March 7, 2010

Elaine Wainwright

Lent 3     Isaiah 55:1-9     Luke 13:1-9

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Everyone who thirsts, come, come to the water… This is one of those many phrases of the poet that we call Second Isaiah that reverberates in our spirits. But in today’s reading from this poet and prophet there is not just this one imperative – come – but the reading is, we might say, riddled with imperatives, with exhortations coming from our God: come to the water, come buy wine and milk, listen carefully to me, incline your ear, come to me, listen, see, seek me, forsake evil ways, return… return: turn your life around. And while the gospel is not filled with imperatives as is the reading from the prophet, it reiterates the phrase unless you repent, unless you repent. Return … repent. There is a call to change, to change one’s mind or way of thinking, to change one’s heart, to change or to turn around one’s life – a most appropriate invitation to us at Week Three, almost midway along our Lenten journey. We are invited to pause on this Sabbath day to reflect whether or perhaps how we have turned our life around or how we might do so into the second half of our Lenten journey.

Such thoughts are, however, not new and as I listened again to our poet/prophet I heard the closing words of our reading: my thoughts are not your thoughts says our God, nor my ways your ways. Indeed, we are drawn into the wonderful imagery: as the heavens or the skies are higher than the earth. Let your imagination envisage that – the distance, the space between the earth and sky – this is the space between our thoughts and the thoughts of our God who calls to us today in the words of the prophet. And we are being called to repent, to turn around our lives so that our thoughts may be God’s thoughts, our ways, God’s ways.

And as I listened anew to this call to repent or to turn around through the imagery of our readings and the actuality of our lives in today’s world, I heard a new call, a call to ecological repentance, to a turn around of my life, of our lives that is not only between me/us and God, or between us as human community. No, the call is there in our readings to a new relationship between us as human community and the Earth community to which and within which we belong. Indeed, the poet/prophet Isaiah catches us up into this expanded web of relationship.

Let’s listen again to the opening call and it is a call because it begins with an exclamation [in Hebrew Ho, Wow – make sure you listen!] And it is a call not just to a few: everyone who thirsts, come to the waters and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Come to the water/s, to water that sustains life, not just human life but life on planet Earth, all forms of life that together make up Earth including humans with all other Earth beings. And the invitation of God is to all to come to the water/s, for all to have sustaining waters. Not only those who have acquired more than others, have acquired that social commodity that the human community calls money. No water is a gift of life for all. This call, this imperative to enable all to have access to this most fundamental sustainer of life, has an urgent ring in our world today. We are aware that water may not be the endless commodity that we once thought, that the changes we are making to Earth and hence for the entire Earth community is threatening this basic commodity water. What can we do this week, this Lent, to turn around our lives so that we know the gift of water, that we use it with reverence and care as gift so that it is available for all in the Earth community. That all may come to the water they need for life and have it without cost, without price.

And the poet goes on: come buy wine and milk without money, without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labour for that which does not satisfy. We are caught up in the intricate web of the human and more than human. Our economic structures shape human life [what would we do without money – surely the prophet is simply deaming/fanticizing!] But the prophet knows that it is this which makes for those who have more and those who are hungry and thirsty. And this economic system is intimately connected to all that is more than human – to water, to the grape which gives wine, the animal which provides milk. It is to all this that the prophet calls us to listen, to incline our ear. This is the call today, a call to listen attentively to the intricate web of relationships within the Earth community, not just human relationships but human and more-than-human. And if we find that these are not in the right order, if they are unrighteous, if they are wicked – again listening to the language of the prophet – then we are called to ‘repent’, to turn around, to re-turn to God’s ways and God’s thoughts.

Jesus the parabler, like the poet/prophet, knew well the just or right relationships between God, the human and the entire Earth community. He drew on this imagery to call for repentance, for change of heart, for change of life when those relationships broke down. And so today’s gospel also invites us to ecological repentance: unless you repent … unless you repent – it repeats. And it is the parable that Jesus tells to reiterate this call to repentance that captures our imagination. It speaks of relationship, the relationship between the more than human and human as well as two different human reactions. The parable contrasts the owner of the vineyard that has a fig tree in it and the gardener or the one who tends the plants. The owner wants the tree to produce, immediately it would seem – an attitude which so characterizes us in our world today – immediacy. The gardener, however, the one who knows about soil and composting and even the care that one must give to plants that are to grow and flourish, this gardener says ‘no – don’t cut it down prematurely. It is not ‘wasting the soil’. Time, care, attentiveness to soil, water, earth and plant – from these we learn a new attitude to life, an attitude, a perspective which like that to water will bring us to change, will bring us to repentance, to ecological repentance.

And so today’s readings are heard through a new lens, the lens of our contemporary ecological imperative as human community which must be in right relationship with all participants in the Earth community. These readings call us to repentance, to a new repentance, to a turning around of our lives. Return to these readings during this week and let their call, their imagery, their poetry invite us to reflect on an ecological repentance that puts us in right relationships with all Earth creatures: for this is to be in right relationship with our God. Let me conclude with the wonderful poetry of our poet/prophet that follows on directly from the reading we heard:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

And do not return there until they have watered the earth

Making it bring forth and sprout,

Giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

It shall not return to me empty,

But shall accomplish that which I purpose,

And succeed in the thing for which I sent it.