Sunday, February 28
Third Sunday in Lent
Focus Theme
Open Invitation
Weekly Prayer
God of infinite goodness, throughout the ages you have persevered in claiming
and reclaiming your people. Renew for us your call to repentance, surround us
with witnesses to aid us in our journey, and grant us the time to fashion our
lives anew, through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
Focus Scripture
Isaiah 55:1-9
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.
All Readings For This Sunday
Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9
Focus Questions
1. What blocks us from what we need most?
2. What are the spiritual "junk foods" we consume?
3. What do you find truly satisfying?
4. What is the difference between excess and abundance?
5. How are you seeking God this Lent?
Reflection by Kate Matthews
Prophets are poets, really, which might explain why they are such great
theologians. This week's reading, or better, this poem from the prophet-poet
Isaiah offers us, in nine short verses, the heart of the biblical message: God
loves us, no matter what, and reaches out to us even (or especially) in the
worst of times, making promises that are not just pie-in-the-sky, not just
theoretical. God promises the things that we most yearn for, deep down in our
hearts, the very basics of life: homecoming when we're lost or far away, a rich
feast when we're hungry, flowing fresh water to satisfy our thirst, and a
community of hope when we long for meaning in our lives--something greater than
ourselves, in which and through which we might be a blessing to the whole
world.
Oh, and another thing: there will be no cost affixed to this wonderful feast,
no price of admission, and everyone (even people you would never expect) will
be invited to the party. Underneath and through this message runs a deep and
tender compassion for the human predicament, our habit of getting entangled,
trapped, in ways and habits that cut us off from the source of what we need
most, or worse, being taken captive against our will by forces beyond our
control, especially, in this case, the materialism that afflicts and mars our
culture.
The Book of Comfort
Our passage from Isaiah comes from the beautiful Book of Comfort, addressed to
the Jewish people in exile in Babylon almost six hundred years before Jesus. We
know that a prophet speaks sternly to the people when they need it, but also
knows how to speak tenderly, to convey God's great love and mercy, when the
people need to hear that message as well; in fact, that really brings out the
poet in a prophet. And this prophet knows that the people are hungry for a
message of hope, a message that promises an end to their captivity and a
different way of life, back home, where they can be who they are called to be,
and live lives faithful to the God who has made an everlasting covenant with
them.
Isaiah knows that even the mention of King David's name will stir the people's
memory of their glory days, drawing their hearts and minds back to a time when
Israel was a great and powerful nation. This time, he adds that, as God renews
the covenant, it is extended beyond one king or dynasty and even beyond one
people, for the chosen people will be a light to the nations, drawing to it
people they have never known or even heard of.
Overflowing feasts and good news
God had led the people long ago from bondage in Egypt and fed them manna and
water on their way to a land flowing with milk and honey, but this trip home
will be no bread-and-water journey. This will be an overflowing feast of
delicious, delightful foods. Timothy Saleska recalls his mother's voice calling
him to supper as a child: "Come and get it!" was music to his ears,
not a command but "good news." He and his brother were happy to run
home when they heard these words, just as the people long ago, in exile, in
"desolation and death," would have thrilled to hear an invitation to
come and enjoy free food, wine, milk, and the restoration for which they
longed. For the people of Israel, it would have sounded to their hungry hearts
like their mother, calling them home to supper. The same might be said of us,
today.
Perhaps the voice we hear, calling us to "come to the waters," to
"buy and eat"--but with no money--is the voice of an ancient street
vendor selling his wares. I'm reminded of the people who stand on a street
corner I often pass, mostly women in green Statue-of-Liberty costumes, wearing
sandwich boards that invite passers-by to a carpet sale, with "bargains
you won't believe" (the connection to the Statue of Liberty, however,
escapes me).
Or maybe this vendor is more like the friendly people in the grocery store who
invite us to try a sample of this or that new cheese on this or that new
cracker. In either case, the offer is made to people who have other things on
their minds, other destinations on their schedule, and the point is to get them
to change course and put carpet-buying or cheese-and-cracker buying at the top
of their to-do list, to imagine their home given a whole new, fresher look by
laying down some new carpet, and a new dish added to their repertoire for the
next time they entertain.
What is God saying to you today?
