Isaiah 55:1-2

William F. Schnell

August 3, 2008

If you were not here last Sunday, you may not know that I am the 2008 recipient of the International Council of Community Churches Charles A. Trentham Homiletics Award.  No longer will I have to respond to inquiries from strangers about what I do for a living by saying, “I am just a preacher.”  Now I can look them square in the eye and say: “I am an award-winning preacher.”  Rev. Horak asked me if I was going to milk this for all it is worth, and I said: “Oh yes.”

I suppose the next step is to publish a book of sermons entitled, Schnell’s Greatest Hits… Volume One.  I can see it now, right up there with Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life and Joel Osteen’s, Your Best Life Now at Sam’s Club.  Maybe not.  With all the preachers around, you would think that there would be a whole section at Borders Books containing nothing but the collected sermons of myriad preachers.  Not so.  Sermons neither sell well nor, apparently, read well.  At best, they might just preach well.

Several years ago a reader of the British Weekly wrote a letter to the editor as follows: “Dear Sir: It seems ministers feel their sermons are very important and spend a great deal of time preparing them.  I have been attending church quite regularly for 30 years and have probably heard 3,000 of them.  To my consternation, I discovered I cannot remember a single sermon.  I wonder if a minister’s time might be more profitably spent on something else?”

For weeks a storm of editorial responses ensued, finally ended by this letter.  “Dear Sir: I have been married for 30 years.  During that time I have eaten 32,850 meals—mostly my wife’s cooking.  Suddenly I have discovered that I cannot remember the menu of a single meal.  And yet I have the distinct impression that without them I would have starved to death long ago.”  Just as food feeds the body, so expositions upon God’s Holy Word feed the soul—often in spite of the preacher’s foibles and failings.

The title of our message for this morning is “Soul Food.”  Soul food is a term that has been coined by Black America to refer to the ingredients and style of cooking that emerged during years of slavery.  Meals were made from what White slave-owners threw out of their kitchens: the green tops of turnips and beets, the small intestines of pigs which were prepared as chitterlings (a.k.a. chitlins), and stale bread that became bread pudding.  Even the liquid from cooked greens, called potlikker, was consumed as a type of gravy, or drink.

What put the soul into soul food was the fellowship of extended family members who brought special dishes to communal potlucks.  Here good cooking was highly prized, but so too was storytelling and the sharing of oral history.  Along with favorite recipes, stories and memories were passed down, news was spread and plans were made.  Sarah Breathnach wrote: "Soul food is our personal passport to the past.  It is much more about heritage than it is about hominy."

Most of us associate certain foods with our personal histories.  Maybe you had a grandma whose specialty was fried chicken or baked pies.  Maybe you gained an appreciation for Korean food while serving in the military.  Maybe spiced spaghetti sauce made from your homegrown Roma tomatoes and served over hand-fashioned spaghetti is your idea of soul food.  The smells and tastes and preparation of such food evoke memories of our personal heritage and eating them feeds both body and soul.

It is no wonder that food is such a common metaphor found in the Bible.  From the Passover Feast to Holy Communion, and manna from heaven to the bread of life, the Bible uses food in a figurative way to bring to remembrance our sacred history and to communicate timeless spiritual truths.  Hence the Promised Land is a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:8), while heaven is envisioned by Jesus as a banquet at which the faithful will be seated and fed.

How can food, as a metaphor, continue to feed our souls today?  Let us look for inspiration in God’s Holy Word as we give our attention to our text for this morning from the prophecy of Isaiah.  This prophecy was probably not written by one man; so much as it was composed by a school of prophecy that took its founder’s name.  The prophecy spans a period of time that would exceed the lifetime of a single human being, covering the reigns of Judah’s last four kings (totaling 113 years) plus the Exile that followed (minimum 52 years).

This explains the dramatic shift that occurs in this book of prophecy, from dreaded judgment to merciful hope.  Much of the book of Isaiah is a prophetic warning to the people of Judah to return to God and his ways before they incur his wrath.  The equally faithless northern nation of Israel had already been overrun by their enemies, the Assyrians, and through an act of ethnic cleansing had been exiled to other places as a slave race.  Isaiah said to the southern nation of Judah, “This could happen to you if you don’t repent and turn back to God.”

As it happened, Judah did not listen to Isaiah’s prophetic voice.  And just as the latter had prophesied, the former were defeated by their enemy, the Babylonians, and exiled into captivity as a slave race.  Yet God continued to speak to his people through the voice of his prophets.  We might have expected him to say, “I told you so,” but God does not chide his exiled people.  Rather, in an abrupt change of tone at the 40^th chapter of Isaiah, he begins to comfort and encourage them.

