Download Sermon TextNovember 16: “A People of the Book, A People of Belonging: Isaiah’s Prophetic Call in Our Time”
Rex McKee
“A People of the Book, A People of Belonging: Isaiah’s Prophetic Call in Our Time”
November 16, 2025
Saint John the Baptist
Rex McKee
Holy One, you have raised me from my slumber; enlighten my mind and heart, and open my lips, that I may do the work you have given me to do. In the name of the Holy Trinity, Amen.
Across this country, in small towns and sprawling cities, in community halls and digital spaces, millions of people have found one another through shared values that bind us together.
They call themselves Indivisible—not just a movement, but a multitude:
Old and young, citizen and immigrant;
Black, brown, white, Native, Asian;
Gay, straight, trans;
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, spiritual-but-seeking.
Distinct voices, united for justice, compassion, and healing.
Long before the word “Indivisible,” another community in crisis learned how to hold one another together.
Bishop Loya reminded us that the Babylonian Exile was the crucible in which much of Old Testament Scripture took its final form. Older oral stories, laws, and prophecies were gathered, edited, and woven together as a displaced people tried to understand how God was still God without a king, a Temple, or a homeland.
In Babylon, the people of Israel became a “people of the book.” They shaped the Torah, the prophetic collections, and the great narratives into the form we know today. The Exile didn’t create Scripture from scratch; it forged a renewed identity grounded in ancestorial memory, justice, and the persistent hope that God’s promise outlasts every empire.
The sacred narrative we call the Book of Isaiah reminds us that we have been here before. Isaiah is not one prophet but a chorus—a centuries-long testimony that God’s truth never belonged to kings or elites, but to ordinary people who refused to forget or fall silent.
Isaiah’s scrolls share the Indivisible narrative: voices speaking one shared hope—that holiness and justice belong together, that God continues creating something new.
For centuries, Christians have read Isaiah as pointing toward Jesus—child of peace, suffering servant. These connections are sacred, yet they can sometimes obscure what Isaiah first meant to its own community. Isaiah is a living narrative collective calling generation to generation toward repentance, return, restoration, and a covenant of justice and hope. The promise of Emmanuel, “God with us,” was first a reminder to a people in crisis that God had not, and would not, abandon them.
To honor Isaiah rightly is to hold both truths:
the ancient community’s hope for renewal, and
the Christian conviction that Jesus embodies that same hope in flesh.
Jesus stands within Isaiah’s stream, related to the sacred community that lived within Isaiah’s dream: justice for the poor, peace for creation, God-with-us in the struggle.
When Isaiah declares, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” we hear the dream of a community rebuilding after exile—a grassroots vision born from the ashes of disappointment. The people returned from Babylon expecting triumph. Instead, they found ruins, hunger, and corruption. And from the rubble, Third Isaiah— not one prophet but a prophetic community—proclaimed:
“No more shall the sound of weeping be heard…
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
They shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.”
This is the poetry of people who have had enough—who imagine a world where no one labors for another’s gain, where all flourish from the work of their own hands, where creation itself breathes peace.
They were the Indivisible of their age—a prophetic coalition of the weary and the courageous, trusting that God works not through kings but through kinfolk.
First Isaiah (7th century BCE) stood before empire with moral fire: repent and return to the Lord. “Cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed.” (Isa 1:16–17) These prophecies arose amidst the looming threat of Assyrian invasion, warning Jerusalem of judgment and predicting the coming exile. Isaiah condemned worship without justice and wealth without mercy. We might imagine First Isaiah at climate marches, food shelves, detention vigils—reminding us that holiness is not built in stone but practiced in love.
Second Isaiah rose during the exile. The messages are no longer accusatory but consoling: “Comfort, O comfort my people…” (Isa 40:1) Those taken into exile included the king and his court, nobility, priests, Levites, warriors, artisans, skilled workers, singers, temple servants, and families of uncertain lineage. The Babylonians specifically targeted the elite and skilled, leaving poorer agricultural workers to maintain the land. These prophecies speak to displaced, forgotten, and grieving people: You are not abandoned. The God who numbered the stars knows your name. If First Isaiah marched, then Second Isaiah tended—binding wounds, rebuilding belief, speaking belonging into the exiled.
