"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.
Why 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 good.
Incline 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." [Isaiah 55:1-3]
Sometimes I am surprised God doesn't give up on this grace thing. It's got to be frustrating to be giving away good things for free, only to have everybody lining up for junk food and being willing to pay top dollar for the chance to get it somewhere else.
This, I suppose, is the tragedy of unrequited love that makes up the first act in the great love story of the Gospel's divine comedy: God keeps holding out the gifts that bring us to life, and offers them like a free meal, but we keep chasing after lesser things and lesser loves thinking they will fill the empty places in these fragile hearts of ours. And for whatever things God can think of to get our attention, we keep spending our lives, our energy, and our love for "that which does not satisfy."
What gives me hope on a day like today, though, is that despite the ways we surely break God's heart in the quest for an ever-elusive Something Else or Someone Better, God doesn't back down on the free part of the offer of groceries without price, and God doesn't give up on the invitation to life in the fullest. I surely would have given up, if I were God. I would have long ago decided with a look of smug self-righteousness, "Well, I gave them all their chance to receive the good I have to give, and they ran off in another direction, so now I'm just done with them." I would have bailed out, cut my losses, and stopped trying--I'm like that sometimes. My willingness to love would have gotten gun-shy along time ago, after one too many times of holding out my hands and being ignored. Maybe all of us are like that, too--we just feel we come to limits of how much we can keep risking love after being hurt, dismissed, or thrown away before.
But God does not. God keeps holding out the gift of grace, even to ungrateful stinkers like me who have convinced themselves that what will really make us happy is found in job titles, bigger salaries, larger houses, political power, candlelight and romance, or having our names carved in stone on a building to leave behind as a legacy. We've been chasing all those dead-end rabbit trails forever, while God has been standing in the center of town offering a gift that sounds too good to be true.
That's an especially powerful message knowing when this word was spoken. The words we call Isaiah 55 are most likely spoken to people on the other side of exile--in other words, people who had been chasing after other things, other gods, and other loves for so long they got themselves carried away into Babylon. The prophet speaks this offer to people who had broken their relationship with God so badly they all swore it was beyond repair--it was a like a marriage ended with divorce, a child who had run away from home, or a friendship in shambles (in fact, those are all ways the prophets talked about the broken covenant between God and Israel from time to time). And yet, despite the ways the people have blown a good thing that was right in front of them, God offers again: come, receive water... bread... wine... milk... life... for free. God offers that the people will be given life again, despite all the ways they have sold themselves out to lesser things before.
It reminds me of a lyric from a song of Mumford and Sons, called, "Roll Away Your Stone," that goes like this:
"It seems that all my bridges have been burned,
But you say that's exactly how this grace thing works.
It's not the long walk home that will change this heart,
But the welcome I receive with the re-start."
That's the offer. When we've burned the bridges, God builds a new one. When we've spent our last buck on fool's gold and junk food, God gives away the good stuff for free. When we've turned in the wrong direction again and again and gotten ourselves lost in the valley of the shadow of death, God brings us back to life. As a gift. Without price.
And if that's how God's offer meets each of us today, maybe we can let some burned bridges be rebuilt today, too. Maybe we can extend grace to someone who has been waiting for forgiveness, knowing we've already been given a restart from God. Maybe there's someone you can share abundance with today, knowing that God keeps giving good things to us beyond our deserving. Maybe... well, maybe today is just the day you and I decide not to give up on someone else, because we know God hasn't given up on us, either.
That's what makes that tragic first act of unrequited love into a divine comedy: grace keeps on offering, insistent on outwaiting and outlasting our misguided quests to fill the God-shaped empty spot in our lives with anything or anyone else.
Here's the offer again--grace is yours already. An honest to goodness free lunch in a world full of hucksters. And what's more, the offer from God isn't a limited-time promotion to inflate sales numbers; it is persistently, perpetually, free of charge.
Lord God, outlast our waywardness with your enduring love.
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