Isaiah 58:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20
I got my first paid job when I was 14 years old. It was at a golf course that had a driving range, a mini-golf course with ponds and plastic animals, and a food stand. After school and during the summer, my job was to do landscaping and maintenance. I cut grass, mulched, weed-whacked, picked up trash, fished golf balls out of the ponds, and drove the golf ball picker to pick up all of the golf balls that the golfers had hit on the range, clean them, and then re-bucket them to sell again.
It was maybe 2004 or 2005. I was paid minimum wage, which at the time was $5.15 per hour. (For context, today’s minimum wage is $7.25 per hour in Pennsylvania and the United States. It hasn’t been updated since 2009. When the minimum wage first came about in 1938 as part of FDR’s New Deal, it was $.25 per hour. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation and our productivity growth as a country, it would be over $21 per hour today.) (Baker)
I was naive as a young teenager and thought I knew more and understood more than I did. As I spent my days doing the work, I strategized how I would form a Sittler’s Employee Union to address the poor wages they were paying us teenagers. (If you want to know what kind of child I was, this is an example.) My family knew the owners and I knew where they lived. I judged that they had a very nice house. Then I judged that $5.15 was a pitiful wage to pay when I thought we employees were doing all of the work for them and making them all of the money to pay for their nice house and cars.
My strategy of forming a union never went anywhere. In fact, I’m not sure if I ever even talked to another person there about it. Like I said, I was naive as a teenager and thought I knew more than I did.
Here’s a little more context for my union strategizing – my dad’s dad was a farmer who owned a few grain mills in the county where we lived as well as a trucking business. He was the kind of man who read the Wall Street Journal every day. He was always complaining about unions (even though his employees were not unionized). They were a routine part of his holiday political rants.
My mom’s dad, on the other hand, was a union-man. He was a Teamster truck driver at Roadway for 30 years. He was proud to be a Teamster and was always grumbling about management when he’d visit growing up. For him, the union was like a brotherhood – they stood with each other, took care of each other, and tried to get fair pay and decent benefits for each other.
I also was part of a United Church of Christ church in the area, which was very steeped in Pennsylvania Dutch culture (which is also my family’s heritage). The Pennsylvania Dutch are many things – hardworking, stiff-lipped, but one of the ways that Christian faith influenced my church and community were three practical values – hard work and responsibility, equality, and fairness.
I don’t want to romanticize any of this. Two things can be true: it’s hard to run a small business and people who create successful businesses should share in the profits. But, it is also true that workers deserve fair wages, benefits, and a part of the company’s success. But I share this story (simple minded as it might be) because our Old Testament reading today, in part, is about God’s expectation for economic fairness.
Our passage from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah is a back and forth conversation between God, the prophet Isaiah, and the business and government leaders of the people of God, Israel. The Lord is telling Isaiah what he is supposed to announce to God’s people. It’s a word of judgement and correction, but the Lord’s hope is that these leaders, these ruling elites will change their ways so that their actions are in line with God’s will.
It begins with the Lord pointing out the people’s hypocrisy. They want to be thought of as Christians. They pray. They go to church. They study the bible. They throw around God’s name. They want God to be on their side and bless what they are doing. And, yet things are not going well. There is still violence and hardship. They are upset that they are doing all of these religious things, and yet God is not making things better for them.
But the Lord is not having any of their complaints. By outward appearances, they are being faithful to God. They are going through the motions of faith. They’re going to church, reading their bible, and talking about God. But inside, their hearts are far from God. “Look,” the Lord says, your problems didn’t fall from the sky. They are a result of how your society is choosing to live.
Then Isaiah points out their hypocrisy. The reason God isn’t paying attention to all of their religious activity is because they have corrupt motivations.
The bottom line on your ‘fast days’ is profit.
You drive your employees much too hard.
You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight.
You fast, but you swing a mean fist.
I don’t know about you, but the Lord’s words hit close to home. I think we can all agree that things are not going well for us as a people. Individually, we might be doing well. But as a people, as a nation, things are not going well and they haven’t been going well for a while. It might be one of the reasons our politics is so divisive, mean, and self-centered.
Are we in a similar boat to the people of Isaiah’s day? Answer these questions with me. Do we put profit and money over the well-being of people? Yes, that often happens. Are workers given a fair deal with fair wages and fair benefits? No, not always. Like the people of Isaiah’s day, fighting and division seem to be the only ways we know how to interact.
