"Vital and Faithful: Working Together for Justice and Mercy"
Isaiah 58: 1-12
Rev. Emily Labrecque, Westmoreland UCC
August 2, 2026
[Pray.]
To understand today's scripture, we need to picture the people Isaiah is speaking to. They have finally come home after fifty years of exile in Babylon. But home isn't what they remembered. Jerusalem is in ruins. The temple has been destroyed. Their lives have been turned upside down, and they wonder whether God has abandoned them.
So they do what faithful people had always done. They pray. They fast. They cry out to God, hoping their worship will bring healing and restoration. But nothing seems to change. Frustration turns into complaint: "Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?" They believe they are waiting for God's justice. Instead, God tells them something they never expected.
‘The kind of fasting you do only increases the injustice in your community. You drive your employees much too hard. You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight. You fast, but still act in self-serving ways. Is this the kind of fast I’m after? Fasting should deepen your relationships, increase justice, and draw you nearer to God. This fasting is not cutting it.’ To God, their fasting read like an empty gesture. They saw themselves as victims who deserved God's justice. But Isaiah reveals something much harder to hear. They had become the very people who were creating injustice for others
But to simply cease from oppressing isn’t enough. To be a people of justice and righteousness required Israel to be an agent of liberation. To promote compassion and generosity, empathy and action.
As Nelson Mandela once said, “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” In other words, we are not truly free, until all people are free.
One of the tenets of our Mark for today, ‘Working Together for Justice and Mercy,’ says this: ‘Draw on the liberating activity of God throughout Scripture to confront injustice and oppression locally and globally.”
So how do we interpret scripture in a way that helps us confront injustice? One of the ways we do this is by practicing what’s called Liberation Theology. Liberation Theology is a Christian movement, started in South America in the 1970s that emphasizes God’s special solidarity with the oppressed.
Everyone reads scripture through their own lens. We connect it with our personal experience and think about the characters and the stories through the lens of our lives. Liberation Theology asks us to do the reverse. Read scripture through the lens of the marginalized and oppressed. This means we could read scripture through the lens of the economically poor; the lens of racial injustice and ethnic supremacy; the lens of sexism and patriarchal power; or through the lens of gender and sexuality. And always, there are more lenses.
But what does that look like in practice?
The original liberation theology asked: what does scripture look like from the bottom of the economic ladder? Whose hunger, whose debt, whose landlessness is sitting quietly in this story?
Black Liberation theology asks a similar question of race: where is God siding with the people in chains, not the people holding the whip? Read that way, the Israelites enslavement by the Egyptians isn't ancient history – it's a pattern.
Feminist theology asks us to look for the women scripture barely mentions – and then to ask why. Whose labor made the story possible but never made it into the text?
Queer Theology turns to stories with figures like the Ethiopian Eunuch — someone who didn't fit the categories of his day — and asks: what does it mean that God included them anyway?
It’s easy for us to feel that scripture is outdated and full of stories of ancient civilizations that have no bearing on our reality in 2026. But the reality is that people are people-y. There have always been times of peace and conflict, issues of injustice and community care. What liberation theology teaches us is that there are a multitude of ways for us to draw on the liberating activity of God throughout scripture to confront injustice in our modern era. And Isaiah is specific about what confronting injustice looks like: sharing your bread with the hungry, bringing the homeless poor into your house. So let's sit with hunger for a moment as a real-world challenge
Charity says: let’s meet the immediate need of hungry people by distributing surplus food to prevent starvation.
Justice says: let’s eliminate food deserts and poverty so everyone can buy nutritious meals by increasing government assistance like SNAP/WIC and raising the minimum wage.
Liberation says: what would it take for communities to control their own food systems rather than remain dependent on systems that keep them hungry?
Work on every level is important. And while we may not have reached the level of liberation yet, Isaiah doesn't leave us with guilt. Isaiah leaves us with hope. God isn't asking for perfect people or perfect work. God is asking for a people whose worship spills out into their lives. A people who loosen the bonds of injustice, who share their bread, who shelter the unhoused, who refuse to look away from their neighbors.
And then comes the promise. Do this and ... your lives will turn around at once. You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations. You’ll be known as those who can ... make the community livable again. The people who first heard these words were literally rebuilding a city from rubble. We are rebuilding something too – communities ruptured by loneliness, discord, and fear. Every act of mercy, every inch toward liberation becomes another stone laid in the effort to rebuild God’s world as God would have it.
May our worship continue in the choices we make, the neighbors we stand beside, and the systems we work to transform. Then, by God's grace, we may become exactly what Isaiah imagined: liberators of the oppressed, restoring the places where God's people can truly flourish together.
Amen.
