Sermon Notes — September 7, 2025
Isaiah 55:1-5
“Feast Without Price”
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
September 7, 2025
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word
Invitation
I remember when my kids were young and I felt like invitations to birthday parties were just constant. In a certain season of our lives it's the wedding invitations that come to the mailbox in rapid succession. Later, we start to get invitations to “milestone birthday” parties – in fact, I think the most recent invitation I received was an invitation to my uncle’s 80th birthday party.
Call it an occupational hazard, but usually when I hear the word “invitation” I think of it in the context of worship. At the end of every worship service one of your pastors usually offers an invitation – an invitation to the rail to pray, an invitation to join the church, or to respond in some other way to what you have experienced in the service.
Today’s text is an invitation. Hey! Come and eat! Scholars tell us that this particular invitation is written to sound like we’re being summoned by a Middle Eastern market vendor who wants us to buy what he’s selling. Hey! Come here and look at what I have for you!
But there’s a big difference between the summons of a street vendor and this invitation from God. The street vendor wants us to use the money we have in our wallets to buy something from him. But God’s invitation doesn’t require us to bring anything with us. We just have to be willing to come to receive.
Will you pray with me and for me?
A few weeks ago Terry lamented the difficulty of preaching from the Old Testament. The Hebrew scriptures take up nearly ⅔ of our bibles and part of the complexity of preaching from them is figuring out how each book is connected to all the others. If we want to fully appreciate the stories then we need to know something about their context, about where they fit into the big picture. Well, as difficult as it is to preach from the history books in the Old Testament – like the books of First and Second Kings – it’s even more difficult to preach from the prophetic books in the Old Testament, like Isaiah. So I’m going to give you the quick version of how we got to the scripture that Bethany read for us.
Isaiah was a prophet to the people of the Kingdom of Judah.
Here’s a map to help you picture where the Kingdom of Judah was located. It’s the area in gold. The city of Jerusalem was its capital. In the year 587 BC the Babylonian army entered the city of Jerusalem and destroyed it completely. The temple was reduced to rubble. The Babylonians then took the best and the brightest of the people living in the Kingdom of Judah and brought them back to Babylon. Jeremiah 52 tells us that those who were left behind in the Kingdom of Judah were the poorest of the poor, and they were left behind to tend the land, living off of whatever they could grow.
Here’s a map of the trip from Jerusalem to Babylon, which would have taken about four months.
It would only make sense that the people taken back to Babylon – the exiles, we’ll call them – were utterly disoriented. They were forced to live in a different culture with different customs and different traditions. Not only that, but surely they were asking themselves and each other, “Where is God in all of this?” Why would God let our temple – God’s home – be destroyed? Why would God let us be taken in captivity to a foreign land where we can’t worship him? Doesn’t God care about us anymore? Are the Babylonian gods more powerful than our God?
But after the initial disorientation of living in a foreign land with foreign gods, these best and brightest probably had an OK life in Babylon. The Babylonians let them do business, and they had plenty of opportunity for success and prosperity.
In the year 540 BC King Cyrus of Persia defeated the Babylonians, and that meant that the exiles were now under the rule of the Persians. And we know from the Book of Ezra that God put it in King Cyrus’s heart to let the exiles return home to Jerusalem. And Cyrus was all for it. He even offered them resources to help them rebuild their temple in Jerusalem that the Babylonians had destroyed.
And that might have been good news, except, remember, many of these exiles had created a pretty sweet life in Babylon, minus the fact that there was no temple for worshiping God. Going back to Jerusalem would mean starting from scratch. Again. When they left Jerusalem, the city was in ruins and the people who stayed probably didn’t do anything more than tend the land. If the exiles returned, they would have to rebuild their homes, their business, their entire lives.
And so God gives them this invitation.
Come and get water if you’re thirsty. And if you have nothing to buy it with, come and eat anyway! Don’t waste your money and your time with the things that won’t satisfy you. Come to me and you will receive what brings you joy and delight!
