March 7, 2004
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture
Scripture text: Genesis 15:12, 17-18, Luke 13:31-35
"Smoking Pot, Flaming Torch:
Foxes, Hens, and Pretenders to Every Throne"
Smoking pot, flaming torch – sound like any particular desert
experience we know? Black Rock? Burning Man? Not quite a Lenten
discipline, I guess, but could speak to our Lenten theme, "Desert
Delight," -- meeting God in the wildernesses of our lives, the
deserted and even deserting places, the hard and harsh, the penitent and
penitential places where only God seems prepared to go with us
sometimes, to make lasting covenant with us for all times and places –
where we pass between pots and torches, rocks and hard places, -- where
there is no way around only through our times of temptation and trial,
of defeat and despair. "And lead us not into temptation." Put
us not to the test. For we know how weak our flesh, and even, God help
us, our spirit can be.
Lent calls upon us to rend our hearts, not our garments, -- to expose
ourselves, become open and vulnerable, searchable, knowable, changeable,
growable, -- as deeply and as darkly, as meekly and as mysteriously as
we can bare and bear. Oscar Wilde claims we are lucky when our hearts
can break, for "How else but through a broken heart / May Lord
Christ enter in?" Christ of the broken and breaking heart, weeping
over Jerusalem, Broken Heart of the Whole World, -- lamenting the
needless violence and war, the suffering we subject ourselves and others
to. That suffering becomes Jesus’ own, -- Jesus the Suffering of God
in this world, perhaps to get the attention of our hearts, -- to reach
us, touch us, break us, remake us.
Hemingway says, "The world breaks everyone, then some become
strong at the broken places." We pray for ourselves, and for all
who are broken, to become strong at our broken places. Maybe that’s
why to see the "Passion" film, to soften our hardened hearts,
which is why our children don’t need to see it. They come with
softened hearts. How do we help them keep their hearts that way? In a
culture of hardening hearts in the highest of places? But Jesus’
suffering, like all of Jesus’ life, always points to the passion of
others, even of masses, whole peoples of others, -- the compassion of
the God who enters all history to share the passion of no-people but
slaves in Egypt, and to lead them gently, firmly out, -- through
wilderness saving and setting free, through desert healing and making
whole. Jesus is always that connective link for us, between the world’s
suffering and our very lives, -- calling attention, bearing witness,
making up-close and personal. Who in the world would Jesus bomb? Who in
the world would Jesus take work away from? Who in the world would Jesus
refuse to bless?
As John Emerson made wonderfully plain in last Sunday’s sermon, the
very same Spirit who has just proclaimed God’s "delight" in
Jesus’ baptism now leads Jesus into the wilderness for testing by the
anti-Spirit, whom Bill McKibben calls "the nano-technologist"
of Jesus’ day. Jesus knows from the beginning of his life and work he
cannot avoid Jerusalem, confrontation with all the "powers that
be" of church, state, and marketplace, -- of religion, politics,
and the economics that can so brutalize our lives. The
religious-political party of Pharisees, who often get cheaply portrayed
as nothing but ruthless enemies of Jesus, here come to warn him away
from Jerusalem. Herod, a pretender to every throne, who runs what might
be called the "Iraqi Governing Council" for the Romans, wants
Jesus dead.
Jesus thanks them but responds, making use of their access to Herod,
tell that fox, that false king, that selected leader, I’ll see him
when my work is done "on the third day." For Jesus, whose work
is never done, whose work is ours, and beyond, there is always a
"third day," by which we may understand a resurrection day, a
day even death cannot keep the God of Life from saving and setting free,
healing and making whole, even until this day. Meantime, "It is
impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem," Jesus
knows. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and
stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your
children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you
were not willing!" Sometimes I wonder how we as a nation might have
responded to the vicious violation of 9/11 less as wounded and
frightened foxes and more as strong and gently world-gathering hens. I
wonder, if we refuse to let ourselves be led by hens, will we always be
led by foxes? . . .
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Hope, Human and Wild,
and a lay leader in his local United Methodist Church in upstate New
York, is last speaker in the series that brought us Willis Barnstone. He
speaks Wednesday, 7:30 pm, School of Journalism at UNR, Thursday, 3 pm,
McKinley Arts & Culture Center, "Poverty & Progress: A
Community Forum on City Planning and the Poor," and Friday, 7:30
pm, Nevada Museum of Art. In his latest book, Enough: Staying Human in
an Engineering Age, McKibben hearkens to God’s creation-making words
in Genesis One: "We need to do an unlikely thing: We need to survey
the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good." Because, warns
McKibben, we’re losing it! "We stand precariously on the sharp
ridge between the human past and the posthuman future." We’d
better love this world, this earth, as it is, and keep it! Tend it.
Protect it. Nurture it. Mother-hen it.
He claims we need our own desert wilderness experiences such as Jesus
has last week in order to re-learn the kind of sufficiency and restraint
that say, just because we CAN do something, something terribly
technological, some magically manipulative solution to a human problem,
does not mean we SHOULD it! Just because we have the technical ability,
for instance, to do away with old jobs, or to make new kinds of war,
does not give us the moral authority to do so. Every so-called
"advance" bears a social cost, mostly to those who can least
afford it! So we need to "retreat" for a time.
With Jesus last week we need to let the stones BE stones, not turn
them into bread just because we can. We need to let all the nations of
the world BE all the nations of the world, -- 192, and counting! – not
turn them into our colonies, our clones, just because we can. Just
because there’s such profit in it. And we need to let God BE God in
our lives, -- full of God’s own surprises for us, God’s own
interruptions, disruptions, eruptions of us – not bargain with God to
save us from ourselves, just because we think we can. Wilderness time
and perspective may, by God’s grace, restore to us the essential
humility of our humanity. Even in the life of this close and loving
congregation, much less in circles of community and of city surrounding
us, there are sisters and brothers among us who have been, and are now,
in their wilderness time, their desert time, feeling deserted if not
deserting, abandoned if not abandoning, and in painful need of
re-welcoming and reconciling. Wilderness, strangely, may teach us to let
others be just who and where they are, fitting our lives to theirs, not
fixing their lives with ours. Fitting our lives, gently, carefully,
patiently, to theirs, not fixing their lives with ours.
There’s an anonymous ditty I learned long ago to help me through
many a Lent. I call it simply "Lent Is," and if you want you
can join me in the "Lent is-es" –
LENT IS
Forty days till Easter,
Not counting Sundays.
LENT IS actually
Six and a half weeks
Of very violet repentance
And very purple passion.
LENT IS
Watching a man go to his
Death and not being able
To stop it.
LENT IS
Helping send him
To the cross.
LENT IS
Knowing this
And letting it sink in.
LENT IS
Not getting off
The hook.
LENT IS
Taking sin seriously,
Taking life seriously,
Taking death seriously,
Taking everything
More seriously
Than usual.
LENT IS,
Among other things,
Having to wait for spring.
LENT IS
Six more weeks
Of shivering
In the cold.
LENT IS
Not a very happy time.
But it is what
You have to go through
To get to Easter.
Amen.
