Proper 7 Year C

Proper 7

Isaiah 65.1–9
Galatians 3.23–9
Luke 8.26–39

The people in today’s reading from Isaiah have apparently got bored with the true God. The chapter opens with God waiting patiently, almost passively, for his people to come looking for him. When they don’t, God begins to call out in welcome, but still the people ignore him.

What are they doing that apparently has so much more appeal? Verses 3–5 describe the rituals that the people have invented or adopted from their neighbours, including sacrificing in gardens, meeting in tombs and other secret and scary places, and eating things that are spiced with the taste of uncleanness and deliberate breaking of ancient taboos. The people have made themselves a crazy, busy religion, made exciting by fear and by trespass into the previously forbidden. They have persuaded themselves that, because they are wholly occupied with ritual, they are being ‘religious’. They have muddled themselves to the point where they cannot tell the sacred from the profane or the just plain stupid...