The Cost of Satisfaction

sermon by Carrie Eikler
Lent 3
Isaiah 55:1-9, Psalm 63

How many here like chocolate? OK, how many here love chocolate? How many here would want to not only eat chocolate but inhale chocolate?

Believe it or not, it is now possible. It is called Le Whif, and it ranks right up there with Willy Wonka’s scrumpdidlyuptous bar and lickable wallpaper. Le Whif is an inhaler that you place in your mouth, like medicinal inhalers, and you inhale puffs of breathable chocolate. You may have heard this story on NPR this week, like I did. You may be ready to run to the internet to order it online, like I considered. You may wonder, “how much can such exquisiteness cost?” like I pondered.

Well, each canister gives you about ten puffs and costs around 3 dollars. That’s 30 cents a puff. I can handle 30 cents for such deliciousness! And no calories! I did have to question the method of airing such a radio report at the beginning of Lent when sweets are often looked down upon. But maybe it’s because it seemed so innocent, so innocuous as simple breaths of chocolate, even the most committed Lenten chocolate abstainer would cave. After all, if you are inhaling it, are you really eating it?

OK, 30 cents a whiff. No calories. It sounds pretty good. But I wondered: does it really satisfy? Would I have to go through five canisters to get the amount of satisfaction I might get out of one small square of luscious dark chocolate, therefore adding the cost of my chocolate fix up to a whopping $15?

The price of satisfaction. It’s not something we often think of. The price of immediate gratification, the price of short-term ego inflation, these are the prices we often think of—not the price of satisfaction. After all, everything has a price, everything has a cost. If we can’t buy something to satisfy our need, we somehow have to trade for it, work for it, rearrange our schedules for it. Satisfaction ain’t free, and is hard to come by...just ask Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones

I think that is what's so intriguing for me in about this scripture in Isaiah. Written six hundred years before Jesus, Isaiah speaks to a people who have been taken from their homes in Israel, and living in exile in Babylon. And in Babylon food comes with a price, and not just a monetary one: “whoever feeds, owns,” reflects Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. “Eat royal bread, think royal thoughts.” Isaiah’s community was threatened with forgetting who they were. They were forgetting God’s covenant with them, looking more and more like their oppressors, at least in their hearts.

So Isaiah sets an image of a feast. This is not simply manna and water. It’s a lavish double entendre—it has two meanings. It’s a physical feast and a spiritual feast. It is eating and drinking… together, and before God. Last week Torin brought us a female image of God as a mother hen. I see another female image of God in Isaiah. God, like a mother in an apron, opening the screen door into the warm summer evening, and with a voice that is full of command and love, shouts “Come and get it!”

And we, her children, run in. Scraping the chairs on the floor as we pull them out, with the steam from the pots and the clink of the silverware, our hands cupped around our rumbling tummies we find our place at the table, the feast. And we don’t know what it cost. Mother doesn’t ask us for any money to go towards the cost of the meal. She doesn’t expect us to work in exchange for the food. She does ask us to wash up, be kind to one another, give thanks, and if she’s lucky, we’ll give a word of gratitude. Not that she needs it, but it sure would be nice. She’ll feed us anyway, even if we don’t wash up the dishes. But cost? No, there’s no cost.

That, sisters and brothers, is satisfaction.

Take a moment and think about a meal that left you feeling satisfied, satiated. Why did it leave you feeling that way? Was it the food? Maybe it was the reason behind the meal? Was it the company? Or maybe it was a combination of these things. Was it more than just your stomach that was satisfied? What does it mean to have a meal that satisfies, a feast that really feeds us, a host that doesn’t pass you the bill, but is just happy that you first showed up.

At Grand Canyon National Park and many places in the Southwest where the humidity is extremely low you can find signs that say “Stop! Drink water. You are thirsty, whether you realize it or not.” Maybe that’s how we can hear Isaiah today, calling us to the thirst we don’t recognize, the true hunger we’ve been trying to satisfy with other than the most nourishing food.

Now I don’t think the idea of us hungering or thirsting for something is foreign to us. But when we thirst and hunger--like the Psalm points us to, like the words of Isaiah seek to satisfy--we are forced to examine those parched throats, and rumbling stomachs. Is it just about finding that thing that makes us happy? So do we satisfy it with what we like? // With what we want? //With what makes us happy?

Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk who walked the divide between the solitary monastic life, and the active public life, thought that the question, “Am I happy?” is a North American preoccupation, not a universal human quest or seen as a universal right, and especially not a biblical concept. In In Merton’s perspective, our obsession with our happiness leads us to superficial and empty lives, striving for that wiff of pleasure rather than seeking the deep satisfaction to our hunger and thirst.

Merton reflects, “When we live superficially…we are always outside ourselves, never quite “with” ourselves, always divided and pulled many directions…we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in lives.”[1] Instead of asking ourselves “Am I happy” we should be asking ourselves “Am I free?”

That’s a tough question, Am I free? It's the question behind our Lenten discipline to hold on and let go. It questions what is essential in our lives, what will really satisfy our longings, and nourish our real hunger. “Ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair…” says Merton, “but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”

That’s thirsting and hungering for God. But I bet Merton might assert that we shouldn’t only think about our thirst and hunger. Isaiah’s words are also about a God who throws open the door, calling for us. And setting down to the table with this God, we realize that the true satisfaction to our hunger and thirst, is that this God hungers and thirsts…for us. That’s the only cost of this satisfaction, which is really no cost at all—the cost of being loved and longed for by God.

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The door is flung open, and the voice calls out to you to come to the table. As we prepare to receive the bread and cup that symbolizes God’s love and longing for us, I invite you to dwell on the thirsts you have that dries your throat, the hunger that pains your stomach. We know the obvious temptations that prey on our hunger, like the words on these empty cups: money, ego, promotions. But what about those that aren’t so obvious? The joy in criticizing others...the false satisfaction of busyness...the chronic need for affirmation. As Thomas Merton asked, are these what you want to live for, or are they what’s keeping you from living fully?

As you come forward to receive the bread of Christ and the cup of life, I invite you, as we have been doing throughout Lent, to close your hands tightly into a fist. Within them contains all the realized and unrealized desires that we have longed for that ultimately do not lead to full living. When you come to the bread and the cup, open your hands with abandon, replacing the empty promises with the fullness of Christ’s table.

Please pray with me: Source of everything good, we have hungered and thirsted for things that do not satisfy.

We come to your table now to let go of our empty desires, and to receive your longing for us. Bless us in this feast.

You are welcome to come, let go and receive.


[1] from Thomas Merton: Love and Living. qtd in “Lent’s terrible gift” by Kay Lynn Northcutt, Christian Century, March 9, 2010.