Buy Without Money
Isaiah 55:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
March 7, 2010
The poetry of Isaiah, the so-called Second Isaiah, contains the words of the opening invitation to come to the Lord’s Table in several of the services of communion that we celebrate. “The Holy One says: Why spend your money on what does not satisfy? Why spend your wages and still be hungry? Listen to me and do what I say, and you will enjoy the best food of all. Listen, now, my people, and come to me; come to me, and you will have life!”
Isaiah seems to be fixated on money, yet he has moved on beyond money to far more important things. A meal, for instance, what can be more important for a human being than eating? Food sustains life, a meal is an unparalleled occasion for human beings to share their spirits and souls with one another. Look around the table with whom you are sharing a meal and you may understand what kind of person you are. Look around the table with whom we are sharing the bread and wine and we may catch a glimpse of what kind of church we may become.
The danger always comes when we assume these melodic phrases are what it’s all about, for we are awfully good at reducing prophetic words to fit snugly and safely into our tame situations. Isaiah’s imagery here is that of a meal - it always seems to be about a meal in the Bible - the heavenly banquet in the Kingdom of God when money is no longer a concern or even a reality. How the circumstances from which Isaiah first spoke colour richly what he was saying needs a little bit of history, spiritual history at that.
Isaiah is one of the longer books in the Bible, 66 chapters long, but for a long time readers have caught that there are several Isaiahs writing in the book. Three is the number now: First Isaiah wrote chapters 1-39 in the 8th century B.C.E.; Second Isaiah, chapters 40-55, is the most frequently cited prophet in the Gospels, writing in the disastrous 6th century; and then a Third Isaiah, 56-66, also in the 6th century. There was trouble in River City with each one, trouble that North Americans have never really experienced, perhaps a hint with September 11, but only a hint.
During First Isaiah’s life the northern kingdom of Israel was crushed and annihilated by the Assyrian Empire, and the southern kingdom of Judah, which continued for another century and a half, was living as a vassal state under the iron hand of the Assyrians, not dissimilar to the former Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe. Depending exactly upon where you were living, your way of life, way of worship, your national identity and independence had been wiped out by forces beyond your control and beyond your fixing.
Second Isaiah wrote nearly two centuries later in a situation that was both worse and better. Empires come and empires go. We know that in our own history, and 2600 years ago the Assyrians were no longer in charge and the Babylonians had become the new bully on the ancient world scene. In 587 the Babylonians stopped fooling around with Judah and simply crushed the country, burned down Jerusalem and its temple. Then in a time-honoured tactic of empires that knew how to eliminate a culture: they forcibly dragged off the leaders of Israel hundreds of kilometers away to Babylon, isolating them from family, religion and language. The Exile was not just a historical period of time, but an attitude, a new way of looking at the world which nobody volunteered to do. The Jewish exiles were depressed beyond belief, convinced that God had abandoned them for their sins and even more that God no longer cared for them. Their worship was structured around worship in the Temple, so when you are no longer capable of worshiping in the Temple because it is too far away and even more because it no longer exists, then you cannot worship.
Is any of this sounding familiar yet? A religious community that was strong and flourishing, being the centre of an entire nation, its culture and its politics, discovers that political, social and economic circumstances beyond their vision, beyond their ability to fix, are destroying the way they have always done things. Their house of worship is gone, their congregation has dwindled catastrophically, all their money has been taken, God doesn’t want them anymore and there is nobody they can blame that matters anymore. Does that sound like us? We are looking for someone to blame in the early 21st century; we are desperately, vainly looking for ways to fix that which is not able to be fixed. We keep trying to do better what we have always done, but no one else wants to do it that way anymore. We keep trying to go back to doing it the way we used to do it when we thought things were going well, only better, but find that the world no longer finds things like that interesting anymore. We have become exiles in our own country.
The reason we can be here today is directly due to how those Exiles in Babylonia decided to rethink who they were and how they were now going to continue to be God’s children. Instead of giving up hope, staying home on the Sabbath, forgetting what the Sabbath is, they awoke to the fact that God had given them a new world, and in order to enjoy the new world they had to give up their old world of king and temple. Without a temple, they invented the idea of a synagogue and the kind of worship that no longer is concerned with sacrifices of animals, but sacrifices of words and hearts. Our Christian worship service is more Jewish than we would ever admit.
Almost 50 years later, Second Isaiah began to speak in the midst of Exile with a different tone of voice, about a new world coming into being that frankly not too many exiles thought believable. The word that Cyrus the Great of Persia is the new power about to come and turn out the Babylonians was fresh in the air. Cyrus had the reputation of being a religiously tolerant ruler and indeed he did drive out the Babylonians and allowed the Jews to return home free. Now all sorts of irony are afoot here, since Cyrus the Persian is nothing less than an Iranian. I have known some very nice and good Iranians, but in terms of world history the ancient Greeks and Romans and Christians and now the modern West have seemingly been at continuous odds with Iranians.
In an earlier prophecy (44:28) Second Isaiah declares the Word of the Lord that Cyrus was God’s chosen one and instrument, God’s anointed, come to save his people. Anointed? In Hebrew that’s Messiah. Cyrus, of course, was not Jewish and not even a hint of Christian, but this was the new world and if the Hebrews wanted to disdain Cyrus because he’s not one of us and doesn’t want to do things the way we’ve done it before, we’d all be still in Iraq.
Isaiah again speaks what God has told him: it’s time to eat, unlike any other meal. What world, what society, what church is not obsessed and tied down by money? You who have no money, come, buy and eat! If you have no money, how can you buy? Come buy wine and milk without money and without price. Things have changed and you can’t just find a solution and fix them without learning something new and living differently. My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. God is leading you in a new direction, a new way, and God is taking you back to where you belong, but it’s not going to be the way it used to be. It will be remarkable - you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains the hills before you shall break forth into singing and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Money can’t buy you love. Why spend your money anyway for that which is not bread and your labour for that which does not satisfy? The environment in which we are a church has changed radically and we are no longer the center pieces of moral discourse in our society. We are exiles, resident aliens, strangers in a strange land, but God is leading us if only we are open to following, and there’s a big banquet waiting for us when we arrive.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan