LENT 3 Year C
Exodus 3:1-16; Psalm 63:1-8, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9
Christ Episcopal Church
Tacoma, Washington
Sunday, March 4, 2019
The Rev. Janet Campbell
There’s no historical record
of either of the tragedies
in today’s Gospel –
the slaughter of Galilean pilgrims
in the Jerusalem temple
by Pilate’s soldiers
or
the deaths of 18 people,
construction workers or passersby,
in the collapse
of the tower of Siloam.
But whether those particular events
actually occurred
doesn’t really matter . . .
they represent the tragedies
that happen all the time . . .
Like last week’s murder
of 50 Muslims at Friday prayer
in two mosques
in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Or the deaths of 157 people
in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302
after takeoff from Addis Ababa
the Sunday before.
Bad things and good things
happen
to good and bad people alike.
“Do you think
that because these Galileans
suffered in this way
they were worse sinners
than all other Galileans?”
Jesus’ response
to those who told him
about the temple tragedy
suggests they had implied
in their telling
that the Galileans slaughtered by Pilate
were somehow at fault.
Because if those killed were
“worse sinners than all other Galileans,”
if the tragedy were understood
as God’s punishment for their sins,
then perhaps Galileans
who could manage to stay
on the right side of God
could count themselves safe,
be reassured such a tragedy
would never happen to them.
Perhaps if construction workers
or passersby
were less sinful than those
killed at Siloam,
no such disaster would happen to them.
But Jesus rejects the flawed theology
of divine retribution
that blames the victim
and makes God a punisher,
a perpetrator
of suffering.
The sin in the massacre
in the Jerusalem temple
surely lies with
Pilate himself,
those who obeyed his order,
the rapacious Roman occupiers
of the land.
The sin in the collapse
of the tower
may lie with
shoddy construction materials
and lax safety measures.
Surely the Muslims
worshipping in their Christchurch mosques
were not greater sinners
than other worshippers in Christchurch,
whether Muslim, Christian, Jew,
Sikh, or Buddhist.
The sin
belongs to the man
who planned
and perpetrated the killings,
to the proponents of White supremacy,
to social network sites
that allow hate speech and violent rhetoric
to spread unimpeded.,
to the deadly weaponizing of the world.
Surely the passengers
on Ethiopian Airlines flight 302
were not greater sinners
that all other airline passengers that day.
The sin may lie,
as current reports suggest,
with shortcuts taken in manufacture,
insufficient pilot training,
lax government oversight.
The supposition that victims
have somehow broken more rules
than we have
creates the illusion
that we can keep ourselves safe
by obeying whatever we think
the rules are.
Behind it all
lies the warped theology
that God is a God of rules
who punishes, in the most horrific ways,
the breakers of rules.
Behind it all
lies the fallacy
that if we can just figure out what people did
to deserve their punishment,
we can, by avoiding what they did,
assure own safety –
But there is no
“safety assurance,” no “life assurance” policy
in this world.
At first,
Jesus seems
to suggest otherwise,
when he says
“. . . unless you repent,
you will all perish as they did.”
Repent = not suffer the same fate.
But hear the parable of the fig tree.
Three years it had been growing,
and still had borne no fruit.
The landowner was ready to cut it down.
“Sir,” said the gardener,
“leave it for this year also,
and I shall cultivate the ground around it
and fertilize it;
it may still bear fruit next year.
If not, you can cut it down.”
The tree is given a year of grace,
a year to continue to mature
so it can bear fruit –
for the gardener knows,
as the landowner,
(probably a city-dweller)
apparently does not,
that it takes at least three years
for a fig tree to mature
and produce its first crop.
But, eventually,
if the tree fails to be fruitful,
if it continues to draw nutrients from the soil
without any return,
it will be cut down.
There is time to bear fruit,
but not all the time in the world.
The parable of the fig tree suggests
that we are, as usual,
worrying our heads
about the wrong thing.
Jesus turns the question back on us –
If there is no life-assurance policy,
then,
what really matters?
what is really important?
“Unless you repent . . .”
Imagine what it might be like,
when we go through the barrier
between this life
and the next,
and we, who now see only dimly,
meet God’s overwhelming goodness
face to face.
In the mirror of God’s goodness
we see reflected with excruciating clarity
all the ways, big and little,
we weren’t as gentle, as loving,
as merciful, as generous,
as forgiving, as truthful,
as good
as we might have been.
