Sermon: Sun 3 March, Communion...'Come, eat, drink, and live'

READINGS: Isaiah 55:1-5; John 7:31-44;  John 7:45-52

SERMON
Let’s pray: May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of all our hearts
be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer, amen.

It’s early morning.
A maid enters a room quietly, opens the French windows,
and stops briefly at the bed in which a young boy sleeps soundly.
Nodding to herself, she leaves, closing the door behind her.
Birdsong fills the room.
A lone, rather plaintive, voice drifts up from the street below
competing with the birds:
‘Who will buy my sweet red roses...?’
The boy stirs, gets up, goes to the window steps out on to the balcony:
we see a beautiful Georgian crescent with rows of white-painted houses
encircling a lush green, tree-filled park,
and, in-between, a road with a single figure,
carrying a basket filled with red, red roses – the singer.
As she continues to sing, others arrive on the street:
milk vendors,
fruit sellers,
knife grinders...
all singing,
all asking:
‘who will buy?’
‘who will buy?’

The boy responds to the sight –
his whole life has just changed:
rescued from the streets,
he finds himself living with kindly folk in comfortable surroundings.
As he looks at the various street vendors
he wants something that none of them are selling –
something money can’t buy,
and, wondering at his change of fortune,
longing not to lose this moment, he sings:
‘who will buy...
this wonderful morning –
such a sight, I never did see:
who will tie 
it up with a ribbon
and put it in a box for me?’

And, can anyone recognise the story and the film – that I’m talking about?
...'Oliver’
Here’s a story of a young boy who, right from his birth discovers life is hard,
that people can be cruel –
and yet, for all that is thrown at him, he somehow manages to retain a sweet nature.
Very early on, in the movie version, we find Oliver in the orphanage:
it’s meal-time and the children barely subsist on a meagre bowl of gruel.
In daring to come to the table and ask for more, he’s punished,
and later sold into an apprenticeship – child slavery.
For Oliver, the pangs of hunger bite deep –
he wants more –
more bread, for sure –
but, more from life, as we see later when he sings:
‘who will buy this wonderful morning.’
He’s found a small moment of grace and peace in his life and he’d like it to last forever.

Over the last several weeks, our readings from John
have focused in upon who Jesus is,
and, how people have responded to him.
We’ve seen him feed a multitude with bread and fish –
we’ve heard him tell his followers that he, himself, is the bread of life.
Only he will truly satisfy the hunger of heart and soul.
He invites us to come:
to feast upon the bread of life –
and here in our passage from John,
to drink of the living water.

It’s also an invitation that God extends to the people of Israel in our passage from Isaiah:
‘Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters...
Come, buy wine and milk without money,
and without cost.’
Here we also find the language of that which does, and does not satisfy:
don’t waste time, money, your life...on the things that don’t satisfy –
God urges his people.
Choose the good stuff – it’s the stuff that will delight the soul.
And we find that it’s listening to God that gives life.

The prophet is giving a message to a broken and battered people –
who have lived through war,
who have lived as captives,
who have lived in the shadows...
better, almost, to say:
people who have half-lived.
These are folk in need of a good word,
in need of good news,
in need... of rescue;
people worn down by hard circumstances
longing for –
hungering and thirsting for –
even just a small moment of grace and peace.
And the God who calls them his people,
calls to them:
‘Come, eat, drink, and live.’
This is the God who will make a new covenant with them:
a new way of living,
a new way forward in the relationship between God and human:
a covenant, a promise, of unfailing kindness.
God has seen their suffering,
God has heard their cries,
God has continued loving them even when they turned their eyes away from him...
‘Listen to me, and eat what is good,’ says God.
God invites his people to the feast
and to feast on life.
God also invites us, his people, to look beyond the immediate:
from those things promoted to provide instant gratification,
to that which may take longer –
because we may need to dig a little deeper,
ask the harder questions of God and ourselves...
we may be tempted to go for the quick fix,
but to do so will only find us dissatisfied a little further on.

Real listening – deep listening – is hard.
So often, in conversation, how many of us are only half listening,
because we’re thinking about what we’re going to say when the other has stopped?
In the invitation to listen to God, we can find ourselves encountering hard work:
so many distractions,
so many shiny things...
but in the work of deep listening,
we also find the other part of the invitation:
the good things to eat that do last, that do satisfy,
that give us not just glimpses of grace,
but a life filled with God’s grace and peace.

God invites his people to come.
Jesus continues that invitation:
to come to the table,
to come and feast upon life,
to come and be truly satisfied
to sate your hunger and slate your thirst.
But it doesn’t end there:
as God’s people,
as Jesus’ followers,
we’re called to extend the invitation to others -
to come, to be welcome, to feast on things that money just can’t buy;
to discover moments of grace and peace that can’t be bought because they’re freely given.
The gift that God offers to us
becomes the gift we can offer to others.

Shortly, we’ll be sharing in the feast:
the bread and wine of communion.
In this meal, with this food and drink,
we’re given a foretaste of heaven,
a foretaste of the new creation,
a reminder of who we are,
and whose we are,
and that in God, we have all we need...
So: ‘Come, eat, drink, and live.’ Amen.