March 14, 2004
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture
Scripture text: 1
Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9
"D & R Cleaning: Stuff Falls on the Just and
the Unjust Alike"
I invite us to close our eyes a few moments to imagine ourselves in a
desert. How is it waiting for us? Ready for us?
Calling to us? Its changing colors, shifting sands, spread around us in
unlimited waves? Discerning our own way through, no signs left that
anyone’s gone there before? Do we sense we come here obedient to a
leading of God’s Spirit? Or driven because we would not come any other
way? Led or driven, once we are here, what do we find? Especially about
ourselves? In this place and time of so few distractions? How does the
desert help show us to our deepest and truest selves? Uninhabited,
uninhibited? Reduced to our essentials? Revealed to ourselves as God
sees us? What are our most deserted and deserting fears? Amid
loneliness, emptiness, harshness everywhere? And who are our desert
angels? Whom we do not see? Whom we least expect to find here with us?
How does God know when to send them? When might we be ready for what
they can give us?
We are living with "D" and "R" words this Spring
season of Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide. Words of death, words of
resurrection. Deserts of dust, rivers of rain. God does not take away
dust but God does send rain. And the dust, and the rain, fall equally
on, and drench, and rinse, us all, -- the good, the evil, the just, the
unjust. I encourage us all to find time with a dictionary. Meditate on
some "D" words and "R" words, -- death, destruction,
disaster, depression, defeat, despair; resurrection, renewal, repair,
recreation, reconcile, restore. Life is such a mixed bag. It defies all
definitive sorting out. Life happens. Stuff falls on us all. The
question of faith is never so much, why does it happen? Why does it
fall? As the question is, what does it mean? And where do we go from
here?
When the towers were felled in New York, they took with them those
who were ready and those who were not. When the bombs fall upon us, --
Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq – and the bombings tear us apart, --
Israel, Istanbul, Bali, Madrid, -- they do not ask whom to kill, whom to
maim. Watching "The Passion of the Christ," I found myself
wishing good and evil, right and wrong, holy and unholy, deserving and
undeserving were always so clear, so uncomplicated, so compelling to me
in life as they seemed to be on the screen. Who were the "good
guys," who were the "bad guys" was a no-brainer, as we
say. If only it had been so transparent, so clear, how could anyone not
have "gotten it?" How could anyone not have grasped the
goodness of Jesus and what he brings to us? How could it possibly be so
hard for us to be faithful to his vision for life on this earth?
Were there no good reasons for those in religious, political, social
and economic power to fear Jesus and his movement of popular question
and challenge to things as they are? Was it not, is it not, possible for
us to wonder if Jesus is asking too much of us? If Jesus is too
idealistic, too hopeful, too much a dreamer for the real limits of life
in this world? If Jesus is going too fast? Were there no good reasons
for the leaders of Jesus’ own faith, -- in behalf of their own people
so often in history attacked, taken over, captured, exiled – to think
they were doing the best for the most of the people by letting this one
most dangerous one and his movement be sacrificed for the good of the
whole? Is it possible that Jesus pushed even God, as a willful child may
a parent, to a point where not even God could help him? Could save him
or keep him from painful death?
And yet, does that mean that God ever leaves Jesus alone? In the
desert of his temptation? In the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus’
joins in such a lover’s quarrel with God’s will? And even on the
cross? Where Jesus certainly feels deserted and asks that very question
of God? It does not take much attention to Holocaust and to the history
of innocent suffering and death in this world to wonder if something, at
least, of God has died many times through the years. But what is the
resurrection if not the most powerful statement ever, in history and
beyond it, that love, even God’s love, has the last word about life?
That with God, truly, all things are possible? That God who can be so
horribly killed, as Jesus was, will not stay dead! Will not take
"no" for the "final answer!" Good Friday deadened
and darkened the world. Easter Sunday rocked and relit it!
According to Paul in this epistle to the Corinthians, the sojourn of
our ancestors under the cloud of God in the desert amounted to something
a little more serious than a lover’s quarrel. Paul sees the Christ,
the promised Messiah, the new age, as with the Israelites even then,
"the spiritual rock that followed them" through the desert.
Their risking of the parting sea was as our baptism to them, and their
hungering and their thirsting led to a sense of God’s enduring
provision for them as by the bread and the cup of communion for us.
Nonetheless, this relationship of people with God turned into a
knock-down, drag-out battle, and the people lost their lives by the
thousands! To idolatry, to immorality, to hard-bittenness and
self-destructiveness.
Paul’s warns us who live in this ending of times, who have
exhausted all the excuses not to change our lives and our life together
for the better: As soon as we think we are standing so strong, so tall,
so invincible, as Babel, we are most ready to fall! Everyone’s subject
to fall, and to falling upon! The just and the unjust alike! God is not
letting us be tested to prove us to be so tough and heroic as we might
like to think. Rather, God is offering us a way out, a new way of return
to God, to the vision of God in Christ for our lives and our life in
this world, that we, and our children, and their children, might
discover some chance to endure! Some chance that offers endurance to all
peoples and to the earth.
