September 28, 2025
How Does Your Garden Grow?
Isaiah 58:6-12; John 4:7-15
Rev. David Germer
Isaiah 58:6-12
6 Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you;
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.”
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
10 if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
11 The Lord will guide you continually
and satisfy your needs in parched places
and make your bones strong,
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water
whose waters never fail.
12 Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.
Our second text is from John chapter 4, verses 7-15.
“A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’
Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’”
The Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Isaiah’s promise was: You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail. Jesus’ promise is that the water that he gives will become in them a spring of water, gushing up to eternal life.
Pray with me. Lord, speak to us, in this moment, that we might be filled by your living water, and become more like you. Amen.
We’ve been exploring, pushing ourselves to create and live, a wider welcome, by making room – making room for one another, across generations, for the stranger, for questions, for children.
Today we are going to think about making room together – to live as a community growing up into the image of Christ.
And we’re going to do that, of course, by looking at a complex, poetic Yahweh monologue on fasting, directed specifically to the people of Israel returning from exile in Babylon to live their lives in Judea, in the late 6th century BCE, which we find in a passage early in what’s called Trito-Isaiah. Naturally. An obvious way to thinking about making room together, right?
That Isaiah passage that Ron read is beautiful in many ways, but there is a lot going on in and around it; much more than we can adequately address, this morning. But briefly, I’ll say this:
Isaiah was likely written before, during, and after the Babylonian exile, which lasted about 6 decades until 538 BCE, when Cyrus the Persian King, fresh off of conquering the Babylonians, allowed the Judeans to return home. It was likely written by multiple authors in the tradition and voice of Isaiah. It’s more complicated than this, and it’s not universally agreed upon, but generally, and likely: The first 39 chapters – First Isaiah or Proto-Isaiah, were pre-Babylonian exile; chapters 40-55 – Deutero-Isaiah, written during the exile; and 56-66 – Trito-Isaiah… the Hebrew people have been allowed to come home. Many of those in exile actually were not living bad lives, and what they returned home to, generally speaking, may have been worse than what they’d experienced in Babylon. Certainly, worse than what they were expecting to come home to.
Imagine someone who had to leave Asheville following Helene, one year ago. They didn’t want to leave, but they had to, and they ended up relocating to Charlotte for a year, living with relatives. It wasn’t easy and wasn’t what they wanted… but they grew to love parts of their life there. And then, one year later, say last week… they returned home, having heard that things were “back to normal,” and they are expecting the Asheville they knew pre-Helene, and they get here, and find… Carrier Park no longer exists? The Grail Movie House isn’t back up and running in the River Arts District? White Duck Taco on the French Broad is gone? Manna Food Bank has moved? Only 9 playable holes at the municipal golf course? All Souls church worships where?
Now it’s far from a perfect analogy… because most people did stay here, and the amount of work that has been put in to restoring the city, and surrounding communities, to most of us is as staggering as the storm itself. So much work HAS been done. But it’s not the way it was. That might be a little what it was like for those returning from exile.
They’ve been gone for generations; but those who remained were doing all they could to simply survive in occupation. And so maybe better analogy would be a large number of Palestinians, God willing, returning to Gaza, months or years from now… to what will surely seem to be an insurmountable task of repairing the breach, restoring the streets to live in.
The Jews returning from Babylon see the work that is before them – rebuilding cities and communities, re-establishing their pre-exile way of life, making their kingdom great again… and they are not excited. Shouldn’t things have been better taken care of? What have the people who remained home in Israel been doing? The Temple isn’t rebuilt? The communities are not thriving, not living God’s laws faithfully? God why? Listen to us! They probably prayed some of those psalms that we’ve talked about and prayed: How long, O Lord?!
In the beginning of Isaiah Chapter 58, their anger at God is expressed this way:
Why do we fast, and you don’t see it?
That sounds like an odd complaint and focal point, to our ears. But remember that fasting was one of the essential religious practices affirmed by every observant Jew. By Jesus’ day it was one of the big three: giving to the poor, prayer, and fasting. Those made up the core of Jewish faithfulness for daily living.
Author Richard Foster notes that Jesus was especially concerned about the motive for fasting, which Jesus addresses in the sermon on the Mount. Foster writes: “To use good things to our own ends is always the sign of false religion. How easy it is to take something like fasting and try to use it to get God to do what we want. Fasting must forever center on God. It must be God-initiated and God-ordained. Every other purpose must be subservient to God.”
Fasting – clearing space in our minds, hearts, and bodies, to make room for God – reveals to us, like nothing else, what instead, is actually filling us. And what we most plainly desire.
So, when the people returning from exile complain: God, we’re doing what you told us to do: fasting; now you have to do what you’re supposed to do: help us! Make things right!… they reveal they have no idea what the true purpose of fasting is. It’s not a show to prove God’s on our side or to get God to do what we want.
But they also reveal what they want, and it’s what most of us want: good communities, safe cities, beauty, enough to eat and drink, justice, places to worship.