I suppose many of us have reacted the same way with our children who are prone to misbehave.  We might warn them of the consequences of their bad behavior, but not beyond measure should our prophecies come true.  Once our children are hurting and truly grieving their bad choices, what good does it do to rub their faces in the dirt?  No, we encourage them that all is not lost, that we all make mistakes, that we can learn and grow from our mistakes and move on as better people.

This is what God is saying to his exiled people through the prophetic school of Isaiah.  The first word of our text is Come… (Verse 1).  Come where?  Come home.  God is opening a way for the repentant exiles to return to the Land of Promise as free men and women—proud citizens of their own country once again.  Their hard service has ended.  They have paid a price for their sins, but God is forgiving them and offering them a new start. 

God is promising to satisfy their yearning to be free.  God is promising to slake their thirst for a better day.  God is promising to feed their hunger for a better life.  Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!  Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost (Verse 1).  It sounds like an offer that nobody could refuse, yet we can perceive a hint of hesitancy in the question that comes next.

Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? (Verse 2).  The exiles have by now lived as a slave race for over a generation.  For many, this is the only reality they have known.  It may not be the best of circumstances living as second-class citizens with limited rights and restricted opportunities but, hey, it could be worse.  The Land of Promise is a fading memory, the journey back is fraught with uncertainty and the prospect of rebuilding and resettling is daunting.  Maybe we are better off here for now despite the shortcomings, maybe some other time, maybe somebody else.

It is hard to conceive of a battered wife remaining in an abusive situation, but some do.  No, they do not take a perverted pleasure in getting beat up.  Yes, they wish circumstances were otherwise.  But the prospect of facing life older and alone without skills or experience, and without money and a support system is just too uncertain, and so they resign themselves to so much less than their mothers and fathers had hoped for them, and their Father in heaven had desired for them. 

Some released prisoners find themselves back in trouble and back in prison in short order because they cannot adjust to life beyond the bars of their cells--beyond the compulsory life and degrading lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.  But once back behind bars they long for a glimpse of sunshine, they yearn for a breath of fresh air, they hunger for freedom and they thirst for love.  In short, they want so many of the things the rest of us take for granted.  But they settle for a cell-they settle for life in bondage like the people of Judah.

I do not think we have to be in a prison cell or an abusive relationship to settle for life in bondage.  Sometimes we can be making six figures or more, live in a fair town like Aurora, have a nice home and family and still feel like we are in bondage—like we are not free to do whatever it is that would bring us lasting satisfaction.  So we seek short-term satisfaction by feeding our carnal appetites for alcohol or drugs, sexual excess, junk food or just plain junk we don’t need.

The prophet asks, Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?  Because, like the Exiles, this is what we have come to know and expect.  It may not be much, but at least it is familiar.  We may instinctively feel that there is something better, but it is so uncertain.  It requires too much faith.  And here we are getting to the crux of the matter, because there is something better for which we were created and toward which our Creator calls us.

Listen, he says, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare (Verse 2).  The key to lasting satisfaction and contentment in living is listening to God, really listening.  If we really pay attention even our discontent will tell us something.  It will tell us that we are not on the path of God’s choosing for us.  Something is missing, what is it?  Listen carefully, and God will make his will and way known.

There are probably some things we need to give up.  There are probably some new adventures of faith we need to embark upon.  After reading the book, Three Cups of Tea, my wife has got me listening to an audio version.  It is about an accomplished fellow who gives up everything to build schools for impoverished children in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  For a while he lives in his car to save every dollar he can raise, because each dollar pays a teacher’s salary for one day in the lands he is serving.

Twelve years later this fellow has been responsible for building 55 schools that are educating 24,000 children (and counting).  The sub-title of the book reads: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time.  His experience makes a pretty compelling case for what the cost of one smart bomb could accomplish if redirected in more constructive directions.  Even more compelling is the case for what one faithful life can accomplish if redirected in the paths of God’s choosing.

God has an adventurous plan and purpose for our lives which he makes known through sermons on his Holy Word (award winning and otherwise), through books about the inspiring examples of others and through many other prophetic voices if we have ears to hear them.  Listening to those prophetic voices will feed our souls as they reveal our part in God’s plan, our purpose for living and our path from bondage to complete contentment and lasting satisfaction.

The Lord has prepared a table for us this morning.  He has prepared some Soul Food for us.  He calls us to come and eat the richest of fare.  Let us answer the call, bringing our appetites for the bread of life.