This poet-prophet is calling us to a much bigger change in our schedule, of
course. Isaiah is saying that "God is trying to tell us something,"
as the song goes: we may have settled so comfortably into a routine and
worldview that keep us busy and distracted that we've lost touch with our
deepest selves, made in the image of God, and our spirits may be thirsty, starving,
and homesick, even if we can't name those feelings on our own. Daniel Debevoise
describes the heat of the southwestern United States, where the humidity is so
low that they post signs like those in the Grand Canyon National Park that say,
"'Stop! Drink water. You are thirsty, whether you realize it or
not.'" Isaiah the poet is doing the same thing, "telling us something
true about ourselves at every moment of our lives," Debevoise writes.
"We may not be immediately aware of how we have wandered away from
God--how life has lost its meaning in pursuit of a promotion or raise, how we
have gotten buried under the demands of economic and social status."
Like some of the ancient Jews exiled to Babylon, we may have made a strange and
uneasy kind of peace with the empire that imposes what Walter Brueggemann calls
a "pseudo-order" on our lives. Just as "they gave their lives
(and their faith) over to imperial productivity," we are easily trapped
from our earliest days into thinking that worth is equated with productivity,
that a dollar amount can be assigned to our value (think of the term "net
worth"). I recall hearing on television that the compensation received by
family members of those who died on 9/11 was based on the victims' earning
potential. It made me stop and think about the grief of the widow of a
minimum-wage worker in a restaurant I'd visited in the World Trade Center years
ago. How can we tell her that her husband's life was worth less than that of
the executive a hundred floors above?
How much are we worth?
Is our value really fixed by "an open market"? Have we made a home
for ourselves in that market, in a way of living that is alien to who we all
are, as children of God? Or, as Brueggemann puts it, are we in an exile, right
where we live, where "we are bombarded by definitions of reality that are
fundamentally alien to the gospel"? He then makes a curious claim, that
our exile is not simply "fact," but "a decision one must
make." Like the Jews who assimilated in ancient Babylon and found a relatively
comfortable way of life if they adopted the values and ways of the empire, we
might not perceive ourselves as exiles, either, Brueggemann writes. However,
like the sign that warns us that we may not realize that we are thirsty, the
prophet wakes us up with a call to come back to God and the source of what will
really satisfy our souls.
Many commentators on this text press this point about our living in an empire
of capitalist tyranny. Indeed, they are quite eloquent about the effect on our
spiritual and physical health. Darryl Trimiew writes of the accommodations that
we make with the powers that be in order to survive. After a dreary week of
meeting the expectations of the system (what Brueggemann calls the empire
could, after all, be called "the system" in our day), we come to
church exhausted and empty, Trimiew says. Like many readers of this text, he
describes a world in which we are caught up in a commercial, profit-driven
culture of excess that does not know the meaning of enough, and he acknowledges
that what we really need, what will really satisfy our deepest hunger and
thirst, is God. That's what Isaiah tells us, and that's the truth that lies
buried deep inside us, the truth that makes us dissatisfied even in the midst
of plenty, even and especially in the midst of excess.
Finding hope and acknowledging the good
At the risk of appearing to be one of those who do not experience the tension
between the gospel and our cultural values (a concern of Brueggemann), I wonder
if our recent economic struggles might provide fertile ground for reflection on
that interface. Brueggemann is only one of the eloquent voices that call us to
change course, to uproot ourselves from a semi-comfortable,
dulled-by-consumption exile by listening to and following God's call to a
different way of thinking and living. We might ask ourselves what we spend our
money on that does not satisfy us, "that which is not bread" (v. 2).
What are the alternatives to what does not satisfy? What are the different ways
of living that "life in God" offers?
Many people work honestly and hard to provide a living for their families and
to contribute to the wider community (including the church), and it's easy to
sound as if we're equating capitalism with "the evil empire" rather
than calling our society to ever higher expressions of justice, to demand from
society the kind of course corrections that will avoid turning us into
something that violates our greatest shared values.
Seeing the positives in our culture
I suppose we could too easily become co-opted by that "system," but I
also believe that we don't have to sound harshly judgmental, either. This
"culture," after all, has improved the life experience of women and
children, paid more (but not enough) attention to civil rights, struggled with
bigotry, and raised the standard of living of a huge (but not great enough)
percentage of the population. How do we acknowledge this progress in our public
life while still challenging ourselves to remember the One who calls us to such
justice in the first place, and seeks to nourish our spirits as well as our
bodies?
So while we speak of exile and empire, we might focus on the difference between
"excess" and "enough," between what we need and what we
want, and, beyond that, far more than we could ever enjoy but are seduced into
thinking that we need. In that pursuit, we are indeed captive and in need of a
liberating word from the poets and the storytellers. Sara Miles' book, Take
This Bread, an extended and graceful meditation on the theme of spiritual and
physical hunger, is a good place to start.
