Lent 3
Preparation
Please begin by reading
Isaiah 55:1-9 in your Bible.
If you do not have one at hand, we have provided that text for you at the end of
this reflection.
Reflection--The
Divine Invitation
At the heart of today’s text is God’s call for those who have turned away
from God to return to God, assured that God’s pardon is freely available.
Our text comes from Second Isaiah. The time is just
before the end of the Babylonian Exile. Soon the people of Israel would be able
to return home from captivity. God's word, spoken through the prophet, is
a call for hope and trust and a promise of salvation to the hearers.
The text opens with an invitation to join God’s banquet and
receive the gracious gifts God offers. The people are to find true life by
paying close attention to God’s word and presence in their lives as opposed to
seeking sustenance elsewhere.
The people of God are reminded that God’s gracious invitation
is grounded in the Davidic covenant. Throughout this covenant, the people of
Israel and David, her leader, had seen how the one who returns to God in
repentance receives mercy.
The section for today’s reading closes with a reminder that
God’s ways are far above human ways and human understanding.
Throughout Lent, an annual journey of repentance, we
encounter a God radically committed to rescuing us, committed to saving us.
Throughout our journey of repentance, we encounter a God who comes to us to draw
us close, offering intimacy, healing mercy and boundless and loving forgiveness.
God offers an invitation to God's prodigal children to enjoy
a life of extravagant spiritual fullness instead of eking out a subsistence
living in a spiritual desert. This invitation demonstrates the essence of
the love and forgiveness God constantly offers to humanity. God chooses to love
as well as be loved by humanity, and so God without fail offers love and mercy
again and again.
Lent becomes a time of renewal, a time where our life can
erupt from the wasteland we have made of it and blossom as new growth in Spring.
We may stumble and fall, caught in the morass of our own making, yet in the
midst of it all, God chooses to love us, to affirm through an everlasting
covenant that we are worthy.
Truly, God’s ways are not our ways. We cannot fully
comprehend how time after time, despite the many ways we fall short and cause
God to weep, God still forgives and calls us to return. God’s love will
not falter, it is a love that won’t let go. Despite what may befall us, it
is a love that cannot be torn away from us. Even death cannot defeat God’s love.
It gives us hope in the midst of total and complete hopelessness.
God keeps covenant with God’s children today just as God kept
covenant with David and the Israelites. God freely forgives the one who returns
seeking forgiveness, the one who is genuinely repentant.
This Lenten season is designed to be a time for us to review our
lives and find those areas where we need to confess that we have not followed
God's will for our lives and surrender them to God, knowing that God’s pardon is
freely available.
revclay
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Isaiah 55:1-9
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 food.
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.
See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and
commander for the peoples.
See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations
that do not know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy
One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he
is near ; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts;
let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for
he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my
ways, says the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. [NRSV]