I made a close friend in 6th grade named Meenal. She was Indian, and Hindu, and she had
been born with two chambers in her heart instead of four, and had surgeries as
a baby that divided it into three, but as a result she was much smaller than your
average sixth grader.
But other than her size, which she dismissed with a flick of her hand
and a sentence about her heart, there was nothing to reveal that anything was
wrong with her. Meenal was funny,
and killer smart. She lived a few
blocks from me and I can remember lip syncing to cassette tapes we’d recorded
off the radio in her bedroom while her little brother peeked in through the
crack in the door in disgust, trying on her sticky dots on my forehead in her
bathroom mirror, and eating meals at her family table across from the painting
of the god Vishnu on her living room wall.
Meenal and I went to junior high together and our friendship continued.
We were always partners for projects and I can still see her pushing her
glasses up her nose, flipping her braid over her shoulder and collapsing in
hysterical laughter over something.
Towards the end of 7th grade, Meenal got sick. She had to go in to the hospital, and I
didn’t know much about what was going on.
I got the flu for a few days, and wasn’t able to visit her there. Then I got better, and she was, for
some reason, still in the hospital, and I still didn’t go see her for a while.
The day I finally was to visit Meenal, my mom picked me up early at
school so that we could go to the hospital from there. I had notes from friends
to Meenal to bring with me. The
school nurse offered to call ahead and make sure it was a good time to see her,
and I pulled on my coat and zipped my backpack shut and plopped down on a chair
in the office while my mom signed me out at the front desk. After a minute, the nurse came out of
her office and came over to me with a strange expression on her face. She looked at my mom and me and said,
“I am so sorry. Meenal died this
morning.”
The biggest emotion I had for the next several weeks, besides just
disbelief and deep sadness, was guilt.
Guilt that I didn’t go see her, what
kind of a friend was I? Regret at having missed the chance to say goodbye. But the more insidious and heavier guilt that kept my crying at night
was the thought that Meenal had died before I told her about Jesus. That was my responsibility – I had been
her friend for two years, and had never told her about Jesus. She knew I was a Christian and had been
at our dinner table when we prayed, just as I knew she was Hindu and had shared
her table. We had talked a little
about our religions, but I had never helped her to know Jesus, and she had died
before I had “the talk” with her. Which
meant, to my 13 year old broken heart, that Meenal had gone to hell and it was
my fault.
Grief and regret tortured me mercilessly day after day. One night lying in bed I cried until I
was utterly exhausted, apologizing over and over to God, begging God to hear
me, to see her, not to blame her for my downfall, appealing to God’s love to do
something to make the situation right.
“She’s just a kid!” I pleaded.
“I’m so sorry!”
And then, in the darkness I heard, almost audibly, a clear voice
completely separate from my desperate pleadings, words that broke through mine,
interrupting them and seeming in my minds eye to wrap around Meenal’s tiny body
in warmth, the voice said, “I’ve got her. She’s ok. She is mine.”
And I sobbed with relief.
I didn’t understand it – it didn’t make sense at all to what I believed
– and in fact I could not explain it for years afterward - but it was so
utterly real that immediately I was flooded with peace – like water washing
through me. “She is mine.”
God doesn’t play by our rules and religion. God doesn’t step in and save those we think should be saved,
punish those we know deserve punishment, or honor our clear cut system of
choices and consequences, penalties and rewards, earning and losing. God doesn’t keep little girls with half
a heart from dying, or send them to hell for what they do or don’t
believe.
When the people ask Jesus about those that had died in a terrible
tragedy, Jesus tells them as much. It’s not because of anything they did. Bad things happen,
death is capricious and merciless.
Disasters strike, sickness comes, terrible things happen to people all
the time, and they are not fair, not earned, not brought on by people’s
thoughts or choices. Sometimes awful things just happen.
And it would be nice if he had stopped there. But he goes on to say, but unless you repent you’ll die like they
did.
Thanks, Jesus, you’ve really cleared this up for us.
Then he tells this story about a fig tree that isn’t producing any
fruit. It isn’t showing any signs of life. Maybe it should just be cut down.
“Give it another year,” the gardener says. “Let me put manure around
it.” The Greek word Jesus puts in the mouth of the gardener, which is so
politely translated as “manure” here is actually the vulgar word for excrement,
in other words, in Jesus’ story the gardener says, “Let it sit in shit for
another year and see if it doesn’t start living.”
