Prophets and Practice

Cease doing evil. Learn to be good, search for justice,

discipline the violent, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.

Isaiah 1:16-17

Wayne Teasdale gives us his thoughts and commentary on Isaiah’s terse, but compelling and directive ethical advice in these words:

“Isaiah (1:16-17) the prophet of Israel sums up this powerful message as the moral heart of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is an instruction on the task of cultivating a good heart, one that is open and responsive to the poor, the orphans, and the widow. It emphasizes the path of justice, which naturally requires a rejection of evil. More important, it demands that each of us control our own inner violence, that discipline begins in our thought.

The prophets of Israel focused on two points: faithfulness to God and his covenant with the people, and justice, which involves conversion of the heart. The latter teaching is the substance of social justice in the three faith of the Book: Judaism,Christianity, and Islam. …”

Looking back to an earlier page, and the despair of MLK, my overwhelming concern is for the passivity, impotence, and stark unwillingness to engage more directly in justice-making; and to elimination of the desperate disparities between the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, the represented and the ostracized, the favored and the anawim…;

The large and looming question is whether the American churches will rediscover their lost ethical backbone, their commitment to Scriptural witness, and their sense of obedience to a more equitable and compassionate life for the many, not just the few…

As I see it, the quest for a more spiritual life is rooted more in operational ethics, and in a more constant willingness to live and act within a moral covenant. It has less to do with any obtuse or abstract theology of personal salvation, or exclusionary concern for individual righteousness.

The Social Gospel is the universal source and provides guidance for our work together… Of course, that means, for each of the great religions of The Book, that they begin to actually practice and embody the words that hold up and describe their faith; that depth and quality of a more wholesale metanoia is what will be required IF they ever truly care to rectify the world and live out any of the foundational teachings of the prophetic vision among us…