Transcript
What Does the Lord Require? A Search
First Baptist Richmond, March 23, 2025
The Third Sunday in Lent
Isaiah 55:1-9
Hear, everyone who thirsts; come to the waters; and you who 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 earnings for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.
This is the third sermon in a series called, “What does the Lord require?” where I’ve been looking through the lectionary readings for those places where God says exactly what he means and wants us to do exactly what he says. As a way of doing that, I’ve been looking for verbs in the imperative mood. Do you know what that is? “The imperative mood is a verb form used to give a command or make a request.”i An example would be, “Sit up straight,” or, “Eat your vegetables.” When I was a boy my mother was often in the imperative mood, but so is the Bible. If you look closely you can find a number of those kinds of verbs in today’s readings.
You might be glad that I didn’t choose to preach from 1 Corinthians 10, where Paul points out the sins of the Israelites during their wilderness wanderings and urges the Corinthians not to do as they did. Listen to the imperatives in this passage:
§ Vs. 7: Do not become idolaters!
§ Vs. 8: Do not engage in sexual immorality!
§ Vs. 9: Do not put Christ to the test!
§ Vs. 10: Do not complain!
And you might also be glad that I didn’t preach from Luke 13, where Jesus mentions two contemporary events in which people died suddenly and unexpectedly and warns his listeners that the same could happen to them if they don’t,
§ Repent!
He says it twice: once in verse 3 and then again in verse 5. As I said, you might be glad that I didn’t choose those passages, even though I would want you to do what they say whether I preach them or not. I mean, this is the Word of God for the people of God, right?
The passage I did choose is Isaiah 55:1-9, which you can find in your pew Bible on page 838. In her comments Meg Jenista says that the role of prophecy is two-fold: first, “the prophets were sent in to afflict the comfortable which—turns out—nobody likes very much.” She says, “Turns out comfortable people don’t like being afflicted. In fact, comfortable people set up systems and processes and whole worlds of shelter and protection from affliction. Calling them back to their primary loyalties is hard work,”ii but that’s what the prophet Isaiah did for 39 chapters, until finally, fed up with their refusal to repent, God sent the Babylonians to humble his people, to conquer them, and carry them into exile. Only then, and only after they have paid the full penalty for their sins, can Isaiah begin to do that second thing prophets do, which is to comfort the afflicted.
Jenista can almost hear the prophet saying, “I know that you are in exile. You’ve left behind your lands. Your families have been separated. You’re under the rule of a foreign power and surrounded by foreign culture, religion, and society. It’s all really and truly afflicting. But it’s not always going to be like this.” At
the beginning of Chapter 40 Isaiah shares the words we have heard so often in Handel’s Messiah: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, and her iniquity is pardoned.”
By the time we get to chapter 55, the prophet is in full comfort-the-afflicted mode. Jenista sums up today’s passage like this:
§ If you are thirsty, drink.
§ If you are a long way off, come.
§ If you have no money, it’s free!
§ If you are disheartened, “your soul will delight.”
§ If you are deflated, “come to me and your soul may live.”
§ If you are groping blind in the darkness, see! Behold!
§ If you are lost, seek.
§ If you are alone, call on God.
She says, “There are 12 imperative verbs in the first seven verses of Isaiah 55. For a people in exile, whose agency is minimized by oppression, whose abilities are curtailed by subjugation, there is good news in this,” she says: “there is something you can do. God’s arms are open wide. Come, come on, come on in. You belong.”iii I could spend the rest of the sermon on any one of those twelve imperatives, but I want to focus on two of them.
The first is in verse 1, where the prophet says, “Hear, everyone who thirsts; come to the waters.” When I read that verse last week I was reminded of my very first backpacking trip with Chuck Treadwell, my brother-in-law, who became my regular backpacking partner. Back then he was a student at the Episcopal seminary in Sewanee, Tennessee, and he invited me to come down and hike
something called “the Savage Gulf,” which sounded irresistible. Just to say that you had hiked the Savage Gulf would have been impressive. So, I went, and we hiked, and neither one of us was very good at it in those days. We weren’t very good at following the map or staying on the trail. We weren’t very good at walking in the woods or sleeping on the ground. But we had both been in the Boy Scouts. We were making it. Until the day we ran out of water.
You would think that in the hills of Tennessee every trail would cross a creek sooner or later, and the one we were on ran right beside a creek. At least that’s what it said on the map. But that part of Tennessee was experiencing a drought, and the creek bed was dry, so dry that we couldn’t find a drop of water in it, not even when we turned over the rocks. And when you can’t find water you begin to get thirsty—really thirsty. We had emptied our canteens hours earlier, and there we were, hiking alongside a dry creek bed, rubbing our fingertips over our cracked lips, feeling our tongues swelling in our mouths.
But then! We began to hear the sound of running water. It was way off in the distance, but you could tell: it wasn’t just a trickle; it was a torrent! And if there’s anything that makes you thirstier than having no water, it’s hearing water and not being able to find it. We picked up our pace along that trail, stopping every hundred yards or so to push through the brush on the creek bank and see if we could see anything. Nothing. It was just as dry as it had been before. But the sound of water was getting louder, stronger, like we were standing under a waterfall, so that it became almost impossible to believe that there was still nothing flowing in the creek bed.
