An invitation to thirst
Isaiah 55
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
February 28, 2016
Speak, Lord
Speak to me
Oh speak, Lord
Won’t you speak to me
I was so blind
I was so lost
Until you spoke to me
Oh speak, Lord
Speak, Lord
And hear my mind
Oh with your word
And heal my soul
Oh speak, Lord
Speak to me
Speak my Lord
Yeah speak to me
Oh, I love you, Lord
Save my soul
God is trying to tell you something
God is trying to tell you something
Maybe God is
Trying to tell you something
Right now, right now, right now
This is my favorite scene in The Color Purple. Shug is singing a bluesy sistah song in the woodsy honkytonk down by the river. Her preacher father and everyone in the country church down the road can hear her, and the choir starts singing “God Is Trying to Tell You Something”. Shug hears the choir, stops what she’s doing, and begins to sing the spiritual with her smoky, soulful voice. Everyone at the honkytonk, including Shug and the band, make their way down the road to the church, Shug singing her heart out. She and her friends burst into the church service, singing and wailing and clapping, her father not believing his eyes that his wayward daughter is singing in church again.
Shug
walks up to her father, embraces him, and says to him, “See, Daddy? Sinners have soul too.”
The
prophets and wisdom poets of the Hebrew scriptures use language of either/or
and before/now. Either we choose God and
God’s way of wholeness or we are defiant and live wickedly, apart from
God. Before, we were exiles and sinners
in a foreign land. Now we acknowledge
our need of God, God brings us home, and once again we declare that we will
live as God’s people. The language is jarring,
almost offensive to us. It comes on like
a spiritual 2 x 4, because most of the time, we don’t know we’re lost. We don’t know we’re thirsty. We don’t think we’ve been corrupted. God is trying to tell us something, the best
good news ever, but how can we hear it if we don’t think we need it?
“The
love of a righteous God is not something to be bought; it is a gift to be
received.” How often do we avail
ourselves of this gift? Most of the time
we get by with what we’re willing to receive rather than live abundantly with
what God is willing to give. We’ve made
an odd and uncomfortable peace with a system that preaches God helps those who
help themselves, that our worth as a person is connected to what we produce, how
much we earn, what we do, how we spend our time, the space we take up. We devote six days of the week to surviving
this system in one form or another, and then on the seventh day we come to church
depleted and exhausted. Or sometimes,
understandably, we sleep in.
Our souls are thirsty, as
in a dry and weary land where there is no water. We “expend our strength and energy upon those
things that cannot meet our deepest longings not grant us infinite joy”.[i] We work hard for our families and for this
family, our church, all of which is good and necessary. But God does not require our worn-out spirits
as proof that we’ve earned a rest. And what
God has in store for us cannot be exhausted.
“You are invited to
plunge into the waters of life, to partake of God’s feast of good things, not
as something earned because of your efforts or endeavors, but because of God’s
love for you and God’s incessant desire to bring you into the kingdom.”[ii] Or put
another way, there is no good reason for us to postpone joy. I’m not talking about happiness, which is so
dependent on our circumstances, but joy—that force that can sustain us through
even the worst of times, that invites us to look up and look around when we
feel like looking down, that reminds us that there are people who love us and
to be thankful for every blessing. Joy
is a choice; it comes from inside us.
There’s no good reason
for us to postpone forgiving ourselves and others, for letting ourselves off an
emotional hook. There’s no good reason
to do or buy or work to excess. There’s
no good reason to disconnect ourselves from community and from God. Even if you’re an agnostic, is it so unbelievable
to think that there is also a force called love upon which you can call, day or
night, that will shower you, water you like so much parched earth? That by allowing this love to fill you will
then allow you to love others—especially those who are difficult to love? Is there any good reason not to hunger and
thirst for this love rather than strive for that which leaves us feeling empty?
Acknowledging our
emptiness, our need, our thirst for God, for love, for connection, and that we
have not put this love first in our lives, is the truest prayer of confession,
admission of sin that we can offer. This
is the fourth step, the most crucial one:
We make a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves. We look at our lives and see the people we
have injured and the relationships we’ve broken, especially our connection to
what is sacred and holy. We admit we
need help mending our lives and rebuilding the bridges we’ve burned. Sometimes it’s not possible to do this. Too much trust has been broken. Yet it is God’s love that makes it possible to
leave the past behind and to live another way.
Ultimately, this
transformation of self is not only for us but for the world around us. As we are liberated from the sin and
emptiness that once chained us, as we return homeward to wholeness and
belovedness, we help others to recognize their own need for what the Bible
calls shalom and that the work of
shalom belongs to all of us. What we
thirst for in our own lives—peace, justice, mercy, healing, acceptance, love—is
what everyone thirsts for and can fill us all to life overflowing. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Benediction
Fr. Richard Rohr writes,
“Love is the source and goal, faith is the slow
process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to move forward without
resolution and closure. And these are indeed, “the three things
that last” (1 Corinthians 13:13). People who have these gifts—faith, hope, and
love—are indestructible.” So let us go
forth to practice faith, hope, and love this Lenten season and always—the
greatest of these being love. Amen.
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