Reality and Imagination: Isaiah 55:1-9
Third Sunday of Lent
All of you who are thirsty, come to the water!
Whoever has no money, come, buy food and eat!
Without money, at no cost, buy wine and milk!
2 Why spend money for what isn’t food,
and your earnings for what doesn’t satisfy?
Listen carefully to me and eat what is good;
enjoy the richest of feasts.
3 Listen and come to me;
listen, and you will live.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
my faithful loyalty to David.
4 Look, I made him a witness to the peoples,
a prince and commander of peoples.
5 Look, you will call a nation you don’t know,
a nation you don’t know will run to you
because of the Lord your God,
the holy one of Israel, who has glorified you.
6 Seek
the Lord when he can still be found;
call him while he is yet near.
7 Let the wicked abandon their ways
and the sinful their schemes.
Let them return to the Lord so that he may have mercy on them,
to our God, because he is generous with forgiveness.
8 My plans aren’t your plans,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
9 Just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways,
and my plans than your plans. (CEB)
One
of my friend Barry’s absolute favorite books is The Velveteen Rabbit by
Margery Williams. I didn’t grow up with
the book; I had a cartoon version on VHS paired with Rikki Tikki Tavi,
which I remembered much better because the snake was dramatic. When I told Barry early in our friendship
that I had never read the book—didn’t even know there was one, really—he
essentially assigned me the reading of it, which tells you what you need to
know about our friendship. It was sweet,
but I didn’t get. And I’ve continued not
to get it even though I’ve read it twice more, still looking for why it means
so much to my friend and so many others.
Maybe one day it will click, I imagine.
The
story, if you don’t know it, is about a stuffed toy rabbit given to a boy that
eventually becomes that boy’s favorite toy with whom he has all his adventures. I who grew up in the Toy Story generation
completely understand a tale of a toy that means everything and, like in Toy
Story—although this book predates Pixar’s film by a solid seventy years—the
end of the relationship is part of the tale.
The boy contracts scarlet fever, meaning all his toys have to be burned
to get rid of the contagion, including the rabbit he loved so dearly. The beloved and now-scruffy stuffed animal is
sure to be destroyed but through the enchantments of the Nursery Magic Fairy,
the velveteen rabbit gets to escape that fate and goes to the forest where he
is transformed into a real bunny who, later, goes and checks on the little boy
as he heals.
The
quotes that so many who love this story return to have to do with that idea of
what a “real” bunny is. One of the
important conversations comes rather early in the tale when the rabbit is
feeling very self-conscious because he’s made of cloth and sawdust and doesn’t
even have mechanical parts, which were just coming into vogue in the 20s, and
someone has taunted him that he isn’t “real.” A much older toy in the nursery,
the Skin Horse, tells the rabbit, “Real isn’t how you are made. It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time,
not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”[1] He talks about how it doesn’t matter if all
your fur is rubbed off and you look awful and your stuffing is falling out
because being loved, truly loved, is what’s needed.
I
don’t get this, and that’s maybe a different sermon and certainly yet another
conversation with my friend, but what I do remember from first reading this
story is being drawn to the scene of grief as the rabbit sits in a sack in the
rain in an empty courtyard, awaiting his fate the next morning of being burned
with all the other infected toys. My
heart ached with this rabbit who had been through so much with the little boy
only for the adults to put him out with the trash. “Of what use was it,” the rabbit asks in the
wet and the dark, “to be loved and to lose one’s beauty and become Real if it
all ended like this?”[2]
We
come in our Lenten series to another in-between space, between reality and
imagination. Societally, we grownups
tell each other either that imagination is a child’s realm or that we can only
use it when it’s productive—imagine a new ad campaign or job restructuring or
layout for the living room. We are sold
the concept of imagination with a slight hint of grief that of course this
isn’t real, that we will have to stop imagining eventually. Reality is harsh, after all, didn’t anyone
tell you? Grownups need to put away our
toys and our childishness, our imagination that clouds our ability to see
what’s real.
“All
of you who are thirsty, come to the water!”
The prophet writing in the three-part collection we call Isaiah presents
to the Israelites a vision of what could be, an imagined future of plenty and
security; you can eat without money, drink without hesitation. The Israelites who were listening, though,
would certainly be skeptical of such imaginary concepts; they were at least two
generations deep in the Babylonian exile, long enough to start forgetting what
it was like to live in a way that wasn’t under the heel of yet another empire,
separate from the people around them for reasons that seemed sillier and
sillier as time went on. Lutheran pastor
Rick Fry writes, “The people were living in exile after having experienced the
trauma and humiliation of being conquered by the Babylonians. The people’s whole theological worldview had
collapsed. Their self-understanding as
God’s beloved and chosen people was throw[n] radically into question through
the trauma they experienced. But now
they were getting ready to go back and resettle their destroyed homeland. It would be like a second exodus.”[3]
We
21st century Americans have no idea what it means to be a conquered
people, especially those of us who are white.
The narrative of these United States is that we are the
conquerors, the ones of whom others beg mercy or grace. So Isaiah’s text is not for many of us in a
literal sense; we cannot understand that lens of grief and loss for a broken
homeland, that notion of not only one exodus but two. Yet Scripture is always multi-layered, always
inviting us to ponder again what we can learn. We may not know the pain and uncertainty of a
destroyed and left-behind homeland, but surely we know that in-between space between
reality and imagination, between what is and what could be. Surely we, too, want to know what it means to
be Real, and whether or not it’s worth the effort.
