God’s Politics

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 23, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Isaiah 55: 1-9

When you want to change the world, you’ve got broadly three options. You can work with the powerful – not necessarily sharing their goals or methods, not always endorsing their slogans or ignoring their lies, but nonetheless patiently correcting their wrong turnings and softening their harsh judgements. Alternatively you can work against the powerful. You can campaign for the dignity of suppressed peoples and groups, you can highlight miscarriages of justice, you may denounce and upbraid and protest. But that choice, between a pragmatism that risks complacency and an idealism that flirts with self-righteousness, doesn’t comprise the full set of options. There’s a third approach, which is actually what we aspire to here at St Martin’s. That is to seek to model what a better society might look like – to practise a renewed politics and try to inspire others to join you and in their own context do the same.

If you think about it, both the Old and the New Testaments assume that third kind of politics. The Old Testament is about the chosen people: a tiny nation buffeted from Canaan to Egypt to the wilderness to the Promised Land and later to Babylon and back. They have no pretensions to be masters of the universe. They’re hard-pressed just to run their own society faithfully and protect it from invaders. The New Testament is even more limited in aspiration to conventional political power: this is a people seeking to model a transformed life, without any pretension to geographical territory. All they’re looking to do is to live God’s future now by sharing together the life they will enter eternally.

From time to time a society has to ask itself, What kind of a people do we want to be? A lot of people are asking themselves that question now as they see the post-war world order being dismantled in a matter of weeks and perpetual allies being treated like enemies and hostile nations being regarded as friends, and commitments, pledges and duties being tossed aside like an infant throwing food from a highchair. It’s timely to recall that we’re not the first generation to ask ourselves such a question. I want to look today at what’s going on in Isaiah 55. This is a chapter written on the threshold between leaving the oppressive life in Babylonian exile and entering the new possibilities of life on return to the Promised Land. What old ways would they look to restore? What would they now do differently? What had they learned in Babylon they wished to keep?

Here’s the vision Isaiah outlines for the returning exiles. There’s five principles. Principle one is this: this society is for everyone. Twice in the first sentence we get this message: ‘Hear, everyone who thirsts… you who have no money.’ This isn’t an exclusive society. The French Revolution set out the principles of a better world. It proclaimed equality and liberty. But what it didn’t understand is that these principles aren’t ends in themselves. They’re both stages, usually but not always indispensable stages, on a journey to something more important. That more important thing is tucked away in the same famous revolutionary slogan. It’s fraternity. These days we might use a more contemporary term. We’d call it belonging. Belonging means there’s water for everyone who thirsts. Belonging means a society that has the things money can’t buy.

Here’s the second principle: this society’s rooted in things of enduring value. This is Isaiah’s penetrating question: ‘Why do you spend your money on that which doesn’t satisfy?’ That’s not a question specifically for the rich or the poor: it’s a question for every one of us. If we were in a Being With group, we’d put it like this: ‘Tell about a time you spent a lot of money on something that wasn’t what you really wanted.’ Or maybe like this: ‘Tell about a time you felt deeply satisfied.’ Or this: ‘I wonder whether money has ever brought you deep satisfaction.’ Money is only at very best an instrumental good – a way of getting us something else. We’ve become a society that can’t talk about final goods, about things of truly enduring value, so instead we evaluate everything by money, because we assume with money, we can make good choices about things of enduring value. But the irony is, those things aren’t fundamentally about money. We can invest in them now, with our time, our love, our commitment, our trust.

Here’s the third principle: everything that matters involves relationships, and the heart of relationships is trust. ‘I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.’ Phrases like this make people nervous right now, because they highlight the particular status of the Jewish people. Notice the difference between a covenant and an entitlement. A covenant is a statement of trust: God will not give up on us whatever befall. But we’re made fully aware of what it means not to give up on God in return, and it isn’t just lip service. The point of an everlasting covenant is you need never doubt God is with you; it doesn’t mean you stop caring. This passage is full of wake-up calls – hear, see, listen, seek. There’s a kind of politics around just now that assumes relationships are about transactional deals where you do one over everyone else. But Isaiah is saying instead it’s about covenants that build trust. Exploitative deals make resentful enemies. Covenants generate long-lasting trust.

