Isaiah 3

Monday, March 18, 2013

Isaiah 3

I am honestly a little baffled what to think of Isaiah chapter 3.  I'm not sure I approve of all the harbingers of a time of chaos listed ("12 and women will rule them").  And I'm not sure I entirely disapprove of chaos.  There's an old curse, "May you live in interesting times."

And I can't helping thinking of the recent episodes of Downton Abbey I've been watching with my mother (recent to us, second season, not the ones airing now), of how World War I is disrupting the carefully maintained rules of social order so firmly established in the first season that we stopped seeing them toward the end.  So well the show did it that seeing people violating them, even for the war, felt like a shock to the system.

If higher causes like defending our country don't call to us, what will break down all the walls we erect to keep us from people?  That keep us from loving or moving to help others?  Perhaps only chaos.

I admit as much as any other person, I like to know my place in the world.  I've never had a particularly hard place in the world, of course, but I like to know where the hierarchy is and where I fit in it.  And what the proper procedure for moving forward is.

So I understand liking the comfort of what's expected.

But I can't help thinking that people are so often at their best in chaos.  Women came out of their single lonely sphere in a time of chaos and since some refused to go back (causing more chaos), I have options now.  The Civil Rights movement was a time of great chaos, but the few who doubt America is better off for it are not invited to my house for dinner.  Which is perhaps unchristian of me, but I don't know how to make the other option work so it'll have to do.

Perhaps what I am trying to say that perhaps the threats of chaos and upheaval and all the upending of the social structure outlined in this chapter - some of which sounds fine and even needed, some of which sounds awful and frightening - aren't to punish or chastize us back into our little boxes.  Maybe it's God's way of reminding us that we created the boxes ourselves.  They were never His idea, and if the boxes stop being warm and comfortable and start becoming prisons, it is quite in our power to step out of them.

Of course, so much of the chapter sounds terrible.  But perhaps that's only when we rise above.