Second Sunday in Lent

Sermon by Leah Lonsbury

Seminary Intern

Oakhurst Baptist Church

March 7, 2004

God of life and love, may the words of our mouths and the meditations our hearts be acceptable to you, this hour and at every moment, for you are our strength and our redeemer. 

            As you have heard from Lanny in the Ash Wednesday service and on the first Sunday of Lent, we have embarked upon a journey in which we will look at the last words of Jesus as recorded in the gospels as we progress through this Lenten season.  Matthew and Mark tell us similar stories and Luke and John shape their versions according to their own visions, but we need to hear all their voices.  Barbara Brown Taylor likens our need for these different perspectives to the need people have when they experience the violence and loss of an automobile accident.  She writes about a wreck that happened on the country road where she lives,

            “Today the wreck is right here, and we have all decided to pull over.  For a little while or a long while, each of us has decided to put aside whatever it was we were supposed to be doing in order to see what has happened here.  How did things get so turned around?  Why did such a promising life come to such a bloody end?  Was there anything anyone could have done to prevent it, or was it meant to be?  Him instead of us. 

            It will defy our understanding, in the end.  Those who offer us easy explanations are just in a hurry to go home.  They do not want to watch the body being tugged from the car.  They do not want to sweep up the glass or talk to the survivors.  They just want to file their reports and go home, where no one will say, ‘yes, but why him, why this, why today?’”

            When we are faced with the violence and loss of the cross, questions overflow our thoughts, and we, like the people on Barbara Brown Taylor’s road seek answers.  She writes, “The wreckage of the cross is so hard to understand that Holy Scripture gives us four reports on it…each gospel has its own truth to tell… each of them shows us a different side of Jesus’ death.  Each of them shows us a different side of ourselves.”  And I would add that each of them shows us a new way to live more authentically as we face both Jesus’ death and all the sides of ourselves in this Lenten season, especially as we face the words that are before us today.  I am thankful for the witnesses of the gospel writers and that they stood around to field the hard questions in the wreckage.  We are also thankful for Jesus’ words as he moved towards his death.  Because in those words, we catch a glimpse of how he lived, and how we should live.

Today’s gospel reading comes from the thirteenth chapter of Luke, verses one through nine.  Hear a word from the Lord…

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.  He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?  No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.  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?  No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”  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.  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?’  He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good, but if not, you can cut it down.”

            I can readily identify with the “some present” at the beginning of this passage who came to Jesus with a tale to tell about Pilate’s actions, because when I was little, I was a fantastic tattle-tale.  This was a talent I had but no choice to develop.  You see, I was the little sister to a deviant older brother who loved to push me to the point with his teasing or harassing that I thought I might absolutely explode in a furious rage, much the way my G.I. Joe men did when he tied them to firecrackers and threw them off our back porch.  Right there, in that very spot, I was sure I might just combust if he wasn’t careful, and you know he wasn’t, not even in the slightest when he was hatching his plans on how to tie a better noose for my Cabbage Patch dolls or fix the door to the steps so I would get locked in the dark, scary basement all alone.  Alas, my mother, who you heard read scripture so eloquently this morning wasn’t so adept at uncovering the wicked plans of my big brother, Justin.  I thought, surely if she didn’t see what was happening, she needed me to tell her about it.  Pretty soon, I think she grew tired of my tattling, and she started to respond with, “Leah, no one likes a tattle tale.”  Perhaps this was to protect her sanity or to teach me to deal with conflict on my own, but I soon devised a way not to learn anything from the situation.  Very clever me.  I would stand within earshot and worry to myself, “Boy, I hope Justin doesn’t slip off the drainage pipe at the end of the creek where Mom told him specifically NOT to go and bleed as he drifts downstream where no one will find him for weeks and weeks and his teachers at school will probably flunk him because he doesn’t show up so he’ll probably never get a job and be a jerky bum for the rest of his life.”  Or, I would coo to my doll, “How is your neck feeling, Becky Sue?  I’m so sorry that nasty boy who lives upstairs in the room with all the model airplanes hanging from the ceiling stuffed you and your animal friends up the chimney before mom got home from work this evening.  I hope he doesn’t lock me in the basement tomorrow afternoon in case I need to rescue you again.” 