Third Isaiah emerged among those rebuilding from ruins. These visions are audacious—ecological, economic, and spiritual: “They shall not labor in vain…” “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together…” These texts reflect life after return, the challenges of rebuilding, and hopes for universal restoration, including foreigners and the marginalized. This is resistance by imagination—a refusal to accept despair as reality.
Isaiah proclaims God’s unfailing faithfulness and power to redeem, highlighting that true restoration is rooted not merely in rebuilding physical ruins but in renewing the covenant relationship between God and the people.
Isaiah was shared, preserved, and layered across generations, portraying the return as a new exodus: a divinely initiated journey where mercy triumphs over judgment and divine holiness calls forth a people committed to justice, righteousness, and compassion.
Isaiah teaches that God alone is sovereign over history, dismissing all idols and human pretensions, and offering hope for all nations to be included in God’s saving purpose. Restoration is God’s response to human waywardness; through repentance and faith, the broken are gathered, healed, and made instruments of light in a world longing for renewal.
Isaiah’s legacy teaches us:
Revelation is unfolding.
Prophecy is communal.
God speaks in the generational voices of a faithful people.
Jesus, like Isaiah before him, warns us not to place our trust in stones, empires, or the illusion of unshakable power. In Luke, Jesus watches the crowd admire the Temple—its beauty, its permanence, its authority—only to declare that not one stone will remain. He speaks not to frighten but to unmask the fragility of systems that pretend to be eternal. Leaders would have us contribute our gold coins to build golden calves and bow before the temples of commerce.
Wars, upheaval, betrayal, and fracture—these are not signs that God has left the world, but that God cannot be contained by collapsing idols. And when the world trembles, Jesus gives the same invitation Isaiah offered: do not be deceived by false prophets and pseudo-saviors; do not be afraid.
Disruption is not the end of God’s work; it is the beginning. Jesus says: This is your moment to testify. This is your time for public witness—with that generational voice within you that speaks hope, love, and commitment. By persistent endurance, by shared courage, by standing in holy resistance and solidarity—we are not lost, for God is with us.
We are the Indivisible Isaiah speaks to in our time—the millions of voices with one heartbeat for love, hope, and justice, following the God who continues to promise, “Behold, I am creating something new.”
We are the continuation of the many voices of divine love.
We are called to return—holding fast to the Way of Love, restored at God’s Eucharistic table, and sent again into a broken world to do the work we have been given to do.
We are not exiles, yet we know division.
We are not rebuilding a Temple, yet we are rebuilding communities of belonging and trust.
We are a beloved community of artists, teachers, nurses, farmers, organizers, students, elders—bound by the conviction that love is stronger than fear, stronger than hate.
When we shelter immigrants, defend dignity, protect democracy, repair our fragile island home, and organize for justice, Isaiah is no longer an ancient text. It becomes renewed scripture through embodied practice. To labor for justice is Isaiah’s inheritance.
God no longer thunders from mountains; God echoes in whispers and conversations, in chants, songs, marches, prayers. The prophetic voice is nonviolent, sacred resistance. It calls for dismantling domination. It dreams of an indivisible humanity, an indivisible beloved community.
Bishop Loya also invited ECMN to be weird and innovative…. and to continue to grow deeper spiritual roots, a renewal of discipleship, to learn to garden in a time of exile setting things down to let them grow.
We are not waiting for God to repair the breach. We—the Body of Christ—are repairing it now: with protest and poetry, welcome and mutual aid, prayer and policy, courage and compassion. Like the generations who carried Isaiah’s scrolls through exile and return, we carry a living prophecy—an indivisible hope—that love is strong enough to build the world God imagines.