Jesus here refers to a much more vicious and ruthless Pilate than we
meet in "The Passion" film. We do not know the exact
historical facts of the incident. Apparently, some Galileans, as Jesus
was, many of whom grew restless and rebellious against the direct rule
of Rome in their lives, compounded by those of their own leaders working
with Rome, -- exactly the circumstances posed by our possibly imperial
presences and "coalitions" in Afghanistan, Iraq, now in Haiti,
who knows where next, -- Some Galileans were worshiping in such a way as
to be seen as protesting, threatening, undermining, perhaps directly
defying a Roman order, and promptly were massacred by Pilate. Was that
some kind of judgment against them, Jesus asks, as if they were any more
sinners and thus deserving of death than any other Galileans? No,
answers Jesus.
The organized violence of the state, and, as we face it today, of the
stateless as well, falls on the just and the unjust alike. Plainly, many
more just than unjust died in the tower attacks on New York, as they do
at our hands in Afghanistan and in Iraq. It is of the very nature of
warfare today that most victims are civilians, old people, women and
children. There is no more "morality" to such warfare than to
the towers of Siloam, adds Jesus, arbitrarily, even capriciously falling
on some eighteen innocent bystanders among all the others living then in
Jerusalem who could as easily have been where the victims were standing.
Jesus’ message is just like Paul’s: If we do not change our ways, if
we do not repent and return to a new way of living together, the way
envisioned by Jesus’ preaching the "Kingdom of God," which
is all Jesus preached, then our deaths, whenever they come, will be as
unready, as unprepared, as so many others.
Jesus is not so much interested in figuring out who is to blame for
such tragedies, -- especially not in how the victims themselves might be
blamed, as it seems to make us feel better to do. Rather, Jesus asks
what is the challenge here? What are the new chances and choices? What
opportunities, what possibilities? What are the hopes? For Jesus we are
always all in this struggle together to live out our faith in God
through the works of our everyday lives. Everyone needs repentance and
redirection in life! Just look at our life together! If we want to say
everyone’s guilty, OK. But it really means everyone’s challenged!
Everyone is invited to change! For the God of Jesus is not about sin and
punishment. God is not about how many blood-letting blows to Jesus it
takes to make up for how "sinful" we are, whatever we may mean
by that. If anything, we are likely to sell "sin" and
"Satan" way short. We are likely to start and to stop with
ourselves. With individual, personal morality. As if we are at the
center of all God’s attention. As if God has nothing better than we
are to do.
Jesus suffers and dies precisely for what Jesus lives for! For the
"Kingdom of God," the new vision of life among us all as his
brothers and sisters, and between us and all the earth, our mother and
our home. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, ON EARTH as it is in
heaven." The Good News is always, as per this parable of the fig
tree and the gardener, God is not done with us yet! God is not done with
any of us yet! God is not done yet with any of us of any faith, nation,
color, language, class, sexuality or condition of life, anywhere in this
whole world!
Jesus invites us to make a decision for life, -- which is a decision
to be reached and touched and moved by his life and his work, -- to
learn, to change, to grow, --even now! If we know nothing worth dying
for, Dr. King used to say, (not killing for), then we may never know
what we are living for!
Jesus is willing to die for us in the sense of the gardener here, --
as Jesus will be mistaken for on the morning of his resurrection! – so
identifying with this fruitless fig as to plead with the owner, with his
Creator God, for one more chance, at least, for a tree that has just
been wasting good soil for three years already! I do not know about you,
but there are plenty of times I feel like I have been wasting good soil
all my life! But does Jesus here blame the tree? Or does Jesus change
the conditions surrounding the tree? Just asking! Does Jesus start
turning over the soil and adding what makes the grass grow? We know what
it takes! It happens! It happens to all of us! Stuff falls, God dumps,
on the just and the unjust alike! So here I am, God! Bring it on! Dump
it all here!
I know how much I need it! Does anything better remind us how
essentially, basically equal we are in the sight of God? Is there anyone
here who does not put on our pants one leg at a time and who does not
look just as foolish, just as revealed, dumping as everyone else? As we
will hear again, with force and with humor, in next Sunday’s parable
of "The Lost Son," we have all, at one time or many, been
equally A.G.A.D. – as good as dead! No matter how hopeless, no matter
how bare, what good is God dumping on us even now? What hope? What new
life? What potential to learn, change, and grow? What old soil in us,
between us, among us, is God turning over? What is God watering? What is
God feeding? What are we thirsting and hungering for? What are we
risking the wilderness journey up to Jerusalem for? The whole world is
dying to know! Amen.
Pastor John Auer
