4th Sunday in Lent
18 March 2007
Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32
Two misunderstandings
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
My brother got all the special stuff. He wore braces to straighten his teeth. He also had a brace for his leg, because of polio. He went on outings with Mom all the time: the orthodontist, the orthopedic surgeon, the physical therapist. All these people were taking care of him. Early on, he had his own wheel chair. Sometimes I got to play with it for a few minutes, but he got to play with it all day, every day. When he went to bed, my mother massaged his leg with olive oil. I still see them at his bed across our room whenever I someone pours out olive oil. My brother went to a special school, where they gave him special education to catch him up on all the class time he lost while in the hospital or recovering from his many surgeries—which were also things I never got to do. My brother got all the special stuff.
I kept begging my mom for something, anything, that was special. Finally, I got glasses. I don’t think I even needed them, but I was so happy to get a pair. They were dark plastic, and I wore them, literally, day and night. Mom scolded me for bending my glasses out of shape by sleeping face down on them on the pillow. I’ve never asked but have long suspected my mother of deciding that eyeglasses were something easy enough, and harmless enough, to satisfy my hunger for special attention. So she got me some. I was so happy.
How do we know we are provided for well enough by the universe? How do we know God cares? How to people get what they deserve? How do we know that we matter? We suppose that children will grow into an understanding of these things, but the truth is, most of us keep wondering.
The two brothers in Jesus’ parable are certainly still wondering. We usually focus on the younger brother, who is at once so brash and yet so naïve, so insolent and yet so touching. But the older brother has issues, too. In fact, it is the older brother who does not resolve matters by the end of the story. At the end of the story he’s worse off than his once dissolute sibling. Both brothers make major life decisions based on misunderstandings of what matters in life. One brother almost kills himself with his misunderstanding. The misunderstanding of the other brother leaves him dying of envy.
Let’s look at these two misunderstandings.
The younger brother. What does he ask for? He asks for his share of everything he’s going to get someday anyway. In today’s culture, who would see the crime in that? These days, you claim what’s yours, and it’s nobody’s business how you use it. The younger brother wants his half, and his father gives it to him.
It’s this part, the father’s part, that’s hard to understand. You’d think the father would put his foot down. You’d expect him at least to be insulted. Doesn’t he understand about teaching a child responsibility? Why doesn’t he tell the impudent child, No? But this isn’t that kind of father. It isn’t the kind of father that matches his will against the will of the child. He is the kind of father that looks at things in the long term, and in the long term, this boy is going to get his piece of the family pie eventually. No matter when he does, his misunderstanding will determine his fate. Neither how much stuff he has nor how long he waits to get it will change his fate. The son has free will. The father understands that much.
What the younger son doesn’t understand is that having something does not also mean being something. Having wealth doesn’t make you important. Riding in luxury doesn’t make you a star. Gourmet dining doesn’t make you refined. Buying drinks for the whole bar doesn’t make you a friend. A night with a prostitute doesn’t make you a lover. In so many ways, we see the younger son’s failure to understand.
It’s easy to see the failings of the younger son in other people, of course. To see such thinking in ourselves, on the other hand, is very hard, and it is part of the art of becoming fully human. As a little exercise, take an inventory of what you own. Start with the big ticket items: house, car, jewelry, clothing, appliances, gadgets. How much of all that did you acquire in order to look better, feel better or display how many notches above average you are? Go ahead. Think about that a minute.
Is this stinging a little? It stings me. Whatever I really, really love having is very likely a problem for me. I really love having my books, for instance. Most of the time I read them once. A few I read twice, and only a small handful of books to I read many times. I could give them away for others to read. I could check them out of the library and save the money and the trees. But I love the books, just love ’em. There’s a small part of me that wants people to know that I read and study. Minister’s are supposed to read and study a lot, and I want people to see that I’m doing my job.
