Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, Listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. [Isaiah 55:1b-2].
Last Tuesday, I had my “AWV.” For you non-Medicare folks, “AWV” stands for “annual wellness visit.” As many of you know, an AWV isn’t an annual physical; the stern lady at the front desk will remind you if you use the wrong words. “Medicare doesn’t reimburse for physicals; it’s a wellness visit.”
I passed with flying colors, but that isn’t the reason I’m mentioning it. You see, I made a mistake in scheduling this year’s AWV. I let them set it for 11:30 a.m., which meant that it didn’t start in earnest until almost noon, with my blood work being completed a few minutes before 1 p.m. Of course, in preparation for the blood work, I had been fasting since 9 p.m., Monday evening. When I walked out of the Duke clinic, I was as hungry as a bear just out of hibernation. The feeling reminded me of those occasional Fridays during Lent when I fast until sundown. The gnawing of hunger is such an unfamiliar phenomenon for folks like you and me. Food, even during COVID-19 times, has been relatively easy to find, particularly as long as one is willing to prepare it at home.
Food plays an important role in Holy Scripture. As we’ve noticed in recent weeks, fully half of Jesus’ parables are about seeds, bread, wheat, and other consumables. With Passover and Eucharist, both the Jewish and Christian faiths have a meal at their very core. When the Israelites were wandering through the wilderness, Yahweh gave them manna (and quail) to soothe their physical hunger. Immediately after being baptized by John, Jesus wanders out into the wilderness for 40 days, where He was tempted by hunger to turn stones into bread.
In this week’s lesson from Isaiah [Isaiah 5:1-5, Proper 13(18), the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A], the prophet, speaking for Yahweh, calls on the Hebrew exiles in Babylon:
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 [Isaiah 5:1].
Old Testament scholars point out that the tone of Isaiah’s words is similar to that of a market hawker, a merchant trying to entice those passing by to try his goods, for his are best. Yet the message is strange. This hawker has the best, but the best is free for all. The hawker chides us along, “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?”
Many of the exiles no doubt thought, “Why, indeed?” You see, like us, they found it quite possible to secure food and all the other “necessities” from within their Babylonian exile. By the time of Isaiah 55, part of the older generation of Hebrews who had been carried off from Judah have died. And so, a considerable segment of the exiles hearing the words of the prophet had never lived in and around Jerusalem at all. They only knew the sort of world that they had experienced in Babylon, where foreign gods were worshipped, where military might was the prevailing form of strength, where Hebrew men and woman could prosper as long as they carefully managed to keep their faith anonymous. It wasn’t that carving out a life in Babylon (or Durham) was so difficult; it was that it was so unfulfilling.
They longed for more, but by “more,” I don’t mean a bigger pot or an extra bit of cloth or leather. I don’t mean a few additional doves or other game to prepare for their Sabbath meal. No, in Babylon — like Durham or Raleigh — they had food to eat, water — sometimes even a little wine — to drink. Yet, there was still something missing. They still had a nagging hunger and thirst, a type of hunger and thirst that was difficult to name.
So it is for many of us, isn’t it? Years ago, for longer than a five-year period, I provided pastoral counseling to a young professional who said he felt lost. An M.D., in a lucrative surgical specialty, he had plenty of money in the bank, a fully-funded retirement account, a lovely (delightfully quirky) wife, and several reasonably well-behaved children in their late teens and early twenties. In short, he had become an expert at living in Babylon. On almost every occasion that we talked, he’d say that he just couldn’t understand his world. He acknowledged that he had everything he’d ever hoped to attain. He was healthy, well-respected, well-positioned, and yet utterly lost. “Tom, I yearn for something — I hunger for something — and I just can’t name it,” was his refrain.
I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, you know. It took me five years to point my friend to Isaiah. One day, after a particularly frustrating conversation with him, I turned to the prophet and said:
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live [Isaiah 55:2-3a].
You see, in Isaiah, the prophet points us to the only “phenomenon” in the cosmos that is deeper and more profound that the sort of deep human hunger and yearning for which no meal can satisfy: it’s Yahweh’s hunger for us. As the prophet tells us (because Yahweh told him), God has an insatiable longing for communion with you and me. Discovering God’s hunger for us is the most humbling, satisfying, most liberating, most joyous experience in the universe. Knowing that God yearns for us, that God is thirsty for our presence, and will stop at nothing to provide us with His communion assuages the longing within our own hearts. It is what the entire creative order is all about.
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