August 2025

‘A pleasant vineyard … let it make peace with me’ Isaiah 27.2 & 5 (NRSV)

This Saying is about God’s relationship with Israel, as prophesied in Isaiah 27.  It compares the Jewish people to a vineyard protected and sustained by God’s mercy. It is full of God’s desire for connection with His people; an appeal to relationship sustained by place and space, rooted in the very land itself.

In a wider sense, everyone’s relationship with God is mediated through space and place. We might be drawn to particular churches, convents or gardens of sanctuary.  Our domestic spaces, if we are lucky enough to have a home, are perhaps where we most often encounter God and the possibility of renewing relationship with Him. 

Keeping our homes and lives simple and open can sometimes enable us to hear God’s voice and Isaiah’s appeal to make our peace with God and with ourselves, to enmesh our roots in Him.  Home can then become wherever God is; something the Jewish communities for whom this month’s Saying was originally intended, knew only too well.   

In global terms, change can sometimes seem the only constant, at times bringing trauma wrought by war, sickness, economic and political inequality and by unchecked greed and hatred.  We see the true meaning of Hebrews 13.8 becoming clear: ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever’.  The joy of 1 Thessalonians 5:18 arrives in the wake of profound sorrows, as our world learns the true meaning of what it is to ‘give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you’. 

Yet whatever our crosses might be, each day brings the possibility of the renewal of our personal relationship with God.  He promises this above all in Isaiah.  We are all those for whom He made this wonderful earth and everything in it, those to whom He sent His Saviour-Son.  We can choose to see this anew and to begin afresh with Him every single day of our glorious lives.  Isaiah 55.12 therefore declares with delight:

For you shall go out in joy

and be led back in peace;

the mountains and the hills before you

shall burst into song,

and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

May we come to know this joy in renewed relationship with God, this August and always.