“Everyone Who Thirsts, Come to the Waters…”

“Everyone Who Thirsts, Come to the Waters…”

Third Sunday in Lent, 2007: 11 March 2007

Ps. 63:1-8; Isa. 55:1-9; 1 Cor. 10:1-13

The weather is finally warming up. The snow pack is starting to disappear. Green grass is beginning to appear. Signs of spring are all around us. Spring is the time of year when new life begins to blossom out of the cold death of winter. For me it’s a reminder that Easter is near, and as I prepare to celebrate the crucifixion and resurrection, it is a season of reflection, repentance, and confession. Call it a little spiritual spring cleaning. It is a time of restoration, during which I set to refocus my vision on Christ as the model for life. Spring is a season of introspection. Introspection is rarely easy and often painful, because most of us prefer to not examine the dark places of our own lives and souls. Instead, we try to forget how far we are from the calling of God, ignoring our shortcomings, our failures, and our sin. It’s much easier to remain intellectually focused, ritually and doctrinally sound, and emotionally detached from faith and the object of our faith. But I can’t do that in the spring. Something about the new life blossoming out of winter opens my life and allows God to confront me with Scriptures that dare me to look deep within myself and to allow God to heal the brokenness that I find there.

That is what this passage has done to me this week. I have spent everyday this week reading this passage from Isaiah 55 several times and opening my heart to the Spirit to let it do its work on me. It hasn’t always been fun, much less pretty, but there is such a strong word of hope and life here, that it has been worth the journey. It is a reminder that spring is a herald of Easter, where the God of resurrection brings about new creation and breathes new life into that which was dead.

[Pray.]

As we step into the world of our text this morning, we are ushered into a street scene. My mind immediately rushes to Proverbs 9, where we hear the competing calls of Woman Wisdom and the Foolish Woman. They send their girls out to the streets of town and have them call out from high places to all who pass by, “You who are simple, turn in here for water and wine and bread!” These sirens call out in the marketplace. They seem to know our desire, our need, our craving, our emptiness, our striving, our longing.

I have spent time among the street vendors in the African or Thai marketplace, listening to their competing voices offering up their wares. I watched consumers and clients, patrons and pilgrims bartering for the best deals, trying to get the best bang for their buck. (Okay, I confess that I have been one of those barterers!) The vendors call to us tempting us with fragrant foods and beautiful merchandise and colorful goods.

But the venders in life are not simply about handmade trinkets or cheap souvenirs. Their call strikes at the heart of that very longing and offers to fill our need. Here in this country we’ve made a multibillion dollar industry of playing on people’s needs and desires, dreams, longings, fears, and insecurities. We continually work to offer the next best thing that promises to fill the void, to solve the problem, to quench our spiritual, emotional, and relational thirst.

But all of these things are hollow, like the empty calories that we eat, hoping to feed our hunger, only to find that we are hungrier and more malnourished than we were before we ate them… As people, we struggle with the temptation of constantly striving for the next thing to satisfy our desires, to get our fix. We look to quench the deep thirst of our souls, to slake our hunger in so many places, in so many things, in so many people…. And far too often we buy into the lies; we keep the madness going. “We spend our money for that which is not bread, and our labor for that which does not satisfy” (55:2).

Anne Lamott is one of my favorite writers on faith. I like her because her coming to faith has been a very long and colorful journey. Her writing is not for the faint of heart. It is honest, probing, reflective, and at times incredibly raw. In a book of some of her reflections on faith, Lamott writes some compelling thoughts on her battle with her own “thirst.” It seemed to fit so well with our Scripture for today that I was drawn back to it all week. She writes,

“I knew by the time I was twenty that I was an alcoholic, even though I was not quite sure what that meant. I liked being an alcoholic; I liked drinking and getting high or drunk with other people like me—I thought of us as being like everyone else, only more so. More alive. Deeper.… And all sorts of other [lies] we tell ourselves when we have lost the ability to control our drinking.

“One day in 1985, I woke up so hungover that I felt pinned to the bed by centrifugal force…. I was literally glued to my pillow by drool. I decided to quit drinking. And I was doing quite well, in fact, until five o’clock that first night. Then the panic set in. Thankfully, I had a moment of clarity in which I understood that the problem was not that I drank so much but that I drank too quickly. The problem was with pacing. So I had a good idea. I would limit myself to two beers a night. Two beers! What a great idea.

“I went to the market, which was one block away, and got two beers—two beers, sort of. What I bought were two sixteen-ounce Rainier Ales…. I took the two Rainier Ales home, and I drank one. I got a little high, but it was only 5:30. And I realized I was going to have to make the second sixteen-ounce Rainier Ale last until bedtime. So after I put on my thinking cap, I realized that if I was going to pace myself successfully, I might need a little… supplement.

“Luckily, I had a Nike box full of prescription pills…. I took one blue Valium that night—so little, so helpless, smaller even than a tic tac—and washed it down with part of the second sixteen-ounce Rainier Ale. Twenty minutes later I began to feel better, a little calmer. More whole. More like God.

“So I was able to fall asleep that night at a nice early hour, like 7:30, and I slept like a baby and woke up twelve hours later, completely refreshed. Wow! I thought. This is fantastic: no hangover, no being glued to the pillow. Whenever people called that morning and asked how I was, I said I felt great, which was true, and that I was on the wagon, which I believed I was, in the reform sense of the phrase….

