In a book on organ improvisation, the late church musician Gerre Hancock offered the following advice: “Salvation is just a half step away.” Dr. Hancock, former Organist and Master of the Choristers at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, was known for his brilliant musicianship and also for his clever quips. “Salvation is just a half step away” was one of them.
Dr. Hancock was offering helpful advice to the improviser who might find her or himself in a musical quandary. Suppose you drop a note or play the wrong accidental. What next? Well, salvation is just a half step away. Use the half step to your advantage and glide seamlessly into another key, or cunningly, improvise around your “mistake” and make it seem as if it was intended after all. Are there really any mistakes when you’re creating music on the spot? This may have been a clever quip, but it is useful advice. Salvation is just a half step away.
But in the convicting words from the prophet Isaiah that we hear today, salvation seems much more than a half step away. It seems octaves away. The prophet first sings, on behalf of his beloved, about a vineyard carefully planted. We don’t initially know that the owner of the vineyard, the beloved, is God and the vineyard represents the house of Israel. And so, the song’s audience is lured into judging those who have failed to be good stewards of the vineyard until the listeners themselves are convicted.
This is the genius of the love song in Isaiah. When the twist comes, it’s painful to realize that you yourself are the one being judged and that you have inadvertently judged yourself.
Isaiah’s song itself begins sweetly. Whatever sweetness sounds like to you, whether in a major or minor key, the song is a beautiful one. Dulcet thirds and sixths serenade what God has lovingly done for his beloved people.
But just a few lines in, we sense that all is not right. Dissonance intrudes. The thirds and sixths no longer speak together, and the piece of music seems to be going off the rails. One has the impression that it is a performance that has suddenly gone wrong. Any musician knows what it feels like to lose control of a musical performance. Maybe you’re trying to play by memory, and you have a slip of the mind. Or perhaps your manual dexterity on the keyboard is not what it should be; your fingers aren’t doing what you’re telling them to do. The piece is close to crashing and burning.
In Isaiah’s song, when the music shifts to the voice of God himself speaking in judgment to his people, we know that things are a mess. The voice of God has intervened, and God’s people are in for a scolding.
We are not told exactly what God’s people have done, but the implication behind the text is that justice has been distorted into bloodshed. Righteousness has devolved into the cry of the oppressed. And we are left today with the music, in all its distortion, moving towards a cadence that is left unresolved, a half cadence or, more accurately, a deceptive one. The music halts abruptly with the cry of the downtrodden, yearning for justice. Salvation, it seems, is much, much more than a half step away.
It’s hard for us to hear this lovely piece of music go awry. It’s difficult to listen to the sonorous thirds and sixths warped into grotesque tritones and overwhelming dissonance. And it’s even more disturbing to hear God speak words of judgment, because if we’re even modestly self aware, we sense that, even thousands of years later, these words are also directed to us.
Now, God is going to act. The vineyard’s protective hedge will be removed. The vineyard will be laid to waste and left to be overgrown with briers and thorns. Anyone who walks amid its greenery will find themselves scratched and stung. The provision of rain will be no more, and the vineyard will dry up and wither. The piano will be put out of tune, and the bellows of the organ will be deflated.
We watch as our performance falls apart, and then we start to blame. We blame others for the low state of affairs in which we find ourselves. We point fingers. We judge. We find every excuse to deflect judgment from ourselves. And, ultimately, we blame God. We hurl accusations at God. God, why have you let our vineyard go to waste? God, why have you derailed our beautiful piece of music?
God, why have you allowed the ruthless weeds of this pandemic to destroy the equilibrium of our world? God, why does the gap between the destitute and the rich grow ever wider? God, why does our civil discourse continue to spiral out of control? God, why has the world’s symphony turned into a cacophony?
It’s so easy to point fingers at God, the One who sought out the fertile hill for the vineyard, who cleared the land so it would produce fruit, who selected choice vines for the planting, and who expected it to yield grapes. God was the One who established the tonic key for us and gave us the rules of counterpoint. We forget that God had great expectations for us. And we forget that we live in the dreadful gap created by our own making, the gap between God’s intentions and our actions.
But hear the words of God: O, my beloved children, judge, I pray you, between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? What more was there that God could have done?
God did everything. When the Garden of Eden lost its initial bliss, God nevertheless put clothes on Adam and Eve. God couldn’t send them away naked in shame. When God’s people grumbled in the wilderness, God provided food even though he had just delivered them from Pharaoh’s grasp. In the fullness of time, God sent his own beloved Son for the world’s salvation. What more could God have done throughout the course of history? And yet, we put God in the dock time and again.
And too often, we fail to see that the judgment we experience is the result of our own making. The gap we inhabit is the great chasm between God’s righteousness and our moral irresponsibility. In our musical meanderings, we have wandered ever so far from the tonic key, which God has laid as the foundation of righteousness. But when we are so caught up in where we think we want to go, when we are allured by distant keys that capture our attention, we can easily slide to places far away, and soon, we find we have gone too far from the initial key and we don’t know how to get back home.
And salvation seems not a half step away, but octaves and octaves away in a completely new atonal system. God looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry! In the Hebrew, the words for justice and bloodshed are eerily similar. And the same is true for the words for righteousness and cry. These are plays on words where one slip of the pen, one different character, changes the meaning of the words.
This is the reality of our world. One careless or intentional slip of the tongue harms another. One distortion of the facts or the truth leads to the oppression of many. People stick their fingers in their ears and hear what they want to hear, and it means that injustice is implicitly allowed to reign. Just as this deadly virus spreads exponentially through one infected person, God’s foundational righteousness is marred by sin after sin. And eventually, salvation seems much further than a half step away.
But God does not leave us there. We may be left with a deceptive or unresolved cadence at the end of today’s reading from Isaiah, but in the silent gap that follows is our implied response.
Time and again, God has come to our aid to provide, and we have been left with the certain knowledge that salvation is indeed only a half step away. But it is none other than the Evil One who stomps us into despair, ever so gradually, by telling us that salvation is octaves, even tonal systems, away. The inner accusing voices tell us that we have fallen too far from grace. We have messed up one too many times. We are in a foreign key and we can never return to the tonic of God’s righteousness.
But this is not the Gospel. In Christ, we have the assurance that salvation is always, always just a half step away. Every turn in repentance, is a half step towards God’s grace. And when all the half steps in the world are put together, we are so much closer to the kingdom that God intends to reign here on earth.
The eerie and abrupt close to Isaiah’s song is our charge to turn the cries of oppression back into songs of joy. The silence in the aftermath of the cries for help is the imperative to stop the bloodshed and seek righteousness. The voices of despair, loneliness, poverty, hunger, and suffering all around us are our summons to take our fingers out of our ears and to listen.
All is not lost. The music has not gone completely off the rails. Salvation is just a half step away. God has promised this to us. What more could he have done? He has laid the foundation for us in Christ. All is ready. All is not lost.
Listen to the cacophony all around us. It is dissonant. It is painful to hear. It seems to be spiraling out of control.
But remember those half steps. They are easy to find. They are plentiful. And God has told us that salvation is just a half step away. What more could he have done?
A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 4, 2020