TAKE ALL YOU WANT, EAT ALL YOU TAKE

3rd Sunday in Lent

            I have no business in all-you-can-eat restaurants.  My problem is self-control, so I wind up eating too much.  Besides, I have an economic theory about buffet restaurants.  If you pay seven dollars for the meal and you go to the buffet twice, each serving costs three fifty, right?  And if you take four servings, that’s a dollar seventy-five each.  You see where I’m going here.  The more servings you take, the cheaper each serving is.  I figure there must be a point at which, if I take enough servings, my meal is free!  Therein lies the problem.  I am not moderate in my visits to buffet restaurants.  I eat way too much.  And I feel obligated to eat everything on my plate.  After all, what does the sign on the buffet say?  “Take all you want, eat all you take.”

            Now imagine an all-you-can-eat banquet.  Imagine that all the food and drink offered to you are without limit.  Imagine that this food and drink are really the grace of God, God’s unearned favor toward you and your community of faith.  Imagine that this food and drink are offered at the exact time you are famished and thirsty, a time of spiritual famine.  Imagine hearing from God’s spokesperson that this food and drink are available, and you can have all you need, all you want.  Imagine that you are spiritually bankrupt and your pockets are empty.  Imagine hearing God’s spokesperson calling out to you, like a seller in the marketplace:  “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.”  Imagine you’d like to, but you’re spiritually broke.  Imagine hearing God’s spokesperson say:  “. . . you that have no money, come, buy and eat!  Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”  Imagine being offered by God all the grace you need in your spiritual bankruptcy.  What would you do?  Here’s what I hope we’d all do:  Trust God and take God’s grace.  I hope we would all take all we want, and eat all we take.

            Of course, the people of Israel didn’t have to imagine any of this.  They had been forced into exile from homeland.  Their new setting was one that allowed them to practice their faith.  But much of the support to their faith—the temple itself, the supportive faith community, and opportunities to gather together with familiar faces—were not present.  As the church in North America is beginning to learn, being a community of faith in an unsupportive surrounding is more difficult than when the faith community and the surrounding context support each other.  Israel endured their time in exile as divine judgment for their collective disobedience against God, according to God’s spokespersons of the time.  So Isaiah said to his own people thus:  “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!  For you have forsaken the ways of your people, O house of Jacob. . . .  Enter into the rock, and hide in the dust from the terror of the LORD, and from the glory of his majesty.  The haughty eyes of people shall be low, and the pride of everyone shall be humbled; and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day.”  God’s spokesperson thundered against Israel’s defection from God’s will and pride which he saw everywhere, including foreign superstitions, display of wealth, confidence in military resources, and idolatry.  Israel’s woes were self-inflicted, to hear God’s spokespersons tell it.  They deserved their exile.  It was their punishment for defecting from God’s will.

            Now, today, we hear from a later spokesperson for God.  This one speaks to the people who are currently in exile.  This prophet brings good news to exiled people.  In chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah, this spokesperson’s voice is first heard with good news.  “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem [in exile], and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’S hand double for all her sins.”  In other words, the war is over.  God declares peace.  Their time in exile is about to come to an end.  God’s grace is being offered, symbolized in today’s text as food and drink.  “Ho, 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.”  The Stewpot is a ministry of First Presbyterian Church of Dallas.  Day after day, people without money are invited to come into the building and be served good food and drink.  Now imagine yourself in the position of the client.  You, like the people of Israel, have no spiritual wherewithal to feed yourself.  You cannot earn your way out of exile.  Now here comes God’s spokesperson, saying, “Come, take all you want, but eat all you take.  It’s all free!”  You hear the utter grace of God being announced, offered freely, without price.  It is simply given away.  Take all you want, but eat all you take.  Your spiritual bankruptcy is overcome by God’s abundant grace.  This is the way the exiled people of Israel heard the good news from God’s spokesperson.  Their spiritual bankruptcy was overcome by God’s abundant grace.

            So, what has all of this to do with us?  After all, we’re not in exile.  Or are we?  “In our own time how numerous the company who live oblivious of their obligations to God and of their resources in him!” Henry Sloane Coffin once observed.  “They are not convicted atheists,” Coffin added, “but they are unmindful of God.”  These words were published in the mid 1950s in The Interpreter’s Bible.  They could have been written this morning, for they describe the early twenty-first century in America.  God’s spokesperson, Isaiah, had decried Israel’s practices of foreign superstitions, display of wealth, confidence in military resources, and idolatry.  The list sounds like contemporary America.  One night years ago and in another location, I was called to the home of parishioners.  A young boy had his whole family enthralled with their Ouiga Board.  He made it spell out any message he wanted them to read, manipulating their thoughts and actions.  And these adults were falling for it!  And people believe in Tarot Cards, including some former church members of mine.  These folks didn’t seem to see that when they trusted these superstitions they turned their back on God.  And the rest of Isaiah’s list is also current:  conspicuous consumption, confidence in military resources, and idolatry in the form of nationalism and the worship of wealth.  When we turn to these false gods, do we not send ourselves into a spiritual exile?  We do.  When you think of it, “exile” is being on the outside of what is experienced by the self and the community as “home.”  Exile is being forced from one’s home.  Our true home is being in a relationship with God.  When we vitiate that relationship by turning our back on God, we send ourselves into exile.

            Well, to people like us, God is making himself available.  God is allowing himself to be found.  God comes very near to exiles to offer us grace.  “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God,” announces God’s spokesperson.  And he says, “Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.”  Look!  God has come near.  So sings the Gospel of John:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . .  And the Word became flesh and lived among us. . . .  From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”  God has come near.  So preaches the apostle Paul:  “. . . in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.”  God has made himself available in and through Jesus Christ.  To us in a spiritual exile, God has come near.  Those of us who are like me have turned our back on God.  To us, God has made himself known and available in Jesus Christ.  God has come near with grace.

            Of course, God’s move toward us deserves our own movement toward God.  Our Lenten journey is about our movement toward God, which is fitting, since God has first moved toward us.  God offers us in a spiritual exile, “. . . come, buy and eat!”  Our fitting response is to take that abundant grace and start a new life.  Take all you want, eat all you take.  Here’s what a fitting response would look like.  “Brian” (not his real name) is a college professor whose self-imposed exile was his decision to end his life after hearing his doctor tell him the results of his blood test.  Brian was HIV positive.  All Brian could think about was his declining health and gruesome death, not to mention the loss of his friends, children, and profession.  So Brian decided to end it all.  He planned to take out his sailboat, drift out into the ocean, take a handful of sleeping pills, and go into the deep never to be seen again.  But God moved toward Brian with grace.  Brian saw an old brochure from South Salem Presbyterian Church talking about their health minister program.  Brian called her.  “She was at my house within thirty minutes,” he said.  “She sat with me while I sobbed tears of helplessness, and she prayed with me.  She convinced me that treatment is available.  She drove me to my first appointment and stayed with me throughout.  She helped me sort out and understand the load of new information I was getting.  Since that first day she has been the keeper of my secret.  She threw down a ladder and helped me begin a long, slow climb out of the pit.”  By God speaking to Brian’s heart and through the ministry of the church, God’s grace was moving toward Brian to help him have a fresh start.  Brian moved toward God’s grace to receive it.  The more Brian moves toward God in submission to God’s will, the greater the recovery he will experience, and the deeper his relationship with God will be.  So it is for us.  We must move toward God, our available God.  We must take the abundant food and drink of God’s grace.  Take all you want, eat all you take.