            My mother’s warning about nobody liking a tattle-tale obviously hadn’t sunk in.  I had my own agenda.  I knew I was right, and Justin was very wrong, and I wanted everyone to know it.  I didn’t mention, because it didn’t seem to help my case at all, that I had followed my brother all over our house, over to his friend Phillip’s house, and into the woods were I tried to help them build their fort but instead ended up knocking it over.  I didn’t mention that all this was after his repeated attempts to get me to leave him alone.  It also seemed not to make much sense to add that maybe one of the reasons my G.I. Joe men had met their death was because they were found riding on his model train set he treasured and asked me never to touch.  But, surely none of this deserved the ferocity of the backlash it received. 

Perhaps Jesus, like my mother, had grown a little tired of the people tattling to him as well.  Maybe the people, like young Leah, were too busy pointing fingers at other people’s faults to see their own.  Maybe their aims and intentions, like mine, were a little off.  And in addition, also like young Leah, their attempts weren’t thwarted and put on a truer course by Jesus’ first warning, because it’s hard to see what’s wrong with you when you’re busy tearing down someone else.  In nine short verses, we hear Jesus repeat the phrase, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”  Jesus, like my mother, says very little, if anything at all, about the accused.  Instead, he focuses on the accuser.  Biblical theologian Walter Wink picks up on Jesus’ astute ability to notice what contemporary psychologists call “projection.”  This is the unconscious process of attributing to others the thoughts and feelings we inwardly disown in ourselves.  Remember Jesus’ saying about removing the log in one’s own eye before worrying about the speck in one’s neighbor’s eye? 

I knew, as it seems the people in our gospel passage did as well, that this maneuver could preserve my own sense of innocence and moral superiority if I could blame, reject or persecute the sinful “other.”  If I could set him up as bad, then I was surely good.  I may have wrecked Justin’s fort, but he destroyed my G.I. Joes.  Come on, which one couldn’t be fixed?  Walter Wink believes that Jesus grasped the profound spiritual significance of this piece of human psychology and its terrible social consequences.  Maybe Jesus and my mother are saying here, “beware, lest you disown your own sin through projection, only in the end to pay the price for your own hypocrisy.”  Viewed from this perspective, maybe we can also more fully appreciate Jesus’ many warnings against hypocrisy.  Perhaps projection is more dangerous than we think.  Rodney Hunter, a professor of pastoral care at Candler, writes, “What is so damning about hypocrisy is not merely the galling impact of its prideful self-contradiction and attempt to deceive, but its underlying dynamic of disowning evil in the self and projecting it onto others who then qualify as scapegoats and targets of abuse and violence.”

As a community, Oakhurst has known firsthand the dangers of projection in society.  John Cross, whose daughter Barbara we heard from a couple weeks ago in our worship service, helped Oakhurst stand against racism in our city and for civil rights.  Racial prejudice is a classic example of projection and it occurs in countless forms.  One of the most beautiful aspects of this church body is the diversity of its family life.  When we hear a pastor from another local church speak on the evening news about the danger and evil of homosexuality and then the cameraperson pans over our church family sharing laughter and love over our Wednesday night meal, we know we are experiencing someone else’s projection onto our friends, our families, and ourselves.

