Light in the Darkness

 This is the text of a sermon I gave at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, USA, on August 24, 2025.

Light In the Darkness

for

Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ

Rev. Tom Sorenson

August 24, 2025

 

Scripture: Isaiah 58:9b-14

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

You know, I don’t get the chance to preach all that often anymore. I’m retired. I’m old. In many ways, I’m old-fashioned. But you have extended the invitation to me to preach with you today and three more times before my wife, your Pastor Jane, returns from sabbatical. And as I start to prepare a sermon these days, I find myself always running into the same tragic reality; and I usually can’t convince myself not to preach on that reality. Mercifully, scripture has hundreds of verses that confront that reality directly, so it isn’t hard to find a text on which to base a sermon. So that’s what I’m doing today. Please excuse me if you’ve heard it before, which I know you have. Our present reality as a nation is so dire that we can’t hear God’s word against it often enough.

One of the Bible passages the lectionary that I use gives us for today is the one you just heard, Isaiah 58:9b-14. In those verses, Isaiah is addressing a situation seemingly not unlike the one we face in our country today. He is addressing a society in which people speak evil. In which some people are hungry. Many people are afflicted and oppressed. Isaiah uses the image of a yoke to represent that state of his community. It is a yoke of evil that is holding the people down. Their present condition is a weight upon their shoulders, and Isaiah is addressing what they need to do about it. Folks, we are living under Isaiah’s yoke too, and boy do we need to do something about it.

Isaiah mentions several things the people need to do get out of their dire circumstances. Those things, he suggests, will lift that yoke of evil from their shoulders. Most importantly, Isaiah says something that our country is forgetting today. He says, in effect, take care of those in need. He says, “offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” We aren’t doing anything close to doing that, are we. Offer food to the hungry? No, we’re cutting food stamps and making food so expensive a great many people struggle to afford it.

Satisfy the needs of the afflicted? Well, hardly. Who are the afflicted among us? They are the unhoused. They are the immigrant of color documented or not. They are sexual orientation and gender identity minorities. They are people who can’t afford health care because they can’t afford or can’t get health insurance. They are people nearly in a panic about what we are doing to the only planet we have to live on.

And folks, we are doing precisely the opposite of satisfying the needs of the afflicted. Our federal government is slashing funds for food stamps and school lunches. Our leaders say they will reduce the price of food, then they do things like impose tariffs that will only drive food prices up. The federal government is slashing funds for the states to address the needs of the afflicted. We have the means to provide housing for all the unhoused, but instead of doing it we make the housing crisis worse by creating and tolerating a real estate market in many parts of the country, our part included, that makes housing simply unaffordable for a great many people. Our federal government has set out to deprive millions of Americans of health insurance who have health insurance today, leaving them to the mercy of a medical and pharmaceutical industry that makes services and drugs prohibitively expensive for nearly everyone who does not have insurance. Our federal government is virtually at war against God’s transgender and nonbinary people. It wants to throw them out of the military. It wants civil rights laws not to apply to them. Our federal government denies the reality of the climate crisis and does any number of things to make it worse. Satisfy the needs of the afflicted? Hardly.

And our federal government is afflicting something else on us. It gives us a government that does not believe in the rule of law. It thinks the president doesn’t have to obey court orders, not even Supreme Court orders. It sees the law only as an obstacle to it doing to our democracy what it wants to do to our democracy, namely, destroy it. And on the issue of law and order, our federal government is dreaming up crises of crime in “blue” cities, then sending in not more police but the National Guard. The National Guard is a military force not a law enforcement force. It’s members train for war not for patrolling city streets looking for crime that isn’t nearly as prevalent as their commander-in-chief tells them it is. We may soon all face the additional affliction of living under occupation by our own military.

A bleak picture, isn’t it. It’s easy to feel helpless and hopeless in the face of it. But here’s the thing. We are a Christian church. At least most of us here consider ourselves to be Christians. We look, or ought to look, first of all to Jesus for guidance in times like there. What did Jesus do? Minister to the wealthy? Minister to the powerful? Tell the Romans to cut taxes for the wealthiest people in the empire? No! He sought out those Isaiah calls the afflicted. The ones Jesus once called “the least of these.” The poor living at a subsistence level. The ill and physically disabled. The sinners. The seekers. And he told all of them that they are God’s special favorites.

And he tells us that we must treat all who are genuinely afflicted as God’s special favorites too. Jesus’ land didn’t have any social safety net for those folks. It left them entirely on their own. That is the system Jesus preached and acted against. And he tells us to preach and act against our system too. Sure, we have something of a social safety net, certainly more of a one than Jesus’ world did. But it has never been adequate, and now our government is obsessed with making it less adequate than it already is. Our federal government and the MAGA movement that supports it are working directly against the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We need to oppose them. We need to stop them if we can, nonviolently of course. In Isaiah, God promises us that if we do those things our “light shall shine in the darkness.” What, or rather, who is the light in our darkness? For us Christians, it is Jesus Christ. Jesus lights the ways of God, and Jesus calls us to live in that light. Both Isaiah and Jesus promise us that if we will work against systems of violence and  oppression God will be with us. God will light our way. God will, in God’s own way, lead us to the end of those diabolical systems.

That’s the promise we have. That’s the promise God calls us to follow. I know that many of you are already following it. I try, in my own very limited ways, to follow it too. So as you continue to follow it, or begin to follow it, look to the light. Yes we work in darkness, but there still is light. There is light, there still is hope because God is with us. God will guide us. God will save us. And for all of those divine truths, let all the people say, Amen.