The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
March 11, 2007
3^rd Sunday in Lent
Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Exodus 3: 1-7, 13-15¹

¹Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. ²There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. ³Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” ⁴When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” ⁵Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” ⁶He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
⁷Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings….
¹³But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”
¹⁴God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” ¹⁵God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:
This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.

Gospel – Luke 13: 1-9²

¹At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. ²He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? ³No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. ⁴Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? ⁵No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
⁶Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. ⁷So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ ⁸He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. ⁹If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

"Enjoy the Ride! It only Lasts Forever."

Our readings for today look at the randomness of tragedies, and the futility of fear, in the face of things that we do not understand. The question posed to Jesus in our gospel text today is the perennial question of theodicy: “If God is a God of love, then why is there evil?” To put it another way, “Why do innocent people suffer?” Actually those who asked Jesus this question already think they know the answer: “What goes around comes around,” they would say, or, more to the point, “Those people will get what’s coming to them!”

These kinds of answers, disguised as questions put to Jesus, were raised because of two recent tragedies. In the first, innocent Galileans were caught up in an argument with Pilate’s Gestapo as they attempted, peacefully, to offer sacrifices in the temple. In the second disaster, eighteen people were simply walking around at the foot of the Tower of Siloam when it collapsed on them, killing them all.

Conventional wisdom of that time, not unlike ours today, held that human suffering is somehow linked to human behavior. Following this logic to its conclusion, people who suffer always have a hand in their own suffering – every victim must share in the blame for being victimized. We even hear it in the universal lament, “What have I done to deserve this?” Society, all too often, has reinforced this blame-the-victim conclusion – most tragically in the instances of verbal and physical abuse within families.

We tend to view the hurts that we suffer in terms of cause and effect – as if it were in keeping with a principle of physics that says, “For each and every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” And yet we are not bowling pins. Psychologists will tell us, though, that accepting the idea that “you get what’s coming to you” is actually a strategy for dealing with cognitive dissonance – we desperately want to make sense out of what’s just happened!

Take these incidents in our gospel reading again; each represents two truths. Number one: people suffered and were killed. Truth number two: these people were innocent. The existential terror that these opposing truths cause in the human soul creates an awful dissonance – just look into the eyes of women and children who’ve been innocent victims of war (what our own military euphemistically refers to as “collateral damage”), and you will see it. Sometimes people will resolve this dissonance by rationalizing one of these two truths as false. So, truth number one, if people did suffer and were killed, then truth number two is revised to become something like, they must’ve brought it on themselves – somehow.

Some deal with this problem, then, purely in terms of sociology or psychology, but for us here today the question focuses on spirituality and just who it is that we trust. Our preoccupation with life’s dissonances such as this can destroy us. It will destroy what strength and freedom we have left to choose life and creativity in the face of death and destruction.³ We who would follow Jesus must not let our energy be consumed by the bitterness of cynicism, or by the kind of despair that is brought about by fear. We would never be able to give birth to the kinds of “fruit” that Jesus constantly refers to in his teachings and ministry.⁴

We know, though, don’t we, that when confronted by tragedy we all too often subconsciously bury the fear that “it could have been us.” The point that Jesus is making here, though, is that the very fear that paralyzes us has got to be confronted and overcome. We need to recognize that it really could have been us. In fact it is.

Compared to the murder of a few Galileans by Pilate or the loss of eighteen people in the collapse of a building, our world is overwhelmed with tragedies. If they aren’t due to the horrors of human conflict, then floods, earthquakes, storms and other “natural” disasters alone make it seem as if we were living in “the last days.” In fact, sadly, that’s exactly how fundamentalist Christians respond to such horrors of our time. They claim that they’re warnings to us from God – never mind the innocent suffering of the people caught up in these disasters. Others say that the people who suffer must have sinned somehow to be punished in the ways that they are. Jesus says, emphatically, that neither of these things is true.

Albert Camus suggested another option for us to consider in his novel, The Plague. He proposed that Christians have got to either become involved in the tragedies of our world, or give up their faith. If a Christian meets a blind person, Camus said, he or she must either be willing to be blinded as well, or cease to believe. We see this option inexorably coming toward us during this Lenten season as we watch Jesus enter into human suffering even to the point of death, and yet somehow he was able to transform that suffering into a renewed proclamation of life.

