a sermon in which I implicitly call Tim Cook a coward

It was last November that I signed up to preach on Isaiah 58:1-12 (“Bring an End to Oppression”) on February 8th, and it was depressing how much the universe gave me to work with over the course of the first few weeks of 2026. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to address the idea of the prophetic critique in Isaiah and invite those of us in the service to emulate that critique in our own day. What I had trouble figuring out—almost right up to the end—was what I wanted to use as examples.

I knew that I needed to reference contemporary events, but I struggled with which examples to use and how explicit to make them. I’m not proud of that last part—I think a more courageous sermon would have mentioned Alex Pretti (and so many others) by name instead of vaguely alluding to just one of them. Calling out Tim Cook by name would have been even easier to do, but I took the easy way out and will have to repent of that in future sermons.

I’m in the funny situation of not knowing the congregation where I was preaching as well as I’d like (long story), so I wasn’t even sure how well this “low courage” version of the sermon would go over, between explicitly breaking the news on Deutero-Isaiah and implicitly referencing ICE killing a man. Most folks are open-minded and are concerned about the direction the country is heading in, but I know that there are different perspectives within the group, and I was thinking a lot about that as I wrote things. It seems to have gone fine, and I know that some people liked it, but once again, I’m not sure that I’m focusing on the right things there. I think I’ll be wondering for a long time how to better follow the example of the prophetic critique myself.

Anyway, here’s the text of the sermon:

sermon text

Our passage today is from the book of Isaiah, chapter 58. When I was growing up, I knew two things about Isaiah: 1) the person Isaiah was a prophet from ancient times, and 2) the book of Isaiah was, well, kind of boring.

I grew up in a family and a church that always read out of the King James Bible. Everything in the Bible is a little harder to understand in that old timey King James language, but Isaiah felt especially hard to understand. It was only in the past 7 or 8 years that I’ve started reading other translations of the Bible, and it turns out that it’s a bit easier to understand Isaiah when it’s written in more modern language.

In fact, once you can really understand what the book is saying, it goes from boring to actually pretty interesting. That’s what I think anyway, but let’s put this to the test and see if you all agree. Let’s start at the very beginning of the book of Isaiah: Chapter 1, around verses 13 and 14. I say “around” because I’m going to read this from The Message, which is more of a paraphrase of the Bible than a translation of the Bible. It’s not the most reliable resource if we want to get into the exact words of a passage, but if we want to see how Isaiah can wake us up instead of put us to sleep, it will do the job nicely. Here we go:

“Quit your worship charades.
I can’t stand your trivial religious games:
Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings—
meetings, meetings, meetings—I can’t stand one more!
Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them!
You’ve worn me out!
I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion"

Wow. Did that wake us up? I’m awake, and I’ve got some questions. If Isaiah is God’s prophet, why does it sound like he’s telling people to stop going to church? Is that what a prophet does?

Now, in Community of Christ, we call the leader of our denomination a “prophet-president,” so we’re used to thinking about a prophet as the leader of a church. It would be rather odd for a leader of a church to tell people to stop attending that church, but prophets in the Hebrew Bible, what we usually call the Old Testament, often play a different role. They aren’t the leader of their religious community. It’s probably the king and some high-ranking priests who are the religious leaders, and as you can tell by the king being involved, the religious community and the national community were pretty tightly connected.

Now, the king and the priests might listen to what the prophet has to say, but they might not always like it. The prophet’s role is to stand outside of the religious and national leadership of the people… and to call them out if those leaders are failing to follow God. So, Isaiah isn’t necessarily saying “stop going to church.” What he’s really saying is “you are doing church wrong.”

In a community where national community and religious community are pretty tightly connected, it can be tempting to say that as long as you’re flying the right flag, God is happy with you. In a religious community that believes it is closer to God than other communities, it can be tempting to say that as long as you’re going to the right church, God is happy with you.

Isaiah’s response to that is “no.” It’s not enough to fly the right flag (if there is such a thing as “the right flag”), it’s not enough to attend the right church (if there is such a thing as “the right church”), God cares about more than that. So what else does God care about?

We can find an answer to that in Isaiah 1, but I’m not supposed to be preaching on Isaiah 1 today! I’m supposed to be preaching on Isaiah 58, so we really ought to turn our attention there.

