It was a frosty morning when I was waiting to meet a friend of mine. I was sitting on the wall waiting for him to arrive at the appointed place when I observed something at a nearby school playground. It was filled with children even though it was a cold morning. They were all bundled up; you could hardly see their faces; they made the most incredible sounds: were laughing, screaming and playing! They were even on a rather decrepit machine that they would normally play on that had got very cold and rusty, and was squeaking. There were balls that were being thrown, and there was a general cacophony of sound. I just closed my eyes for a minute and listened to the children play.
Sociologists observe this – and they are correct – that there is sort of a rhythm to children playing. The sound had everything from high pitched noises to low ones, to pounding and beat and rhythm. It was really quite something! As I sat and listened and enjoyed the children playing outside, I thought of something I had encountered only very recently. That is something that maybe you know something about, but I had not, and that is what is known as the poetry slam. Now, you are all wondering? “Ah-ha,” you all go! Of course, you all go to poetry slams, right?
Well, poetry slams were created in the 1980s and came out of Chicago. Originally, the poetry slams were designed for young people in particular, to talk about and to express poetry that came from the urban reality of the street. Often know as Dub, which of course has its own rhythm and is at the heart of a lot of rap music, poetry and poetry slams came up as a form of competitive poetry. People would present their poetry on the stage, and the audiences were the ones who would, by virtue of either a panel selected from them or simply by the level of applause, would determine who wins a poetry slam. This competitive poetry would bring some of the most erudite and articulate young minds from the streets of urban areas to people who had little to say, but wanted a forum in which to say it. It was amazing!
These slams have taken on, particularly in the last few years, a life of their own. There is hardly an urban centre anywhere in the western world that doesn’t have a poetry slam. Of course, always wanting to be hip and up on whatever is happening today, I decided I would watch some poetry slams on YouTube. And I did – with great interest! As a lover of poetry, and realizing there is an amazing gulf between Byron and Shelley and Tennyson and what I was hearing coming from the streets, the rhythm of the streets in urban culture today, I nevertheless realized that there is in this some richness and power.
This rhythmic, message-based sound that comes forward with power often says really great things. There was one person I listened to called Daniel Ortiz, and I thought, “In the midst of this there is profundity and there is humour in equal measure.” Daniel Ortiz has won a number of these slams, and in one poem he has a line that he repeats it – and I love it! – “Even when you fall on your face, you are still moving forward.” Isn’t that lovely? In other words, he is suggesting in one of his great poems that even though you life may not always be working out, there is still progress. Even when things are falling apart, there is still this opportunity to progress. Even when you fall flat on your face, you are still moving forward. And I thought, “This is great poetry!” Somehow poetry is the only way you can say things like that, and have meaning and purpose and rhythm and cadence around it. I just loved it! Now, I am not sure that I am going to be appearing in any poetry slams around the city in the near future, but I will tell you this: there is something about capturing the urban sound and rhythms that make sense.
We go back thousands of years in today’s passage from the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah is the second of two Isaiahs, the latter one, but he is the one who captures the urban beat on the ground. What we have in this passage, although you can’t tell by our Order of Service, is that if you go back and look in your Bibles at home, you will realize that as soon as we begin Chapter 40 where this text is, it is set out in a poetic form with strokes and with lines that are metered. Actually, what we have here is the most incredible poetry, and Isaiah is writing poetry that has come from the streets. He is writing at a time when the people of Israel are living in exile. They are living as refugees in someone else’s city, in someone else’s land. He captures this sense of the urban rhythm of the exiled people.
As he does so, he hears a number of things that are arising, and they are all about God. What the people are saying is that God must have somehow forgotten about them, because they are not in Jerusalem, because they haven’t returned to their own land, and they have to live in a foreign land in Babylon. They have no sense that God has cared for them, and because of that, they felt they had been forgotten. There is also another thought that emerges, not only has God forgotten about them, but even more despairing, God is no longer in charge of things. “We wouldn’t be in the mess we are in” they are thinking, “if God was on our side and if God was in control. God has lost the plot.” They also must have been thinking, “Well, maybe we are hitching our star to the wrong God. Maybe it is not the One God, the Creator, the God of the Universe, the God of Israel that we should be worshipping. Maybe we should be worshipping the gods of Babylon. Maybe it is Bel or Nisrach, maybe it is Nebo, maybe it is one of these other gods that we should be worshipping, for it seems that the Babylonians have their gods and they are doing better than we are, so maybe we’ll just worship those gods instead of Yahweh, the one God of Israel. You can feel the grumbling. Isaiah senses it. He knows what is going on the street. So what does Isaiah do? He writes some poetry! He writes poetry for the powerless.
