If anyone’s counting, roughly the 52nd presidential debate took place this past week – I think that’s about right. And watching it, I was reminded again how deep the disagreements are between our national leaders, between and within parties, about how we can best climb our way out of the current economic crisis our nation is facing. Many of our leaders are smart and experienced, so their lack of consensus would seem to imply, at least to some of us, the real truth: nobody seems to know quite how to spend (or save) ourselves out of these GDP-, job-growth, and housing-market blues. The cumulative effect of all this is to make us feel uncertain of the near future. And it’s probably true that nothing makes us as anxious as prolonged uncertainty.

There was once a kingdom in which uncertainty had moved in and all but taken up permanent residence. It seemed that all Jerusalem could talk about was the rise of a superpower to the north. Mighty Assyria, with her seemingly unstoppable army, was devouring its smaller neighbors like pack of dogs running down rabbits. In the year 732 BC, Assyria easily overcame Judah’s old nemesis at Damascus, but down in Jerusalem nobody was celebrating – they knew that this meant their time, too, would be coming soon enough. While their politicians dithered about whether to ally with Egypt or to try to stall for time by paying tribute to the Assyrian king, the Hebrews wandered Jerusalem’s subdued streets and markets, arguing politics and looking north to the mountains, waiting for a storm to break. Worshippers crowded into the Temple to plead with God for deliverance, crying out, “O God of Israel, our enemies are great: save us from them!”

They were so preoccupied with fear, with desperate prayers and reproach for their inept kings, that they had very little energy to worry about those whom God had repeatedly told them they should be protecting. The poor, the crippled, the destitute widows and orphaned children living in the alleyways and streets – who had time for such as these? They could not hold a defensive position or provide intel or expand the tax base. So the people crowded into their gilded sanctuary, and left the feeble ones to fend for themselves.

And then, as Erin shared earlier in this new year, the Word of the Lord came to Isaiah, son of Amoz, and it was not an altogether popular Word, either. Through the Isaiah, the Lord interrupted the pageantry and prayers of the Temple, saying in no uncertain terms, “Enough! I am fed up to here with your endless pleas for mercy, while you have forgotten entirely how to show it yourselves! Look - your officials chase after bribes, and your princes sell access to thieves. You bow down to lesser gods, and disregard the plight of the widows, the orphans, and those with no means to provide for themselves. I’m plain sick and tired of your worship, your repetitious prayers, your feet tromping in to bring meaningless offerings without passion or heart. Enough of this!”

That’s a hard word, no doubt about it. But the truth is, people do find it difficult to turn toward their neighbors when they are busy running scared. Not that it’s impossible. In the course of the unique history of our nation, the characteristic American virtue of concern for individual life and liberty has often come to the fore during seasons of blight or pestilence or privation. When times have gotten tough, we Americans have tended to pull together and work for the common good, in the belief that our nation is no greater than how we treat one another.

But when the trial is sustained, when anxiety regarding the future does not let up, even we have risked letting fall by the wayside things like mercy and compassion, mission and justice. Out of fear of the other, we sent our armies to round up or exterminate Native Americans in the 19th Century; in the Second World War, while we made unspeakable sacrifices for the sake of liberty abroad, at home we imprisoned Japanese-American families in camps encircled with barbed wire. We did these things, these grievous sins, because we were afraid of those we called them, and unsure of our own place in the future. These were times we became fierce individualists, refusing to acknowledge our shared reliance upon each other; instead, we reckoned compassion for those we saw as ‘others’ to be an unaffordable luxury. Dare we say it: our great nation has known seasons when we gave up on notions of civility and shared humanity. We showed the fragility of our virtue.

But as Christians, we already know about the fragility of human virtue, our need for a God who loves truth and will not abide its absence for long. God saw that justice, compassion, charity and mercy were being ignored by the Hebrew people and their corrupt leaders, because they were afraid and their hope was fading. To such as these, God gave Isaiah a word of good news to share: “Turn aside from these evil ways: they are not who you are, not whom I made you to be. Learn again what it is to do right. Seek justice for those who have been denied it. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Heed the plight of, and join in advocating for the destitute among you, the widows. Remember again who I AM.”

Not one of these commands was new. That’s why the prophets of old actually did very little predicting the future, and a whole lot of reminding their contemporaries what was forgotten. Much later, the One promised by the prophets would say in a moment of genuine frustration and amazement: “how is it you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ but do not do what I say?” In that very passage, a few verses earlier, Jesus reminds those who are listening how they are to live: they are to resist the ways of the world and instead show love to their enemies, to do good to those who hate them, to pray for those who abuse them, to be merciful, as their Father in Heaven is merciful. Again, none of these were novel, unheard of ideas. They were what the Law required.

As Christians, we believe we were made to show care for the poor and mercy to the afflicted. Not to turn an indifferent shoulder to these for the sake of convenience or profit. We know what is right. None of us, of whatever persuasion, are really confused about what is right.

And yet all it seems we hear from both our political parties is a spirited defense of “the middle class.” And as Pogo Possum says, “we’ve met them and they is us.” Amazingly absent from our nation conversation are any impassioned speeches about the single mothers supporting their families on $350 a week, the elderly frequenting food pantries, the working poor who do have jobs but still depend utterly on food stamps. These are the widows and orphans of our age. If they aren’t, who is?

We know what is right – that we should care and express care for these at the bottom, who fear for a place to live, a meal to eat. That we should share our abundance with them. It’s just that when we get anxious as a people, we become so overwhelmed we stop doing what’s right. We don’t argue that these things aren’t important to God anymore. We just ignore them.

Now I don’t know if the pain of last four years has made you afraid. Some among us have lost their jobs; others have wondered if they would (maybe still wonder). Some have had their homes threatened by looming foreclosure, and others of us, perhaps more fortunate, have watched the value of our homes shrink along with our investment portfolios, tunneled out by collapsing markets. Some of us who have been hit particularly hard…are not afraid. Others of us were scared at the outset, and we live in fear even now, with the cupboards full.

But this much is true for all of us: there is challenge for us in God’s Word from Isaiah today – even a warning: if we are so driven by fear that we forget God’s command to ways of mercy, forget Jesus’ thirst for justice among us, we’re not gonna fool God by anything we do or say here. No way. We are reminded, we who say ‘Lord, Lord,’ that believing in the One we worship here means having the courage to do the right thing every other hour of the week. Therefore worship is not a moment of respite, an hour to escape the stress we feel in the course of our worldly lives. Worship is the hour when Jesus reminds us who his Father really is, when we renew our focus upon the One who leads us to act justly in the mission fields where we live.

So we don’t come here to escape from reality: we come here to experience the most authentic, undistorted, real thing in our universe. In a few moments, we’ll leave here, to go back out into a world that got to where it is by denying God, living as if there were no God - certainly not One who has spoken. The world will tell us what it always has: “You are on your own. Take what you can get and lock up what you have. Prepare to fight for it. Don’t let them take it from you – they didn’t earn it and it’s yours.”

I hope we know the richness and goodness of God well enough to discern the greatest of those lies. For those who are in Christ, there is no “they.” There is no them. There’s just us, we, a people loved by God and called away from living for less than the enjoyment and glorification our Maker. There is no them. We all need, equally, the saving grace of Jesus Christ. And he means to give it to us all.

So we choose not to be afraid. Instead we choose to worship on a foundation laid upon the solid rock that is Jesus Christ, who frees us to do the right thing.

Amen.