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. 

If we can keep our homes and lives simple and open, we might better hear God’s voice and Isaiah’s appeal to make our peace with God and with ourselves, to enmesh our roots in Him.  Home then becomes wherever God is; something the Jewish communities for whom this Saying was originally intended, knew only too well.   

In global terms, change seems currently to be the only constant, 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.  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 such joy in renewed relationship with God be yours this August, and always.