“By the fifth day, though, after drinking the first of my sixteen ounce Rainer Ales, I began to resent anyone’s attempts to control me—even my own. And so, as an act of liberation, I bought a fifth of Bushmills Irish Whiskey and had drunk it all by dawn.

“It only took me one more year to admit that I could no longer control my drinking. And finally on July 7, 1986, I quit, and let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober….

“Early on I heard a sober person say, ‘Religion is for people who are afraid of hell; spirituality is for people who have been there.’… I love to listen to [sober alcoholics] tell their stories of ruin; I’m a sucker for a good resurrection story. And I love to hear of their efforts not to see what was as plain as day…. I love these stories because they show where we began, and therefore how far we have come, from the blame and delusions of our drinking days to the gentle illusions by which we stay sober.” (Traveling Mercies, 184-189)

It would be easy to dismiss Lamott’s account of her attempts to quench her deep thirst with alcohol as someone else’s problem, as something to which we are immune, inoculated by some special vaccine that protects us from our own longings, our own compulsive cycles of sin and addiction. But none of us is immune to the longing to fill the restlessness of our hearts. We all find ourselves settling for cheap substitutes, for that which doesn’t give life. At times we all put in enormous “effort not to see what was as plain as day.” To one degree or another, we all suffer from the disease described by Augustine, who, after reflecting on all the things he did to find peace and fulfillment in his life, prayed, “God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

We try to fill the emptiness and restlessness with that which is not bread and that which does not truly satisfy (55:2)….. For Israel in exile, it was a deep fascination with Babylonian power and the Babylonian gods. They thought that they could be their source of hope, security, and life. The contemporary exilic prophet Jeremiah put it this way, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jer 2:13) It is such an unnatural response: the people of God turning from the fountain of living water to go after that which doesn’t satisfy, putting their trust in cisterns that can’t even hold stagnant water, much less flow with living water.

For us it may be different, but we struggle with compulsion nonetheless. We may try to fill our emptiness with an addiction: alcohol, prescription meds, work, food, gambling, sex, pornography. People use all of these things to still the restlessness of their hearts. It may be material things. You may be enslaved by a consumer driven society to buying the newest and the latest, the hottest items that promise to make life better and more worthwhile to live. It may be your relationships with people. You may be sucking the life out of your friends or your children or your spouse because you are asking them to fill a place and a need that only God can fill. Or maybe it’s power, which feeds us the false sense that we are dependent on nothing other than our own prowess, pride, proficiency and prestige, that in some way we are our own god.

We could even be trying to quench our thirst with something that is as seemingly innocuous, or even beneficial, as religion itself. But that may be the most dangerous compulsion, possibly far more dangerous than the enslavement to alcohol that Lamott describes. Spiritual things can become another commodity that we use to try to quench what only the life giving water of God can fill. Sometimes it comes in our need to get the next religious ‘fix,’ where we feed off of spiritual highs and need to have the next new religious experience in order to feel alive. Or, it can be the prideful need for right religious observance or doctrinal purity, where our faith is often placed in our rightness instead of God’s righteousness and our life is found in our purity rather than in God’s pure living water. Both of these are equally as dangerous and empty of what gives real life. They are religion as a drug, an “empty food” that doesn’t nourish or satisfy.

And it is here, it is here that our text encounters us, scrutinizes us, critiques us, and summons us to something new, something better, something real, something that satisfies and gives life (55:3), offering us something to quench our thirst and sate our hunger. But this is not just another cry from any ordinary vendor. The voice of street vendor crying out in our text is none other than the voice of Yahweh.

God calls us to give up our fascination with power, with possessions, with both lifeless religion and empty attempts at spirituality, and to return to the free, gracious, and compassionate gift of the only one who can give true life, who can deliver us from our enslavement to ourselves and to the principalities and powers of the present evil age.

God has moved and provided the grace, that which gives life. He offers us an alternative, a new vision of the world, where the priceless things that truly satisfy are given freely and abundantly. He offers us the chance to change and grow, to stop spending our money for that which is not bread, and our labor for that which does not satisfy. God offers us the knowledge and love of another on terms other than those of our own fear and compulsion. Will we continue in our idolatry, persist in our sin? Will we keep trying to feed our hunger with what doesn’t satisfy or nourish, drink that which doesn’t quench our thirst?

Thirst. Everyone who thirsts, come. Thirst. Thirst is all that is required. All you need is to admit your thirst. Give up the illusion that you can find something to quench your own thirst. Then come; don’t wait; come, buy and drink from the deep wells of God.

The cry of our hearts must echo the cry of the Psalmist from our call to worship today: “Oh God, you are my God. I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps. 63:1)

And God hears our cry and replies: “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters… Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear to me, and come to me; listen, so that you may live!” (55:1, 2b-3a)

Can’t you just hear the voice of Jesus saying to the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water, water that will truly quench you thirst. The water I give will become in those who drink a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:10, 14).

But this morning, maybe we need to hear the call again. Maybe you find yourself compulsively going after things that do not satisfy. Maybe you feel the emptiness of a life nourished only on that which is not true bread. Maybe your soul is parched and thirsty for God, as “a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Hear the cry of God above the voices of the other street vendors this morning, “Everyone who is thirsty, come to the waters…. 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 the return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (55:1, 6-7).

Thirst is all that is required. If you are thirsty, come, seek and find the Lord.