himself is not the sign- it seems to suggest rather a time line, a hope that within the time it takes for a child to be conceived, be born, be weaned and grow to understand good and evil there will be a change in the fortunes of the people. But Matthew, and the community for whom he wrote his gospel, must have been reading the prophets like Isaiah to...

the last chapter of Isaiah I read was chapter 6, which says this... Then I said "How long, O Lord?' And he said 'Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land. Even if a tenth part remains in it, it will be burned again....' (6: 11, 12, 13) Prophecy is such a strange, disturbing thing. I hear of the cities of my home country being laid waste, and see pictures on the news of buildings burning, and can't believe what I see. And in my head echo these ancient words from a book that most people living in the UK would say has no relevance to the way they live their lives. But something important has gone wrong. I don't think solutions will be found in politics, education, tax reforms, urban planning....or any human initiatives. This is judgement of a totally self-imposed form. People who have disregarded God...

Reading Isaiah is not like any other type of reading I do. At my local library, books are helpfully given stickers to indicate genre, and I can choose 'romance', 'historical fiction', 'travel guide' etc. If I choose to read a story, then however realistic the author makes his characters and settings sound, I am aware all the time that they only exist as a figment of his imagination. When I read a travel guide, I expect that I could visit the places described and they would actually exist. Isaiah messes with my expectations of reality.The text lurches from mythical poetry, through stinging social criticism, to these first verses of chapter 6, which suddenly sound like history. We are given a date in time, the year that King Uzziah dies, which seems to point to the fact that this is going to be a serious, reliable record of events. But in verse 2, Isaiah is describing his vision of God, surrounded by six-winged seraphs. We find this so hard to understand, but who ...

The preference for poetry over prose carries on through chapter 5- it's clearly the lyrics of a song, and it's a song that moves from being a love-song in the first two verses to a lament, full of pain and regret. It's helpful to imagine it being performed as a song, by a soul singer in a dimly lit bar in a city somewhere, rather than preached as a neat three point sermon or dissected in a theology book. The song starts with a guitar picking a melody, drawing on old folk tunes to conjure up a gentle, tender feeling of delight and care for a vineyard, a people. Verse 7 shows us that "The vineyard of the Lord of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting." But this bucolic beginning doesn't last long- the singer's voice turns harsh, an electric guitar screams and the bass and drums sound an insistent note of decay and dissolution. The singer looks round the room at those who are attempting to drown their sorrows, and un...

I've been on holiday, and instead of reading Isaiah I read Lord of the Rings. Maybe because Isaiah was on my mind, there seemed to be a lot of parallels. As I picked up Isaiah again and came to chapter 4 v.2-6, it sounds just like something Tolkein might have written. It's not that long, so here it is in full:   In that day the Branch of the LORD will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors in Israel.     Those who are left in Zion, who remain in Jerusalem, will be called holy, all who are recorded among the living in Jerusalem.     The Lord will wash away the filth of the women of Zion; he will cleanse the bloodstains from Jerusalem by a spirit   of judgment and a spirit   of fire.     Then the LORD will create over all of Mount Zion and over those who assemble there a cloud of smoke by day and a glow of flaming fire by night; over everything the glory   will be a canopy. ...

I approached Isaiah chapter 2 as an intellectual, theological puzzle and struggled to find any answers- and then read chapter 3, which is pure poetry. Not pretty, sentimental rhyming type of poetry, but words used as art in the best sense, to tell truth. Bruggemann talks about how we live in a prose-flattened world, where we expect truth to come in scientific, logical, rational or mathematical ways and are losing the ability to see truth in art. My daughter and I watched part of King Lear yesterday, and she commented how, compared to drama and film of today, Shakespeare takes so long to say anything. Characters have speeches lasting for pages, where they find multiple ways of essentially saying the same thing- but Shakespeare knew something about writing that today's scriptwriters, political speech-makers and twitter users have lost. So perhaps we should try reading Isaiah chapter 3, which really extends until verse 6 of chapter 4, as poetry. Listen to the cadences of the roll ca...

I visited the Mauritshuis in The Hague yesterday with a friend, and what made the trip especially enjoyable was the audio guide we used, which explained the story of each painting, pointing out details we would have missed without it and explaining the meaning of the symbolism in each picture. What I would like is an audio guide to Isaiah chapter 2. It seems, at first reading, to be a bit of a jumble, containing hope and terror, worship and idolatry, cedars of Lebanon and a few rats and bats thrown in for good measure. What is going on? Does Isaiah really believe that there will come an actual time in history when nations 'never make war or attack one another'? (Is 2:4) Or is this just a pretty piece of poetry? Verse 11 and 12 sound a lot like the song Mary sang when she realised she was to be the mother of Jesus, but his coming was nothing like the terrifying scenes that Isaiah describes: 'You had better hide in caves and holes- the Lord will be fearsome, marvelous and g...

Isaiah 1 The book of Isaiah begins by telling us that Isaiah was the son of Amoz, and that he wrote during the time of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah who were kings of Judah. The academic theologian in me wants to stop right there, and get out my commentaries, so I can find out at what point in Israel's history this was, who those kings were, if the name Isaiah referred to a real person or was a pseudonym for some other author, and what were his motives for writing. But I have to acknowledge that a lot of that stuff is an avoidance tactic to hearing God's word. Reading the Bible is a funny process- rather than read it as any other kind of literature, Christians read it because we believe something supernatural about it- we believe that it is the word of God. Now we interpret that in all sorts of ways, but it must mean that by reading these words, written many years ago to a people and a context that is far removed from mine, I expect to encounter God. Find out who He is? ...

My friend Charlie preached today about the importance of reading the bible, and made the point that the first step is just to open your bible and get on with it... good advice, which needs saying not because we don't know it, but because we don't do it. So, I started to think....where to start reading? The obvious, and appealing choice, is one of the gospels. Why? Because they are narratives, and stories are easy to read, they have a natural flow and momentum, we want to know what happens next. Also, for Christians, the gospels have the huge appeal of Jesus. Of the Trinity, he is the one we find it easiest to understand....which was the point, I suppose. Second best must be a tie between Psalms, which come in handy bite-size portions, and can usually be relied upon to say something inspiring and easily applicable to whatever situation we find ourselves in- or one of the epistles, which funnily enough have the same characteristics to recommend them. So why not try someth...