But it’s even more than that. I just feel better with all those books around me. If I want a new idea, I might start leafing through books, instead of struggling with my creative blockage. I think there’s even a tinge of fear that makes me hold onto books. If there’s a thought in one of them that I want to retrieve, I want the book there so I can look it up. The fear is: I may not remember something important, something essential to my ministry, my life or my happiness.
Now, all of this may sound innocuous enough, but it is really a small example of something that has infected our way of life. Just like I think I can’t have too big a library, other people think they can’t have too fast a car, or too big a house, or too many houses, or a too big a diamond, or too much money, or too much fame, or too much power. Even people in modest circumstances can want too much. They can want too much control over the people close to them. It is even possible that someone have too many friends. Too many friends? Yes, if the reason for all the friends is not friendship so much as fear that being alone with yourself for a while is unbearable, your friendships may be a way to avoid the discomfort of being alone in the quiet with yourself.
The younger son asked for everything he wanted, and he got it. He used it up like there was no tomorrow, until he came perilously close to the point where no tomorrow was exactly his situation. He was down to eating pig slop, if he could get it. After you run out of pig slop, I think that’s when you die. In any event, the younger brother had become pretty much dead inside. There was hardly any identifiable soul left in him, and if soullessness isn’t death, what is?
So the younger son looks at the situation and decides—in ways that he is probably not even aware—for life. He decides for life in the sense that eating as a servant in the family compound is surviving, of which the younger son, no doubt, is aware. But he doesn’t seem to be aware that choosing to live in a community of mutuality is a choice for life. He does not seem to be aware that pressing through his humiliation is a choice for life, even if mere humility, which is noble and the antithesis of humiliation, is all that’s called for. The younger son does not understand that there is a love in the world that waits for us at the very heart of the universe which will never pass away, which never alters, which judges for goodness but does not condemn out of anger, and which burns with eager longing for the return of us all. The younger son makes a most important choice for the sake of his life and for the life of his father and family. He is not even aware of how profoundly he is changing not only his life but also the world.
And though the younger son makes the life-saving, life-changing choice, he still misunderstands the father. He thinks that if he comes back and grovels deeply enough, his father will condescend far enough to permit him a lowly place in the household. If the younger son displays himself in deep enough shame, the father’s ego will be lifted enough in the eyes of the world, and the son will be granted a mean survival. The father needs to see the son’s shame. Or so the son believes.
But shame and ego and the eyes of the world are irrelevant to the father. Rather, gratitude and goodness and blessing are relevant to the father. Hope and life and joy are relevant to the father. Reunion, embrace and devotion are relevant to the father. Mercy is relevant to the father. Love is relevant to the father. Grace is relevant to the father. The son has completely misunderstood, but, albeit for his own mistaken reasons, he shows up back at home, and the father bestows grace. There is the fabulous robe, the bright glint of the ring, the clean sandals, the fatted calf and the feast. The son is restored, the family is made whole, the community is renewed.
But there is yet more misunderstanding, the misunderstanding of the older son.
The older son misunderstands the world in about the way I misunderstood my life as compared to that of my brother. Of course, all the things he was getting came to my brother as a result of various kinds of misfortune and calamity, but I understood what came to him as signs that the universe somehow favored him. As for me, I just lived my life and did my duty. I had my share of childhood misadventures, but mostly I got up, dressed myself, did my school work and obeyed the rules of the household. I wanted the world to repay me with a celebration of my obedience and loyalty with a special celebration—at least as much attention as the world gave my brother. To me, love meant special attention and acknowledgement. I wanted every day to be Valentine’s Day.
Now, we all of us appreciate the importance of demonstrating our affection as signs of love. We all enjoy the surprise of a special gift or act of kindness that signifies grace, but something goes wrong when we become alienated for the failure of a loved one or the universe or God to brighten the dark place in us where the light of our own soul should be. For the older son, the important relationship with his father had at some point ceased being the love between them. At some point, the older son’s relationship with his father became the extent to which the father granted him gifts and public approval.