And then we rounded a bend and there it was—a river of cool, clear water, flowing over wet rocks, splashing playfully into deep pools and swirling eddies
before disappearing into a huge opening in the side of the hill, as if an earthquake had swallowed it up. Why hadn’t anybody told us about that? But we didn’t waste time wondering about it; in those days before we learned to purify all our drinking water we simply unclipped our Sierra cups, scooped up some of that water, and drank it down. And can I tell you this? When you are really, truly thirsty there is nothing better in this world than water.
Isaiah says, “Hear, everyone who thirsts; come to the waters.” In the next verse he says, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” And that reminded me of last summer, and those days my family and I spent in that little French village. I think I’ve told you about it before, but it was a medieval village in the South of France, with cobblestone streets so narrow you couldn’t really drive through town. We parked our car outside the city walls and dragged our suitcases to the house we were renting.
There were heavy wooden shutters on the windows to keep out the afternoon sun, but at night we would open the shutters and sleep with the cool, caressing breezes blowing through the house. It was delicious. And the village was so quiet! I mean, you would think that if everyone’s windows were open you might hear someone snoring in the house across the street, but no: those French people are so polite. That first night, worn out from a long day of travel, I slept as I have rarely slept before. But then, around six o’clock in the morning, someone at the little bakery in the center of town began baking bread. I couldn’t hear it. I could smell it: the aroma of baking bread wafting in through the open windows on that gentle breeze. It woke me up, and the longer I lay there the hungrier I got—
not for just anything but for freshly baked bread. I got up and got dressed. I walked the forty steps from my front door to the front door of the boulangerie. I was able to read the sign in French that said, “Open at 7:30,” and I groaned. It was only 6:30. How was I supposed to wait that long? But I did, and when the door opened I was the first one inside, and when I got the baker’s attention I recited the sentence I had been practicing on Google Translate for the last hour: “J’attendais avec l’eau à la bouche.” Which means, “I have been waiting with a watering mouth.”
Some of you have eaten a traditional French baguette, still warm from the oven, slathered with fresh, creamy butter and a big dollop of sweet, strawberry jam. You know what I’m talking about when I say that was the best thing I had ever put in my mouth. It was, as Isaiah might say, the kind of rich food that satisfies. Well, those are just two illustrations to give you a taste of what the prophet is talking about. He is inviting people who have been dying of thirst to come to the waters. He is inviting people who have been starving to death to come and eat. But of course, he is not talking about physical thirst and hunger: he’s talking about the spiritual kind. He hints at it when he says, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your earnings for that which does not satisfy?”
I think most of you know that my daughter Ellie and her husband (along with our two adorable grandchildren) just moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Sydney, Australia, which is on the other side of the world. But in an international move like that one you can’t just load everything onto a truck and drive it to your new home. You have to make decisions about what can go and what you will have to leave behind. And I think Nick and Ellie were amazed by how much they had
been able to accumulate in only thirteen years of marriage and how much of it they no longer really needed. Have you ever had one of those moments? When you look at something and say, “Why did I ever buy this thing? What internal itch was I trying to scratch?” They had lots of moments like that as they were packing up for Australia, but I’ve had them, too. I think we all have.
Isaiah asks, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy?” And then, a few verses later, he offers the remedy: “Seek the Lord while he may be found.” Isaiah argues that God is not only bread and water, good as those things are. God is a rich feast, full of every delicious and satisfying thing you could ever want. So, seek the Lord while he may be found. Let me say that again, especially for those of you who have been part of this DiscipleNOW weekend: “Seek the Lord while he may be found.” It’s an imperative. And it’s an imperative with a warning: if you don’t do it now, while you still can, there will come a time when you can’t, when it will be too late.
So, how do you do it? How do you seek the Lord? I think you probably already know. You come to church. You read the Bible. You write in your journal. You listen for the whispered voice of the Holy Spirit. You fast. You pray. You give alms. You come to Sunday school, to Wednesday night supper, the prayer retreat, Journey to the Cross. You do the Lenten book study. You sing hymns, and psalms, and spiritual songs. You do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. And when you get to the end of all that you sit down with a friend who is also trying to love God and follow Jesus, and you talk till the tears come or until you burst out laughing. You do whatever you can to seek and find the Lord because you believe, in your heart, that the Lord is the one who can satisfy your deepest longings, the one who can fill your life with meaning and purpose, and
not just your garage with more and more unsatisfying stuff.
So, here’s what I want you to do: as you go through the week I want you to imagine that you can hear the sound of running water as Chuck and I heard it when we were on that trail, that you can hear it all around you, and that you will realize that it is not calling you to a rushing river, but to the One from whom all blessings flow. And as you go through the week I want you to imagine that you can smell the aroma of freshly baked bread, as I did when I was in France. I want you to smell it in the air everywhere around you and realize that it is not calling you to the village bakery, but to Jesus: the Bread of Life. I want you to seek the Lord while he may be found, and I want you to find him, because in him, and in no one else, is the life that truly satisfies.
Thanks be to God.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
