Preached by Michael Cheuk, March 11, 2007
Third Sunday in Lent, Year C
Isaiah 55:1-9 “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. 2 Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. 3 Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David. 4 See, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander of the peoples. 5 Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations that do not know you will hasten to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has endowed you with splendor.” 6 Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near. 7 Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. 8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. 9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
In the late 90’s a struggling soft drink brand decided to change its image. This soft drink, once touted itself as a sparkling combination of Lime and Lemon soda with “the refreshing taste of lymon,” now came out with an ad campaign that said: “Image is nothing. Thirst is everything. Obey your thirst.” Do you know what that soft drink is? (Yep. Sprite.) I remember one of those Sprite ads where a young kid drank Sprite to the background of some upbeat music. And then after taking a drink from the can and feeling energized, he tried to dunk a basketball only to be rejected by the basketball rim. The background music immediately grinded to a halt. And we get message: “Image is nothing. Thirst is everything. Obey your thirst.” Those Sprite ads seem to expose the false notion that certain soft drinks can make you better looking, more attractive to the opposite sex, more athletic and more prosperous. In a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” way, those Sprite ads told us not to fall for the manipulative marketing ploys of Madison Ave. No drink is going to help you dunk the basketball like Grant Hill. In the end, when it comes to soft drinks, the only thing that matters is that your thirst is satisfied. So, don’t be shallow and fall for image, drink Sprite to quench your thirst.
Those commercials were popular partly because it made fun of the whole advertising industry. But more profoundly, I think those ads tapped into our increasing wariness of the hyped-up promises of advertising in general. It’s refreshing to hear somebody say that beauty, sex appeal, smarts or material wealth cannot be had just by buying a product. But it’s not like Madison Ave. is going out of business anytime soon. One of my guilty pleasures used to be watching late-night TV infomercials. Who remembers the ginzu knife? The veggie-matic? The ab-flex? Or how about the Nutrisystem ad where John Kruk claims that he lost 32 lbs and says “My wife says I’m not as disgusting to her as I used to be.” Or for you kids, how about all those commercials on kids TV? The commercial for one play-dough type product gets kids across the country yelling at their TV sets on cue: FLOAM! When I was growing up, I remember asking my mom to buy me Trix cereal, because as you know, “Trix are for kids.” According to one study, the number of 30-second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child is 20,000.[1] And do you know why we have so much spam clogging our email boxes today? It’s because it works! People actually do respond to get-rich-quick schemes. People actually do respond to emails advertising cheap prescriptions. I think people respond to all kinds of advertising because they are thirsting for something, and they are seeking all sorts of ways to obey their thirst.
We thirst for authentic, intimate relationships. We thirst for meaning and purpose. We thirst for love and acceptance. We thirst for wholeness and peace in our lives. And many times, we will go to great lengths to try to fill that thirst. Yes, we buy products that promise to make us more attractive to others. We work harder to make more money to surround ourselves with the trappings of success. We go from one relationship to another, hoping that one day, we will find a person who will perfectly fill and complete us. Sometimes we even act out in inappropriate ways as a desperate measure to get someone to notice us, to pay some attention to us. We see all those things played out in the lives of people who make the front page of supermarket tabloids. We wonder: “For people who seem to have everything going for them, why are they so messed up?” Perhaps they are thirsting for something that nothing else that they’ve tried so far could satisfy. It’s almost like they are wandering in a desert, desperately looking for oasis, and when they think they’ve found it, it turns out to be only a mirage.
For them, and for us, God gives these words through the prophet Isaiah: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” God spoke these words of hope thousands of years ago to a people who were forcibly taken away from their homeland into a foreign country to live as slaves. God speaks these words of hope today to citizens of the greatest country on earth and yet who are perhaps enslaved by our own fears, insecurities, sins, and addictions. God invites us to come to his living waters, but we have to recognize that we are thirsty for Him. But in our thirst for everything else, sometimes it is hard to admit that our ultimate thirst is for God. God invites us to come to buy bread and wine, but we have to recognize that we have no money. But in our thirst to be self-sufficient, sometimes we like to think that we could earn God’s blessings instead of begging for God’s grace. We’d rather labor on what does not satisfy than to admit that there’s nothing that we can do to be worthy of God’s abundant provisions. But God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and God’s ways are not our ways. God declares: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
And so, God tells us this morning: “Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David.” For a thirsty and starving people, God lays out a feast, and invites us to eat what is good, to delight in the rich and nourishing provisions of God. We are invited to the feast not because of what we’ve done or because we could have afforded it. We are invited to the feast because of the faithful and everlasting promise that God made with David. God promised David that his dynasty would last forever, and that from his lineage, a Messiah will come to save His people. And when Jesus came to the waters of the Jordan River to be baptized, a voice came from heaven to declare: “You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” And this morning, Alesha and George came to the waters of baptism not because of anything that they’ve done to deserve God’s acceptance, but because of what Jesus has already done for them. They came declaring their thirst for God and their wish to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. They came seeking God and found that God was near. And the waters of baptism symbolized outwardly what was already true in their lives: the inward cleansing and pardon of their souls by the initiative of God’s abundant mercy. As recipients of God’s mercy, we have been adopted into the family of God; we have been grafted into the lineage of David. So we too, are children of God’s promise, and we are invited to the feast.
When Beth and I went to Hong Kong and China with my parents to celebrate my grandfather’s 80th birthday, almost every meal we had was a nine-course banquet. We were served fresh fish, lobster, oysters, scallops, jumbo shrimp, chicken, duck, pork, soups of all kinds and tender vegetables at almost every meal. The food was so elegant and fancy that we did not see ordinary steamed rice served in any of the meals. People whom I had never met, went out of their way to treat me like royalty, not because of what I had done, and certainly not because I could pay for any of the banquets. They did it because of their love for my grandfather. Beth and I and my sister Lisa and her husband Ed were invited and accepted because we were the grandchildren of Ho Hung Chee. We just tagged along and said, “We’re with him.” And that was good enough.
So this morning, God invites us to feast upon His goodness and to take nourishment in His promises. We come buying bread and wine without money, because the price has been fully paid already by Jesus, who Himself is the bread and the wine that satisfies. The Lord’s Supper is a feast that is made possible by God’s grace, God’s free gift to us. Because of Christ’s saving work, we are the children of God. We just tag along and say, “We’re with Jesus.” And that is good enough.
During this season of Lent, we acknowledge that yes, we do thirst for authentic, intimate relationships. We thirst for meaning and purpose. We thirst for love and acceptance. We thirst for wholeness and peace in our lives. But as important as those all of those thirsts are, let us also acknowledge that beneath it all is our ultimate thirst for God. God invites us to turn away from everything in our lives that are not ultimately satisfying. Will we listen and respond to God’s invitation? I pray that we will continually come to drink deeply from the waters of life, to be sustained by God’s generous provisions, so that we may live as children of God. Amen.
[1] http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html