You and I may be more like those victim-blamers who came to Jesus than we think – taking God for granted, thinking that we know how God acts and what God has to say about it all. We come to church each week expecting to find God in our worship and liturgy, in our lessons and classrooms, and so we box God into these sacred times and resist opening our hearts and lives to the presence of God in the rest of our lives.

God is not just in the rituals of our Sunday morning experience. God is in the burning bush of Darfur, ablaze as a cry for liberation. God speaks through the withered fig tree of Africa’s drought, as well, calling us to labor on behalf of a dying land – to give its people a chance for nourishment. God calls out of the needless deaths of war, when any numbers of alternatives still remain open to us. And, yes, God calls out to us in the earthquakes and mudslides of Asia to remind us that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ “keepers”⁵ – even though they might be on the other side of the world.

As Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have pointed out for us in our Lenten study book The Last Week:

…taken as a parable, the fig tree’s failure is a cipher for that of the temple. The framing fig tree warns us that the framed temple is not being cleansed, but symbolically destroyed and that, in both cases, the problem is a lack of the “fruit” that Jesus expected to be present.⁶

And so they may say later:

…when worship substitutes for justice, God rejects God’s temple – or, for us today, God’s church.⁷

God also “speaks” to us in every creative event and moment of compassion throughout the history of the world. And often they call us to look for God in unexpected places, to listen for a “word” that takes us by surprise. They call us to move out of our self-centered smugness – our assurance of salvation simply because we’re Christians – and stand on the shaky ground where bushes burn and the voice of “I am” calls us to see the affliction of others, and then join with God in delivering them out of the hands of their oppressors.

By now Lent may be far enough along for us to have forgotten the ashes, but Easter is still well over the horizon.  We have choices to make:  we can forget about Lent until Holy Week is on us, or we can try to open ourselves to the message of reform and transformation that Jesus flings at us in today's gospel lesson and let if affect our daily lives.  It's a very personal challenge. 

I don’t think that this is meant to disturb us, to make our Lenten journey all the more morbid and our night dreams anxious. What we’re talking about here is a way of living that recognizes the sacred, not only all around us but within us – which the saints of the church have always been telling us we ought to try. Live as if this day, this hour, might be your last. As that line from a prayer that I most often use at memorial services says:

Help us to live as those who are prepared to die. And when our days here are completed, help us to die as those who go out to live, so that living or dying, our life may be in You….⁸

Most of us know people who are dying – friends, family – or those who have just died. If we don’t, then we may be living in a greater stage of denial and fear than we’re willing to admit. People who are dying have a lot to teach us – especially how precious those last moments are. They can teach us about a kind of freedom that happens when we begin to acknowledge the limits of our life span, about how tender it is to embrace life and to do what’s really important, and right, and good with the time that we have left.

Walking through the desert of Lent is meant to teach us about survival. Our lives are relatively short. They don’t have to be mean, meaningless, and without love. But we’ve got to be aware, to open our eyes, to open our hearts, to open our minds, to open our doors – to be willing to change some things within the church …to reform our lives. That’s what Jesus was constantly teaching. It’s never too late. It’s always possible as long as we have life.

So Lent has to be given a time and a place that it might have such an effect on us. What harm am I doing – to myself or others – that I must turn away from? It would be good for us to check-up on some of our self-destructive patterns and bad habits and reconstruct some good ones – run a checklist on our eating and drinking, our driving and interactions with others, our dependency on drugs or alcohol, the necessary rhythms of work and play, exercise and rest. It would also be a good thing for us to take an inventory on our relationships – loves and hates, friends and enemies, family and co-workers, children and those older than we are. What might we discover needs to be done: forgivenesses begged for or given, ties severed or reinforced? What kinds of celebrating or mourning do we still need to do? Now’s the time. Spring is in the air, and Easter a runaway train. It’s all possible. The only thing that may be holding us back is the paralysis of fear, or is it the foolishness of pride? Maybe it’s just the simple interference of everyday patterns, habits and systems that we’ve allowed to be imbedded into the precious years of our lives.

We’d better grab hold and enjoy the ride! It only lasts forever. Let's not waste the time we've been given.

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