Isaiah 55:1-12

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Ryan was seven years old. I asked him to draw a picture of God for me for a seminary project I was working on. He took his time, using several colors to fill in the details. I waited for him to finish so that he could explain what he had drawn. There on the paper was what can only be described as a seven-year-old’s version of Luther’s “Mighty Fortress”. It was an elaborately fortified castle sitting on a cloud with a single tower. Toward to the top of the tower was a small window with an even smaller stick figure looking out, dwarfed by the surrounding battlement. The figure, Ryan explained, was God -remote and inaccessible in that mighty fortress.

Our reading this morning ended with God’s words through the prophet, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” We hear that and we’re likely to think that maybe this little boy’s drawing isn’t so far off the mark. Maybe God in heaven is so far away, so completely removed from us and our everyday lives that church is just the place we come to place the long distance phone call for our prayers and our praise to a God who isn’t just out of state or overseas, but beyond our reach.

Except that when God says, “My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts,” it is the conclusion of a picture painted for us by the prophet Isaiah that is far different than a remote and barely visible figure in a tower.

“Ho!” cries the prophet, “All who are thirsty come to the waters.”

This is not the command of an austere or threatening voice but a cry of invitation, like a barker on the carnival’s midway or a vendor in the marketplace. “Are you thirsty? Come get a drink.”

Have you stood in the water aisle of the grocery store lately? First of all, take in the fact that there is a WHOLE aisle devoted solely to water. Because there are so many kinds of water to choose from: distilled water, sparkling water, spring water, purified water, flavored water, smart water, enriched water. Only in today’s reading it is God speaking through the prophet and the water offered here can’t be found on a shelf or out of the tap. This water is from God’s fountain of life, like the water Moses brought from the rock to keep the Israelites alive in the desert wilderness, or the living water Jesus speaks of with the Samaritan woman at the well in John’s gospel. This water isn’t bottled for sale, and neither is the rest of what is offered.

“Come, buy and eat… without money and without price.”

Your money is no good here, God tells us, I’ve got it covered. But let me ask you, God goes on, since we’re talking about it, why do you spend your money the way you do?

That’s a pretty tough question, one that we would only let God ask, and even then, we aren’t so comfortable with it. It is a good question though. Spoken some 2500 years ago, this question posed by God through the prophet continues to trouble us even today, particularly we who live in a nation of such vast wealth where televisions sell for what an entire family lives on in a year in other parts of the world, if they’re lucky. But does what we spend our money on sustain us?

Gregg Easterbrook at the Brookings Institute wrote a book called The Progress Paradox that examines how even with comparatively more money in our pocket than in previous generations, better overall healthcare and longer life expectancy, we’re also less content, less satisfied. By dozens of measures, Easterbrook says, life has gotten better, and yet polling data suggests that rather than happier, more fulfilled lives we experience greater rates of depression and anxiety. And yet we continue to feed the beast, sometimes going deep into debt to buy more and better stuff, spending money we may not have on empty calories that only satisfy us for a moment a deeper hunger

that never seems to leave us. What can you do when you get everything, or most everything that was supposed to make you happy and it doesn’t? As the song lyric goes, “It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.” But that’s hard to do when everyone else seems to have so much more.

A friend once told me about a study that was done several years back. Respondents were asked to choose between two outcomes. In the first they received a pay increase while others in their workplace received a greater pay increase. In the second outcome they received a pay cut while their co-workers received a greater pay cut. The majority of participants chose the second option. They’d rather have it bad as long as others had it worse than have it good if others had it better.

Listen to me, says God in our reading, and eat what is good. The feast that God offers, are the words that nourish our lives yet don’t cost a thing. We don’t have to work harder to be able to afford them. They require no long-term financing. That is the way of the world. This is God’s way. Thankfully, our ways are not God’s ways.

Sometimes I think that it’s us who have put God up in that tower and tried to lock God away. It is not God who has remained at a distance from us, but we who keep our distance from God always at arm’s length, if not further. Perhaps we are confused, or embarrassed by the wealth of generosity that welcomes every last one of us as penniless and yet invites us to eat richly. God’s ways look nothing like our own; they are as far as the heavens are above the earth.

Several years back, the film Babette’s Feast offered a vision of the kind of feast that God invites us to. Babette is a talented chef from Paris who has fled from one of that city’s many uprisings in the nineteenth century. She ends up as the cook and housekeeper for two spinster sisters who live in a tiny village on a bleak coast in Denmark. The sisters are carrying on in the place of their deeply religious father as the leaders of a small but strict Lutheran sect. In her new role Babette is allowed to serve only the blandest of food in keeping with the community’s puritanical sensibilities. When Babette receives word that she has won a lottery prize of ten thousand francs the sisters fear she will leave them, but instead, Babette asks if she might prepare an elaborate feast in celebration of their deceased father’s 100th birthday. The sisters begin to fear for their spiritual well being as Babette begins acquiring the exotic ingredients for the meal. They do not wish to hurt her feelings either, so they secretly vow to resist the delights she is preparing. The night of the celebration arrives and the grumbling community gathers at the table. Then something quite extraordinary happens as the magnificent seven-course meal unfolds. Their apprehensions turn to joy as they delight together in tasting such a gift of love. As the evening passes long-held resentments are forgiven and the guests go out into the night singing a hymn of praise.

Why do such a thing?

Why would God invite us to such rich delights? God’s thoughts seem not set on being high and mighty, Not remote and inaccessible. Instead the words God speaks are of everlasting covenant -that unbreakable bond between us and God- and a steadfast love that neither hesitates in its goodness nor doubts the wisdom of such largess. These too must be God’s thoughts and not our own, we who so quickly lose sight of God’s promise and doubt that our gracious Lord could be so good.

And in this way God’s feast is somewhat different from Babette’s because this invitation to “delight in the fatness” of God, as the old Revised Standard puts it, is not extended to a pair of benevolent if somewhat uptight sisters. The audience of this invitation is a people in exile. These words are spoken in Babylon; to people who find themselves far

from home because of the ways they had turned their back on their promise to be God’s people. How many times does it take before you or I are ready to walk away from a one-sided relationship? Who would think to invite a person who wants nothing to do them to such a sumptuous dinner? But as God reminds us, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.”

The Anne Tyler novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is about a family in exile from one another. The title of the book comes from one of its characters, Ezra Tull. Ezra has the idea for a restaurant that offers the food that you are homesick for. Whether it’s a meal that tastes like what your mother used to serve, or just a plate of something that tastes like your hometown: barbeque or po’ boys, green chile stew or loose meat sandwiches.

What God is offering ultimately is an invitation to come home, to delight in the rich goodness that God sets before us even exiles of our own making. And when we accept that invitation we discover that the ways of God and the thoughts of God are not so far off at all. They are the food that sustains our very lives, with a love that claims us, and the faithfulness to redeem us; transforming our exile in the wilderness into something like home. Amen and amen.