The Richest Fare

The Richest Fare

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 28, 2016

Scripture: Isaiah 55:1-3, 6-9

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We just heard a few verses from the book of Isaiah. They’re from the part of the book that was written in the mid-sixth century BCE when many of the leaders of the Hebrew people were in forced exile in Babylon, some six hundred miles or so away from home. These verses were written over 2,500 years ago, yet every time I read them I am struck by how contemporary they are. That of course is how it often works with Bible. Texts written in ancient cultures so different from ours that we can hardly comprehend how foreign they would be to us speak truth us in our time and place. These verses from Isaiah 55 are among my favorite verses in the entire Bible. They begin with a divine invitation to a heavenly banquet: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” It’s a magnificent heavenly invitation to everyone, especially the very poor, to come to God’s table and partake of the food and drink that God offers. I’ve always been able to buy the food I need, but even so these words always lift my spirits and kind of make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. They are God’s unconditional invitation into the life of God. They say God welcomes everyone. Absolutely everyone. Without condition. Without any admission test. It is an invitation to those the world considers unworthy, expressed here as an invitation to the very poor. The fare the God offers is for everyone. Absolutely everyone. That, my friends, is great good news indeed.

These words come to us from the sacred traditions of Judaism, our mother faith. They come to us from a very long time ago. Yet they speak powerfully to us, or at least to me. I need the food that God offers as much as anyone. I suspect that you do too. Our world needs God’s feeding as much as the ancient world ever did. These words speak God’s invitation to all people in all times and places. Thanks be to God!

Yet these words of invitation to a feast aren’t actually the part of what we heard that I find to be the most surprisingly contemporary and the most powerful. Those words come next. Isaiah has God ask God’s people a truly profound and very current question: “Why spend money on that which is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” Every time I read or hear those words I’m amazed that they were written so long ago, for they seem to me to be speaking directly to our current circumstances and needs. OK, maybe that’s because I hear them speaking so directly to my own life story, but I think they do a lot more than that. We all know that our society has more problems than we can keep up with. High rates of drug addiction and alcoholism. High divorce rates. A huge number of homeless people, some but not all of whom are addicts or alcoholics or who suffer from mental illness that we do such a lousy job of dealing with. Perhaps most of all violence. Violence is all around us. Our nation uses it around the world. Domestic violence is far more prevalent than most of us realize. Gun violence wracks our homes, schools, mall, and work places. Yes, there is much good in our society. Much caring and taking after, but the social ills never seem to go away. They just seem to get worse. Perhaps they seem to get worse in part because with all of today’s mass media we hear about them more than we used to, but there’s more to it than that. We really do live in a world with massive dysfunction.

Now, I’m no sociologist. I haven’t done in-depth study of any of these problems, but I have lived in this world for quite a few years now. I have worked in this world for quite a few years now, in various capacities including the one that has me up here in front of you this morning. Based mostly on my life experience, I am convinced that a foundational cause of all of those problems is that we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy. Let me use some of my experience as an example. Back when I used to work as a lawyer in downtown law firms we all knew that the research showed that easily half of all lawyers said they would rather be doing something else if they could. They just thought they couldn’t. So did I. We called it “golden handcuffs.” What we were buying wasn’t bread. Our labor did not satisfy, but oh my was the money good. I also knew that in the downtown professional world in which I was trying to pass the divorce and alcoholism rates were through the roof. High powered lawyers for whom I worked had extramarital affairs with their associates and legal assistants, and sometimes with their law partners, all the time. Many lawyers saw legal ethics as nothing so much as meaningless barriers to them making even more money.

Somehow I managed to avoid those traps myself, which I can only ascribe to the grace of God; yet at some level I think I always knew that I wasn’t cut out for life in that world. Still, I kept trying. I kept working. I even tried to run my own law office for a few years, something that led me into depression and an emotional/spiritual crisis that eventually landed me in ordained Christian ministry, which came as at least as much of a shock to me as it was to anyone else. And what was the problem? I was buying that which is not bread and laboring for that which did not satisfy. The prophet we call Second Isaiah knew that dynamic over 2,500 years go. I came to know it twenty-five years ago.

Here’s what I think my problem was and what I think our society’s problems are grounded in. We get a hint at it from the wonderful last lines of our reading from Isaiah this morning. Isaiah has God say “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways….As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God’s ways are not the ways by which the world lives most of the time, not the way most people live most of the time. Yet God created us in God’s image and likeness. God created us to live, as fully as we can given our mortal limitations according to God’s ways. When we seek to live according to God’s ways we are fed the bread of heaven. When we seek to live according to God’s ways, we live lives that truly satisfy. Why do we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy? Because we rely on ourselves and the world not on God. Because we think living up to the world’s standards will bring us wholeness of life.

But here’s the truth: It won’t. Living the way of the world leads to a dead end, or at least it does for an awful lot of people. Living the ways of God brings us true bread and true satisfaction. What are the ways of God? Pretty much the opposite of the ways of the world. A life lived in love not in hatred. A live of cooperation not competition. A life of inclusion not exclusion. A life of peace not violence. A life of caring not indifference. A life of service not selfishness. Yes, those are generalizations, and it is up to every one of us to discern what they mean specifically for us in our own time, place, and life circumstances. Whatever the specifics are, that way lies health, wholeness, salvation. That way lies God’s richest fare, a banquet of true life and true love. May we find the grace to live as God calls us to live, with real bread and true satisfaction. Amen.