The Third Sunday in Lent, March 23, 2025
March 1, 2025 | by Bruce Epperly
| Reading 1 | Reading 2 | Reading 3 | Reading 4 | Reading 1 Alt | Reading 2 Alt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Isaiah 55:1-9 | Psalm 63:1-8 | 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 | Luke 13:1-9 |
As I pondered today’s scriptures, a scene from my small town America childhood came to mind.
In the spirit of 1950s ecumenism, my Baptist preacher-father brought our family to a Sunday
afternoon picnic sponsored by the local “Holy Roller” church. The food was plentiful and good,
and the meal was punctuated by regular words of affirmation, “The Lord will provide. Yes, the
Lord will provide.”
In many ways, today’s passages are about God’s providence and our ability to open more fully to
God’s provision for our lives. God will provide for our deepest needs: we just have to come to
the waters and join the party. Now, strict Lent followers cancel saying “Alleluia” during Lent.
“You must be penitential, and Alleluias have to wait till Easter,” they say. Well, today’s passages
evoke a chorus of Alleluias regardless of Lenten penitential mores. God provides. We have what
we need, and we just need to reach out to receive God’s blessing and then reach out to others in
generosity.
Isaiah describes divine socialism. Come to the waters. Come to the table. Even if you have no
money, you will be fed. God will provide bounteous nourishment for us, and not just for us, for
everyone. No transactions. No quid pro quo. No bullying into spiritual submission. In this time
of administrative xenophobia emanating from the White House and many of our Christian kin,
Isaiah asserts that God wants everyone to enjoy the fruits of God’s bounty: around the table sit
undocumented residents, transgender youth, gay and lesbian couples, Ukraine politicians, Israelis
and Gazans, and maybe even a place for Orange Jesus, if he deigns to accept God’s grace.
“Seek God while God may be found; call upon God for God is near.” Now is the time for healing
and wholeness. Don’t wait till tomorrow to accept God’s bounteous grace. Don’t procrastinate
about “doing something beautiful for God.” This is the day that God has made, let us rejoice and
be glad in it!
Then, come words oft misunderstood by preachers and theologians. “For my thoughts are not
your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Often,
I’ve heard these words with an underlying threat. Get right with God or you will suffer. In
contrast, I think, given the context, that the verses mean: Look at God’s generosity and
inclusiveness. Look at God’s welcome to all people. Don’t fence God’s grace or generosity.
God is more generous and graceful than we can ever be. These words are a call to widen the
scope of our love and generosity to reflect “the wideness of God’s mercy.” To create a world
where everyone belongs. They are a call to look at the big picture of God’s loving and wise
creativity, God’s delight in diversity, and God’s quest for wholeness for all creation. God’s
vision is big, and we need to expand our vision. God’s love is limitless, and we should share in
God’s limitless love for friend, foe, and outsider. The readers of Isaiah will live out God’s all-
inclusive love in daily life and in their civic responsibility. Their faith will be universal and not
parochial.
“My soul thirsts for you,” says the Psalmist. “I want to delight in your rich feast…cling to your
protective providence.” God is ready to give us everything we need. We are the ones who bar
the door to our hearts and to caring for our neighbors, equally beloved by God.
Paul’s words from Romans have a punitive ring. God is graceful, but if you don’t accept the
grace, if you turn to immorality, there will be consequences. You are free to be God’s creative
companion or sow seeds of destruction and incivility. God is not mocked! If we turn away from
God’s way, we will be unable to share in God’s spiritual food. Perhaps, less threateningly,
Whitehead notes:
[God’s] purpose is always embodied in the particular ideals relevant to the actual state of
the world. Thus all attainment is immortal in that it fashions the actual ideas which are
God in the world as it is now. Every act leaves the world with a deeper or fainter impress
of God. He then passes into his next relation to the world with enlarged, or diminished,
presentation of ideal values. 1
What we do limits or expands what God can do in our lives in the world. As Amos notes, when
we turn to injustice, we may experience a famine on hearing the word of God, despite our claims
to piety, elaborate worship, and doctrinal orthodoxy. (Amos 8:11) There is a consequence in
turning from God’s vision, and it may harm your soul as well as your community. (For more on
Amos, see Bruce Epperly “The Prophetic Amos Speaks to America,” Energion Publications)
Jesus’ words contain both grace and threat. First, joy and sorrow come to all. Believer and
unbeliever, citizen and alien, alike experience the randomness of life. None of us is immune
from suffering. There is no exact cause and effect, or direct karma, in the world. Indeed,
accidents and chance events happen that even God can’t control. Still, what we do matters. The
unfruitful tree will be cut down. We can turn away from God, from the vine of life, and
experience meaninglessness, anxiety, fear, and isolation. We can thwart God’s way and
minimize God’s presence in the world. Yet, God is always willing to give us one more chance.
God keeps on offering us a vision of what life can be. God’s providence constantly nurtures us,
even when we turn astray.
For the preacher and community in these troubled times in which leaders invoke the smallest and
most retributive visions of God, the one true God is generous. God gives us more than we
deserve. The waters of grace are flowing. Our calling is to go with the flow: to provide spiritual,
relational, and nutritional nourishment for all God’s children. To grow with the flow – to expand
our spirits in love and our agency in power to transform the world. Let us share the bounty,
letting God’s grace flow through us to bring a balm in Gilead to this troubled world.
Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of