What they want isn’t bad. It’s that they think it’s owed to them because they’re special, that they demand it because they think they’ve earned it with their fasting and their religion. That’s where God’s issue is. And so God responds: “Oh. Oh! You’re calling… whatever it is that you’re doing… fasting? Is the “fasting” you are doing fasting that pleases Yahweh?”
The answer of course is “no.” These were misguided, disingenuous fasts.
Not all who publicly fast make any room at all for the will of God.
Not all who publicly sing loudly with their hands up are truly worshipping the God of the Bible who centers the oppressed and poor and marginalized.
Not all who say “Lord, Lord!” or profess to be Christians truly know or follow Jesus, whose harshest words were reserved for religious insiders who spoke loudly about their faith.
There is performative worship that has nothing to do with lives lived in alignment with the ways that God’s people are called to live.
Walter Brueggemann, commentating on this very passage, says: “Such worship gives no access to God, because the God of Judaism is not open to instrumental, calculated manipulation.”
And it wasn’t just that they were counting on the fasting to save them. God’s clarifying response adds more to the picture of how they were missing the mark.
Look at verse 9. They were also 1) speaking badly of others, 2) heaping unfair economic burdens on the most vulnerable, and 3) pointing the finger – blaming anyone and everyone else.
I mean can you imagine a society in which people of faith do these things?
The strangest part of what I just said, is that when I wrote it, and I’m guessing, when you heard it… we did one of the very things God is calling out, in them, and us. Maybe you didn’t, but I thought:
“Yeah! They [pointing off at others] are the worst – those people who speak badly of others and point the fin… ger.” [Realizing I’m doing it.]
Now that isn’t to say that there isn’t right and wrong, or that all are equally culpable for injustice in our world. That isn’t true.
We should call out hypocrisy and false Christianity when we see it, and my goodness it is truly in our faces right now, with Christian nationalism.
We should and must draw distinctions, with conviction. We should state clearly that our primary allegiance is to the God of all nations, not to any one nation. And while love for our country, and the ways that it does reflect God’s goodness and justice can honor God beautifully, too often that love gets elevated to and put in a blender with our love of God. Love of God should flavor and animate all other loves, not be overpowered or consumed by them. Christian nationalism is simply not Christian, any more than the fasts of the returning exiles were true fasts.
But – and this is so important, and so hard – God doesn’t say: “So I want you to sort out the fake Christians, or fasters, or people, from the real. Give me a hand and categorize and label everyone you come across, would you?”
No: God says: “you be the real. Do what I’ve taught and commanded and shown, from the beginning. And watch as I care for your deepest needs. I will satisfy and fill you. I am the living water; and what you desire the most – beautiful communities and spaces and vibrant life for those around you and for generations to come – I am about those things.”
There are hundreds of thousands of people right now genuinely searching for this.
Yes, there are some saying: “There is a culture war that is going on, and it’s as heated and ramped up as it’s ever been, and it’s time to choose a side;” asking: “which side are you on, and which side is God on, and how can I be a part of the side I’ve heard is the God side?”
But I believe that just as many are genuinely wondering and asking: “In these fraught times, how can I honor God with my life?”
The fasting that pleases God is living out the first commandment: love God – not by the piety of religious practice – but by way of living out the second commandment: love your neighbor, as yourself.
Those of you in Koinonia groups were invited this week to reflect some on the people you spend time with, in recognition that we cannot love those we don’t know, and we can’t know those with whom we don’t spend significant time. (And by the way, arguing in Facebook comments doesn’t count as “spending time with someone,” nor does reading articles about categories of people with whom we don’t share things in common – like Jesus and the Samaritan woman – whether neighbors or enemies or both).
Here’s Walter Brueggemann again, on Isaiah 58: “The neighbor is not a detraction or an inconvenience but is the currency through which community with Yahweh is on offer.”
That’s it. And that’s what Ron read.
The alternative to performative religion is (and we see this directly in Isaiah 58):
- Sharing bread, homes, and clothing;
- Recognizing that the poor are not some other, but are our kin – members of the family of God – the human family;
- Offering food to the hungry, satisfying the needs of the afflicted;
- Loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing the straps of the economic burden, letting the oppressed go free;
- Restoring communities, repairing breaches, for the benefit of generations to come… together. All these things – together.
Our well-being, Isaiah says, comes only in a community of neighbors.
You’ll hear from Ami Greene give a Moment for Mission in a few minutes, inviting you into one of the ways that we do this together: Saturday Sanctuary. Many of us will be together next weekend at the retreat, loving one another and dreaming together about other ways that we might make room, together, as a faith community.
And guiding those community gatherings and conversations must be the joyful recognition that:
- the way we experience the living God;
- the way our love is poured out into neighbors and enemies;
- the way our cup overflows with love;
- the way our thirst is quenched in the parched places;
- the way that the gardens of abundant life around us grow – watered by unending spring and source…
is that we return again and again to the living water: Jesus.
He has this water, and he is this water.
Thanks be to God, that he is poured out, freely, for us, and for all. Amen.