It has often been the case that people who are successful, whose lives are developing well, who are healthy, who have all the resources of the world, tend to think of God as being strong, and in charge of the universe. Things must be good with God, because things are good with me! Likewise, they see creation as being benign, a beautiful thing. Why? It is because creation is treating them well. They are successful, they are rich, they are powerful, they are healthy, they are strong, and they are productive. They have all these great things, so creation must be nice and wonderful. They rely on that and think God is in control, everything is working out well, and I am blessed by the created order – that is it! But, Isaiah is listening to the sound of the street, and the sound of the street is not about people who are successful, powerful, affluent and wealthy. They are not people who are healthy or feeling optimistic; rather they are the powerless. So he asked this question of himself, “How do I write about God to people who are powerless? What do I say?”
This is where Isaiah begins our poem today. He begins by suggesting that one of the ways the powerless might regain their faith in God is if they allow themselves to understand history. He starts off by saying, “Do you not know, have you not heard of the things that God has done, of the wonders of God’s creation, the number of things that God has made? Have you not heard? Do you not know? Has the great oral tradition of Israel given you nothing? On the contrary, it has given you a great deal! It has told you of the great and the marvelous and the mysterious things that God has done.” Isaiah says that they are unfathomable at times, we don’t know them, but history reminds us of the things that God has done. Has God not brought down the powerful and the unjust, just as he did Pharaoh? Does God not raise up those who have been beaten down? Is that not what happened under Moses? Implied in all of this is the need for people to have a sense of history.
I love what William Carl, the American preacher, says about the people of Israel at that time. He says that they had become “Amnesiacs.” They had lost a sense and a memory of history. They had forgotten what God had done for them. He wanted to remind them, “You might be in Babylon right now, and sure it might appear that you are questioning the power of God and think that you have been forgotten, but you have not been forgotten. Renew your memory as a people, and you will realize what God has done.” That is one of the reasons why I believe so firmly in Christians and people of faith knowing their Scriptures and their Bibles. It is not just a matter of some sort of religious piety or you should know it because it is the thing to do. You need to know it to make sure you don’t suffer from amnesia so that the people of God don’t forget what God has done over thousands of years of history.
This is not some sort of made-up, go-as-you-wish, dial-by-wire type of faith; this is something that is rooted in the very history and the fabric of God’s people. That is why, more than anything else, Isaiah wanted that great oral tradition, not a written one, but an oral tradition to be remembered by the people who were living in Babylon. “Have you not heard? Do you not know the Lord, your God, is everlasting?” Time and again he says this, because he also wants them to be purposeful. He wants them to have a sense of identity. You see, one of the dangers for people who, when they feel they are aliens and they are living in exile is that they lose their identity. Israel had lost all sense of who it was, and as every successive generation went by, the greater the danger that they would forget that they are the people of God, and had been chosen by God. Isaiah knew this. He heard what was going on in the street. He heard the pain of a people who had lost their identity. The only way that Isaiah could speak to these powerless people would be to remind them that God loved them even in the midst of all of this. That they have an identity, but their identity is in God, “Like the grasshoppers, so great will they be! So great will you be! Is God not greater in God’s love than all the other gods?”
I love the writer, Paul Thigpen, who writes in Christianity Today. He often writes deep, heavy theology. I love reading his deep, heavy theology, but once in a while he breaks out of it, and he just tells a story. He told a simple story about how one day his wife was diagnosed with an illness and she had to go in to the hospital for an operation, just staying overnight. He decided after he had dropped her off to go home and to clean up the house and make it sparkling clean so when she came home everything would look beautiful, and she wouldn’t have to lift a finger for days. What a kind, husbandly thing to do! So, he goes off and he sees his wife in hospital and he has a lovely visit with her, and he knows that the next day she is going to come home. But after the visit, he returns home and he can’t believe what he sees! His kitchen looks like a bomb has hit it! There are chocolate finger-marks all over the refrigerator and oven doors. There is flour on the floor. There is fat and oil spilt. There is sugar grinding under his feet. There are pots and pans that have been pulled out of cupboards. It looks horrendous!
