Lent 3
March 20, 2022
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without
price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight
yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may
live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my
steadfast, sure love for David.
See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and
commander for the peoples.
See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and
nations that do not know you shall run to you,
because of the Lord your God, the Holy One
of Israel, for he has glorified you.
Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while
he is near;
let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous
their thoughts;
let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on
them,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways
my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my
ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
I remember the day someone stopped by and dropped into a chair in my study. It was the middle of a workday. She had a responsible job. Without any interrogation from me, she started detailing all that was wrong with her job. The hours were long, the people were dedicated, the salary was rewarding. “I couldn’t put my daughter through college if I didn’t have that job,” she said. “I like the job but it’s killing me. I’m wearing a set of golden handcuffs.” Anybody know how that feels?
Or there’s that man with the flashy car, the fast car, the red convertible. And he dresses like he should drive a red convertible. His problem is relationships. He’s had a few, most didn’t last. Now married for fifteen years, he seems happy, but he says, “Something’s missing. She’s wonderful. We never fight. We love one another dearly.” He paused, and then he said it, “But I don’t think she or anybody else can provide all that I want. What’s wrong with me?” I listened, and thought quietly, “I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with you.”
Somebody else confessed her problem with prayer. Raised in a Protestant home, circumscribed by clear rules, learned a lot of Bible verses, yet now she has a hard time praying. “I pray for my family, I pray for my friends, I pray for the world,” she confessed. “But it feels like I’m merely working through a checklist. Going through the motions. What is it that Jesus said? ‘Heaping up empty words.’” I knew exactly what she was saying.
Moments like these come to all of us. Since it’s the season of Lent, I suggest we pay attention to them. At heart, they are spiritual moments. They don’t take place in a church – they take place in our souls. If we are honest, we know why they can be so disturbing. We are waking up and discovering that the world as we know it is not enough. And that why such moments can be so profound.
The job pays well and it’s wringing us dry. The heavily cultivated relationship doesn’t provide all we want. The practices of faith ring hollow. We know these situations – and they resonate with countless others. The candidate we elect turns out to be a disappointment. The investment scheme is a bust. The good friend betrays you. The new car turns out to be a lemon. Promised a successful medical treatment, we become the rare exception. The dream for the future is dashed. The preacher who seemed so well-spoken becomes a bore. And so on and so on. You have your list, I have mine.
If we are spiritually attentive, we discover more than disappointment and disillusion. We have a hunger for something that the world cannot satisfy. Call it God, or grace, or salvation, or happiness, or some sense of completion or contentment, whatever it is lies beyond our ability to acquire it.
Like the composer of the book of Ecclesiastes, that wise sage who had it all – and discovered it wasn’t enough. According to legend, that was King Solomon, one of David’s sons. He prayed for wisdom and God granted the prayer. He had money, fame, and a big palace. He also had 700 wives and 300 girlfriends (1 Kings 11:3). For some reason, I don’t think he was satisfied. It probably wasn’t due to the statistics; rather, it was because he was a human being.
And so, we have this remarkable poem today in the 55th chapter of Isaiah. The prophet addresses it to people on the verge of going home. Well, they’ve been told they were going home. Truth is, most of them were born in Babylon, and Babylon has become their home. Their parents and grandparents had been stolen from their homeland. They were Jews from the kingdom of Judah and were kidnapped and forced into slavery in the Babylonian empire.
That was seventy years before. Mom, Dad, and the grandparents were mostly gone. And Isaiah says, “It’s time to go home.” Well, all they know is Babylon. All they know is the Empire around them. Maybe they had heard the stories of Abram and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and Moses, but that was distant history. Just like the Bible stories that you and I have heard – they happened a long time ago in a land far away. And there is a disconnection between those old promises of faith and the land where they now reside.
So Isaiah the poet pokes his finger in that disconnection. “Anybody thirsty?” he asks. “Anybody want a free meal?” Oh, they can’t imagine such a thing. They’ve had to work for their food. The Empire has made sure of that. But there is a meal offered to all of you, free of charge. They can’t imagine what he’s talking about. After all, this is poetry that does not rhyme. You must work on it – or give it enough imaginative space to let it work on you.
