Sermon for SMHP, Year C, Lent 3, March 23, 2025
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. 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, my
steadfast, sure love for David.
4See, I made him a witness to the
peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. 5See,
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 God has glorified you.
6Seek the Lord while God may be found, call upon the
Lord while God is near; 7let the
wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return
to the Lord, that God
may have mercy on them, and to our God, for God 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.
There’s a
thing we do, when we think about scripture.
It’s a common thing, which you have probably heard, or done, or
both. A simple Google search reveals
just how common it is.
Here’s one:
on the Christianity Reddit thread, a user asks, Why does the God of the
Old Testament seem so different from that of the New Testament?
Or there is this blog article: Reconciling
the God of the Old Testament with that of the New. The article is actually a helpful
reminder to consider context and differences in literary genres before making
blanket statements about who God is in the two testaments.
There’s one comment. Never read the comments. “God's actions in the OT are deliberately and
wilfully vengeful, violent and destructive to the extent that he torments the
Egyptian Pharaoh in Exodus by hardening his heart to inflict more and more
punishment. There is no justifiable reconciling of the God in the OT with that
in the NT unless you go beyond the text and create your own justification.”
And just for good measure, here’s one more
article on the seekers’ blog Got Questions.
“Why is God so different in the Old Testament than He is in the
New Testament.”
“Old”
Testament: Mean, vengeful God.
“New”
Testament: Kind, puppies and kittens
nice God.
There are
multiple ways to dispel this myth, but I’m just going to offer one. Isaiah 55.
I could probably offer all of Isaiah, which has been referred to as “the
fifth gospel,” for the number of times it is quoted in the gospels and the
themes it has in common with them.
This
prophetic book is not a gospel, though.
This is an “Old Testament” book, and that’s probably the last time I’ll
use that term, because I much prefer “Hebrew Scripture.” There’s a thread of anti-semitism that runs
dangerously close every time we try to make the case that one testament has a
mean God and one has a nice one.
Does God do
mean stuff in the Hebrew Scriptures?
Sure. There’s over a thousand
pages of history there, and the humans who wrote it down loved to say it was
God who smote their enemies. But it’s
also God who establishes covenant after covenant with a people who philander
and squander God’s love.
To read all
of that history and poetry and wisdom and conclude “Oh, the Hebrew Scripture
God is super vengeful and mean” is like listening in to our house at bedtime
and concluding, “Oh, Donna and Colleen are terrible parents! All they do is say ‘have you brushed your
teeth?’ over and over in an increasingly desperate tone.”
No matter how
long it takes him to brush his teeth—average time, in my unscientific
study: fifteen minutes—no matter how
long it takes, afterwards we will be cuddled up in bed, all three of us,
reading a book. Because when you are a
parent, you default to love and forgiveness.
At least, that is the plan, and it’s a plan written by…anyone?
Yeah, God. who says, in the voice of Lady Wisdom, “Ho!
Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy
and eat!”
The heavenly
banquet is an image of salvation. Sure, God
is offering water to the thirsty and rich food to the hungry, but what God is
really offering is endless love, forgiveness, and eternal life.
For a price
of…nothing.
If you’re a
human, and most of us are, that sounds kind of absurd.
If you’re
living in a world--and all of us are--where everything is increasingly
transactional, and value is measured in dollars and “influence,” what God
offers is, absolutely absurd.
Love—the
thing we all want—for nothing. God loves
you, like a frustrated parent about to read to you from Laura Ingalls
Wilder. And it costs you nothing.
Forgiveness—God
will forgive the most egregious sins.
It’s there in verse five. “I will
make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.”
I don’t know
if you know this, but David was kind of a bast…imperfect person. He did some stuff. And God called him on it, or Nathan called him on it.
So when Lady Wisdom offers up
proof of the “everlasting covenant” by tying it to David, we should imagine a
great king, but also an imperfect man, forgiven by God for some very bad stuff.
Just as many
of us have been forgiven by God for some pretty bad stuff.
Stop there
and just breathe that in. “I am
forgiven.” No matter what I’ve done, I
am forgiven. I may be called to account…but I am forgiven. God’s grace has poured down over me like an
endless stream.
Stop there
and see if you can feel that. God’s
forgiveness pouring over you. God’s
grace set before you like a banquet of all your favorite things, for which you
owe nothing.
This is SO
countercultural that it is often presented in poetry so that it can try to find
a new neural pathway to use to sneak into our brains. It’s so counter-cultural that we’ve always
needed laboratories where we can practice
this kind of living—out of abundance, resilience, gratitude, and joy.
God has directed us to build
labs where we can practice letting go of scarcity thinking, and of the idea
that we are powerless over the foolishness of the world.
They’re called, these
laboratories…? Church. And synagogue. Mosque. Sanga.
There we
experiment with showering each other with love, and we work on our ability to
forgive the trespasses of others as God has forgiven us ours.
Brilliant
thing, this church—in Greek it’s the ekklesia—the called out
ones. We’re called out, separated out,
so that we can be salt, and light, and leaven for our whole world. There are people who don’t know how to
interrupt the foolishness of living out of scarcity. Paucity of thought.
And usually
at this point, I’m thinking, “How can we share this with more people?!” So many people need to come experience this
grace and love and welcome for themselves.
And they do!
But this week
I’m not thinking out there. I’m
thinking right here. [point to heart]
Because the
abundant love and grace that Lady Wisdom offers in Isaiah 55 has poured down on
me and on my family for weeks now. You
all have shown up in so many ways, including making the time to be here on
Friday, or contacting me to tell me why you couldn’t—which I completely
understand.
You’ve held
us in the midst of our grief and made space for us and reminded me every day of
the promise that Isaiah describes—the promise of bottomless love and welcome,
and hope. The God of a whole
Bible’s worth of grace.
The world
does need this. In each of our lives are
people who need to hear Lady Wisdom’s cry:
“Ho! Turn in here!”
There is
still abundance.
All is not
lost.
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