A sermon on Isaiah 55:1-9 by Nathan Nettleton

Many of us would have been appalled this week by the statements that came from the parliamentary opposition’s immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, when he called for special “behaviour protocols” for asylum seekers and community notifications of their whereabouts. He did this after an asylum seeker was charged with an assault in Sydney, and the implication of his demand was that asylum seekers pose a greater risk to public safety than anybody else, despite the fact that there is no evidence at all to support such a view. And even if there was such evidence, his demand is still ludicrous. We already have behaviour protocols. They apply to everyone. Assault is already illegal, for everyone. The only purpose his comments served was to vilify one small sector of our society and provoke further suspicion and hostility towards them, which presumably he is doing in the hope of attracting a few extra votes from a climate of fear.

What an unpleasant contrast Scott Morrison’s comments make to the spirit of the immigrant-welcoming inscription on New York’s Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

And that inscription reminds me of the words of God in the opening verse of tonight’s reading from the prophet Isaiah:

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.

The context of those words is not specifically about immigration and asylum seeking, although a couple of verses later in our reading, it does say “nations that do not know you shall run to you”. But it is the spirit of the words, rather than their specific application, that seems so similar to me. You see, what underpins the fear-filled bile being peddled by Scott Morrison is a fundamentally different view of the world: a view that is convinced that everything that matters in the world is in scarce supply and that therefore if we let anybody else get a share, we will end up without enough ourselves. This view of the world sets us in competition with one another, and the more deeply we feel the scarcity and the consequent threat, the more we will sense that that competition really is a matter of life or death. We begin to imagine that the whole world is like one of those scenes of the arrival of a food aid truck in a place badly stricken by famine where people fight and scrap and climb over one another in their desperation to secure for themselves a share of the scarce nourishment. But over and over the Bible tells us that God does not share this view of the world. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord, nor are your ways my ways.” God created this world and filled it with an abundance of every good thing, and story after story gives us a vision of this abundance as God sees it. The stories of Jesus feeding the crowds when there seemed to be just a few loaves and fish to start with, and there are basketfuls left over, are the classic examples of this message. When everyone is perceiving only scarcity, Jesus sees abundance and invites us to see it and partake of it and enjoy it.

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.

The truth is that we don’t live in a world of genuine scarcity. Even now that the world’s human population has gone over the six billion mark, the planet still produces more than enough food to feed everyone abundantly. Certainly there are parts of the world that have some serious scarcities, but modern transportation means that we have the means to distribute the food if we have the will to do so. But in a competitive user-pays world, the will to do so is the one genuine scarcity. And why? Well, largely because a widespread perception of scarcity, genuine or not, has become necessary to the whole way the world’s economic system works. Some economists admit that the basic principles of capitalism are impossible to explain unless a scarcity of resources is taken for granted as one of the starting assumptions. And so much of the time, a perception of scarcity is being manufactured, because the economy needs people to be afraid of missing out in order for them to put a value on acquiring things. And if everybody has an abundance of something, then a new version comes out and appetites are fanned and we are persuaded that we need to get it now “while stocks last”. Have you noticed that in the last couple of years, every time there is a hard rubbish collection, the nature strips are full of televisions sets, most of which still work perfectly well. There was an abundance of televisions, but we all suddenly needed a big flat screen one, because what if everybody else had one, and we missed out? And there is no end to the cycle because the happiness and fulfilment promised with every purchase always turns out to be a mirage, and there is immediately something else on the horizon that we can’t be truly content until we have acquired. You’d think Isaiah was writing a column in a modern newspaper when he says, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” Except that if he kept saying things like that, today’s billionaire media barons wouldn’t let him write in their newspapers.

All of this is a profoundly spiritual problem, not just a problem confined to economic culture. Once our worldview is shaped by an assumption of scarcity, we bring that assumption to our relationships with ourselves, with one another, and with God. We imagine that “resources” like love, and mercy, and acceptance, and contentment are also limited commodities, and that we have to strive for them, and defend them, and compete for them, and make sure that others are not getting our share. We have been immunised against recognising and understanding the biblical images of God pouring out blessings in generous abundance, “in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,” (Luke 6:38) by a world that believes that the ultimate truth is that there is no such things a free lunch.

But “my thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord, nor are your ways my ways,” and the God made known to us in Jesus does not seem to believe that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

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.

One of the reasons we are so scandalised by the extravagant mercy that Jesus spoke of and lavished on us is that it is offered to everyone else too, including people who clearly don’t deserve it. And the delicious irony of that feeling is that it exposes our blind arrogance in thinking that we do deserve it, or that at least we were more deserving of it than “those” people, and then Jesus turns around, both grieved and amused by our conceit, and goes right on forgiving us even for our vanity and greed and hard-heartedness. For there is no limit to his capacity for mercy, but still we rebel, because we have been well taught in the ways of most valuing that which not everyone can yet attain. We desperately want what we see other people desiring, and we crave to be among the chosen few who are most envied for already having what everyone most values but few can yet obtain. If God’s love and mercy and acceptance are abundantly available to even the least deserving, what value can we put on them. Our whole engagement with the divine “economy” crumbles into confusion.

All of this is very bad news, so long as our concept of winning means rising above others and seeing them lose. It is very bad news for those of us who are proud of having managed to prove ourselves worthy by our superior virtue or superior understanding or superior deeds or accomplishments, and who have been confidently anticipating our superior rewards accordingly. It’s not that these things are not valued in God’s economy. God delights greatly in whatever good and wonderful things we achieve. Its just that God’s love and delight and generous blessings are lavished so richly on us already, that more of them will not set us above anybody else. There is no scarcity, and God’s generosity is not carefully conserved and measured out in merit-based handfuls. But all of this is only bad news if you are determinedly clinging to an economic view of the world where you gain the most by proving yourself better than others. If you’ve tried that and lost, or you’ve done well in that and realised that the paradise at the top of the ladder is only a mirage and the winners are just as restlessly unsatisfied as the losers, then this is very very good news. For Jesus invites us into a whole new world of extravagant abundance where we can delight both in our own richness and in the richness of our neighbour. It is not yet a world where nothing goes wrong. As our gospel reading reminded us, accidents and atrocities still happen, but these are not part of an economy of punishments for those who deserve them. In this new world, those of us who most deserve to be punished will be those who are most surprised by the joy of extravagant mercy and love. It is all laid out before you and your place is booked. It all begins right here at this table, where a single loaf of bread and a single bottle of wine are blessed and offered to us by our risen Lord and are discovered to be not signs of scarcity at all, but signs of the generous fulfilment of our deepest hungers and hopes.

Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, receive without money and without price,
bread and wine and milk
and love and mercy and acceptance and asylum and welcome
in generous abundance,
pressed down, shaken together, running over,
more than enough for all the world to share.