The High Way, Isaiah 55:1-9

The High Way

Isaiah 55:1-9

Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins

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. 2Why 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. 3Incline 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. 4See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. 5See, 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. 6Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; 7let 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. 8For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. 9For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

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Several of years ago, a spiritual mentor of mine (his name was Zeke) told me about a dream he’d had the night before. In his dream, he lived in a culture, or perhaps a community, in which no currency was needed. Each person simply took what he or she needed, and similarly contributed all they could toward the collective good.

Can you imagine?

This is the same vision the prophet Isaiah had, written in the section we read together a moment ago. “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.”

Zeke’s dream sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? And maybe a little naive. Because most of us have spent our entire lives in a very different kind of economy — one built on earning, on transaction, on merit. You work, you get paid. You perform well, you get promoted. You follow the rules, you get to belong.

The people Isaiah was addressing knew that economy well. They had been living as exiles in Babylon for decades. Jerusalem had fallen. The Temple was rubble. And if you wanted to survive in Babylon, you learned quickly how Babylon worked: you accumulated what you could, you traded carefully, you earned your place.

But Isaiah turns to them — and turns to us — with a pointed question that cuts right through all of that striving: “Why do you spend your money for what is not bread, and your labor for what does not satisfy?”

It’s a question worth sitting with during these weeks of Lent. What are we spending ourselves on? What are we chasing that keeps leaving us hollow? Most of us know the feeling — the promotion that didn’t fill the void we thought it would, the accumulation of more stuff that somehow left us feeling emptier, the exhausting effort to prove that we belong, to demonstrate that we are worthy of a seat at the table.

Lent, at its best, is an invitation to stop and notice. To name the ways we’ve been running on Babylon’s economy. And to turn — that ancient word, repentance, simply means to turn — toward something different.

And here is what we turn toward. Not a demand. Not a set of requirements. Not a checklist of spiritual accomplishments we must complete before we qualify.

An invitation.

Come. Come to the waters. Come, you who have no money. Come, buy and eat. Come.

Isaiah repeats the word like a vendor crying out in a crowded marketplace, pushing his voice above every other competing sound. And notice who is invited. Not the spiritually accomplished. Not those who have their theology sorted out. Not those who have successfully completed some set of Lenten disciplines and emerged purified and worthy.

Everyone who thirsts. That’s the only qualification. Thirst. Hunger. The simple, honest acknowledgment that you need something you do not have.

I think about that sometimes when we gather around this Table. Because we Christians have a long, unfortunate history in the church of making the Table into a reward — something you earn by believing the right things, or belonging to the right tradition, or having gone through the right ritual. We have turned Christ’s open invitation into an “invitation only” affair.

But listen to the text. The vendor in Isaiah’s marketplace isn’t checking credentials. He’s crying out to anyone who is thirsty. The bread and cup we will share in a few moments are not a prize for spiritual achievement. They are food for the journey — offered to anyone who will receive them, anyone who will simply acknowledge their hunger, acknowledge their thirst.

The only credential required at this Table is hunger. Come as you are. Come with what you have. Just come.

Isaiah does something remarkable in verses three through five. He takes the covenant God made with David — those ancient promises of steadfast love, of blessing, of a people who would draw the nations toward the light — and he extends it. Democratizes it. Declares that those promises are no longer the property of a royal line or a religious institution.

They belong to everyone.

Every exile. Every person at the margins. Every person who assumed the promises were meant for someone else, someone more qualified, someone with better credentials. Isaiah looks them in the eye and says: the everlasting covenant is for you.

This is precisely what the Table has always been meant to embody. In the earliest Christian communities, the shared meal was scandalously countercultural. The enslaved sat beside the free. Women broke bread alongside men. Gentiles and Jews passed the cup to one another. It was, by the standards of the ancient world, an astonishing social disruption. The Table was the place where the covenant got democratized — where the old hierarchies dissolved, at least for a moment, into something that looked like the kingdom of God.

