Thomas J Parlette
“God’s Shopping Spree”
Isaiah 55: 1-9
3/23/25
Do you remember the pleasure of staying home from school on a school day? Whether it was because you were sick or the weather was bad and school was closed for a snow day – there was just something special about staying home from school during the week.
Those of us who are “of a certain age” remember the days before video games and streaming services that you let you watch whatever you want, whenever you want. It used to be that you had the three major networks, maybe one or two other local channels, and that was it. There were only so many choices and if you wanted to watch TV, you watched what was on.
Part of what made a sick day or a snow day so special was daytime TV. On Saturday morning, we got all the cartoons and then the sports, but during the week, it was a whole different world. Two kinds of programs ruled the daytime airwaves – Soap Operas and Game Shows. I loved the game shows.
Two of the biggest and longest-running game shows were “Let’s Make a Deal”, with Monty Hall. I’m pretty sure it still on with a different host these days. But the basic format has changed very little. Winning contestants chose their prize blindly – “I’ll take what’s behind door #1, or door #2, or door #3. If they were lucky they’d win something like a trip to Hawaii, or a living room set or even a new car. But – chose the wrong door and you might end up with a can of turtle wax, or some sort of gag gift like a scraggly, old billy goat. You never knew for sure.
Then there was “The Price is Right” with Bob Barker. Contestants played various games testing their knowledge of how much things cost. If they won, one of the prizes I remember was a shopping spree in a room full of merchandise. They were given a shopping cart and a time limit – whatever they could grab off the shelves and get into their carts with in the time limit was theirs to keep. Trick was – it had to stay in the cart, if it fell out, you lost it.
Then there was a show called “Supermarket Sweep.” This show took place in a supermarket, and you had to run up as high a total as you could to win – but again, it all had to fit in your cart, and you got to keep what you picked up. It was great fun to see the various strategies as some people went right to the meat aisle and loaded up on steak, while others went for the imported spices and such. Part of the allure of such shows was putting yourself in the contestants place and dreaming about what you might take home in such a shopping spree.
In this passage from Isaiah today, we read a little bit about God’s version of a shopping spree:
“Hear, everyone who thirsts;
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.”
So what’s behind God’s invitation here, why does God offer this shopping spree to stock up on food, wine and milk?
Remember that Isaiah is writing to an exiled people. These were people who had once been elite citizens in the Kingdom of Judah, and they had been hauled off lock, stock and barrel to the faraway city of Babylon. That was all part of the plan for the King of Babylon, that’s how he managed his empire. He takes all the prominent citizens from the conquered nations and resettles them in his capital city, in little ghetto neighborhoods. It’s an ancient version of the “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer,” kind of logic.
The Judean exiles aren’t in prison, exactly. They have some freedoms. They can come and go within the walls of the imperial city. They are permitted to set up small businesses or practice a trade. Their senior leaders are even invited every once-in-awhile to feast with the King himself.
But it isn’t like having their own land. It’s a big cage – but it’s still a cage, as nice as it is. None of them are starving, but they’re not well-off, either. The Babylonians always have subtle ways of reminding the Judeans that they are not equals – they are second-class citizens at best.
So, when Isaiah – the great prophet of hope – spins for them this mad fantasy of buying “wine and milk without money and without price,” it sounds pretty good to the dispirited ears of the exiles.
What is remarkable about Isaiah’s vision is that he’s promising the Judean’s more than leaving poverty behind and getting back all they’ve lost. He is promising them something entirely new. All the usual economic laws will be suspended. Without money! Without price! He says. Abundance for all, by the grace of God – that’s the name of the game.
In his book, Who Switched the Price Tags?, Tony Campolo tells a story from his youth growing up in Philadelphia. (1) In Philadelphia, the night before Halloween is known as Mischief Night, instead of going out looking for candy, young people go out looking to pull pranks. One year, Tony and his best friend devised the perfect Mischief Night prank. They never carried it out, but they sure had a lot of fun thinking about it.
