Lent 2007 Blessed Hunger,
Holy Feast
Lent , March 11th
Speaker: Linda
Worship Leader: Jonathan
Music leader: Summervills
Confession
response: Leonard
Texts:
Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
Isaiah 55:1 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. 55:2 Why 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. 55:3 Incline
your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make
with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. 55:4 See,
I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples.
55:5 See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not
know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of
Israel, for he has glorified you. 55:6 Seek the LORD while he may be found, call
upon him while he is near; 55:7 let the wicked forsake their way, and the
unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy
on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. 55:8 For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. 55:9
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your
ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Psalm
63:1 O God, you are my God, I
seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my
flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. 63:2 So I have looked
upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. 63:3 Because your
steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. 63:4 So I will
bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.
63:5 My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with
joyful lips 63:6 when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; 63:7 for you have been
my help, and in the shadow of your wings
I sing for joy. 63:8 My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.
1
Corinthians 10:1 I do
not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and
all passed through the sea, 10:2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud
and in the sea, 10:3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 10:4 and all drank
the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed
them, and the rock was Christ. 10:5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most
of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness. 10:6 Now these things
occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they
did. 10:7 Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is
written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to
play." 10:8 We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did,
and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. 10:9 We must not put Christ to
the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. 10:10 And do not
complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. 10:11 These
things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to
instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. 10:12 So if you think you
are standing, watch out that you do not fall. 10:13 No testing has overtaken you
that is not common to everyone. God is
faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the
testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.
Notes: some
interesting mixed metaphors here….the Rock that gave them drink and followed
them was Christ. Is this what Dame
Julian used in her nursing-mother Jesus image?
The “desiring evil” thing builds beautifully on Isaiah’s lament of those
who crave what does not satisfy. Also
reminds me of the single mom who quoted this last verse and remarked that she
wished God didn’t have such a high opinion of her.
Luke
13:1 At that very time there
were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had
mingled with their sacrifices. 13:2 He asked them, "Do you think that
because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all
other Galileans? 13:3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you
will all perish as they did. 13:4 Or 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? 13:5 No, I
tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."
13:6 Then 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. 13:7 So 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?' 13:8 He replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until
I dig around it and put (balw!!—pelt
it, literally throw crap at it! Cognate
of our “ballistic”) manure (koprian--cognate
of “coprolite”) on it. 13:9 If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if
not, you can cut it down.'"
Notes: Wow, talk about giving something/one incentive: if a good life in a vineyard with the vines
doing all the heavy lifting isn’t enough to spur you into producing good
fruits, let’s hurl a little crap your way…so, how does this work with the
testing of 1Cor and the abundant life promised in Isaiah?? Stupid obvious question: why was a fig tree planted in a vineyard?
Contemporary
quote: "Of all acts of man,
repentance is most divine; the greatest of all faults is to be conscious of
none." -- Thomas Carlyle
Introduction:
One
of my Lenten disciplines this year
is finding something every day to
laugh out loud about;
I’ve
been paying special attention
to the various online pastors’ lists
I browse,
looking for funny things coming out
of other pastors’ congregations….
at
Winter Camp I shared some of the bloopers
that showed up on message boards and
in bulletins.
Here’s
another one:
A
pastor was pondering the news from his denomination where several prominent
clergy had suddenly resigned, citing burnout and frustration. So he worked out a sermon on some of the
issues that pastors face to help his congregation understand the
challenges.
When
the guy who changed
the church’s message board along the
street
asked for the next week’s sermon
title,
the
pastor was ready with an eye-catcher,
“Are Ministers Cracking Up?”
But
when the pastor pulled up at the church the next day,
he was a little stunned to read,
“Our Minister’s Cracking Up.”
Thanks
for your patience with your minister during the craziness of
our move!!
I don’t think I’m cracking up—
thanks to the help of
many of you, and Gary’s family—
but this has been a stressful couple
of weeks.
In
fact, Gary and Frieda are looking forward to their trip to Africa in two weeks
as an opportunity to recover and relax….maybe….
As we
continue to travel through Lent
we run head on into a really tough
Gospel text today.
It
brings to light an issue that
really can—has--caused people to
crack up….
First,
we hear the expansive, joyful text
from Isaiah, in the Hebrew
Scriptures
urging
people to come to the feast, the party
that the forgiving, generous God
is throwing for all those who are
hungry and thirsty….
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? Listen carefully
to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your
ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.
Isaiah goes on to urge people to come home to a
merciful and forgiving God:
Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let
the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return
to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will
abundantly pardon.
And then, boom!
we read the Gospel from Luke 13
and
while it contains the invitation to repentance as well,
it
is downright painful by contrast.