On a national and international level, we see the devastation and hurt that can come from allowing a lack of self-examination to turn into an unloading of terms like “evil” on another person, race, religion, or country.  We see the people of our country and the world seek for answers in volatile times, turning to questions of innocence and judgment, but if we allow ourselves to be a part of that world we examine, we discover that unlike what the marketers of war would have us believe, today’s lesson doesn’t allow us easy designations of judgment on others and innocence for ourselves.  The tower of Siloam, probably a part of the wall in Jerusalem fell in this story.  A tower has fallen in the story of our nation as well.  We don’t disregard the massive loss of life, the senseless killing that happened that day, even if we avoid an easy association of the Muslim world with the words “terrorist” and “evil” and start to look instead at the practices of our nation and our lives that might cause someone to act out against us in anger.  Recognizing the huge complexities of living peacefully and justly as a part of this human race may yet transform our easy analogies to a deeper and life-giving kind of ambiguity.  We begin to see that what Jesus is telling the people when he says, “Repent!”  We see that his rousing cry has not to do with who has caused the most harm or earned the most favor in the sight of God.  God is not the heavenly bookkeeper that the people are imagining, who checks off by the name of an individual what they have done that is good and subtracts blessings when they have failed to live up to God’s expectations.  Grace is not earned and loss and violence are not punishments.  It is a good thing that the state of our lives depends not on the merits we have earned.  This does not mean, however, that there are no consequences for the way we act.  In the absence of repentance, war, rumors of war, dissention, and fear continue to plague our human existence.  God does not smite humans with a determined punishment—our brokenness is a consequence of the unrepentant human state, backs turned to God, and fingers pointed toward each other. 

Moving past this projection and turning back around to look closely at ourselves, we heed Jesus’ repeated warning.  We grasp at the life we have before us, like the observers of the accident on Barbara Brown Taylor’s road, unsure of why we are spared in this world, and we hear Jesus’ words: “Unless you repent, you will perish as they did.”  Wes Avram writes, “We see that all persons are implicated in some way in patterns of injustice and unpredictable brokenness—potential victims as well as potential victimizers.  We see that none deserve protection or destruction more than others, even as real decisions can have certain effects.  Yet, we may still repent, not only by acknowledging specific wrongdoings (as important as that may be) but also at a deeper level.  We may make a basic choice to follow Jesus’ ways of healing and restoration.”  It is this restoration, this second chance for life that our eyes fall upon when we repent or turn to God.  We see the fig tree in the passage being spared for growth and fruitfulness.  We see its worth being measured not by its current uselessness, but by its potential to produce fruit that can be seen as well and good.  It is our potential to produce the fruits of mercy, faithfulness, generosity, love, and obedience to a more authentic life in the spirit of our Gardener.  And it is this spirit of the living God, our Gardener, that we are seeking in this season.  We turn to God, through the last words of Jesus to learn, in his dying, to live as he did.  We turn, we repent, because we know that God has yet more to do in the world than we could possibly grasp.  It is why we turn away from projection of our own short-comings on strangers, enemies, and even those we love, and turn toward our God.  Because, as Wes Avram says, “God has yet more ways to mend the rough edges of suffering than our politics, or our spiritualities, than we can comprehend.  Repentance is a way of saying it’s so.”  We are allowed, like the fig tree, a moment of grace in which to act, knowing that our resulting actions are measured by a Gardener with high standards for love and mercy.  Judgment and grace are balanced in the hands of this Gardener, and it is there we look for our lives’ direction.

Paul D. Duke writes about this passage in his work Spared, “Jesus turns the crowds’ expectation around and makes it a story about each person listening to him.  Tyrants kill, towers fall, without taking particular aim at the wicked or the righteous.  Jesus’ main point is that the comfortable people, the ones who are not experiencing a crisis right now, need to use this time to make themselves ready.  The fig-less tree may have yawned comfortably through several harvests without bearing fruit, but when will it ripen and bear the fruit of compassion and justice the Gardener expects?  Have you thought about these ordinary days and why they’ve been granted to you?  They aren’t ordinary at all!  Receive them with wide-eyed gratitude.  Today a person, a family, a nation has been spared- make that count for something!” 

We see in this that the time for reorienting our lives toward the God of Life is right now.  To think that this reorientation can be dealt with on our on schedule, according to our own agenda is to trivialize our need, to misjudge the seriousness of God’s love, and to court disaster (Rodney Hunter). 