“Listen
carefully to me,” says the prophet.
Not
only says but commands. This text
is full of imperatives: come, buy, eat, listen, look, seek. Professor Samuel Giere writes that “the
vision set out here is not optional…It is Yhwh’s reality into which the
hearer is invited. There is not a truly
viable alternative.”[4]
What has been lost will be restored, what is empty shall be filled, and God’s
presence will infuse all.
That
idea of presence is important here because there’s language of covenant; “I
will make an everlasting covenant with you, / my faithful loyalty to David. /
Look, I made him a witness to the peoples, / a prince and commander of peoples.
/ Look, you will call a nation you don’t know”.
Promises, promises; the people of Israel have heard visions of plenty
before, have heard of the covenant of David, but here they are, conquered and broken. What good is a new covenant when the last one
worked out so poorly? Why bother
imagining something new when reality is so ready to crush those dreams?
Professor
W. Dennis Tucker, Jr. writes that, “In the ancient world, when a new king would
assume the throne he would often issue a mišarum edict, declaring a
release from all debts. As part of this edict, the king would also call for a
great banquet to be enjoyed by the people of that kingdom. Both events, the
edict and the banquet, signaled a new day under a new king. The opening lines
of chapter 55 remind the hearer of such a banquet and more importantly, the
signaling of a new day.”[5] The commentary of the Jewish Study Bible
adds, “Deutero-Isaiah transforms the older Davidic covenant by democratizing it…The
fact that foreigners will want to join into the covenant community provides a
sense of relief to the community…far from being eternally downtrodden and
despised, the community of Israel and its teachings are sufficiently appealing
to attract converts.”[6]
Promises,
promises; lovely that there’s this new relationship, this new covenant, this
whole idea of what will come, but what’s the catch? There’s always a catch. This is what separates daydreams from harsh
reality, after all.
It’s
a cynical view, but it’s not totally wrong; taking hope and giving it skin
always requires something, and it is up to us whether we’re willing to give
that. Even the Skin Horse’s explanation
of becoming Real is edged with that realization when the rabbit asks, “Does it
hurt, becoming Real?”
“‘Sometimes,’
said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t
mind being hurt.’”[7]
This is not
to say that I encourage people into suffering for its own sake; again,
different conversation about pain as a desired thing, but here the cost of
pushing dreams into reality is giving up all the ways we’ve tried to force
reality into being more imaginative. The
prophet names spending money for things that don’t satisfy, chasing actions
that bend away from God, demanding that God match our expectations instead of
stretching ourselves to meet God’s. He tells
the Israelites that they do not get all the answers but they will need to
embrace the change.
I
have learned in this profession that faith, on occasion, absolutely sucks. My mother can chastise me for the language
there all she likes, but it does because I really want to understand
things. I want to know how we’re going
to sustain people eating without money, or how the covenant is going to work
when it’s with an entire people instead of a single king, or what God’s plans
are when reality is harsh and yet there are all these verses about trust. I want to know how to deal with the grief of
sitting in the rain in an empty courtyard asking whether being Real is worth
just how much it sucks to be able to imagine a just world all but have this one
instead.
Maybe
that’s why I have to keep reading The Velveteen Rabbit over and over,
and Isaiah over and over, and the gospels over and over: I have to re-learn
that being Real is not about my understanding but about my recognizing that it
is all rooted in and driven by love.
This feels like the sappiest, worst platitude, but when Isaiah says that
God’s ways are higher than my ways, that entering covenant will require change,
that trust is difficult and that’s just true without any larger caveat, it is
all built on the foundation that God loved and loves God’s people so much that
God did not leave them in exile, does not leave us to the harsh grasp of our
unjust reality. Professor Giere writes,
“God’s outrageous abundance, the center of the everlasting covenant, spills out
of any boundary that anyone might place upon it” and that feels Real, Real with
a capital R because love beats in the heart of that reality where no one is
sent away empty, where no one is sent away at all.[8] This is the kind of love that moves nations
back to trusting a God they thought had forsaken them; this is the kind of love
that gives a people the courage to rebuild their home; this is the kind of love
that gives us strength to get up and insist again that injustice is not the
final word; this is the kind of love that doesn’t fit on a wall plaque but digs
grimy fingers into the ground in a windstorm and holds on; this the kind of
love that refuses to be cute and chooses to be gut-wrenchingly real; this is
the kind of love that makes it worth sitting in a courtyard with your fur all
rubbed off, knowing that becoming a breathing bunny will never make you a more
real rabbit than the adventures you went on with the one who loved you.
The
verses right after today’s pericope are actually some of my favorites in Isaiah:
“Just as the rain and the snow come down from the sky / and don’t return there
without watering the earth, / making it conceive and yield plants / and
providing seed to the sower and food to the eater; / so is my word that comes
from my mouth; / it does not return to me empty.”[9] Promises, promises; but is not idle
imagination that God runs on. It’s
reality. It’s possibility. It’s the recognition of much, much bigger
plans, much different ways, and hope so strong it changes the world. May we be willing to do the work of
partnering to make it so. Amen.
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