Here’s the fourth principle: become the kind of society others would want to join. Right now people want to come to this country. We’re being told that’s a problem. To me it’s saying, for all our faults, we must be getting something right. Do we want to become a country no one in their right mind would want to come to? And as it happens we need a lot of the things these people are bringing: energy, initiative, ambition, hope. Isaiah anticipates, ‘Nations that do not know you shall run to you.’ Just acting in your own narrow self-interest will leave you without allies and will deprive you of the goods that come with interaction and exchange. There’s an appropriate kind of envy. Isaiah is saying the nations will admire you and will run to you and their envy will demonstrate that you have become a blessing to them. We may say, ‘Things are difficult right now. We can’t do everything we want to do, and some people are going to feel impatient or hard done-by.’ But this is the point. Politics is hardly ever about arriving. It’s about forming a story in which everyone can belong, you’re seeking together things of enduring value, and you’re fostering communities of trust. If you get those things right, you’ll have a story you can believe in and others can aspire to. Arriving is a bonus – and an illusion, because there’ll always be fresh challenges to face.

Here’s the fifth principle: the people who have most to give are invariably those who’ve made mistakes. Isaiah says, ‘Let the wicked and unrighteous return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.’ Our biggest fear is that we can’t be honest with one another, because if we were we’d face rejection. So we embellish our cvs, we use euphemisms and obfuscating jargon to describe difficult things, and in relationships and the workplace we struggle to articulate simple but troubling truths. It’s often said, ‘There’s no failure; only failure to learn’; but we’re becoming a society abrasive to transparency and truth. We’re obsessed with our own moral purity, so instead of trying to persuade or gradually change the heart of a person or institution or country that attracts disapproval we instead have to boycott them or cut ties with them lest our name be associated with something impure. We’re mesmerised by the illusion of moral perfection, so when a person or institution turns out to have made a mistake we assume there must be resignations and people must be cancelled. And sometimes it doesn’t really matter whether they actually made a mistake or not: we ignore such trivial details because we need a sacrificial lamb to assuage our anger and hurt. This sixth-century prophet takes away our biggest fear – which is that if God knew the truth we’d be eternally rejected – and engages our contemporary obsession, that by presenting ourselves as righteous we can fool everyone including God. Isaiah says, ‘God will abundantly pardon.’ That doesn’t mean no accountability: it means in God you can never separate judgement from mercy. Why did we ever let them become separated among us?

As the bedraggled and bewildered chosen people make their way back from Babylon and ask themselves what kind of a society they want to belong to after the trauma of exile, these are the five principles of politics Isaiah offers them. It’s about a society where everyone belongs. It’s about shared things of enduring value, what Augustine calls ‘common objects of love.’ It’s about building trust. It’s about becoming a society others want to join. And it’s about seeing the dynamism of giving people a second chance.

Those things seem pretty significant right now because, in a way that’s alarming, they’re being questioned at the highest level of global politics. Instead of belonging, we find exclusion and expulsion. Instead of enduring value, we have the exaltation of selfishness as a quasi virtue. Instead of building trust, we have dodgy deals and hostile announcements and predatory declarations. Instead of appropriate envy, we find a world shuddering in horror. Instead of shrewd judgement and abundant mercy, we have instant judgement and no mercy. Isaiah points us to exactly what’s wrong and precisely what needs to be different.

But I suspect Isaiah might be just as concerned about what’s happening to our denomination. After all, doing justice, as we saw at the beginning, isn’t primarily about denouncing others but modelling the good ourselves. I suspect Isaiah might be alarmed at a church that struggles to understand that everyone belongs, that seems captivated by numbers and money and public perceptions rather than the things of enduring value, that savagely turns on its leaders and undermines trust, that’s becoming anything but a community others want to join, and that’s forgotten God’s abundant mercy in a frenzy of denouncing and cancelling.

Isaiah is pointing us not just to a politics for returning exiles, but to God’s politics, a politics of world and church, where we seek as earnestly as possible to replicate and anticipate the joy of communion we long to share eternally. Isaiah isn’t a perfectionist: these words are shaped by the humiliation and deprivation of exile and point to a sustainable and realistic future. They’re as true today as when they were spoken and written. And they’re framed as an invitation: come, come, come, hear, listen, listen, see, seek, return. That invitation has perhaps never been as vital and urgent as now.