Maybe you remember this commercial – it was so successful it ran for thirteen years. Filmed in Boston’s North End, it starts off with a woman leaning out of a window of a brick apartment complex calling out: “ANTHONY! ANTHONY!”. Cut to a young boy running through the cobbled streets of the North End – the voice-over explains that “Most days Anthony takes his time going home, but today is Wednesday, and in Boston’s North End, Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day.”

The second image, one you can still see most days not far from where that award-winning commercial was made. It is Haymarket, where all the produce vendors set up their tables and stalls, with as many kinds of fruits and vegetables as you can imagine, all displayed as attractively as possible to entice the strolling shoppers. Oranges, grapes, lettuce, broccoli, asparagus, tomatoes, mushrooms of every variety, every hue of green, red, orange and brown. And the noise – vendors crying out their bargains, shoppers haggling, transactions being made.

Put these two images together and you get some idea of the message Isaiah delivers to the exiles in Babylon. God is speaking using the words and cadences of a street vendor: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!”

In some ways, it is a startling contrast, isn’t it? One the one hand, the Lord God Almighty! On the other hand, a street vendor bellowing out an invitation to come and buy! If this seems a bit, well, unseemly to you, perhaps a bit out of character with what you might expect from the Creator of heaven and earth, you can bet it was that and more to those who heard this message the first time. It must have been a real attention-grabber.

I think God knows, and Isaiah knows as well, that what is needed right then is a real attention-grabber. Something radical, refreshing, perhaps abrasive enough to cut through the competing cacophony of imperial culture and at least figuratively take this drowsy exilic community by the shoulders and shake them to consciousness. Such an approach would never have been needed a generation or so before, for those who grieved their first-hand experience of the loss of Jerusalem, of the place they had called home, of family and friends left behind. But now, with the passing of generations, that anger and grief has been replaced by resignation, by an acceptance of the way life was, by the desire to accommodate to the Babylonian culture in such a way that individuals and families might make a better future for themselves right there in the only land they had known since birth. So God’s street vendor call comes ringing out through Isaiah, “everyone who thirsts, come to the waters! All who are hungry, come, buy and eat!”.

I wonder sometimes if the situation of those exiles back in Babylon was not all that different in some ways from the situation we find ourselves in. Are we thirsty? Are we hungry? Do we even know if we are?

I am speaking, of course, as is Isaiah, in the spiritual sense. Are we spiritually hungry, spiritually thirst, or have we even stopped lately to consider the question? I sometime think we are like that over-worked, over-stressed executive cruising the warming trays at still another corporate-sponsored meet-and-greet, eating out of habit just because it is there – not because they are hungry. And I sometimes think we are like all of us at one time or another, just filling up on so much junk food that our system has just lost track of whether we ought to eat a square meal. And I sometimes think that we have just become so out of touch with our deepest selves, with being made in the image of God, that while our spirits may be thirsty and on the brink of starvation, we cannot even name those feelings for ourselves.

It is like those signs they post out in Grand Canyon National Park, where the heat is intense but the humidity is very low: “Stop! Drink water! You are thirsty, whether you realize it or not.” It may be that our circumstances have been such that we have wandered away from God and not even noticed – so buried as we are under the demands of making a living, paying the mortgage, raising the kids, taking care of the parents, keeping up to the social status to which we aspire, trying to keep it all together.

In our own way, we can be as much as exiles as were those in Babylon long ago. And would that God would give me the eloquence, supply me with the words, to wake us up – to wake us all up, me included – to hear the gracious call home that God extends to us. I think that this is part of what the season of Lent is all about – a time when we might be purposeful about trying to figure out just where we are spiritually – to get a gut check, as it were. That is really what all that giving up something for Lent thing – something that few of us do anymore – is all about.

And yet I think what may be behind our reluctance to do that spiritual temperature check is the worry about what we might find if we do – the worry that we will realize that beneath all our scurrying and doing and convincing ourselves that this is really what living is all about, we will find that at heart we are desperately hungry and frightfully parched, unhappy and unfilled, feeling far from home and alone. And the truth is at the core of this fear is the reality that this fear is fact. We are, in truth, in exile. We are not in charge of our lives, and all our scurrying and hard-work and nose to the grindstone behaviors cannot change this. No matter how hard we parent, our children will wander off to where the wild things are and end up in the sorts of troubles that keep us up at night. No matter how much we exercise or try to eat right, sooner or later some disease or injury is going to crop up and try to do us in. No matter how hard you strive to be the best at your job, there is the chance that a corporate decision in Seattle or an investment banker on Wall Street or a company based in Asia will take an action over which you have no control and will put you out on the street. We are in exile.

And yet, the good news for us today is that it is precisely here, right in the midst of exile, that God’s gracious word comes to us, just as it came to the exiles in Babylon long ago. It is when we wake up and see that we are in exile, so very far from our true home, that we are opened up for the transformative word of God that can lead us to spiritual growth and fulfillment.

M. Scott Peck puts it this way: “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

So perhaps you can see that today’s Scripture and today’s sermon, are really for the few among us – or is it, really, so very few of us? – who feel, deep down, uncomfortable, unhappy, unfulfilled. The good news is for you – good news that there is an open invitation to you, to all who hunger and thirst, to come to the table, to the banquet which God graciously spreads before us all. It is an invitation that comes without strings, without price, without cost. Your money, your good deeds, your past accomplishments or lack thereof, they are no good here. Just come. Come and find a new life, an abundant life, a life where you can set those cares aside and trust that your loving Creator will provide for you no matter what.

And just as Anthony, when he hears that summons to come for dinner on Wednesdays, comes dashing excitedly through the streets, not because he hears a command, but because the invitation is music to his ears, may you and I respond to God’s call to come on home.

Amen.