It would be as if we gave a medal to someone for being the church’s best Christian, whereas the reward for the faithful Christian life is the deep connection the believer has with God. What God does for us in our outward life to prove God’s love is never the point. I wonder how much our prayer life would change, if we really understood this. We might spend less time giving God instructions about how to improve our lives and start spending our prayer time searching our soul for the rivers of mercy, love and grace that God has supplied with the waters of blessing. We might spend our prayer time grazing in pastures of joyfulness so green and lush that we seek others to join us there and be fed in those pastures. We might not ever again worry that whatever we have, little or much, is not enough.
The older son, for all his virtuous loyalty and discipline, is left at the end of the story with his relationship—and his very happiness—unresolved. He might die a lonely and bitter man. When we esteem ourselves the good and responsible ones who deserve what we have, this is the danger we face. It is the danger a comfortable and safe American way of life presents to us, unless we learn to understand and accept God a God of mercy, love and grace, a God who does not honor our cultural standards of work and reward but who abounds in mercy and sheds grace on all for the sake of love. The younger son, for all his failures and violations of the relationship with the father, arrives at the moment when he is able to receive grace. There is something about our need to reach the point of deep humility there for us to learn. There is something about the love of God that desires to draw us in, embrace us and grant us the fullness of life that we cannot resist, when we finally surrender to God’s grace. Amen.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
March 11, 2007 - Unless we turn
3rd Sunday in Lent
11 March 2007
Luke 13.31-35
Unless we turn
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
One day in second grade, Rebecca learned the astonishing truth about the Tooth Fairy from her friend Rachel, who pulled Rebecca aside and said, “I know who the Tooth Fairy is. Last night I woke up while the Tooth Fairy was putting the money under my pillow, and guess who the Tooth Fairy was?”
“Oh, who was it? I have to know!”
“My dad. My dad is the Tooth Fairy.”
Rebecca ran home after school to her mom: “Mom, I know who the Tooth Fairy is,” declaring it as if she’d grown up, and knew.
“Oh, well,” her mother said, “who is the Tooth Fairy?”
Rebecca said, “Rachel’s dad is the Tooth Fairy. Ronny Loberfeld is the Tooth Fairy.”
Her mom said, “This is totally a secret. Ronny is the Tooth Fairy, but you can’t let anyone else know.” From that day on, all the notes under Rebecca’s pillow were signed, Love, Ronny Loberfeld. Rebecca thought of him driving around Boston in his Volvo collecting teeth and leaving treats under pillows.
That story’s from a recent This American Life, Ira Glass’s great weekly Public Radio program. The topic of the episode was “kid logic.” People long believed that children live in an impractical world of unreality and make believe that makes them dependent on grownups for realistic daily life, but in recent years we’ve learned that kids really do operate with deliberate reason. Still, Ira Glass explains, “There’s a kind of story that kids tell, where they look at something going on around them, observe it carefully, think about it logically—how one thing connects to the next—and then come to conclusions that are completely incorrect.”
There’s another story about the four-year-old girl on an airplane just after takeoff, who turns to the woman next to her and asks flatly, “When do we get smaller?” She’s seen airplanes take off and get smaller and smaller, so she reasoned that, now that she is in an airplane, she should notice herself shrinking pretty soon. That’s kid logic.
We all can remember how we have come through childhood and into stages of development where we outgrew this thinking. My wife tells of when she was in a store and her mother telling her they couldn’t afford something, because she didn’t have the money. “Oh,” Marcia said to her mother, “but you can write a check.” As kids, there’s a point where we get it, but in some important way we don’t get it—not till we’re older. When we grow up, we know better.
But for some reason, when it comes to our adult religion, acting like we know better doesn’t happen all the time. In all the rest of our lives we may think like grownups, but in our religious life we often use kid logic. One time, Jesus was listening to people talk about those Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices—very gruesome. Using kid logic, the people talking to Jesus reasoned that since God decides who’s going to have bad things happen to them, they must have done something to offend God.
