Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 14, 2004
Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
I don’t know about you, but I spend an awful lot of time being dissatisfied, and I can’t figure out why. I mean, I don’t have all that much to be dissatisfied about. When I’m able to step back from it for a minute and look at it more or less objectively, it seems to me that I’ve go a pretty wonderful life. I mean, It took a long time and a lot of struggle to get here, but I’ve got a job, a calling that I love. As your pastor I feel far more truly myself than I ever have before in my life. There are difficulties and challenges of course. Still, I meant it when, one week ago yesterday, I gave a sermon at Jane’s installation as pastor of Sunnyslope Church in Wenatchee that I gave the title "It’s A Wonderful Life." For me, being a pastor truly is a wonderful life.
And then there’s Jane. I have a primary relationship in my life with a woman whom I love, a relationship that feeds my soul and gives me immense joy. I have two wonderful kids whom I love and with whom I have, on the whole, a wonderful relationship. I even get along with my parents, who are still living at a stage of my life when most us of have lost our parents. Yes, when I look at my life from the outside, it looks pretty wonderful.
Still, when I feel my life on the inside, most of the time it doesn’t feel as wonderful as it looks. Much of the time I feel anxious or down. I feel a lack of energy, a lack of enthusiasm. I hide those feelings pretty well most of the time, but they’re there. They’re there a lot; and my experience of life tells me that if I’m feeling something like that so strongly, then probably quite a few other people struggle with the same issue, the issue of not feeling as satisfied in life as our external circumstances suggest we should. So I hope that this morning I’m not just preaching to myself, although certainly I am preaching to myself as well as, I hope, to you.
I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to figure out why these feelings are there. I’m still not sure I know why; but I’m starting to do something about it; and this morning’s wonderful, rich, moving passage from the 55th chapter of Isaiah give some real help in figuring it out. The key, I think, lies in the first lines of verse 2. It’s in the form of a question: "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?" Isaiah 55:2 (NRSV) For a long time, I thought that was a rhetorical question. It was, I thought, simply a more poetic way of saying: "Stop spending your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy."
But the other day I was again doing some "lectio divina" with a member of our congregation. Remember that that’s a kind of structured prayer that focuses on a brief passage from scripture. I used those lines from Isaiah: "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?" That exercise directed me first to ask whether or not I do that, and the answer came very quickly: Yes you do. So the exercise then led me to ask: How do I do that? And that lead to the question: What is the bread that I don’t buy, and what is the money that I don’t buy it with?
Of course, I think we all understand that the words bread, money, and labor here need to be understood both literally and metaphorically. Isaiah probably meant his question literally, at least initially. In the ancient world, most of the people lived on bread and little else. Isaiah probably was telling people, on the most basic level, not to waste their meager resources of money on things other than bread lest they end up literally starving.
But as is usually the case with Biblical passages, I find the metaphorical meanings far more significant than the literal meaning of the passage; and what I learned as I meditated on Isaiah’s questions the other day is that the metaphors money and bread can have many different layers of meaning. Probably the first level of metaphorical meaning leaves money as just money and sees bread as a metaphor for that which sustains life generally--food, shelter, clothing etc. Moving to a more abstract level of meaning, the question can mean: Why do you spend your resources on things that do not sustain life in a broader sense, things that bring satisfaction, that bring joy, that bring wholeness of life? Now we’re getting to a level that potentially means a lot more to those of us fortunate enough to live lives in procuring which the basics necessary for survival is not really an issue. That bread here is a metaphor for the things that really satisfy is suggested by the parallelism of the lines of the question: money for bread or not for bread; labor for that which satisfies or which does not satisfy. These lines are poetry in the Hebrew original, and in Hebrew poetry the second line of a couplet like this is always intended to repeat or to amplify the first line. So, Isaiah is asking, why do you spend your resources on that which does not truly satisfy, that does not bring wholeness of life, that does not bring peace and joy.
So far, this is probably fairly obvious. We have explored the metaphorical meaning of bread, and we have seen money as a metaphor for resources. The insight that came to me the other day, however, is that money here has other, deeper metaphorical meanings. What came to me was the insight that I do not so much spend my material resources on that which does not lead to joy and wholeness of life as I spend my psychic, emotional, mental resources on those things. I assume you are all familiar with the concept of "inner monologue." That’s the little voice in your head that’s always talking to you, always telling you things. If you’ve never thought about it before, stop right now and listen to it. Maybe it’s just the little voice that’s saying: What’s he talking about? I don’t have a little voice in my head. If that’s what you’re hearing, that’s the little voice I’m talking about!
Now, if you’re like me (and most other people, for that matter) that little voice is usually pretty sharply critical, pretty negative all the time. Mine is always judging people, and usually not kindly. Worse, it is always judging me, again usually not kindly. It’s always pointing out what’s wrong with a situation, how things aren’t the way they should be, how it wishes things were different than they are. My little voice is always telling me about all the things I can’t do, all the things I’m not good at. It’s also pretty critical of other people, although it can also be pretty naïve about how great somebody is, usually as a way of telling me I don’t measure up to some ideal that it is projecting onto someone else.
All that is leading up to this: When Isaiah says that we spend our money for that which is not bread, I hear him saying: We spend an awful lot of emotional energy in ways that does not make us happy, that does not bring us joy, that does not lead to satisfaction and fullness of life. That’s what I heard Isaiah saying to me when I meditated on his question this past week. Stop letting your emotional energy run in such negative directions. Stop telling yourself you can’t do things. Stop being so critical of other people. Those are just ways of keeping ourselves upset, anxious, or depressed all the time. That’s spending our emotional labor on that which does not satisfy. I still can’t answer Isaiah’s question of why I, or we, do it; but then I don’t think he would much care about why. The question really is rhetorical. The point is: Stop doing it!
Now, that’s what this Isaiah passage is saying to me. Maybe it’s saying that to you too, or maybe it’s not. The question is, however, for all of us I think, a good occasion to stop and ask ourselves: What am I doing that keeps me from being truly satisfied in my life? Am I spending money for that which is not bread, and labor for that which does not satisfy? If you’re not feeling fulfilled, if you’re not feeling satisfied, then the answer to that question is yes. Maybe you spend actual money on material things that you think will bring you joy and satisfaction only to find that they don’t. Maybe you, like me, expend emotional capital in ways that keep you from the fulfillment and satisfaction that we all desire and that God desires for us. Maybe you spend your time in ways that bring you no joy, but you keep doing it out of habit or because you can’t see any alternative. Maybe none of this applies to you, although I doubt it. So let me challenge you throughout the remainder of Lent to examine your life, your way of being, to try to discern the things that keep you from being fulfilled and satisfied.
And when you do, change them. Lay them at the foot of the cross and give them up to God. It is in giving up the things in our lives that are not bread, the things that do not satisfy, and in turning to God that we receive the water, the wine, and the milk without price, that we receive the things that truly satisfy and fill us. Those things are the love of God, the grace of Christ, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Now, in Lent, is a time to seek God while God may be found, to call upon God while God is near. We can be fulfilled, we can be satisfied. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? I can’t answer that for you. I pray that in this holy season you will seek to answer it for yourselves. Amen.