That vision belongs to us still. Every time we gather here, we have the chance to enact it again.

Now we come to the heart of it. The verses that give this sermon its name.

“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.”

We sometimes read those verses as a kind of cosmic put-down — God saying, essentially, you couldn’t possibly understand me. But I don’t think that’s what Isaiah intends. In context, these words come immediately after the call to seek the Lord, immediately after the invitation to return to a God “who will abundantly pardon.” The point isn’t that God is remote and incomprehensible. The point is that God is more generous than you can imagine. More gracious than you would dare to design. Higher, in the sense of more expansive, more merciful, more welcoming than anything our transaction-based economy would produce.

This is the high way. Not a highway in the sense of speed and efficiency — but a way that is simply higher than the roads we’re used to walking.

God’s ways are not a ceiling we cannot reach — they are a horizon more generous than anything we would have designed for ourselves.

There’s a film that inspired this entire Lenten series — “The Way,” with Martin Sheen. Some of us watched it together on Thursday night. Sheen’s character, Tom, is an American doctor who flies to France to claim the body of his son, who died in a storm in the Pyrenees on the first day of walking the Camino de Santiago. In a moment of grief and impulse, Tom decides to walk the Camino himself, carrying his son’s ashes with him on The Way.

Tom begins the journey as a man in control. Competent. Certain. A man who has built his life on knowing exactly what he’s doing and doing it well.

The Camino dismantles him, almost immediately, and with a kind of gentle humor.

Early on, he drops his backpack — containing his son’s ashes and everything he’d packed for the journey — into a fast-moving river. He runs after it, and jumps into the rushing river to grab it. He is able to retrieve it, but everything — everything is soaking wet now, including himself.

Later, a teenage boy steals his pack. When the boy’s father finds out about his son’s theft, he is mortified. As penance, the boy is made to carry Tom’s pack all the way to the edge of town. Tom walks beside his reluctant, sulking pack mule, his indignation slowly giving way to something that looks like grace.

And then there is the tapas incident. Tom, feeling confident from reading his guidebook, orders “tapas” at a Spanish restaurant with the easy authority of someone who has clearly done his research. The server — with no small amount of theatrical correction — explains at considerable length why Tom’s use of the word “tapas” is insulting in this particular region of Spain. Tom receives the education in silence.

Three small humiliations. Three moments when the certainty he carried from home was gently, insistently relieved from him.

This is what the high way does. You cannot walk too far along God’s “High Way” as the person you were when you started. You cannot muscle your way through on competence and confidence. The way is higher than that — and it will keep showing you so, with patience and sometimes with humor, until you learn to walk differently. Until you learn to receive rather than achieve. Until you learn, as Isaiah’s exiles had to learn, that the God who is calling you home is more gracious than any system you have ever navigated.

The high way is the way of abundant pardon. The way of free water and free wine and a table where no one is checking your credentials at the door.

So here we are, on the second Sunday of Lent, somewhere on the road. Maybe you’re here today and you feel parched, dry, desperately thirsty for something, anything, that will satisfy. Maybe you’ve been running on Babylon’s economy for so long you’ve almost forgotten what satisfaction feels like. Maybe you’re here today carrying more than your fair share of grief, or uncertainty, or guilt, or the quiet exhaustion of trying to be enough.

Isaiah’s voice cuts through all of it like a vendor in a marketplace, like a pilgrim who has walked this road before and knows where the water is:

Come. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon the Lord while he is near. Return — not because you have earned the right to return, but because the God who waits is not keeping score. This is a God who will abundantly pardon. A God whose ways are higher — more generous, more gracious, more welcoming — than anything we could construct on our own.

In a few moments, we will gather around this Table. And the Table will say what Isaiah said, what it has always said: the only qualification is hunger. Come as you are. Come with empty hands. Come, because Someone has been calling your name in the marketplace, and the invitation has never been rescinded.

This is the high way. It is higher than anything we would have designed.

And today, as always, the invitation stands: Come.