Then the Lord asks a bunch of rhetorical questions through Isaiah. “Do you think this is the kind of worship I had mind?” “Do you think this kind of religion is acceptable to God?” The answer to both is ‘no’.
The Lord reiterates what kind of worship, what kind of religion he wants from the people:
“This is the kind of fast day I’m after:
to break the chains of injustice,
get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
free the oppressed,
cancel debts.
What I’m interested in seeing you do is:
sharing your food with the hungry,
inviting the homeless poor into your homes,
putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad,
being available to your own families.”
According to God, being faithful is not just about believing the right things, or coming to church on a regular basis, or being raised in a Christian family. Being faithful is also about what you do. Now, we may not be in a position of power to change a workplace or a town, let alone a State or nation. But, when we do run into situations that are unfair or unjust, we can try to do something about them, no matter how small they can be. We can stand up and for the person who is being abused and taken advantage of. We can share what we have with those in need. We can put down our phones, turn off the TV, and be around for our family. Those things are all important to God. I don’t think God expects us to change the world. But I do think the expectation for faithfulness is that we do the good we can with what we have.
The Lord’s promise to the people is that their circumstances will turn around and they will experience God’s saving works if they start taking seriously God’s command for economic fairness, if they start taking seriously God’s command to be at peace and not fighting with one another, and if they start taking seriously God’s command to take care of the poor and vulnerable among them.
“If you get rid of unfair practices,
quit blaming victims,
quit gossiping about other people’s sins,
If you are generous with the hungry
and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out,
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness,
your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.
I will always show you where to go.
I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places—
firm muscles, strong bones.
You’ll be like a well-watered garden,
a gurgling spring that never runs dry.
You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew,
rebuild the foundations from out of your past.
You’ll be known as those who can fix anything,
restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,
make the community livable again.”
My grandmother called me yesterday. She’s in her 80’s. She and I don’t agree on everything, or even a lot probably, but one of the things that she said yesterday was that she was glad to grow up when she did. She said she was glad that she grew up in a time before the internet and cell phones. She said life was better when she was growing up. She said that things are too hard, people are too mean, and time is too busy. Of course there were lots of problems in the 40’s and 50’s when she was growing up. But, I’ve heard something like that before from a lot of people. Something seems to have changed in the last 50 years, and it hasn’t always been for the better.
I’m going to say something that might sound controversial, but isn’t meant that way. Here it is: our faith is political. It’s not political in the way of Democrats and Republican political. For most of us, we are probably cynical about politics (and tired of it). Most Americans think the political system is corrupt and not working for the average person.
But, politics doesn’t have to be a dirty word (even though it normally is). Here’s why. At a very basic meaning, politics is about how we as people organize ourselves to live in a community. Politics is about things like who will lead us, what are the rules we will play by (or not play by), and what are our rights as citizens and responsibilities as citizens that we each have. Politics can be done in a small village of a few hundred to a city, State, or large nation like the United States.
What we mean by saying that our faith is political is that God cares about how we human beings run things. The Lord cares about how things are run at a church all the way up to how things are run at a national government. The Scriptures give us a word from the Lord about our politics. That’s part of what our passage from Isaiah is about today. That word involves love of neighbor as yourself, fairness, equality, personal responsibility, and justice.
In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus instructs us as Christians to be like salt and light. Salt is an ingredient that flavors things and preserves things. Light brightens a space and allows for work to be done. Light brings safety and light brings hope. In our personal lives, we are to be salt and light and do those things. But we are also to be salt and light when we are in a group, running a business, working, and when we are talking about politics.
The reading from Isaiah ends with this instruction from God: “You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again.”
I think the Lord here is giving us one of the clearest ideas of the church’s mission. What are we to do as Christians? Fix what is broken. What’s our responsibility as a church? Rebuild and renovate what has fallen into disrepair. How are Christians supposed to do politics? Make the community livable again. Again, this is not to say that we can change the world or fix everything that is broken. I’m not asking us to be naive. But just because there are huge problems, doesn’t mean we can do anything. We can do all the good we can with what we have. We can try to fix what is broken, rebuild what has been damaged, and make the places where we live good, fair, and peaceable places to live, work, and go to school.
Amen.
Work Cited
Baker, Dean. “CORRECTION: This is What Minimum Wage Would Be If It Kept Pace with Productivity.” CEPR.net, 21 January 2020, https://cepr.net/publications/correction-this-is-what-minimum-wage-would-be-if-it-kept-pace-with-productivity/. Accessed 7 February 2026.