Every unkind thing we’ve said . . .
every cruel and thoughtless thing we’ve done . . .
all the suffering we’ve caused . . .
present all at once . . .
and much of it
we may not even have realized
we had done.
How many times
did we knowingly and unknowingly
break others’ hearts . . . and God’s . . .
That is the moment of judgment
toward which our lives carry us,
day by day.
After the seeming eternity
of that terrible moment,
God breaks the silence.
God speaks.
“Welcome, beloved.
How good that you are here.
You must come in, sit down and eat.”
Love’s banquet is served,
the saints from every generation appear,
and the celebration begins.
A celebration of the good we did do:
the small and large acts
of courage, compassion,
forgiveness, reconciliation –
much of it
we may not even have realized
we had done . . .
but holiness was growing in us all the time . . .
when we told a risky truth,
when we comforted someone who was sad,
when we pushed back
against a racist or homophobic joke or slur,
when we let go of a grudge or a prejudice or a resentment,
when we stood up against injustice,
when we reconciled with someone we had hurt,
or who had hurt us.
when we repented . . .
When we look back at our life
from that banquet table,
when we look back
at the beautiful world in which we lived,
at the amazing human community
of which we were a part,
when we look back
at the countless opportunities we had
to love friends and family,
co-workers and strangers,
to enjoy books and paintings and music,
and mountains, lakes, flowers, birds and bugs . . . dogs!
to run and play and work and dance,
to do justice, love kindness,
and walk humbly with God . . .
When we look back . . .
how we have used that gift,
who we have been and what we have done
will be the only thing that matters.
Jesus says
the time to be attentive to that is NOW.
NOW is the time of grace.
NOW is the day of salvation,
not tomorrow, or next week,
or next year.
NOW, in Lent,
in the springtime of the Church’s year,
when the earth is warming
and tender shoots of Easter life
are stretching toward the sun,
the barren fig tree may yet spread its leaves
and bear fruit.
Ash Wednesday’s liturgy
invited us to the observance of a Holy Lent
“by self-examination and repentance;
by prayer, fasting and self-denial,
and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.”
(The Book of Common Prayer page 265)
NOW, in this Lenten spring,
is the time to cultivate the ground of our soul,
loosening, aerating, turning it over,
letting in the light of the gospel
and uprooting the sin and self-absorption
that chokes new growth.
NOW is the time to
apply the nourishment
of spiritual reading,
daily prayer,
quiet meditation.
These Lenten disciplines
prepare the soul
to bear fruit.
And what is this Easter fruit
but reconciliation?
Reconciliation
with God –
giver of life
with its glorious and frightening freedoms,
its chances, changes, choices,
its infinite possibilities
for joy and for sorrow.
Reconciliation
with self –
letting go of hurts and failures and angers,
forgiving ourselves the past,
as God does,
for the sake of the future.
Reconciliation
with others –
seeing in every human being
the God with whom we must make peace,
the self with whom we must make peace,
and
to know that we are all one,
and to live at peace.
Reconciliation
with life itself –
accepting the things we cannot change,
working to change the things we can,
seeking always the wisdom
to know the difference.
The daily spiritual practice
of reconciliation
cultivates in us
an Easter way of living,
in communion with
God, self, others, and all of creation.
The very stuff of life is the
freedom of the wide world,
the freedom of every living person
in each moment
to be wise or foolish,
to create beauty or ugliness,
to hurt or to heal,
to be at war with one another,
or to be reconciled.
Rather than
providing life-assurance,
which would require the end
of those life-creating freedoms,
God gives us grace-assurance –
that there will always be
strength and endurance
for the tests and challenges
a freely-lived life brings.
Bad things happen,
and the only positive thing about them
is they may get our attention,
may remind us
that NOW is the time
to be fully alive,
to do justice, love kindness
and walk humbly with our God.
Lent is a vision of God’s grace,
and a stretching toward it,
toward the goodness of God
that seeks always
to enlarge our hearts, our minds, our spirit.
Sooner or later,
the tree of our life,
having borne its fruit,
will be cut down by death –
Let us play, work, struggle,
laugh, rejoice, strive, sorrow, reconcile,
live fully, freely, expansively,
wholeheartedly for God
and one another.
Let us,
as the Lenten Eucharistic prayer bids us,
prepare with joy
for the Paschal feast,
when Good Friday’s cross,
bearing the broken body of Christ,
becomes Easter’s tree of life,
yielding the fruit of reconciliation.