Hear!
The more you’ve been looking for… it’s right here.
Isaiah 55.1-5
Hear, everyone who thirsts; come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and a commander for the people. Now you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
I wonder what you’re hungry for.
It’s Sunday, and chances are that some of you skipped breakfast this morning which, admittedly, isn’t a very good idea. Breakfast, after all, is the more important meal of the day. Even Jesus took time to broil some fish by the seashore during the sunrise after Easter. And so, some of us may be hungry for scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, fresh fruit, and a nice piping hot cup of coffee.
But there are other hungers; the desire for something you want but you haven’t got or can’t have. The hunger to do better in school but the grades all stay the same. When you long to meet someone, but all the someones you meet don’t meet your hopes and dreams. When you interview for job after job only to receive rejection after rejection. When you want something to go right, just for once, but people and institutions let you down. When you know the better way to parent but you still parent how you always have. When you enjoy all the guest preachers but then the old preacher comes back from renewal leave.
Such hunger can dictate and reshape our very beings. It can transform our temper, realign our relationships, puncture our patience, confuse our clarity, and unravel our reality.
Do you know the expression, “We are what we eat”?
Well, we’re also capable of contorting into the shape of what we hunger for.
Just think, for a moment, about someone in your life who’s been bent out of shape recently - it’s probably because they’re hungry for something they don’t have. Or, if you’re feeling particularly brave, think about yourself… I wonder what you’re hungry for.
And yet, there’s still yet another kind of yearning, a hunger. It’s the hunger that is deep in the marrow of our souls, but it doesn’t have a name and we can’t always describe it. It’s a longing that has no simple fix and easy remedy. It’s mysterious and strange and just outside the limits of description.
However, in 1987 a band from Ireland came very close to conveying this hunger.
The song starts with an electric guitar playing a chiming arpeggio and the slightest hint of a tambourine. And then the drums drop and the vocals kick in.
“I have climbed the highest mountains,
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you.
I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you.
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for.”
Do you know the song? Well, if U2 isn’t your cup of tea, there’s another super famous band who also articulate this same type of indescribable longing and hunger. This song is from 1965:
“I can’t get no satisfaction.
Cause I try, and I try, and I try, and I try,
I can’t get no (buh buh buh), satisfaction.”
Isn’t it interesting that a song from the 60’s and a song from the 80’s are still so wildly popular? Perhaps it’s because they strive to convey the deepest degrees of that hunger that has no other name. The restless and even delirious hunger that knows we haven’t found what we’re looking for and we can’t get no satisfaction.
But, again, that deeper longing isn’t the same thing as staying up late scrolling through Amazon reviews trying to find the perfect product. It’s not the paralysis of analysis when trying to discover the next show to watch on Netflix. It’s not the head-swiveling at the Golden Corral as we attempt to satiate the hunger in our bellies.
It’s the nagging underneath it all, like a magnetic pull toward the ineffable.
Isaiah know these hungers and the differences between them. For a whole generation God’s people were in exile, forced to live as strangers in a strange land, with new customs, new foods, new stories. And their hunger was quite simply the desire to go home.
But then, right here in Isaiah 55, God speaks toward their deeper hunger. Because God did bring them home, God restored all that was wrong, and yet they were still hungry. They hadn’t found what they were looking for.
And God says, “Why do you spend your money on junk food? Why do you work so hard for the things that do not satisfy?”
It never ceases to amaze me how these ancient words still speak with such vitality. Most of us, like the Israelites after exile, have more than we need. We live in a time in which we have access to everything. We can watch any movie, we can read any book, we can order any food, we can listen to any song, on a little device we carry in our pockets. But it isn’t enough, is it?
It is true that much of what we do as God’s church is all about striving to meet the hunger that has a name: we give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, medicine to the sick. But, like U2 and the Rolling Stones, people want and need more than that. And what we need most of all isn’t something we can earn or deserve, we can’t find it or manifest it.
Instead it has to come to us.
And the it has a name: Jesus.
On Monday afternoon we opened up the church to more than fifty kids for Vacation Bible School. Volunteers had worked diligently to tun the church into ancient Rome as Paul, yours truly, was going to lead us on an adventure with the early underground church. We used Paul’s letter to the church in Rome to guide the themes for each session and the kids learned about how God’s love changes us, but that love never changes (I am convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord).
We had the kids in mixed-age groups like families where they ate all their dinners together and went through all of the various activities such as exploring the liturgical movements of the underground church, experiencing a first century open air market place with leather-work, carpentry, and masonry, learning songs that convey the depth of God’s immutable love, and even a petting zoo on Friday night.
On Thursday night, as one group were sneaking their way into the underground church, which was just the church parlor with a bunch of black drapes all over the place, a rather observant kid saw a chalice and plate on the table, grabbed a nearby VBS participant, and shouted, “Yes! We’re having communion!”
They shouted with the same acclamation I would have at that age if we went to Chuck E. Cheese!
You know you’re doing something right as the church when a kid is that excited for the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation.
Obviously, part of that excitement is due to the excitement of VBS. We had people in costume, there were decorations everywhere, and it was fun.
But it was also more than that.
Early in the week, after the kids made their way into Memorial Hall, a father of some of the kids pulled Eric aside and said, “Hey, sorry, we’ve been so busy this summer and I just realized that we haven’t paid for VBS. How much do we owe the church?” And Eric, ever-faithful Eric, said, “VBS is free.”
And when I heard that it struck immediately with the passage from Isaiah.
Hear, everyone who thirsts; come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.
You see, every night this week was a little Isaiah. The kids were served dinner at their tables by saintly adults who gave of their time and talents to do so, they were incorporated into the story of salvation that is the difference that makes all the difference, and they were met by the Lord who delights in giving us what we truly need.
Listen, says the Lord, listen so that you may live. I am making a promise, an everlasting covenant; behold the one who comes from the line of David. Because of the One who makes a way where there is no way, people will come to you who you would otherwise never know, they will flock to you because I am doing a new thing, I am filling you with life and delight. Here, in the strange and wonderful place of grace called church, you can find what you’re looking for because I, says the Lord, I am looking for you.
The mysterious and strange truth of the Gospel is this: There’s something deeper, longer-lasting, and more insatiable than our hunger, and it’s God’s hunger for us.
God refuses to be anything other than God-with-us. God won’t give up on us. And, when push comes to shove, God would rather die than let us be stuck with our own devices.
God’s hunger is greater than ours. And God’s hungers for us, for our well being, for our belonging, for our experience of love and grace and mercy in this life.
Only God would come up with an idea like the church. A place of grace in which we discover the more we’ve been looking for, is already looking for us.
Worship is like VBS. We get a little dressed up. We have certain decorations. We’re incorporated into the story of salvation. It’s a little Isaiah. We encounter the God who encounters us, the God who gathers us from all of our different stories into this new one, the God who glorifies us no matter what we’ve done or left undone.
And so, again, I wonder what you’re hungry for. Listen, says the Lord, eat good food, and delight yourselves in goodness of every kind. Come, the table is set for you and it’s all free but it isn’t cheap because it’s priceless, for everyone.
The more you’ve been looking for… it’s right here. Amen.