            So if we turn from projection and looking for fault and sin in others, to a self-examination and an openness to God, if we repent and turn to God, how do we find direction for this kind of authentic living?   Here we look to Jesus and his words from the cross.  Jesus was born under a star and into a task he may or may not have understood, but no matter what else was clear to him, he knew that God’s hand was upon him.  He knew his acts of healing, feeding, and teaching were gifts other people did not have.  He saw how these attracted people to him.  Two times in his life he heard a voice from heaven telling him who he was—this voice touched him and those who stood and watched at his baptism and then again on the mountaintop where he had secluded himself and a few disciples to pray.  Twice he heard, in the very voice of God, “This is my Son, my Beloved.”  Not everyone heard it like he did.  That was evident in all he faced in trying to carry out his mission of reconciliation and love.  This love kept him going when his closest followers missed his main purpose, when he couldn’t possibly tackle all that needed to be done, when he felt so very alone and misunderstood.  The love in God’s voice was his sustenance.  The voice covered him and reassured him that God’s hand was upon him and in his work.  And suddenly, Jesus finds himself facing Jerusalem as the events leading to his death unfold.  And the voice is gone.  The air in the city is ominous and the people are abuzz at Passover.  Judas leaves dinner with murderous intent, and the voice is still silent.  Jesus prays desperately to hear that voice again in the garden, “Abba, Father… remove this cup from me…”, but the cup remains and not a sound is heard.  Instead an angry mob fills his ears, and the next day, on the cross, the people’s taunts and insults and his own gasping for life drown out all other sounds.  Barbara Brown Taylor continues the story, “he strained, he strained to hear the voice of love that had sustained him all his life.  If there were ever a day he needed to hear it, if there were ever a day he needed to be reminded who he was—but there was no sound from heaven, no sound at all.”    This silence that Taylor writes about is broken by Jesus’ cry of longing and hurt.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  And he dies, with a loud cry of agony.  What can this feeling of forsakenness possibly teach us about living in the Spirit of God?  How can death cause us to live?  It is because Jesus dies in a manner consistent with the whole of his life.  He dies grasping for God.  He cries out for the love he has known and desires to know where that love is carrying him in what seems to be its absence.  This is consistent with the Jesus we see in Luke 13:1-9.  There he turns the people away from the world and its brokenness and towards God.  In this turning, he urges them to grasp for God, to seek God’s path in the time they have been allowed.  He points out that the Gardener has allowed them another year in the good soil of the earth, God’s creation, and that their job is to bear the fruit of God’s love and mercy to a world overgrown with choking vines.  Reach, he says, for the source of Life, for the warmth and creative rays of the Light that would penetrate our lives if we would simply turn to face it.  The Psalmist knows this reaching, this grasping, for he has tasted the goodness of life in the garden.  “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.  So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.  Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.  So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name… you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.  My soul clings to you.”  Isaiah knows it as well in the passage for today, “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.” 

Return to God, reach, grasp, seek the Source of Life.  Follow Jesus’ example as he speaks in the last moments of his life in a way that was consistent with all of his living.  These words alone may sound like the end of all faith, but instead, it is just the beginning.  Jesus died grasping for his Abba, whose voice he could not hear.  What better definition of faith is there?  Reach, grasp, seek God even when God seems unreachable.  We hear once more from Barbara Brown Taylor, for “in Jesus’ suffering, he is the comfort of those who have no comfort.  In his abandonment, he is the God of those who have no God.  Hearing no voice of love, he cried out, making a sound that—for many—became the voice of love.”  We also see that he becomes the voice of those who would cry out in their grasping for God.  He serves as our first and best example of a life spent in pursuit of the Source of Life.  We are not forsaken, for we have heard the voice of love.  We have only to follow its sound as it echoes in our ears above the noise of this broken world, luring us towards fruitfulness and the light of the Sun on our faces.  Amen.