Before we do, though, let’s talk a bit more Isaiah: the book and the person. Isaiah is a long book, and over the past 250 years or so, scholars of the Bible have noticed that it’s probably only the first 39 chapters that were written by the original prophet Isaiah. The rest of the book, including chapter 58, is most likely written by people hundreds of years later, who really appreciated the original Isaiah and wanted to kind of write a sequel—one that hit all the same notes, but was a bit more relevant for their time.

It can be awkward when we learn that parts of the Bible were probably not written by the authors that are traditionally associated with them. This happens with some of Paul’s letters, for example, and the Book of Daniel was probably written in a very different time and place than the story that is told in that book. We can respond to that awkwardness in different ways, but the reason I bring this up at all today is because I think there’s something special about Isaiah 58 not being written by the original Isaiah.

If people hundreds of years after the original Isaiah liked what they saw in Isaiah 1 and decided that they would follow that example to critique the religious and national leaders of their time, that gives us permission—right there in the Bible—to also follow Isaiah’s example, to consider how in our day, we and the people in our community might be settling for flying the flag and going to church, and ignoring things that really matter to God. Let’s turn to Isaiah 58 and see what those people in that time felt really mattered—I’ll bet that we find something relevant to us today.

Here, I’ll turn back to the NRSV instead of The Message. As I read, we’ll first hear the people speaking to God. They are fasting, going without food and water, in the hope of attracting God’s attention, but it doesn’t seem to be working. In the first part of verse 3, they complain:

“Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”

In the rest of verse 3 and through verse 4, God responds:

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day
and oppress all your workers.
You fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.

“You serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers.” That, God says, is why those fasts do not count for anything.

Like most people these days, I have a little black rectangle that I keep in my pocket and that goes with me almost everywhere. It’s a really useful device. I can make calls on it, I can send messages with it, and I can access nearly all of the world’s information with it. This little black rectangle was made in a faraway country and then shipped here for people like me to buy it. It’s made in another country because you can get away with paying workers in that other country a lot less than you’d have to pay workers in the United States.

Those workers might move from rural areas, where farmers make even less money, to new industrial zones, where they can make a bit more. To make that extra money, they might sign up at factories on large campuses that have their own dormitories. They might sleep eight to a room in those dormitories, with a bed and a curtain making up all of their private space (and they might have to supply their own curtain). Their roommates might work in different areas of the factory, making it hard to chat about work, or come from different regions with different dialects, making it hard to chat at all.

At any rate, there might not be much time for chatting at all. There might be 12 hour shifts, and unpaid work meetings before every shift. There might be mandatory overtime. There might only be one day off every other week. You can make little black rectangles pretty cheap under those conditions, but the company that makes this kind of little black rectangles still charges a fair amount of money, and pockets a lot of that cost for itself. The company that makes this kind of little black rectangles is one of the richest companies in the world.

Recently, many of the employees at this company—and these were well-paid employees here in the U.S., not the employees in faraway countries who are paid poorly to do the actual work of putting black rectangles together—talked to their bosses about using their status as one of the richest companies in the world to stand up for something.

Law enforcement officers had recently shot a man ten times—six times while he was already wounded and motionless on the floor—despite the fact that he had done nothing illegal and nothing threatening. This event had sparked debates that might have been familiar to Isaiah. There were those who said that the event may be unfortunate, but because the shooting had taken place in the name of a particular flag, the officers couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. These employees of this wealthy company felt differently. They felt that flying the right flag (if there is such a thing as “the right flag”) wasn’t enough. More is expected of us, and they wanted their company to say so.

The top leaders of their company made some sympathetic noises but ultimately didn’t do much. Those top leaders knew that taking this kind of stand could anger people who have the power to make it much more expensive to have little black rectangles manufactured in faraway countries. It was more valuable to these leaders to continue getting rich thanks to their access to poor workers than it was to express any kind of moral concern. Those leaders knew that they were one of the richest companies in the world because they relied on some of the poorest workers in the world.

What about me, then, the person carrying around this black rectangle in my pocket? Am I a sinner for using this device that comes at the price of the sins described in Isaiah 58? I don’t know? I don’t think so? I hope not? I think the world is more complicated than that, and I think that God appreciates that. But as leave church today, I will remember that attending church is not enough—that it is good, but that God expects more of us, and that God expects me to do my part.

Let us finish with with Isaiah 58:6-9, which tells us what God wants us all to be working toward:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you;
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.”

• Community of Christ
• sermons
• Tim Cook
• Apple
• Alex Pretti
• Isaiah
• prophetic critique
• Deutero-Isaiah