Lent 3C.2: Isaiah 55:1-9, Luke 13:1-9 “Thirsting for God”
Several weeks ago we thought about the 40 days and nights that Jesus spent in the wilderness. We wondered aloud about how hungry a person might get after being without food for such a long time. We remembered that Satan had tested Jesus severely after he came out of the wilderness, the desert. The first thing Satan asked Jesus to do with the power that God had given him was to turn a stone into bread. We joyfully remembered Jesus response, “Man does not live by bread alone.”
Today we are called to get in touch with the thirst that Jesus experienced. All of our scripture lessons from the Psalm through Isaiah through the thirsty fig tree in Luke speak of thirst. It was and is a common phenomenon in desert regions of the world. Think of camels think of hot sun, think of the wind blowing hot sand into your face and hair. We know dryness in the mountains, but not like the desert dwellers knew.
Can you think of a time in your life when you were very, very thirsty? Dryness can be downright painful. I am a person who grinds her teeth at night. Because of this, I have been given a small device to keep my upper and lower teeth from coming together during the night. The only problem is that it sometimes keeps my lips from meeting, also, and my mouth dries out so fully and painfully that every taste bud feels like a dagger. Dryness can be very painful. We thirst.
Dryness is a metaphor for lack of easy creativity in the world of artists. Dryness means the creative juices are not flowing. It has to do with writer’s block, and painter’s paralysis, and musical murkiness. It pertains to being closed up and shut down. “O God, you are my God, I seek for you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is not water.” (Ps 63:1)
Well, Jesus knew it in the wilderness and told it to us through scripture, that not all hunger is physical hunger. There is a spiritual hunger that we all experience as well, and a painful spiritual thirst. Yet our biggest mistake is to think that such hunger and thirst can be satisfied at the physical level. God calls us to a different type of refreshment through the prophet Isaiah: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that 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 labor for that which does not satisfy?” Just as Jesus told Satan that man does not live by bread alone, so we see that not all thirst can be quenched with water. Isaiah and the Psalmist call us to nourish our spirit through prayer and spiritual formation.
I am pleased to include in this message a teaching from the Beatitudes. We have been wending our way through the Beatitudes this Lenten season. You know the one I’m referring to. “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be filled.” My dialogue partner for this segment of our message is the recording of Jesus’ words found in Glenda Green’s book Love Without End: Jesus Speaks. This book has illuminated scripture for me in ways I had not previously experience. Like Glenda, I have struggled with the world “righteousness.” I think we have all known enough “self-righteous Christians” to have a bad taste in our mouth from this word. As always, Jesus reinterprets for Glenda and for us. “Righteousness is being the love that you are. It means that you are right with yourself, right with your fellow man, right with God, right with the one spirit. Simply being the love that you are. That is discovered through a right relationship with the heart.”
He goes on to tell her, “The heart is a powerful and magnetic center that generates life energy for the body and the soul and draws to you all the needs and requirements of your life.” He explains that when we find the time to commune with God in our own sacred heart, we will feel the presence of God and be anointed with God’s righteousness. From these holy inner communions will come higher forms of intelligence than our brain can know. And through them the rightness will come into our lives.
Jesus will have already told Glenda of these higher forms of intelligence. He has presented them has unity, love, life, respect, honesty, justice and kindness. Jesus rephrases the beatitude to convey that when we hunger and thirst for righteousness (to be the love that we are), the basic purity and innocence of our hearts will be awakened. It is through the heart’s power that we are able to be the love that we are.
Before we wrap up our time together, let’s not forget that poor fig tree that Jesus speaks of in Luke. The people are all clamoring around him with questions about groups of people who have been slain by Pilate’s troops. You see, in the collective mind of Israel, sin and judgment were closely linked. People who are freaked out by the notion of judgment are inclined to find a rule book and live tighter and tighter into the law. “If I just do everything right, this angry God will not smite me dead.” Jesus had a hard time convincing people that the kingdom of God was within them and that they need fear neither judgment nor death. Instead, they would be given many opportunities to remember that like him, we all came from God and may have again the pleasure of communing with God while we are still in our flesh. What is required is repentance, which we read from the Greek as metanoia, which implies a change of mind and heart. We open that heart to a loving God, who may dig around at our roots a bit, and may apply a bit of manure to our lives, and may allow us to get pretty thirsty, but who always has our best interests in mind, and will always wait with us for as many years as it takes for us to bear fruit. And that God gives us other seekers to walk that road with us. And that God gives us water from a well that never runs dry.
I’d like to finish with a reading of Isaiah 55:10-13. It’s the part that Michelle did not read. We shall and do experience joy and peace and we do indeed sing with joy when we remember who we are and cultivate our hearts through communion with God.
10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
12 You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.
13 Instead of the thornbush will grow the pine tree,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.
This will be for the LORD's renown,
for an everlasting sign,
which will not be destroyed."
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