Even very smart and successful Christian grownups find themselves doing this without even knowing it. Jerry Falwell, for instance—one of America’s most popular and influential Christians—used kid logic when he explained to his eager listeners that God sent Hurricane Katrina to devastate New Orleans for what Falwell considered the immorality of some of its citizens. He just thought that New Orleanians must have done something bad that offended God, and it just happens to have been what offends Jerry Falwell. Of course, at our comfortable remove from the day Falwell thought like a kid about faith, it’s true that most of us find the very idea a little ridiculous. What we don’t notice, though, is that we most of us, now and then, revert to religious kid logic, or what the apostle Paul called “childish ways” in our Christian lives.
Now, it’s normal and natural for kids to reason the way they do. There’s nothing bad, certainly not evil, about it, but Jesus thinks it’s a serious problem for adults. When adults use kid logic for religion, someone gets hurt. People often die.. So when the excitable religionists around Jesus are carrying on about what kind of sinners the ill-fated Galileans were, Jesus pulls their religious rug right out from under them.
“Do you think,” he demands to know, “that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” Do you think? It seems that nobody ever wonders about this, but now that Jesus asks, it isn’t so obvious, is it? I mean, when we find out someone has cancer, we often think back to remember if they smoked cigarettes or ate hotdogs filled with nitrates. When we read the name of someone’s child in the police blotter, we review our mental notes on the mistakes his parents made raising him. If a college coed is sexually assaulted, we wonder what she was wearing. It’s a reflex in us. We can’t help thinking that the bad things that happen to people are somehow always their own fault.
We should wonder: When Pilate, the regional leader for Rome, victimizes these otherwise unremarkable Galileans locals in the most horrid way, do people declare, “Hey, what’s with that sicko?” No, they don’t. Strange to say, what people want to know is how those poor people caused the evil that befell them. This astonishes Jesus. Or maybe he’s not exactly astonished, because he’s seen ample evidence of human foolishness, but he’s still terribly disappointed. Jesus does not believe that God would punish innocent people with the cruelty of a sadistic, low-level political functionary for their sins. God had nothing to do with it. God did not cause it. God did not let it happen. God watched in disbelief along with the rest of the helpless onlookers.
Jesus does not want us to take away from this ghastly episode a warning about how our secret guilt may bring calamity down on us. That would be kid logic. We’re not supposed to sit around worrying when God is going to whack us for our spiritual blunders. But Jesus does want us to come away with a greater sense of responsibility for our spiritual wholeness and moral integrity. Is it Jesus’ belief that our moral failures result in catastrophe? “No,” he contends, “but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Is this a mixed message? In one sense, this sounds as if Jesus is telling us that we actually will get punished like the Galileans for our sins, unless we get our act together. You’ll all perish, just like them, he may seem to say. We could take Jesus this way. But he’s clearly trying to get at something else.
Listen again: “Unless you repent, you will all perish.”
Jesus wants repentance, which is different than just not sinning. Maybe you’ve heard someone mention metanoia, the Greek word we translate repentance. It’s not just a decision to obey all the rules, though that is hard enough. Repentance, in the sense of metanoia, means turning into something else entirely. It means taking your thought and belief beyond anything you’ve ever heard or thought or felt.
In metanoia—repentance—you don’t just learn the things Jesus taught; you learn to think the way Jesus thought. You don’t just follow the tried and trusted rules; you learn to discern the standards of obedience for your life today in the way Jesus established new (and abandoned old) standards of obedience for life in his time and place. You stop seeing yourself as the mere product of your history, influences and biology; you see yourself as a new creation, a creation that gives new life to your history, influences and biology. You see yourself rising above the emotional bondage of your past. You see yourself moving, if you’ve been stuck. You see yourself growing still, if you’ve been in frantic motion. In metanoia—repentance—you finally look fearlessly at the shadowy monsters in your soul, after a lifetime ignoring your own monstrous shadow. You also see the beauty of your soul, after endless years of inward contempt, contempt you probably learned from people who are disturbed by your uniqueness.
