[Mcgregorpage] McGregorPage #703, Lent 3, 3/7/10

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Lent 3 – March 7, 2010


Isaiah 55:19
Psalm 63:18
I Corinthians 10:113
Luke 13:19


The Empty Tank


Human hunger runs deep.  We are the only creatures with eating disorders.  We eat right past full because "full" doesn't mean fulfilled.  Everything we do runs to excess because the fill-gauge is attached to another tank, not the one we are filling.  Isaiah promises food, but the way he talks about food tells us that it will fill the other tank, the one that is always registering empty.  The Psalmist talks about the soul thirsting and the flesh fainting not for water and food but for God.  Fill the first tank as one may, the other remains empty.  Paul reminds the Corinthians that the confusion between hungers, between empty tanks, has led to the demise of God's people in the past and can bring his readers down too.  Jesus shocks us with the idea that God might be hungry too, hungry for repentance, our repentance, (hungry, if only for our sakes).  


Our country is populated with top leaders who apparently try to fill their insatiable tanks at the public pump.  Is this a threat to their service to the country, or is it just the nature of business and politics?  If I am right about the gauge actually being connected to another tank, one that doesn't get fed regardless of how full the first tank becomes, then it is a problem in proportion to their power.  Who knows what the "empty" reading will require at the expense of the country?  Wise decisions are made on a full tank; the other tank, that is.


I used to operate as if the church could and should fill my other tank, but found that the response to my sermons could never be enthusiastic enough, worship attendance never high enough and finances never secure enough for that.  I have concluded that the church, though important to my sense of wellbeing, can never fill that other tank.  I will never be the pastor I am called to be until I repent of such expectations and let God fill that tank.  Unless I do, I will always feel empty and anxious as a pastoral.


"Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.  Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?"  (Isaiah 55:1-2)


This tank lies buried within us reading "empty" while we feed the obvious tank full to overflowing.  Only repentance can uncover the access to this buried tank.  Only with the recognition that we are dependent on God to fill it will it ever be filled.  We have hidden its opening beneath heaps of denial.  Determined to fill ourselves, we have obscured the only prospect for being truly full.  But, the gage, ever connected to the other tank, continually registers "empty" despite every effort.


What is a "full tank" to a person killed in the service of worship, or one hit by a falling tower?  What is this warning? " ... unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did." Jesus seems to blur the cause and effect relationship between sin and disaster.  Then he connects the two again with his warning.  Disaster finally arrives for voracious, empty people.  The two attract each other.  Likewise, disaster can reach out and include those who repent, those who open themselves to God's filling, but their death is not the same disaster.  They die in the Lord and to the Lord.  Death ends our ability to fill ourselves, but it doesn't change God's ability to fill us.




May these thoughts strengthen you. 
 
An Open Letter to Fellow Pastors 
>From Roland McGregor, United Methodist Pastor 
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