Then the poet asks a single question to probe and puncture: Why do you spend your money on the things that do not satisfy? How did he know?
How did he know that you can go up and down the aisles of Target, fill your shopping cart with all kinds of goodies that you had not imagine you wanted until you walked into the store, and by the time you push that heap of purchases out to the car, you’re already regretting some of the things that you bought? Buyer’s Remorse, they call it.
This happens regularly to me. We had a lot of firewood delivered before the winter. I couldn’t find my hatchet. Rather than look for it in the garage (where we found it last week), I saw an ad for a super-duper wood splitter. Looked great! You attach this wedge thing on your power drill, push it on a chunk of wood, it splits the thing wide open. “Honey,” I said, “wait till you see what I ordered!”
About three weeks later, it shows up. There’s Chinese lettering on the outside of the envelope, no return address. I rip it open. Somehow the super-duper wood splitter looks smaller than the advertisement. But I click it onto the power drill, and then discover I need to charge up the drill. A few hours later, I take it outside and give it a spin. I hit the button – zzzz – sounds good! Then I press it on a chunk of wood, and it gets stuck. Nothing happens. A few more attempts, nothing happens.
I wonder, “Why did I throw away $39.95?” That’s the best description of my spiritual life that I can offer. Or to put it in the words of the poet, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?”
Suddenly I understand why seventy percent of the Psalms of Israel are complaints: we invest ourselves in goods, situations, and structures which can never fill the gaping vacuum in our souls. Once again, we are forced to wait on God. To pray that God will provide what the goods and kindred of this world cannot.
There’s a grand old hymn that we don’t sing enough. Maybe it is just too honest. The first two stanzas go like this:
Spirit of God, descend upon my heart;
wean it from earth, through all its pulses move;
Stoop to my weakness, mighty as thou art,
and make me love thee as I ought to love.
And then the second verse grabs me by the shoulder:
I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
no sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies,
but take the dimness of my soul away.[1]
It’s this “dimness” that provokes us to reach for the things that can never satisfy. We spend money, we consume banquets, we glug down the wine. We flick through the channels and grumble how there’s nothing to watch. We start reading the novel, then flick to the last page to see how it ends. We pay for a gym membership and never go. We tell ourselves the next purchase will make us happy, or the next friend will settle our unsettled hearts. Same old human condition: spending ourselves on the things that cannot satisfy.
When he comments on Isaiah’s poem, scholar Walter Brueggemann warns those far from home about becoming enslaved to the enticements of the Empire. You have a covenant with God, a long-standing love with your Maker. Don’t give in to the hype and nonsense of a world obsessed with consuming you. That would be to fall into the “wicked way,” the “unrighteousness” warned against by the poet.
By contrast, the poem that we hear today is full of invitations. They are offered in the verbs: come, eat, listen, delight, incline, seek, call, return. Forget all that counterfeit bread. Chew on something that will sustain you. Drink deeply from the water of life. It’s free, and it can be found.
There’s a young man from Virginia who has left the comforts of home to travel the world. He’s on a three-year service trip, traveling by ship, mostly, and finding ways to serve others in whatever port he lands. I’ve been following his journey off and on. Recently I was quite taken by his summary of what he has learned: “What I love most in this world cannot be confined by it.”
Let that sink in for a minute. “What I love most in this world cannot be confined by it.” He doesn’t tell us what That is, but we might be able to guess. Especially if we, too, are sufficiently fed up with the Empire’s junk food that we will come, eat, listen, delight, incline, seek, call, and return.
Remember that old hymn that I quoted? There is a third verse:
Hast thou not bid us love thee, God and King;
all, all thine own, soul, heart, and strength, and mind?
I see thy cross; there teach my heart to cling.
O let me seek thee, and O let me find!
[1] George Croly, “Spirit of God,
Descend Upon My Heart,” 1867. Public domain, found in many hymnals.
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