Repentance, metanoia, is all this and then some. It is a complete turning—turning around, turning inside out. Unless we turn, we are doomed to the relentless universal march to death. This is what Jesus means when he says that “you will all perish as they did.” Unless we turn and choose a path toward life, we all walk along a path toward death. Scientists call it the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Everything dissipates and runs down. On a heart monitor it’s flat lining. Unless we turn, we dissipate and die. In biblical faith, unless we turn, we are consigned to the empty grayness of the self-absorption, fear and isolation we know as hell.
But if we do turn—if we repent in the sense of utterly recasting ourselves, our lives, our church, our society and everything—something very special happens. Instead of being absorbed with ourselves, we see and understand ourselves as discrete agents of grace in the furthering of God’s purpose. Instead of living in fear of what other people’s beliefs and conduct say about us, we are free to enact our faith with force and integrity wherever we are. Instead of isolating ourselves in our little religious camp of righteous Christianity, we grow in connection to the faith of others—the faith of Christians who don’t think like we do, or the faith of other religions—people who follow their spiritual path with the same integrity and mutual respect in which we follow ours.
Repentance, in this biblical sense of metanoia, is hard work. You have to admit things about yourself you’ve always tried to hide. That’s hard to do. But it’s okay, because everyone else who knows you well has already long seen behind your curtain. You have to change habits that make other people responsible for the condition of your mind and life. That’s hard to do. But it’s okay, because the best person to change your condition is still always you. You have to decide every day to live with the risk of courageous faith. That’s hard to do. But it’s okay, because the more you step into the risk of faith, the more you stand under the assurance of God’s care. You have to love your neighbor in ways that others may not like or understand. That’s hard to do. But it’s okay, because the misunderstood love of Christ is still the most powerful force in the world for goodness and hope.
When you repent, what you become is the gleaming light of love by which all around you will see a little bit better what God is doing in the world to save us from our greed, from our careless despoiling of creation, from our warring madness, from our heartless exploitation of others and the anxiety that underlies every evil of humankind. When you repent, you begin the salvation of the world, beginning with yourself.
We are gathered in this place, today, because we know the work of repentance is hard. Along with whatever other reason we each of us chose to come together in this place today, we come here, I believe, because only with the mutual accountability to and support of one another, and God, will we find the honesty and strength to lean into the work of our faith. It is brave and noble of you to be here, and I bless you for your earnestness. I bless you for your longing. I bless you in your doubts. I bless you, with trust in the grace of God through Christ Jesus, that you will rise and turn, confident in the faith Christ has in you to fulfill his gospel of mercy and peace through your living. Amen.
11 March 2007
Luke 13.31-35
Unless we turn
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
One day in second grade, Rebecca learned the astonishing truth about the Tooth Fairy from her friend Rachel, who pulled Rebecca aside and said, “I know who the Tooth Fairy is. Last night I woke up while the Tooth Fairy was putting the money under my pillow, and guess who the Tooth Fairy was?”
“Oh, who was it? I have to know!”
“My dad. My dad is the Tooth Fairy.”
Rebecca ran home after school to her mom: “Mom, I know who the Tooth Fairy is,” declaring it as if she’d grown up, and knew.
“Oh, well,” her mother said, “who is the Tooth Fairy?”
Rebecca said, “Rachel’s dad is the Tooth Fairy. Ronny Loberfeld is the Tooth Fairy.”
Her mom said, “This is totally a secret. Ronny is the Tooth Fairy, but you can’t let anyone else know.” From that day on, all the notes under Rebecca’s pillow were signed, Love, Ronny Loberfeld. Rebecca thought of him driving around Boston in his Volvo collecting teeth and leaving treats under pillows.