The prank was to break into the local five-and-dime store. They weren’t going to take anything. All they wanted to do was to switch the price tags on as many items as they could. They rolled around in fits of laughter as they imagined the confusion that would break out the next morning when the staff opened the store and the customers started arriving. Clock radios for a quarter – paper clips for 5 dollars each. What delightful, and mostly harmless, anarchy!
Tony then makes the point that some evil power in our world – the devil – has broken into our lives and changed the price tags on everything. All of us are living in the chaos resulting from this prank. There’s tremendous confusion about which things in our world have real value, and which things are mis-labeled. More often than not, we go running off in search of things that, in God’s great spiritual economy, are worth next to nothing.
Isaiah points out that God’s values are fundamentally different from ours:
“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.”
God’s way is to offer “wine and milk without money and without price.”
This passage is a warning about misplaced worship, what Christian theology names idolatry. It was the reformer John Calvin who referred to human beings as “a perpetual factory of idols.” (2) It seems we just can’t help ourselves.
That word “idolatry” sounds quaint and old-fashioned perhaps. The stories of the Hebrew Scriptures are replete with very physical sorts of idols, clear representations of other gods – from the golden calf of the wilderness to the clay fertility goddesses of the Canaanite people. In the New Testament addresses the problem of food offered to idols in the pagan temples, and we know from our church history how many early Christians were sent to the lions in the Roman Coliseum because they refused to bow down to the looming statue of the Emperor in the public square. But isn’t all that stuff in the past?
Maybe – Maybe not.
The idols that tempt us today are far more subtle than giant, gilded statues of emperors. You don’t need to look any further than the modern sports world to find examples of idols. Football and basketball and baseball are worshiped so completely that you can definitely look at them as idols. Pop music also produces it’s share of idols – there’s even a long running TV show called American Idol that actually plays right to our desire to worship idols. Or you could look to our American past to examples of idol worship.
Diana Butler Bass writes, “Most days, I drive over a spot in a road where a statue was once located. Since 1889, a confederate soldier stood on a high podium in the middle of the busy intersection of Prince and Washington Streets in Alexandria, Virginia…”
“He’s gone now, after much argument and several changes to the law. In June 2020, a month before the city was set to remove the statue, the United Daughters of the Confederacy took him down and secreted him off to an undisclosed location. For several months, his podium remained. But that is gone now as well. The city paved over the foundation so cars can move freely through the intersection. Nothing remains of the dejected Confederate.”
“That statue is only one of many memorials recently removed from public areas in Virginia. The fight to take down the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville resulted in neo-Nazis and white supremacists invading that University town and ended with a murder. Weeks of dramatic protests in Richmond, Virginia’s capital and once the capital of the Confederacy itself, led to the dismantling of the many statues that once constituted Monument Avenue, a wide boulevard of multiple circles with memorials dedicated to the leaders of the defeated southern army – idols from the past.”
“After the Richmond bronzes had been removed, I was in the city speaking at a church. The pastor, a religious leader who agreed with their removal, asked me: “Have you driven down Monument Avenue yet?”
“No, I haven’t been there recently.”
“It is stark, emotionally powerful – but in a different way than it used to be. You look down the road and the statues, the idols are all gone. There are empty altars everywhere.” (3)
I think that image would please Isaiah, the prophet of hope. “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help,” says Psalm 146. “When their breath departs, they return to the earth, on that very day their plans perish.”
But the Psalm 146 continues, “Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever.”
All the things we idolize in this world, all the things we think have the most value, are actually meaningless. Hope in the Lord – that is our most valuable commodity – Hope.
Listen again to Isaiah’s invitation from God:
“Hear, everyone who thirsts,
Come to the waters…”
Come, buy wine and milk
Without money and without price.”
The things we idolize in this world, money, fame and power, they don’t mean anything in God’s new economy. God’s economy is far different than anything we have ever known. God economy is more like a shopping spree - built on grace and generosity and abundance.
And for that, May God be praised.
1. Tony Campolo, Who Switched the Price Tags, Thomas Nelson, 2008.
2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Library of Christian Classic, The Westminster Press, 1965.
3. Diana Butler Bass, “Empty Altars Everywhere,” The Cottage blog, Feb. 22nd, 2023.