He
asks his audience—who have just brought him the bitter news
of the brutal act of their ruler
in murdering a group of Galileans in
the act of worship –
“Do
you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way
that they were worse sinners than
all other Galileans?
No,
I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”
Say
what?
They
weren’t worse sinners than the rest of Galilee? There is no connection between
their sin and what happened to them?
But
if we don’t repent, we too will perish as they did??
This
is certainly one of the more enigmatic Gospel readings.
Barbara Brown Taylor who I quoted
last week, weighs in on this text as well; she says,
Calamity strikes and we wonder what we did wrong. We scrutinize our
behavior, our relationships, our diets, our beliefs. We hunt for some cause to
explain the effect in hopes that we can stop causing it. What this tells us is
that we are less interested in truth than consequences. What we crave, above
all, is control over the chaos of our lives.
Luke does not divulge the motive of those who told Jesus about the
Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices. The implication is
that those who died deserved what they got, or at least that is the question
Jesus intuited. "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in
this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?"
It is a tempting equation that solves a lot of problems. (1) It answers
the riddle of why bad things happen to good people: they don’t. Bad things only
happen to bad people. (2) It punishes sinners right out in the open as a
warning to everyone. (3) It gives us a God who obeys the laws of physics. For
every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Any questions?
(This
is a theology that can cause one to crack up—with guilt, with fear. There is a man who stops in occasionally to
see me; he wanders the country, unable to resume a normal life because he
blames himself for the death of a loved one.
I would guess that each one of you can think of someone you know who has
been wracked by guilt like this--or maybe there is something in your own life
that causes you this kind of ongoing anguish.
Notice: this is guilt without repentance.)
It is a tempting equation, Barbara
says, but Jesus won’t go there. "No," he tells the crowd, "but unless you repent, you will all
perish as they did." In the South, this is what we call giving with
one hand and taking away with the other. No,
Jesus says, there is no connection
between the suffering and the sin. Whew. But unless you repent, you are going to lose some blood too.
Oh. (emphasis added)
So,
what is the point, here?
Let me
illustrate a place where this gets way too real for me. Sometimes, Gary sleeps with his face against my hair, snoring a little or
breathing rather noisily. I wake up in
a panic when in my sleep it dawns on me that his breathing has completely
stopped—no sound, no movement, no ebb and flow of warmth on my scalp. He has sleep apnea so this is something I
tend to worry about, that some night he will just stop breathing. As I wake up all the way saying “Gary!” in
panic-stricken tones, both his pulse and respiration rate shoot right up; so
far, he has always jerked awake thinking that at the very least that there must
be an intruder in the house….
Now,
some day, Gary and I will both die.
We
don’t know when, or who will go first.
But the
issue isn’t whether one of us will be guilty of the other’s death;
I don’t think so.
I think
the issue is what kind of fruit
will those moments of nocturnal
panic
produce in my days?
Will
they increase my gentleness and tenderness and love
for Gary during the day?
This is
the kind of repentance that Jesus is asking of us.
This is
the repentance that goes beyond guilt and fear to
genuine change in thought and behavior.
This is
the repentance that turns our lives around,
causes us to pivot in our tracks
and
sometimes strike out in a completely new direction….
I think
what Jesus is saying is that even really bad things—the manure that the
gardener digs in around the roots of the unfruitful fig tree--can operate for
good in our lives….helping us bear fruit.
Life is
uncertain.
We
don’t have complete control.
Bad
things happen in the easiest of lives.
We
can’t totally protect ourselves or the people we love….
and that can leave us open to panic
in the middle of the night.
But, do
we use these thoughts that bring sudden panic
as a way to make life and love more
fruitful
for those with whom we live—
or will
we let those thoughts only convulse ourselves with panic,
increase anxiety, guilt, and stress?
I
think that right here is the warning that Jesus is giving us.
Use your fear of what may happen to make good
choices;
you don’t
know what will come your way tomorrow.
There
may be time to salvage your life and your relationships
with God and others—
or there may not.
So live your life in a way
that won’t give you regrets—
regardless of what comes down the
pike toward you.
It
may be in the small things,
the opportunities for the random
acts of kindness
that each day brings each one of us.
It
may be in the huge pivot points of our lives,
driven by the chaos or calamity we
try so desperately to control,
to understand…
Thich
Nhat Hanh says, “Each moment brings you the choice to move towards your own
soul or away from it.”
This
is repentance.
It’s
all about the choices we make,
the direction we move.
Repent,
Jesus says,
or you will perish as they did.
I
want to end with a real-life illustration of just this kind of repentance,
this radical form of changing one’s
life…
Reference: Barbara Brown Taylor
teaches at Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga. This article appeared in the
Christian Century, March 4, 1998, page 229; copyright by the Christian Century
Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription
information can be found at www.christiancentury.org.
This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.)