Sunday, March 3, 2013: Isaiah 55:1-9; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

It seems counterintuitive, but Lent is all about abundance. When we focus on a time of renunciation and discipline, these are not ends in themselves, but the conditions necessary for the enrichment of our imagination.

Almost nothing is more difficult for us to imagine than something coming from nothing. Yet that is the signature of the presence of God, the Creator of all things. For God it is no problem to create something out of nothing. For God, scarcity, which is easier for us to imagine than abundance, is absurd. God’s self-depiction through the prophet Isaiah confounds any expectation of calculus: come, buy food, eat, get wine and drink, but without money or price. How on earth can one buy without money or price? God is desperate to show us a generosity that makes a mockery of our smallness of mind and our conviction of the difficulty of getting things that we want and need.

When we recall Isaiah’s phrase about God’s ways not being our ways and God’s thoughts not our thoughts, it is usually to conjure up bafflement at a mystifying distance. This is exactly the reverse of what Isaiah says. What is it that is so different about God’s ways? God’s ways are hugely abundant, generous and for us, while wickedness and a fear of our imaginations continuously hold us back. It is difficult for us to imagine that God is near us and has a plan to glorify us. It is easy to be moralistic about “ways of wickedness” and “thoughts of unrighteousness”; it is much harder for us to glimpse that “thoughts of righteousness” rest on a huge abundance of generosity and mercy, and that our tendency to close down frontiers and create security by contrasting ourselves with feared or impure “others” is a well-trodden path of wickedness that we leave only by daring to be open to what is new.