If we think the faith we confess can be boiled down to an easy system,
with simple answers, a cause and effect type of arrangement with God, then we
are off base. And if we think
confessing the right kind of belief can guarantee long life, or salvation, or
freedom from suffering, we are wrong. We cannot find easy blame for the tragedies that happen in
life, no formula for avoiding them or preventing them from happening to
us.
Death can happen any moment, Jesus says to his questioners, and unless you repent, you will die like
they did. One moment here, the next,
gone. So it begs the question, how
will you live your life?
Repent. he says.
Repent is not a moral word, like we like to make it. It isn’t about
what we do, or being good or bad. It’s not feeling really badly about what
we’ve done. Repentance in the
biblical sense is a complete reorientation. It is a 180 - turning from death to life. Sometimes it is used as something that
happens to you, rather than something
you do. One biblical scholar says, “It can be more about being found
than about finding oneself.”[1]
I repented that night about Meenal. I was found by God. I was reoriented from death to
life. I was deeply conscious of my
shame, my weakness and precariousness, I felt the fragility of life and the nearness
of death, and above and around these things and right up next to them, I was
caught in the overwhelming and astonishing awareness of God’s mercy and love
that holds us all. I could now see
the whole of our friendship as a gift, and not as a failure; I saw Meenal now
laughing and talking a blue streak at God’s own table.
And my own life was redeemed and given back to me, no longer captive
to guilt but a gift, every day one more day than she had.
“What about my friend?” I
had asked.
“She’s gone and it’s not her fault, and it’s not yours either,” God
had answered. “But what about
you?” How will you live? Repent. Turn to me and live.”
This business of life and living is not about what you earn or
squander, being deserving or unworthy.
It is not about right and wrong, or good and bad. It’s more urgent and elemental than that
– it’s about life and death. This
is the paradigm shift Jesus is trying to impart to his listeners.
Death comes, and tragedy and suffering strike often without
warning. But how will you
LIVE? Will you live toward life or
toward death? What will define
you? What will your life
confess?
Will you participate in death? Will you let your life be run by fear –
seeking to preserve yourself at all cost, even over against others? Even at the expense of your own
well-being and wholeness? Will you let the same force that takes lives in
senseless violence or horrible disasters be what you live for, whether you
serve it or avoid it, always keeping your eyes on it and letting it dictate
your actions? Hiding your shame,
protecting your pain, living in self-judgment or isolation? Will you live as though your life is of
no value, a waste of soil, failed expectation, trapped in regret? Will you live
toward death?
Or will you repent and live toward life?
Will you turn away from death to God – whatever suffering and tragedy
may befall you, and participate in life, the life that defies death and our
structures that serve it? Will
you confess the abundance that invites all to come to the table and eat – money
or not, the life that doesn’t pay you back by what you earn or deserve, or by
what circumstances you’ve landed in, but by the grace and love of God alone,
the life that seeks wholeness and connection, fullness and love? The life that
hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things? Will you live in the life you were
created for?
And if you need help getting there, Jesus adds, why not sit in the
shit for a while?
Because if you do, you may find that it awakens repentance. You might
notice that it nurtures awareness of your fragility and reality, prompts confessions
of honesty about your circumstances, forthrightness about your state. And after a time a shift begins to
happen within you from death toward life – you are found, you are reoriented,
the warmth of the sun and the cool of the rain penetrates your thick skin and
nourishes you deep within. And, you
may begin to see brand new life coming from death itself; out of the stagnancy
and even the stench is born beauty, strength and fruit.
Life is fragile, and it is short. And there is a lot about it we can’t
control. And we do a lot within it
that serves death, breaking down instead of building up. We confess that. But by the grace of God, life is also a gift. And we also confess that God brings life –new life, full
life, life unexpected and glorious that changes us and makes us live differently,
that makes our very living into a confession of enduring hope.
And Christ calls us, again and again, to repent, to be reoriented back
to the life for which we are born, and into which we are called. God’s grace invites us all to the
banquet table of the life that overcomes death, saying, “2Why do you spend your money for that
which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen
carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in
rich food.
3Incline your ear, and come to
me;
listen, so that you may live.”
May we listen and live.
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