That’s my paraphrase.
But didn’t we just say that the exiles had everything that they needed in Babylon? So why is God speaking to them like they don’t have everything they already need, like they don’t have money to buy whatever they want?
Because what God is offering them, money can’t buy.
What God is offering them is a relationship and a mission.
An everlasting covenant, is what God offers them – a covenant that continues the relationship that God established with their ancestor, King David.
And when they choose to enter into the relationship – that covenant – they will be a light to the world and a witness to God’s power and God’s righteousness.
That, God tells them, is what will truly satisfy them. Yes, you’ve had quite a time in Babylon. You’ve made the best of it. You’ve prospered. You’ve built a life for yourself in Babylon. But that life will ultimately leave you feeling empty. While you may get good food and the best wine, and while your stomachs may be full and your bank accounts overflowing, none of that will ever satisfy you. You will always want more. So come, God says, and have a relationship with me, do the work that I have for you, and you will see that I can give you a life that is so much more abundant than the life you can make for yourself.
And best of all?
It’s free.
It costs nothing.
Let’s think about “free” for a minute. I don’t know if it’s a thing around here, but in the communities where I lived in West Tennessee, we loved a good porch pickup. Redecorating your house and need to get rid of things but didn’t want to go through the trouble of selling them? Porch pick up. Got a bunch of kids’ clothes that don’t fit your kids anymore but don’t want to take them any further than your front door? Porch pickup.
Now listen, I love a good porch pickup. You can get some great things from a porch pickup, especially if you know the person who’s offering and you like their taste. But aside from a good porch pickup deal, don’t we tend to devalue things when we find out that they’re free? You know, we think, if you’re just giving it away then it must not be worth much. If you don’t want it anymore, then why would I want it?
Take this logic a step further, sometimes we devalue things that we haven’t personally worked for because our pride gets in the way.
So maybe what God is offering in this invitation – wine and milk without money and without price – maybe it isn’t exactly free. Yes, God offers it to anyone who will receive it, but that’s the catch. If we are going to receive what God is offering, the biggest cost may be our pride. We may have to come to terms with the truth that what we desire the most – what will be most satisfying to us – is the very thing that we cannot earn or create ourselves. And that thing that will satisfy – the only thing that will satisfy – is our relationship with God. Only God offers it. Only God provides it. The only thing left is for us to accept it.
This meal that we are about to receive comes with an invitation. Now, I know that the first thing you thought of when I said “invitation” earlier was a party, and maybe you’re thinking, “This isn’t exactly what I think of when I think of a party.” But listen, in our Communion liturgy you will hear this prayer
By your spirit make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at his
(pause)
Anyone?
His heavenly banquet.
This meal is a foretaste, it’s a glimpse, just a teaser, of the great banquet – the biggest and best party ever – where Christ will sit with his church around the cosmic table and all sorrow will be wiped away.
The invitation is an invitation to feast at a table that we did not set and to eat a meal that we did not buy. It is an invitation to sit at the table with Christ and with each other, and it is an invitation to commit ourselves to all of those in the world who haven’t yet heard Christ’s invitation and who need to know that there is a place here for them, too – both at this table and at the cosmic banquet where we will join Christ at the end of all things.
This meal that we are about to receive is free. It is God’s gift to us if we will come and partake of it, if we will come with hearts that know that this gift – this new life – this satisfaction – is nothing that we could accomplish for ourselves. The only thing that we can do is receive it and give thanks to God.
As we prepare to come to this table to receive once again this gift of salvation, I invite you in these next few moments, and in the week ahead, to sit with these questions and ask God’s own Holy Spirit to help you wrestle with them.
Is there anything that is keeping you from responding fully to God’s invitation into a relationship with him? If so, what is it? If not, how are you responding?
Who in your life needs to know that God is inviting them to this table?
Thanks be to God for the free gift of grace that we receive once again. Amen.