Roger Ray, pastor
March 3, 2013 Lent 3
Isaiah 55:1-9
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3Incline 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. 4See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. 5See, 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.
6Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; 7let 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. 8For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. 9For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Many of you will have heard the behaviorist illustration that says that if you drop a frog in hot water it will jump out immediately but if you put it into cold water and allow the temperature to slowly rise, the frog will complacently sit until it dies from the heat. This is a great illustration about how we either react or fail to react to a crisis. If a horrible situation arises all at once, we know to respond quickly and meaningfully but if it just creeps up on us slowly, with a very gradual evolution of our circumstances, we may just slumber into our own demise.
And, as it goes, the illustration is helpful when it comes to things like climate change. The only reason we are still burning coal to generate electricity and burning gas to power private individual automobiles is because the poisoning of our environment is so slow, so gradual, that it is easy not to say, on any particular day, that things have gone too far and we must change our ways.
So, the slow boiled frog illustration is true when it comes to humans and environmental disaster. It is not, let me stress this, not true about frogs. I don't know what kind of sick high school biology experiment started with putting live frogs on to boil but given the opportunity, a frog will escape lethal hot water.
Which, in a way, is kind of sad because even a frog will not sit quietly and allow its environment to become lethal but either the most arrogant or the most intelligent of earth's inhabitants will sit still while our own conduct kills off our species.
I love this text from Isaiah that David read for us this morning. The prophet asks why people spend their resources on that which does not satisfy them. Did joining the country club give you the close circle of friends you thought it would? Did building a bigger house make you feel as important as you had hoped? After stock piling guns and ammunition, do you actually feel safe? It is like drinking diet coke because you are hungry. Even if you could drink a thousand diet cokes, you would still be hungry because, even though it is sweet and bubbly, there is no food value in it.
The prophet is, of course, not talking about food. He is asking why people spend their time and resources on things that don't really satisfy them. That is a good question!
Jurnegan Moltmann wrote in his work, The Theology of Hope, that there is something called the "sacrament of the status quo." The way that things are comes to be viewed as holy. 19th Century missionaries, who went from the United States to teach Christianity in Africa, New Zealand, and Indonesia, couldn't imagine the Christian faith apart from western commerce and American government. Many succeeded in passing along the faith but they were, in many ways, better at spreading the markets of Coca Cola and American's addiction to cigarettes. In many places in the world, the Christian missionary churches are a fading memory but Marlboro and McDonalds are still there.
We don't have much mass transit in the USA because we have cars. We make cars. And because we make cars we build roads. And even though our cars and roads are destroying the planet we cannot conceive of a world without all of these cars and roads and when the dinosaur juice that runs our cars starts to get scarce, rather than looking for alternative ways to get around, we will literally intimidate, control and even go to war to keep things just the way that they are, even if to do so we will destroy ourselves in the process! That is the sacrament of the status quo.
Because, the voice of the prophet, the voice of the poet, is rarely heard in our day. Only in church, really, and that not in many churches and not that often there. Almost every minute of every day we deal with the way that the world is and give only passing thoughts to how it might be.
And, eventually, you get to the point that you cannot even imagine the world as being any different from the way it now is. In fact, when you hear the way the politicians talk about it, we have to do whatever we have to do to maintain this consumer - military based economy and society, even though we know how it is going to end.
Our generation is like a man standing on a set of railroad tracks watching a locomotive headed straight for him and he is so accustomed to standing on those tracks that he has no will left to get out of the way of the oncoming train. Even slight changes in position seem to be too much trouble, to require too much effort, too much sacrifice to act to save his own life.
The prophet Isaiah asked the people of his day, "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?"
"Why do you just dig in and entrench yourself in a culture which is based on controlling the rest of the world through militarism so that you can consume more and more of their stuff?" "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?"
It seems that all of the power in the world is either economic or military. And you don't need for me to tell you that the church, in almost every century, in almost every place, has become little more than the court jester for the forces of the military and money. The thing that has made this congregation so different is that we have very nearly entirely rid ourselves of bondage to the kind of prejudice and superstition which are generally the hallmarks of religious practice and to try to actually hear the challenging word of the prophets.
When it comes to the environment, the church absolutely must stop being the lap dog of the marketplace. It is time for us to get up and do some barking around here.
The poet, the prophet, sings:
"Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price."
If we will allow our imaginations to be infected by the poet's words then the world as we know it can come to an end, and the world as God imagined it can emerge. We don't have to just stand on the railroad tracks and watch the world come to an end, we can help it to be reborn.
Recycling plastic and paper is a largely symbolic gesture but we should do it because the discipline of doing it helps us to think about how we can save the planet. The fact that our church leased an electric car makes a statement, a largely symbolic statement but one that needs to be made. We should all try to live closer to where we work, drive less and insist on mass transit investment but until then, we should burn as little fossil fuel as possible.
Going out and helping to pick up trash out of a local river is largely symbolic but you will not quickly come home from a day of nasty river recovery and then passively pollute a river ever again. We can air condition our homes without Freon, we can grease our cooking pans without hydroflurocarbons and we can keep our underarms smelling fresh without deteriorating the ozone layer.
The first thing is that we have to stop standing on the railroad tracks while the train comes towards us. Then we need to put a stop to these science experiments that involve boiling frogs.
