Acts of Religious Piety

This week I'm preparing to preach on Isaiah 58:1-12.  A number of Bible versions I've read entitle this section as having something to do with "True Worship."  In it, Isaiah bears God's message to the people of Judah after they've returned from exile.  While the passage does deal with worship and fasting, the problem God sees in the people's worship and fasting is that it is disconnected from the rest of their daily lives; furthermore, the piety they show in worship and fasting is contrasted by their oppression of others and failure to serve those in need.

I'm still working on the sermon and what all this means for me and the people where I serve, which you may see if a manuscript comes out (but not if it's only notes or an outline).  However, as I was researching, a line stuck out at me.  Carol J Dempsey writes about this passage in Feasting on the Word,

The theological point [of the passage] is clear: acts of religious piety as private acts of devotion are meaningless when they are divorced from acts of justice and righteousness.  

On first glance, I took Ms. Dempsey at her word and read on, but it stuck with me.  I'm not sure I can argue with her based on Isaiah.  I'm not sure I want to, theologically at least.  In Christ, we have the blessed gift of being invited into God's kingdom-building work on earth as in heaven.

I suppose what is hard to swallow is the starkness of Dempsey's words, as though Isaiah's weren't already enough: private acts of devotion and piety are meaningless if unaccompanied by acts of justice.  Meaningless.  I'd like to offer some self-justification, but I'm not sure I've any ground to stand on.

Dempsey (and Isaiah? and God??) challenge me.  They lead me to wonder about this coming Sunday when this text will be read and proclaimed.   To take it to the extreme, they make me wonder about feasting around the Lord's table this coming Sunday.  If we merely share in the Eucharist, sing our last song, and go to brunch, have we made Communion meaningless by privatizing it and divorcing it from righting the wrongs of a broken world and soothing its aches?   That's a hard thing to write or think - that Communion could ever be meaningless.  It couldn't be... could it?  May God make it not so.