That story’s from a recent This American Life, Ira Glass’s great weekly Public Radio program. The topic of the episode was “kid logic.” People long believed that children live in an impractical world of unreality and make believe that makes them dependent on grownups for realistic daily life, but in recent years we’ve learned that kids really do operate with deliberate reason. Still, Ira Glass explains, “There’s a kind of story that kids tell, where they look at something going on around them, observe it carefully, think about it logically—how one thing connects to the next—and then come to conclusions that are completely incorrect.”
There’s another story about the four-year-old girl on an airplane just after takeoff, who turns to the woman next to her and asks flatly, “When do we get smaller?” She’s seen airplanes take off and get smaller and smaller, so she reasoned that, now that she is in an airplane, she should notice herself shrinking pretty soon. That’s kid logic.
We all can remember how we have come through childhood and into stages of development where we outgrew this thinking. My wife tells of when she was in a store and her mother telling her they couldn’t afford something, because she didn’t have the money. “Oh,” Marcia said to her mother, “but you can write a check.” As kids, there’s a point where we get it, but in some important way we don’t get it—not till we’re older. When we grow up, we know better.
But for some reason, when it comes to our adult religion, acting like we know better doesn’t happen all the time. In all the rest of our lives we may think like grownups, but in our religious life we often use kid logic. One time, Jesus was listening to people talk about those Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices—very gruesome. Using kid logic, the people talking to Jesus reasoned that since God decides who’s going to have bad things happen to them, they must have done something to offend God.
Even very smart and successful Christian grownups find themselves doing this without even knowing it. Jerry Falwell, for instance—one of America’s most popular and influential Christians—used kid logic when he explained to his eager listeners that God sent Hurricane Katrina to devastate New Orleans for what Falwell considered the immorality of some of its citizens. He just thought that New Orleanians must have done something bad that offended God, and it just happens to have been what offends Jerry Falwell. Of course, at our comfortable remove from the day Falwell thought like a kid about faith, it’s true that most of us find the very idea a little ridiculous. What we don’t notice, though, is that we most of us, now and then, revert to religious kid logic, or what the apostle Paul called “childish ways” in our Christian lives.
Now, it’s normal and natural for kids to reason the way they do. There’s nothing bad, certainly not evil, about it, but Jesus thinks it’s a serious problem for adults. When adults use kid logic for religion, someone gets hurt. People often die.. So when the excitable religionists around Jesus are carrying on about what kind of sinners the ill-fated Galileans were, Jesus pulls their religious rug right out from under them.
“Do you think,” he demands to know, “that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” Do you think? It seems that nobody ever wonders about this, but now that Jesus asks, it isn’t so obvious, is it? I mean, when we find out someone has cancer, we often think back to remember if they smoked cigarettes or ate hotdogs filled with nitrates. When we read the name of someone’s child in the police blotter, we review our mental notes on the mistakes his parents made raising him. If a college coed is sexually assaulted, we wonder what she was wearing. It’s a reflex in us. We can’t help thinking that the bad things that happen to people are somehow always their own fault.
We should wonder: When Pilate, the regional leader for Rome, victimizes these otherwise unremarkable Galileans locals in the most horrid way, do people declare, “Hey, what’s with that sicko?” No, they don’t. Strange to say, what people want to know is how those poor people caused the evil that befell them. This astonishes Jesus. Or maybe he’s not exactly astonished, because he’s seen ample evidence of human foolishness, but he’s still terribly disappointed. Jesus does not believe that God would punish innocent people with the cruelty of a sadistic, low-level political functionary for their sins. God had nothing to do with it. God did not cause it. God did not let it happen. God watched in disbelief along with the rest of the helpless onlookers.
