Reflections on Isaiah
55:2a
March 18, 2025
The readings from the Revised Common Lectionary for next
Sunday, March 23, 2025 include one of my favorite passages in the entire Bible.
It is Isaiah 55:2a. It reads: “Why do you spend your money for that which is
not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy?” That question was
and is of existential importance to me. Its original context is probably that of
Second Isaiah, that is, roughly, and only roughly, Isaiah chapters 40-55. The
setting for Second Isaiah is the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people in the
mid-sixth century BCE. It sounds like Isaiah is calling his people back to
attention on their Jewish spiritual heritage. Holding onto that heritage couldn’t
have been easy during the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian Empire had conquered
Judah and destroyed Solomon’s temple there. They had hauled essentially
everyone who mattered in Jewish political and religious life off to Babylon,
located hundreds of miles to the east of Jerusalem. The Jewish faith had been
centered on the Jerusalem temple. It would have been rather easy for the Jewish
exiles to lost the faith that they could not longer practice as they had for
centuries. I hear Second Isaiah here calling his people back to what really
matters, to what really satisfies, namely, a spiritual life in connection with
the people’s God.
Those are probably the specifics of the context in which
Second Isaiah wrote this verse, but the verse has a far broader significance
than that. Bible verses matter mostly when they are not only about something
that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away but are about
us too. Isaiah 55:2a is very much about us as much as it is about the Jewish
exiles in the verse’s original context. It is very much about me and my life’s
journey toward wholeness and satisfaction.
To understand this verse, I suppose, we have to start by
asking: What do the metaphor “bread” and the word “satisfy” mean here? What is
truly bread for us? What truly satisfies us? I take both of these words to be
referring to that in life which truly makes us whole. That makes us the people
God has created us to be. That leads us to know and to become our true selves,
the selves God made and intends us to be. I’ll use myself as a good example of
what I mean here.
For over half of my life, I spent my time in my professional
life pursuing that which did not satisfy. I first intended to follow in my
father’s footsteps and become a university history professor. I spent seven
years obtaining a PhD in Russian history. When I got that degree in 1977, there
were essentially no decent job openings for university Russian history
professors. Today, so many years later, as I look back on my life, it sense
that trying to be a professional historian would not have satisfied my spirit
the way I thought back then that it would. In any event, I never became a
university Russian history professor.
I went to law school. At first I found the law fascinating
and fun. I did really well in law school, and I got a first law job with a
significant law firm in downtown Seattle, Washington. At first I was thrilled.
I can remember walking down the street in downtown Seattle hardly able to
believe that I was actually there and doing what I had been hired to do, namely,
practice law. I was nowhere nearly as successful as a lawyer as I had been as a
law student. I was a good lawyer but not a great one. I worked for three
different downtown law firms between 1981 and 1992. I made partner at none of
them.
So I opened my own law office. At first I did OK in that
office. I was fine until 1994, when I started to find it more and more
difficult actually to do any legal work, not that I had all that much to do. Two
things happened in 1994 that bear on my point here. One was that my wife and my
daughter, who was in high school at the time, sat me down in our living room.
My daughter said to me: “Dad, you’re depressed.” She, and I assume my wife, saw
my clinical depression before I did. Not long thereafter I was on
anti-depressant medication. It helped, but not all that much.
I’ve written about the other thing that happened before, but
I’m going to do it again here. One day, as I sat in my law office feeling
pretty miserable and finding it very hard to make myself do the little bit of
legal work I had to do, I did a Jungian psychological exercise called active imagination.[1]
I sat down, cleared my mind as much as I could, and asked myself this question:
“Why am I having so much trouble practicing law?” Instantaneously, with my
having had no time whatsoever to think about an answer to my question, an answer
came booming up from somewhere deep inside (or perhaps from completely outside
me): “You’re not a lawyer!” Well, I knew
that was ridiculous, so I argued with the answer, wherever it was coming from.
I said: “Of course I’m a lawyer. I’m sitting here in my law office. It says “Thomas
C. Sorenson, Attorney at Law,” on the front door. I have a little bit of legal
work to do. My Washington State Bar Association number is 11977. Of course I’m
a lawyer!” Again whatever it was that was answering my question said forcefully:
“You’re not a lawyer!”
So I thought OK, I’ll stop arguing with the answer and ask: “If
I’m not a lawyer, what am I?” Again, instantaneously, with my having given the
answer no thought whatsoever, the voice within me said: “You’re a preacher!”
Well, I knew that was perfectly ridiculous too. “Preacher” wasn’t even a word I
ever used. I’d say minister or pastor but never preacher when referring to the man
at the church I attended who did the preaching. So I ended the exercise and
went on as I had before, struggling to do legal work and making no money at
all.
