Isaiah 55: 1-11

“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” If you have no money, how can you buy? Without money, how can you eat? What sense is there in these words? The prophet is here inviting people to come and feast upon God’s word. Verse three when he invites us to “listen carefully” reveals this to us—that we are, again, called to feast upon God’s words to us. We can feast on the Word privately and corporately.

From these opening reflections we turned to verse two, which reads: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” “How,” I asked the gentlemen this morning and now all the rest of you who may now be reading these words,” have you spent your money, your time, your work, your efforts on things, projects, endeavors that have not satisfied you, that have left you more hungry, more unfulfilled, more empty, more desperate? How might these words speak to our current financial crisis?

Verse six and following: “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near… For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.” These verses give us a combination of movements. First, we are invited to seek God, to pursue God, to call upon God; but then we are told that we will never entirely find or capture or encapsulate God, that God is mysterious, that he eludes us, that just when we think we have God all figured out God moves on us. I think this combination of seeking God and yet knowing that we will never finally “get” God are really important. These scriptures hold together an active faith with a humble faith. We must do our part in seeking and wanting and trying to follow God, while also remembering that God is God, we are not, and that faith is a journey filled with surprises and mystery and hints and guesses. Words like these dispel the magical notion that all we need to do is follow these 6 steps, these 7 truths, these 8 rules, and then we will have God entirely. Flee from such programmatic over simplification and theological hubris.

Verse 10 and following: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth… so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty.” When I asked the fellows what these words might mean, one of them said that God’s word is to germinate in us and then we are called to bear fruit for God. This is exactly right. I then asked what “fruits” we are to bear and someone else said that we are called to “bear the fruits of the Spirit.” Now, this sparked a connection to Paul’s letter to the Galatians that reads this way: “… the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (5: 22-23) For the rest of our time together we reflected on this list and I asked everyone to do an inventory of this list of fruits in their own lives and commitments. How about you? Are you bearing these fruits in your life?

I finished out the session by talking about a man I had once known whose life had been changed by reading through this piece of scripture dozens of times each day. At a very low and difficult time in his life he knew that if he continued to live as he was he was going to die, and die with a great deal of fall-out and pain and disappointment all around him. He decided to change. One of the ways he changed was by carrying these words around with him wherever he went. Over time, by the grace of God, these words changed his life; these words bore fruit. I commend them to you.