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.

A matter of life and death

Isaiah 55

Luke 13:1-9

I made a close friend in 6^th 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 7^th 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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[1] Matt Skinner, commentary on Working Preacher