Nothing else happened until 1997 except that I continued to
be miserable. Early in that year I began seeing a Jungian counselor. One day I
told him of a dream I’d had. In the dream I was walking across a beach wearing
wingtip shoes, the dress shoes I wore when I was being a lawyer. I walked
across the beach until I came to the water. Ahead of me was only the vast
expanse of the sea. My counselor knew immediately what the dream meant, though
I didn’t at first. It meant that I had gone as far as I could as lawyer. That I
was in fact done with law. It was time for me to do something else, to be
someone else.
But do what? Be who? I had no answer to those questions that
made any sense. I sort of wanted to go back to school, get a PhD in systematic
theology, and become a seminary professor; but I knew that was impossible. I
was too old. I couldn’t afford, I’d probably have to so some place like Yale to
do it, there being no way to do it in the Seattle area. So I did nothing. I
just kept going to my law office and being perfectly miserable.
Then Providence stepped in, or so it now seems to me.
Seattle University, a Jesuit university in central Seattle, had been granting
fully accredited Master of Divinity degrees for years; but, seeing as it is a
Roman Catholic university that did not train Roman Catholic priests, it granted
them mainly to Catholic laypeople who wanted to do ministry, most of them women
whom the Church would not let become priests. It turned out that for quite some
time leaders of a dozen or more Protestant denominations in the Seattle area
had been working with Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry, the
part of the university that granted MDiv degrees, to find a way that that Roman
Catholic university could train Protestants for ministry. So on July 1, 1997,
the School of Theology and Ministry created what it called the Institute of
Ecumenical Theological Studies. Overnight, half of the students at that
Catholic seminary, were Protestants. I knew I had to be one too. I just knew I
had to go to SU and get an MDiv degree. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how I
could afford it, and I knew I was too old. Still, I just knew I had to do it.
So I did. I closed my law office and took a job with a legal
services firm called the Legal Action Center that was part of Catholic
Community Services of Western Washington. We provided free legal representation
to low-income tenants facing eviction. We said we were a homelessness
prevention agency. That job was as much of a Godsend for me as the School of
Theology and Ministry was. It was a half-time job. It got me a 25% tuition
reduction at Seattle University. I never thought on the day when I went looking
for some job, any job, in the classified ads of the Seattle Times that I would
ever find anything like it. I’m sure the two lawyers who made up the agency at
the time never thought they’d get to hire a lawyer who had been a senior
litigation associate at the fourth largest law firm in the country, which I was
from early 1986 to the end of 1989. It was law that felt like ministry. It was
indeed a Godsend. I was finally doing law that was bread, that satisfied my
soul in a way law never had before.
I received my MDiv in December, 2000. During my time at STM
I finally figured out what I was supposed to be doing with my life. As part of
my studies there I did a year of internship work at a local UCC church. After I
had been there a short time I said to God: “You’re kidding, right? This
is what I’m supposed to be doing?” Sure surprised the hell out of me and later
would surprise the hell out of everyone who knew me, but that was exactly what
I was supposed to be doing. In March, 2002, I was called as the parttime pastor
of a local UCC church. I was ordained in the UCC in June, 2002. I knew the
first day I walked into that church’s building as the church’s pastor that I
was already a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer. And I was at last a
preacher. I was fifty-five years old. Becoming who I really am gave me
satisfaction and fullness life that nothing else I had ever done ever had.
All of that was my journey to finally, at long last,
spending my money for that which was bread and my earnings for that which did
indeed satisfy. To put the same point another way, it’s my journey to finding
out who I really am. Finding out who God created and called me to be. And I am
convinced that being who you really are is about the only thing there is that
is bread and that truly satisfies. So many people spend their lives being
someone other than who they really are. So many people work at jobs that are
just jobs and have no other way to be who they really are. So many people live
denying their sexual orientation or gender identity, that is, living as someone
other than who they really are. So many people stay in personal relationships
that stifle them rather than make them whole. So many people spend their lives
chasing material goods, wealth, prestige, and power, none of which is really
bread for them, nor does it really satisfy them. It doesn’t make them who God
made them to be.
So, my friends, I pray that you have discovered who you
really are. I pray that you spend your money for spiritual bread and your
earnings for that which truly satisfies. If you have, I imagine you know full
well what I’m talking about here. If you haven’t, it seems to me that you have
work to do. You might start by doing that psychological exercise I talked
about.[2]
You may need professional help to do it just like I did. You may do it alone,
or you may do it with others. It doesn’t much matter how you do it. It matters
a lot that you do it. I pray that you either have or you will.
[1]
The book from which I took this exercise said don’t do it alone. You may get
lot in your inner mind and not be able to get yourself back out. I did it alone
anyway and got away with it, not that I recommend that anyone else disregard
this warning.
[2]
You’ll find it in Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work, Using Dreams and Active
Imagination for Personal Growth (HarperSanFrancisco, 1986).
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