What does bread mean to you?
While Brueggemann has written stirringly on this text in many of his books, his
words about bread and the symbolism of bread are especially moving: "The
street vendor knows that all the way from manna to Eucharist, we have taken
food to be a sign, sacrament, and gesture of an alternative....that touches
everything, economics as well as liturgy." In the church, we give thanks
for all good gifts and struggle to discern and articulate alternatives to
"the powers" — the systems and practices — that deny those gifts to
any of God's children. Like our secular culture these days, we're mindful that
we can consume junk food for our spirits as much as our bodies, and we have to
learn to say no.
And, Brueggemann says, we have to be aware that this bread "always comes
with a price. Eat royal bread and think royal thoughts. Eat royal bread and
embrace royal hopes and fears," but we remember that "we are children
of another bread." Like Jesus speaking of the reign of God, we are called
to "redescribe the world" so that we might know the difference
between exile and home, and learn to "live out of the promise,"
together.
Again, the heart of the biblical message
Many of us may be attempting with varying degrees of success one kind of Lenten
discipline or another, to learn to act and think in new ways that will
transform not just our own, personal lives but the life of the world around us
as well. It's hard work, and it requires persistence. Two weeks into Lent, we
may have already become discouraged, but that may be a result of thinking that
pure willpower on our own part is the source of our strength and the
determinant of what will happen in our lives.
And why not? We breathe in a culture of self-determination — the peril of
freedom, perhaps — and find it difficult to admit our powerlessness in the face
of the relentless seductions and messages of our culture. Maybe the point of
Lent is for us to adjust our sights so that we at least understand what it is
we ought to hunger for, or in fact what we do hunger and thirst for, in our
deepest being: justice, mercy, peace, healing, acceptance, love. And not just
for ourselves, but for all of God's children. That must be what shalom looks and
sounds and feels like, and it's at the heart of the biblical message.
The mystery of God's ways and the hunger of the heart
The closing verses of the reading remind us that we can never fully understand
or even lay out God's "plan"; was it Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who observed
that if we needed something explained to us in the first place, we wouldn't be
able to understand it? And yet we do have a powerful confidence that
homesickness and hunger are not at the heart of that plan. But maybe we need to
feel, to connect with, our hunger, our homesickness, not for "what does
not satisfy," but for God and for the gifts of God. All humans share this
deep need for God, whether we name it in that way or not.
However, at any given time, not all of us share physical hunger and thirst. It
is a spiritual discipline — in Lent, but in every season, really — to remember
those who hunger and thirst for physical food and water, and to strengthen our
unity in both religious and secular settings by responding to that need. Can we
gather at the table each Sunday without remembering all those beyond our walls,
in our neighborhood, our city, the countryside that surrounds us, and the world
beyond? Are we building communities that reach out as well as welcome in? Both
are important: after all, we never know which exiles might be coming home this
Sunday, hungry and thirsty, and longing for a community of meaning in which to
put down roots.
Heather Murray Elkins describes "sacrifice" in a much better way than
we have traditionally understood it, that is, as giving something up with
almost grim determination. She speaks instead of "the right
sacrifice" as something that happens inside us, "a gift of the heart,
of the self. God, who is all merciful, looks for true seekers, people who hunger
for God." Is there a more fitting way to approach the communion table this
Lent than hungry, hungry for the gifts of God?
A preaching version of this commentary (with book titles) is at
http://www.ucc.org/worship_samuel.
The Rev. Kathryn Matthews serves as dean of Amistad Chapel at the national
offices of the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, Ohio (
https://www.facebook.com/AmistadChapel).
You're invited to share your reflections on this text on our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/SermonSeeds.
For further reflection
Mahatma Gandhi, 20th century
"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them
except in the form of bread."
Victor Hugo, The Memoirs of Victor Hugo, 19th century
"The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One
must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal."
Frank McCourt, 20th century
"After a full belly all is poetry."
Thomas Fuller, 17th century
"We never know the worth of water till the well is dry."
Mahatma Gandhi, 20th century
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's
greed."
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 20th century
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger,
I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
George Eliot, 19th century
"It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are
still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we
must hunger for them."
John Piper, A Hunger For God, 20th century
"If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of
God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because
you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with
small things, and there is no room for the great."
Mick Jagger, 20th century
"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might
find, you get what you need."