He looks at this terrible place that he had left so clean and tidy, and realizes that his daughter did this. He goes looking for her, and he can’t find her but he does see that under the flour there is a little note:
Dad:
I was trying to do something good for you.
Love,
Angel
She had gone into hiding! She went and hid in her grandmother’s place, which was adjacent. The grandmother had been looking after the little girl but had fallen asleep. He sees his daughter cuddled up with her grandmother, looking terrified as he walks into the room. She knows what she has done, she knows she has made a mess. He said, “I looked at her, and at that moment, every bit of anger found its way through the whole of my body and out through the soles of my feet, for I realized that everything that had been done had been done in love.”
Isaiah writing to the exiles knew this. He wanted them to know that despite the whole mess they were in, God still loved them, maybe not in control in the way that they thought. Maybe they thought he had forgotten them, but he hadn’t. Then, in the most glorious passage I think in almost all of The Old Testament, he starts to renew their sense of purpose. He had written a poem for the powerless, but now he was writing it for the purposeful. For the second time he says:
Have you not heard? Do you not know the Lord is everlasting, the Creator of the ends of the earth? He does not faint or grow weary. The Creator of the ends of the earth, his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
Poetry for the purposeful!
Isaiah knew that the people were feeling weak. He knew that they were feeling that their whole life was in decline, but in the midst of it he says, “Have you not heard? Do you not know the Lord is everlasting? He will lift you up!” In the most glorious words of The Old Testament, “like eagles’ wings” the most glorious bird, the most powerful thing that lifts the greatest bird, the eagles’ wings will lift you up, you will not be faint, you will not stumble, and you will not have to do anything except wait on the Lord. My glory, what a poem! Even when you are falling flat on your face, you are still moving forward, because God is with you.
A couple of weeks ago, I read an article that many of you will have seen I am sure in the North Toronto Post. It was entitled, something like “Losing our Religion.” It was about how so many, particularly United Churches were closing in Toronto, and in our own neighborhoods. It is true, they are! It said that even more will close, and how the different developers are talking about how to use these churches. One of the comments that was made by a Councillor – and I do applaud him for it – is that yes, it is not only these buildings going but they have been places of great social support, a great network for people in the community, and often we don’t realize exactly what churches do. He is absolutely right!
I have thought about that, and about all those churches that still exist like our own, and I say to myself, “What do we need to do and what do we need to be?” Sometimes, you know, that is actually not the question. The question isn’t always what we have to do. Sometimes it is a question of simply asking ourselves if we are prepared to be faithful. Look at Isaiah, look what he says to the people who had been living in exile. Does he say you have to do this, that and the other? Is there a particular form of worship? Is there a particular law or a new program that you have to put in place? No! You wait patiently on the Lord, but you remain faithful, and he will lift you up on eagles’ wings. He has an uncanny way of turning. It is not all just as things appear at the moment; it is how things can appear in the future. What Isaiah is saying to the people who have lost their sense of purpose is simply, “Be faithful.” There is a virtue in just being faithful, and that faithfulness can have its own rewards, for you will be lifted up on eagles’ wings.
I know she probably wouldn’t appear in a poetry slam, and I know that her poetry has become a little de rigueur among some of the social elite, particularly in the United States. It has received a great deal of acceptance, but still at the core of the poetry of this person there is a sense in which even in the midst of your powerlessness, you can rise. Even when it appears that everything is down, you can be strong. The person I am talking about is Maya Angelou, and writing about the black experience and the fact of the rising of people who have been oppressed, she wrote one of the most spellbinding poems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Isaiah would put it this way: “Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted, but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles; they will run and not be weary; they will walk and not faint.” A poem for the powerless about the wonders of God! Amen.