Proper 15, Year C | Isaiah 5:1-7
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
August 17, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
This summer the Lectionary has taken us on a whirlwind tour of the Hebrew prophets. We’ve met Elijah, Elisha, Amos, Hosea, and now Isaiah. We’ll spend the next nine weeks with Jeremiah, followed by brief encounters with Joel, Habakkuk, and Haggai before the close of the Church Year.
When reading the prophets, we need to remember what prophecy actually is. In our standard American conception, we think of prophets as mystical seers who predict the future, enigmatic figures who utter mysterious riddles leading to fated, world-altering events. And that’s certainly how it can appear from our vantage point in time. We read past prophets but overlay what is now history back onto their writings. Since we see them describing things they couldn’t possibly have known about, we skip a few logical steps and assume they somehow knew about things yet to come. But that’s all an illusion.
What prophets are actually talking about are either current or imminent events—things actively taking place in front of their eyes. Paying attention to what they see, they combine memorable—and sometimes graphic—imagery with skillful wordplay to describe their contemporaries’ activity and to offer warnings about where their behaviors and attitudes are taking them. The reason it feels like foreknowledge is because we humans are remarkably consistent in our overall behaviors, following the same broad patterns time after time. We hear the prophet predicting the future not because God granted the individual psychic powers but because we as a species keep doing the same (preventable) things again and again, continually blinding and deafening ourselves to ancient wisdom by presuming our own actions and attitudes are somehow superior to the people who’ve preceded us. Every time we start repeating the same mistakes, prophesy “comes alive” for a new age. But the writings aren’t there to convince us that the events of our time are somehow predetermined by God’s ineffable will. Rather, our ears have finally opened to their alarm against harmful behavior and its looming consequences.
Isaiah functioned as a court prophet in Jerusalem in the mid-700’s BCE, a time of extensive regional instability. The Assyrian Empire was obliterating societies around them, ultimately devouring their neighboring Northern Kingdom of Israel. Judah and Jerusalem nearly fell as well, though they managed to survive beyond those invasions. The kings Isaiah served under were generally considered to be good rulers, too. The Hebrew Bible’s history books talk about extensive efforts at religious reform during their reigns: bringing the Temple back up to spec, discovering lost Scripture manuscripts, centralizing worship at Jerusalem, and the like. But even in the context of all those attempts at revitalization, a deeper and more deadly issue remained.
Last week we heard Isaiah describe the Judean leadership as “rulers of Sodom” and “people of Gomorrah”[1]—cities legendary for their devastating ends more than a thousand years prior to our text. In the modern world, people associate Sodom and Gomorrah with certain forms of sexual behaviors, but Isaiah’s accusation specifies a different issue entirely: “Your hands are full of blood.”[2] Judah’s public efforts to honor God may have changed, but these external reforms—morality legislation, renewed sacrifices, and building facelifts—will never function as a bribe for divine favor. What God really wants is for them to “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, [and] plead for the widow.”[3] It doesn’t matter how much effort the leaders put into renewing traditional worship or enforcing old-school cultural standards. As long as they refused to reflect God’s merciful, generous, and compassionate nature throughout the whole of their society, all the modifications in the world remained a slap in God’s face.
Apparently Isaiah’s initial warning didn’t work, so this week we see him taking a new tack. Picture a lone, awkward figure stepping up to the mic at a party of all the powerful and influential figures. After tapping it and asking, “Is this thing on?” he unexpected improvises a remarkably skillful love song.[4] English translations, however, basically give us the Kidz Bop version of the performance. The opening stanza is more than bawdy. In terms of Hebrew poetry, it makes the Song of Solomon read like a Doctor Seuss. Anyone with the remotest sense of propriety would have been struck dumb in raw mortification.
If someone had somehow managed to ignore him, he certainly caught their attention with the last word of verse 2. “Rotten grapes” may just have been the loudest record scratch in history. Hammering its way through a series of steamy innuendos, no one would have expected this song about swelling vines and erecting towers to climax in a not remotely rhyming word that literally translates as “stinky things.”
But spell broken or not, the prophet keeps singing, calling his listeners to name one more thing the lover could have possibly done to increase their satisfaction. Because Judah’s elite continue to ignore the plight of the common people, abusing them by appropriating and then hoarding resources, God threatens to strip the vineyard of the protection long provided, leaving it abandoned while the rest of the world has its way with it.
The third and final stanza begins with a not-so-subtle reference to the military action already threatening the region and concludes with some remarkable wordplay that simply can’t translate outside the Hebrew language. “Justice” differs from “bloodshed” by a single letter, and the same goes for “righteousness” and “cry,” which the listeners would have recognized as the term used to describe the voice of Abel’s blood after Cain murdered him, the accusations against Sodom and Gomorrah that led to their destruction, and the weeping of the Hebrew slaves under their Egyptian oppression. This is a cry that doesn’t just draw pity from people standing nearby but direct and angry intervention from the Creator God.
Hearing all that, you might still be wondering, so what’s the point? What does something that took place more than 2,500 years ago have to with me today?
The answer brings us back to what we first began talking about this morning. Isaiah’s song is prophecy—not a prediction, but an admonishment laying bare societal-level instances of abuse, one that makes clear the consequences of what God will do with those who continue to refuse to address these core corruptions. Isaiah may have been speaking to his contemporaries in the Ancient Near East, but the reality of his warning echoes across time and space and still stands as clearly today as it did then.
God couldn’t care less about efforts to tidy up society.[5] Surface reforms might make us feel good about ourselves, but attempts to modify other people’s behavior or paint over things we imagine to be offensive will never address core ills rotting below the surface. It’s like with my foot. I could have been wearing the best orthopedic shoes in the world and had surgery after surgery to try to fix any possible problem, but if the doctors hadn’t started treating the bone infection, sepsis would have set in and begun spreading, devouring more and more of my foot and ultimately destroying the rest of my body with it.
In God’s eyes, the issues we lament in our society—the ongoing nostalgia for and attempts to rebuild the mythical good old days—have little to do with the actual problems. Our attempts to hide from poverty and control what others do and think will never bring us life. The true God isn’t like Molech—they can’t be bought off by continuing to offer the sacrifice of other people’s pain and misery. What God desires is for us to address our core realities—our collective and institutional sins—and to work toward change.
God isn’t interested in efforts to look all spiffy or to impose order. Being God’s Image, God expects us to move beyond our own comfort and interests and to begin embodying who God is—not the greedy God we aim to manipulate and bend to our own wills, but the God who is the source, redeemer, and sustainer of all; the God who serves and seeks the best for all Creation; the God for whom we prove our devotion only when we walk, in love, as Christi, bettering the lives of those around us.
[1] Isaiah 1:10 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] Isaiah 1:15
[3] Isaiah 1:16-17
[4] I’m indebted to Brennan Breed’s commentary (https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-20-3/commentary-on-isaiah-51-7-12) for most, if not all, of this information about the text’s actual content.
[5] To make anything “great again”