So That You May Live

 Sunday, March 7, 2010

Lent 3C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Isaiah 55:1-3, 6-9

¹“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. ²Why 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. ³Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, … ⁶Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; ⁷let 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. ⁸For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. ⁹For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

What’s the saying, “if it seems too good to be true … it probably is!”

To give a bit of historical context to the passage this morning:  Israel has been in exile in Babylon for the last 50 years, and even though they were in exile, the Babylonians allowed the Israelites freedoms that made the exile less … exilic … less of a hardship, if you will.  The Israelites were allowed to own land, to establish and grow businesses, to practice their faith.  The only thing they COULDN’T do was to go back to their homeland – to Palestine. 

Then, in 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Persia conquers Babylon and within the same year issues a decree stating that all the Israelites who want to may return to their ancestral home, back to the land that most of them have no living memory of, but only know of through the stories they heard from their parents and grandparents. 

Picture this:  you are born and grow up in a city that for all practical purposes you consider to be home.  You realize you’re a little different from your neighbors down the street, you speak fluent Babylonian as well as Hebrew, because you learned the one language from your friends and the other from your parents.  You grow up, you meet and fall in love with your husband or wife and marry, you start to have kids, you set up a little shop in the front part of your house, you start to build it up, your life seems to be coming together fairly well … word comes to town that there are things happening in battlefields far away … and then in the capital … then you start seeing soldiers coming through town in different armor than what you are used to seeing… then one day a herald comes to town and calls a press conference in the central square.  He steps up on the platform next to the fountain, pulls out a roll of parchment, and begins to read from it. 

What he reads makes the old folks in your group cry and hug each other.

The people of Israel are free to return to their home. 

But you, well, you look around at your friends and are a little mystified as to what the big deal is about… after all, you’ve got a business to run, a family to raise, a house to build, a wife to support, and you were just thinking about approaching the caterer down in the next block about that feast you were going to throw for your next anniversary in a couple of months … and you also had plans to speak to the mason about adding on that second story you and your wife have been talking about since your third child, Josiah, was born… and now she’s expecting your sixth baby … you DEFINITELY need the room.       

The conditions in Babylon were not so bad … in fact you could even say that the Israelites were doing really pretty well. So there was very little incentive for folks to leave their known comforts for what would probably end up being, first, a grueling cross-country trip from here to there, and second, once THERE, well … from what the scouts had reported, there was going to be a LOT of rebuilding to do … a LOT of free labor to donate, and not a lot of time to fix up a house for your family, much less open shop and try to make a living.  There goes the hot tub for the courtyard you were beginning to dream about. 

This part of Isaiah is written specifically for you.  It’s the voice of God calling you, inviting you to reconsider, to reevaluate what is truly important in your life.  It seems like an extravagant statement to begin with – in a land where water is a relatively scarce commodity, and was used as currency in some areas, or to establish the value of a person or of land, you’re invited to come and drink as much as you like – and not only water, but wine and milk as well… and all at no cost! What wretched excess!  Where’s the catch?  Where’s the hidden cost?

This is an invitation to live into the extravagant grace of a God who welcomes with open arms and celebrates the life given to us in ways we can hardly even imagine.  This is an invitation from the one who MADE heaven and earth to partake IN the bounty of heaven and earth through HIM. 

It is a gentle invitation, away from what we can so easily come to consider significant, important to our wellbeing and meaningful parts of our lives, and they actually end up being so much dross, so much garbage. 

Lent is a time to consider that invitation even more profoundly than during the rest of the year as Christians.  Our call is to constantly be vigilant and intentional about NOT letting other things cloud our vision, blur our focus away from God.  But during this season especially, we are invited to delve even deeper, explore more fully those aspects of our life that we so easily take for granted: our comforts, our enjoyments, our habits, and hold them up to the purifying light of the gospel – that invitation that extends beyond the limits of the tribes of Israel into the world at large and beckons us to a life of engagement – a life given to God, to love and to serve through loving and serving others more than ourselves. 

If we have been living as though what is temporary matters, as if what we own and can buy and touch and show off to our friends is what life is all about, we might be understandably uncomfortable at the prospect of approaching a Holy God with that in our baggage.  After all, we hear over and over again of a vengeful, angry God, a jealous God who punishes the wicked for their iniquities. 

But in our passage this morning, we have a clear image of a God that is not so inclined to destruction, who is more inclined to do the opposite:  verse 7:

“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.”      

That is the Gospel – the good news, told hundreds of years before Jesus walked the earth. 

And the writer seems to be reading the minds of those who will hear these words read or who will read them and ask themselves … “WHAT??  What about the righteous? Those who HAVE kept the commandments, who HAVE lived in the fear of the Lord, who HAVE kept the faith?? 

God’s answer is simple, however hard it may be for us to hear:

^“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.”

In short, God is simply saying ‘you don’t understand because … you are not me.’ 

Is this really too good to be true? 

Maybe. 

I’m going to go ahead and trust that it IS true. 

How about you?

Let’s pray.