Pretending and Returning

 

Luke 13:1-9 We all engage in magical thinking from time to time.  Sometimes it’s relatively harmless – if I wear my team’s jersey on Sunday they will win the game.  Other times it’s a bit more toothy – If  I pray the right way, with the right words, I will be protected from danger.  Sometimes it’s based in measurable data – seatbelts wearers survive more accidents, vegetable-eaters have lower risk of heart attack.  So it throws us somehow when our magical thinking doesn’t pan out. How could he have a heart attack? He was such a healthy eater! How could she have died in a car accident? She was such a faithful seatbelt wearer!     We want simple. Clear cut. But life doesn’t give us that. We want guarantees and we don’t get those either.  Nobody wants to talk about this, but the truth is, mostly we want our simple, clear-cut guarantees because we are terrified of dying.  As we pray at funerals, “We forget that all life comes from you and to you all life returns.”  Boy do we.  So much so that we try whatever we can think of to not die – whether it’s the big D that is coming for all of us, or the little d’s we have nearly every day in the form of humiliations, losses and devastations. We want to transcend our mortality in whatever ways we can - look younger, go faster, do more - because we can’t accept that we get this one teeny life and that’s it.   And then we can’t even let ourselves enjoy this one teeny life we do have because either we suspect that by appreciating it we might jinx it (more magical thinking).  Or because in this one moment we are stuck in we are worried we are missing out on something else, something better.  We are so caught up in trying to earn, or prolong, or maximize, or protect our lives, that we often are not actually in our lives.  This week I was talking with someone about all the millions of great books in the world, and he mentioned that if for 50 years you read a book a week, you would read 2,500 books in your lifetime. That’s it. No more. Even a long, full life is terribly, insultingly limited.   So we pretend. We try to control what we cannot control. And if we can’t control it, maybe we can pray the right way to get God to control it in our favor. We employ our magical thinking, put on our blinders and soldier on.     So then, it is terrible news, terrible, that sometimes bad things just happen. Disasters strike, sickness comes, and appallingly unfair things happen to people all the time. Life is full of suffering. Loss and grief are just a part of the package of being human. This news shouldn’t come as a shock to us, but somehow, every time, it still does.    When people bring up to Jesus a current event, a much-discussed atrocity, this horrible, unthinkable act of murder and desecration that has happened, Jesus skips all the speculation and punches a hole right through their magical thinking. Did those who suffered like this deserve it in some way? Did they, by something they did, or neglected to do, bring this tragedy upon themselves? No! Jesus answers. And then he brings up another recent scenario with mass casualties, and asks, What about those people, did they deserve to die this way? No!    But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say, but unless you repent you will die like they did.     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” in our bibles is actually the vulgar word for excrement. In other words, in Jesus’ story the gardener says, “Let it sit in shit for a year and see if it doesn’t start living.”   There is no magic formula for preventing tragedy from happening to us.  Death can come any moment, just like it did for those unfortunate and unsuspecting people, and unless you repent, you will die like they did.      Repentance isn’t about feeling guilty or being judged.  Repentance is being reoriented. Exchanging your way of seeing the world for God’s way. In the Greek it means turning around, changing your mind, going in a different direction.  And the Hebrew core of it actually means to go home. Repentance is returning to our home in God’s love. To repent is to be found.     Lent is a time for repenting. It’s a season for actively, consciously, exchanging our messed up ways of seeing this world, trading in our magical thinking, our existential armor, our pursuit of security and stability, our fear of death and weakness, our endless striving and pushing and fleeing and fighting. Instead we let God draw our hearts and minds and lives back toward our source, to steep us in the love that made us, receive the love that claims us, and respond to the love that pulls us to share deeply in this life with each other.  Our Lent theme is “Cease striving and trust that I am God.’  In other words, Stop doing it your way and surrender to God’s way, aka., Repent.   Just like life’s moments of triumph, contentment and happiness, life’s tragedies are no less filled with the presence of God, no less available to God’s activity, no less moments in which our belonging to God and each other is real and tangible. In fact, they are often more so.  God is not apart from death or suffering. Jesus came into our death and bears our suffering. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing, nothing, nothing. So we may see, and bear, and not turn away from the terrible injustice or suffering of others, surely not turn them into moral lessons to try to protect ourselves.    Trading our way of seeing for God’s way means that my neighbor’s joy is my joy, and my enemy’s suffering is my suffering. That we are all inseparably bound, responsible for each other, and for the land, sky, air, and water that hold us, and the creatures that inhabit this world alongside us.  And it means trusting that love, eternal and unending, permeates every moment, even the terrible ones.  So we rage at the falling bombs, and grieve at the dying children, and rejoice at the defiant people rescuing, and feeding, and sheltering one another in the midst of it all, and we recognize there the Holy One at work. Always at work. The unwavering force of love, God’s unshakeable purposes for all, cannot be derailed by evil or hindered by death. This world is held in God’s love, infused with God’s justice, moved by God’s heartbeat, drawn into God’s purposes, heading towards God’s peace. And dying is transitioning from the space constrained by time and limitation where we just glimpse this and seek to trust it, to the space beyond time and limitation, where the love and peace of God is all in all. It’s completely returning home.   I don’t want to diss us dear humans for all the magical thinking we engage in.  I think it’s because part of us, deep underneath our conscious knowing, knows that there is more than this. We know we are eternal. We know we are made for fullness of life. More life than this life we are given can contain. But that is the dilemma of being human, isn’t it? We sense this deeper thing, this possibility, and yet we cannot attain it. No matter what we do, we can’t get there on our own. Because it’s not about us and what we do or don’t do, believe or don’t believe.  All of life, every breath, is a gift. Life is an ongoing, never-stopping gift that God is continuously giving, right now, even.  This breath is a gift.. And this one… And this one...  All of life is holy, infused with the very presence of  God.  God is just giving Godself away, every moment, in us, through us, calling us back to Godself, drawing us back into love that outlasts death. Return to me. Repent. Let go of your striving and trust me.    And maybe the way we get there is just by being willing to sit in the shit.  Maybe it’s only when we accept this mess of a life and choose to inhabit it deeply - embracing our own mortality, admitting our own nothingness without God - that the fullness we were made for, life so abundant as to grow fruit in us, and feed others through us, can flourish.  Maybe we just have to be where we already are - deathbound and knee deep in dung – and accept that no magical thinking can protect us, no right beliefs can buffer us, we’re just exposed and wide open, where the sun, and the rain, the elements and experiences can permeate us.  And within the limits of our teeny fragile life, the infinite love of God, the origin and destination of our eternal being, will bring forth in us that which we can’t produce ourselves. And we will be fully alive.   Amen.