I once asked a confirmation class about joy. They said that the shortest spurts of happiness come from material gifts, while the longest living joy comes from relationships. They understood, as well, that happiness is fleeting, but joy comes from within.

When I prepare funerals, I ask families to tell me what the person loved. Almost always the first answer is relational – spouse, children, family, friends, church family, all of the above…. and then come the answers that are active: gardening, sports, some club, travel, cooking, work etc. (Sometimes sports affiliation arise as well. Loving or hating the Yankees is, apparently, identity forming.) Almost always, the list of what a person loves fits into “relationships” and “activities.”

At times, I wonder how that question would be answered for me. I’m sure just about anyone could say people and skiing and Sky Lake, but beyond that its not fully clear. Our concept of what we love may be different than what others see of us. What we love is visible by what we DO, not just what we think about doing. I wonder how what I do is different from what I think.

Hopefully what we DO, what we spend our time on and show our love for, are the rich food and bread that truly feed us. That is, we seek to live so that the places we put our love may be the ones that feed our inner spring of joy. The book of Isaiah almost outdoes itself with the questions of 55:2: “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 food.” Why DO we spend our time on activities that don’t feed our souls? Why DO we spend money on things that won’t feed any part of us?

This is a passage that scholars believe was written during the exile. That is, the first hearers were in captivity in a foreign land. I don’t know how Babylonians treated their war captives for sure, but it seems reasonable to assume that they were similar to most other nations throughout time. I doubt there was rich food to be had, nor milk. There may have been bread, and lousy wine, but maybe not a lot of it. I don’t know if they were getting wages, but if they were, they were likely not very high. I doubt as well that they had much choice about what they did with their labor.

On that basis, this strange prophecy seems pie in the sky high. The suggestion is that God will provide abundant wine and milk, bread and rich food – for free. These weren’t things they were getting at all. God is said to reaffirm God’s love for David and the Davidic covenant, but the king’s line had been killed off. It is said that the nations will run to Israel, but Israel can’t even go home. Why would Isaiah say such words to people who knew better?

They’d gone without enough food for a long time. They knew that God hadn’t provided. They’d labored for other people’s wealth for a long time. They knew that God hadn’t intervened.

This is a passage that indicates that God is going to change God’s mind and choose to take care of the people again, after God has intentionally chosen not to for a while. After all, it ends with a call to repentance, suggesting that God wants to give these good gifts, but that they are contingent on the people’s choice to return to God. This is the point where I get squirmy. It sounds a lot like preaching to the Syrian refugees that if they return to “right worship” and “regular prayer” that God will take care of them again.

Yet, it speaks a deep truth. In the book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” David Graeber suggests that all the world’s major religions emerged as counters to the world’s markets. As market economies came into being, and dehumanized in profound ways (paid armies, unraveling of community ties, interest, debt slavery, etc) there was a need for a voice to call into question the standards of the market. Each of the world’s religions argues against usury (high interest), affirms the value of human life, calls on people to treat each other as precious, rebukes the acquisition of excessive material goods, and claims that the deeper meaning of life cannot be bought nor sold. That is, each of the major world religions argues against the underlying principles of the world’s markets. Graeber goes further to indicate how the various ways that markets developed around the world impacted the ways that each of the religions took on different stances and flavors.

Isaiah’s call to repentance is a stronghold of this principle. Even speaking to captives in a foreign land, he calls them away from the principles of the market into the principles of God. Isaiah refuses the idea that access to food should be reserved to those who have money! Isaiah suggests that God offers the good stuff without cost, upsetting the whole system. Isaiah diminishes the value of work itself as a means of survival. (It is pretty socialist, I’ll admit. Then again, capitalism isn’t a Biblical value.) Isaiah calls the people out of the system that dehumanizes and into a relationship with God that can vaccinate them against the values of the market.

Jesus’ parable does some similar things. May we remember that nurturing a tree in the desert of Israel takes serious resources. Water is scarce, and trees need water! (Think the crisis of almond farming in CA during this epic drought.) Fertile soil takes effort and resources. Market economies would suggest that the tree was wasting preciously allocated resources.

Yet, the gardener doesn’t want to give up on the tree that has been wasting resources though. Instead, the gardner wants to GIVE MORE to that tree – to bury it in manure and give it every chance it might have to bear fruit. Rather than blame the tree, the gardener seems to take blame on himself, for not giving it all it needs. This doesn’t make sense! It makes sense to uproot the tree and put in a new one – if we are talking about trees. More likely this passage is about Israel’s spiritual condition (because that’s how the metaphor usually goes in the Bible). Like Isaiah, this passage is a call to repentance.

Isn’t it interesting though, to reconsider repentance? What if it isn’t about sins in the ways that it so often as been discussed, but rather is about turning way from the morals of the market economy and turning to the morals of God and God’s kin-dom? Remember, just in case I haven’t said it recently, that the Bible indicates that our work as Jesus followers is to transform the world we have into one where everyone has enough and the gifts of life abundant are shared among everyone – the kin-dom. Doesn’t that take the sting out of repentance and make it really awesome? (#ThingsNoOneExpectedThePreacherToSay)

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’m happy to say that the Gospel theologically debunks the issues that the Isaiah passage presents! The Isaiah passage, in case you forgot, implies that exile is the fault of the people for not being sufficiently faithful to God. This is a pretty normal perspective in the Bible, although not the only one. It is probably fair to call it the Deuteronomy perspective. It may also be worth remembering that the end of the exile came about 500 years before Jesus was born, but the meantime hadn’t been great for the Jews. First they were a vassal state of Persia (although they got to go home, which was great), and then Greece, and then Rome. So the wounds of the exile were still present among the Jews.

The two particular problems that get named are unique to Luke, unknown in other sources, and yet feasible historically. The first is the murder of a bunch of Galileans in Jerusalem while they were bringing ritual sacrifices to the temple. Historically speaking, if this happened, it was assumed that they were part of a violent revolt against the empire. That’s feasible. The second is the death of a group of people when part of the wall of Jerusalem fell on them. The existence of a tower there hasn’t been confirmed, but it is a place where it would have made sense to have a tower.

The point, however, that is made is that the people didn’t die because God was punishing them. They were no different from everyone else. Those who lived couldn’t claim to be alive because they were better. Death and destruction is not a punishment from God, nor and life abundant a sign of God’s favor. Those premises are rejected, and it has significant consequences for understanding the world and the Bible. Of course, it also gets turned into a call for repentance, because it is Lent and all scriptures call for repentance. Good thing we found a way to LIKE repentance.

The scriptures serve to remind us to concentrate on the things we love and the things that bring us life. Joy can’t be purchased. The premises of the market are wrong. We need not be distracted by them, particularly because it makes it harder to the markets to account for the ways they dehumanize God’s beloved people.

Seek joy where it can be found: in relationships with people you love and activities you deeply enjoy. That, it turns out, is part of turning the world upside down – to how God would have it be. Amen

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 28, 2016