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Meditation from the Ash Wednesday Service

                                     “The Isaiah Connection”  Isaiah 58:1-12

One of the programs I enjoy watching is PBS’ “American Experience”. Several weeks ago they did an episode on the bombing of Germany in World War II. In the summer of 1943, the Royal Air Force, with assistance from the American airmen, bombed Hamburg Germany in an attempt to break the will of the German people. The images that appeared on the screen were not just pictures of bombers high above the city dropping their loads, or aerial views of the explosions. Instead they showed pictures of the destroyed buildings, shell-shocked women and men scrounging through rubble, and the piles of bodies that lined the street. An estimated 50,000 civilians were killed, and nearly one million people were left homeless.

As I looked at the pictures and heard those numbers I felt something I had never felt before – shock, anger, grief. Oh I have felt those feelings before for other victims of the war before, but never for the “Germans.” It was a new experience to realize that these were people who looked like me, some of whom may have had the same last name as me. The Germans went from being nameless, faceless automatons to people – real people.

We tend to treat people on the other side as if they aren’t people. It’s easier to hate that way. Whether they are on the other side in a war or on the other side politically, theologically, in worship styles, and so on – we tend to remove names and faces in order to feel better about the way we treat them. Amazingly enough, with the exception of actual warfare, the ones we damage most are ourselves.

We forget that we are all God’s children; all made the same with the same feelings, dreams, and hopes for our future. We are all in relationship with others as children, parents, siblings, spouses and friends. We forget that when cut we all bleed.

We tend to treat God that way as well. We create nameless, faceless gods that fit with whatever actions we want to justify at the time. And in doing so, even if we use the “right and proper” forms of worship, we are not being true to the God who created us, not the other way around.

During this season of Lent, I would invite you to hear the names, sees the faces, and hear the stories of those we would like to call enemies, or at the very least strangers. As Isaiah shares, it is in welcoming others, in acknowledging this wild and wonderful thing called the human condition in one another that our light will break forth and our healing will spring up.

Notice that Isaiah is not referring to the healing of others – as if “they” are in need of correction – but to our healing. The healing that comes from hope that we are all in need, and that in doing for someone else, in recognizing the need in each one of us no matter what side we are one – that everyone will get healed.

Call it the Isaiah Connection – we are all connected to each other, and when we satisfy the needs of afflicted, then our light shall rise in the darkness and our gloom will be like the noon day. Hope will break forth and in hope comes healing that is truly transformation.