You are a beloved child of God
Isaiah 55
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 commander for the peoples. 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. Seek the Lord while he may be found call upon him while he is near let the wicked forsake their way and the unrighteous their thoughts let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Being a prophet is hard, thankless work. The call of a prophet is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable or, to put it more plainly, to tell the truth. (To put it more Lutheran-ly, to call a thing a thing).
The comfortable, in general, do not like to be made uncomfortable. Not only will we do what we can to avoid [physical and emotional pain (which makes totally sense and is a very human survival instinct), we will often go out of our way to simply not see things that make us uncomfortable, to be reminded that there is suffering in the world. Prophets are there to remind the comfortable that there is suffering but that there is something that the comfortable – that we – can do about it. That is Isaiah’s primary concern.
For the first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah, what scholars often call first Isaiah, the prophet is calling out the people on the ways they have offended God, ignored the covenant, harmed their neighbors, and their behavior has landed them in exile. The people to whom God is speaking in chapters 40-56 are people who have been forced into exile in Babylon. Their home is destroyed. They are having to participate in the Babylonian culture and economy in ways that compromise the things that make them distinctively Jewish. The have been removed from their land, they are slowly being divorced from their culture they are losing who they are. This can lead to a sinking into despair. In light of this difficult way of existing, the author (or authors) of Isaiah move from the prophetic work of afflicting the comfortable to comforting the afflicted. Isaiah 40 begins with the phrase, “Comfort, comfort my people,” and provide comfort, God does.
Here in chapter 55, God is painting a picture of the unending, free, abundant banquet that is life with God. Isaiah is giving people the good news of God’s grace that is both material and spiritual. In spite of the ways the people have broken their promises to God, God is making them a promise of the near future when they will be returned to their land. They will have all that they need. It is also a reminder of the history of the people of God and how they have been feed freely while in exile. God is appealing to the past to remind them of the possibility of the future, producing hope through reviving their memory.
The people are being reminded they are glorious.
They are told that God is with them, right there, if only they look.
Even after they have wandered from God, broken their promises, messed up again and again, God is there and will be there. They don’t need the temple for God’s closeness, they just need to see God, and God will be there.
God is telling the people that it hasn’t always been this way and it won’t always be this way.
Now, if you have ever struggled with depression, you might have experienced such statements as irritating. When one is depressed, when one is stuck, when one sees no way out of their situation, no amount of future casting can make it feel better in the moment. But what God is doing here is also giving the people action steps. Hope is a verb! God is giving them concrete things they can do, right here and right now. Go to the water! Eat! Enjoy! Listen! Be revived! Because hope, to survive, requires action.
To hope for a better future, we have to take steps, however small, towards it today. The biggest action the people must take, the path to the land of abundance, is turning back to God’s way. It is in God’s way abundance can be found, thirst can be quenched, sustenance is free and unending.
Much like the people to whom God is speaking through the prophet, we are, both people who need comfort and people who need to be discomforted. We need to be reminded that we are not following the ways to which God has called us and told to turn back towards God *and* we need to be held tightly, reminded we are glorious, and given comfort and grace. We need to be given hope that things will not always be like this and concrete things to do to get to the place where things aren’t like this (whatever this is).
Hope can be really, really difficult to lean into. We live in a culture that rewards cynicism, that broadcasts the worst news and often uplifts the worst people for clicks. Some people call the hopeful naive and insist that only by leaning into the grimmest facts can we be real about our situations, whether that be our own personal lives or what is going on in the world around us. In our ever so human world, to hope requires vulnerability, to hope is to gamble with losing, to deal with the face that the what is hoped for might not happen, it is to sit with uncertainty (and how we hate uncertainty).
Earthly hope is, as Rebecca Solnit writes, “is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky… hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency… hope should shove you out the door. Hope just means another world might be possible. Hope calls for action, action is impossible without hope.” In his 1930’s treatise on hope, Ernest Bloch wrote, “The work of [hope] requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.”
As residents of this very human world, this is all very true for us. But there is one difference. Because we believe in God, because we know Jesus Christ, because we live resurrection lives, we know a redeemed world is a reality. We know another world *is* not only possible, but is on its way. And so we can throw ourselves actively into what is becoming with confidence and fervor because we believe in the promise, in the water and wine and milk and food, in the grace and trust and protection, we believe in the kingdom of God. And every step we take towards different ways of living, every step we take towards more love and more compassion and more grace is a step back towards God.
