Are You Thirsty?

Hi, I know it is ages since I wrote anything - a full explanation will come soon...

But for now, here is the sermon I am about to preach tomorrow.

Are You Thirsty?

Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63

Good morning, I know you may have been expecting Leslie up here this morning, but she was so sick on Friday we decided I would be here instead. Maybe when she is feeling up to it she can write her sermon and email it out to us, because when I saw the texts she had for today I was really excited – what a perfect choice for Lent.

Isaiah starts with a question

Is anyone thirsty?

Have you ever been really thirsty? I mean dehydrated, mouth parched Thirsty?

Do you remember what it was like? Did you feel like the only thing that kept coming up was a need for a long cold glass of water, Ok maybe it was a beer or lemonade; maybe a tea or coffee? Something to quench that thirst.

That’s the thing when we are really thirsty our body & mind will do whatever it takes to get us to go & get a drink. It becomes an obsession if you are thirsty and there’s nowhere to get a drink!

The people around at the time of Isaiah and David knew this. David wrote this Psalm when he was out in the wilderness where there isn’t much fresh water to be found. Here he is describing his longing for God as being like his longing for a long cold drink of water in a dry and parched land.

Have you ever longed for God with such intensity?

It is a strange place to be in. Deeply uncomfortable, yet somehow it’s the best place because as you cry out, deep inside you know that God will come satisfy. But the waiting is excruciating. We feel like we will die.

Actually without satisfying our thirst we will die.

The odd thing is when we are dehydrated at first we long for water, for a nourishing drink; but if we go too long we begin to shut down, to not feel thirsty and that when the real danger is present.

Some years ago my friend Denise & I decided to go to Austria for a holiday and the cheapest way was to go on a bus. We had been on the ferry and then on the roads for hours. We were travelling over night & I kept drinking water and eating snacks between dozing. I would ask Denise if she wanted something but she didn’t. By about 5.30 am we were in Germany and she was acting very strange & I could see she was heading for comatose. We had to call an ambulance and she was admitted to hospital. I spent the next 4 or 5 days with her & slept in the corridor of the unit while she was hooked up to drips and having injections every 4 hours. We were flown back to England and she was admitted to hospital & she spent another 10 days there and then 3 weeks with me while she was in recovery. I found out later, she had not drunk much the day before we left, she was worried we would not stop when she needed a bathroom break, she had drunk almost nothing on the trip to the ferry, nothing on the ferry because she felt sea sick and then nothing on the overnight bus trip. Her dehydration nearly wrecked her kidneys, put her into a mental breakdown and almost killed her all because she stopped drinking & then stopped feeling thirsty.

Just as a body can exist without food for long periods of time so our soul can exist without many things, but a body without water will die and a soul without God will die.

So are you thirsty?

Slide 2

When we are out somewhere and we’re thirsty we go buy a bottle of water or go to a cafe; the same was true in Isaiah’s time, there were water vendors; guys with big clay jugs of water or skins filled with water slung over their donkeys backs. I have no idea what they charged for a cup of water, but you’d be willing to pay if you were out in the heat of the sun and knew the only other option was to go to the well and haul up the water yourself.

But Isaiah says this water, the drink he’s talking about is free! Come and drink even if you have no money. That means it’s available to anyone. That’s good news! But it gets better, he says there’s a choice including wine and milk and it’s free too!

Ok, so my imagination got going on this. Water – that is so we can live, it’s essential, because can’t live without it. The milk is nourishment – ok that’s a hard one for me as a vegan who’s allergic to milk – but I can still go with the concept of nourishment preferably from almond milk; but what about the wine? Well it certainly makes you happy & feel good if you don’t have too much, and these days they say red wine is full of antioxidants so sort of good for you too in small amounts & certainly in Isaiah’s time it was a drink that was not going to go off in the heat and was culturally acceptable as something to have with a meal. So water, milk and wine, all good! And whatever you choose it is free! Water, milk, wine – Come & get it!

So what I saw here is God offers us a drink for our soul that will give us life, will nourish us, make us happy and keep us healthy!

Wow! That’s worth being thirsty for.

What I also saw is that when God says in verses 8 & 9 of our Isaiah reading that his thoughts and ways are higher, way beyond ours, it means we so often limit our view of God, of what he can do, of who he is, what he will give us. We limit the possibilities he has for us.

I wonder have we longed for a glass of God given life water and made do with murky water from the creek?

Have we desired the wine of the Spirit to make our hearts glad and yet been too scared to take a sip in case we get drunk and lose control?

Have we needed the nourishment of God’s milk but been afraid to come and ask, embarrassed by being so needy, or fearful of such intimacy?

We are in a time of Lent, a time of reflection, of confessing our limits, a time of preparing ourselves for God to do something new, to reveal more of himself to us. This is a time of thirst, a time of recognising how dehydrated we have become, how much we need his living water.

We are fortunate that during Lent we have mini Easters every Sunday, where we can come and remember that our Messiah has already come. Where we can come to the table and be nourished by the bread of his body and the wine of his blood. Where our thirsty souls can be refreshed and our hearts uplifted and our bodies nourished.

We do not provide the drink, he does. We do not pay for it; it is his free gift. All we do is come and drink. We come and choose to drink our fill of what he offers.

We can say, today Lord I will have the living water, to refresh me, to give me life, abundant life.

Today I will have the wine of your Spirit to be made glad and filled with joy and have my inhibitions swept away so I may be my true self made in your image.

Today I come as a child, and drink of the nourishing milk of your comforting presence, so that your peace will fill me and I will grow.

Today I come to taste and see that the Lord is good.

I come weary, parched, dehydrated, but I know I will leave quenched and nourished; filled and satisfied.

Today, right now will you come and drink?

Are you thirsty?

Take a moment to bring that thirst to God

Let us come to the table with open mouths and glad hearts that there is food and drink here for us.