Jesus does not want us to take away from this ghastly episode a warning about how our secret guilt may bring calamity down on us. That would be kid logic. We’re not supposed to sit around worrying when God is going to whack us for our spiritual blunders. But Jesus does want us to come away with a greater sense of responsibility for our spiritual wholeness and moral integrity. Is it Jesus’ belief that our moral failures result in catastrophe? “No,” he contends, “but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Is this a mixed message? In one sense, this sounds as if Jesus is telling us that we actually will get punished like the Galileans for our sins, unless we get our act together. You’ll all perish, just like them, he may seem to say. We could take Jesus this way. But he’s clearly trying to get at something else.
Listen again: “Unless you repent, you will all perish.”
Jesus wants repentance, which is different than just not sinning. Maybe you’ve heard someone mention metanoia, the Greek word we translate repentance. It’s not just a decision to obey all the rules, though that is hard enough. Repentance, in the sense of metanoia, means turning into something else entirely. It means taking your thought and belief beyond anything you’ve ever heard or thought or felt.
In metanoia—repentance—you don’t just learn the things Jesus taught; you learn to think the way Jesus thought. You don’t just follow the tried and trusted rules; you learn to discern the standards of obedience for your life today in the way Jesus established new (and abandoned old) standards of obedience for life in his time and place. You stop seeing yourself as the mere product of your history, influences and biology; you see yourself as a new creation, a creation that gives new life to your history, influences and biology. You see yourself rising above the emotional bondage of your past. You see yourself moving, if you’ve been stuck. You see yourself growing still, if you’ve been in frantic motion. In metanoia—repentance—you finally look fearlessly at the shadowy monsters in your soul, after a lifetime ignoring your own monstrous shadow. You also see the beauty of your soul, after endless years of inward contempt, contempt you probably learned from people who are disturbed by your uniqueness.
Repentance, metanoia, is all this and then some. It is a complete turning—turning around, turning inside out. Unless we turn, we are doomed to the relentless universal march to death. This is what Jesus means when he says that “you will all perish as they did.” Unless we turn and choose a path toward life, we all walk along a path toward death. Scientists call it the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Everything dissipates and runs down. On a heart monitor it’s flat lining. Unless we turn, we dissipate and die. In biblical faith, unless we turn, we are consigned to the empty grayness of the self-absorption, fear and isolation we know as hell.
But if we do turn—if we repent in the sense of utterly recasting ourselves, our lives, our church, our society and everything—something very special happens. Instead of being absorbed with ourselves, we see and understand ourselves as discrete agents of grace in the furthering of God’s purpose. Instead of living in fear of what other people’s beliefs and conduct say about us, we are free to enact our faith with force and integrity wherever we are. Instead of isolating ourselves in our little religious camp of righteous Christianity, we grow in connection to the faith of others—the faith of Christians who don’t think like we do, or the faith of other religions—people who follow their spiritual path with the same integrity and mutual respect in which we follow ours.
Repentance, in this biblical sense of metanoia, is hard work. You have to admit things about yourself you’ve always tried to hide. That’s hard to do. But it’s okay, because everyone else who knows you well has already long seen behind your curtain. You have to change habits that make other people responsible for the condition of your mind and life. That’s hard to do. But it’s okay, because the best person to change your condition is still always you. You have to decide every day to live with the risk of courageous faith. That’s hard to do. But it’s okay, because the more you step into the risk of faith, the more you stand under the assurance of God’s care. You have to love your neighbor in ways that others may not like or understand. That’s hard to do. But it’s okay, because the misunderstood love of Christ is still the most powerful force in the world for goodness and hope.
When you repent, what you become is the gleaming light of love by which all around you will see a little bit better what God is doing in the world to save us from our greed, from our careless despoiling of creation, from our warring madness, from our heartless exploitation of others and the anxiety that underlies every evil of humankind. When you repent, you begin the salvation of the world, beginning with yourself.
We are gathered in this place, today, because we know the work of repentance is hard. Along with whatever other reason we each of us chose to come together in this place today, we come here, I believe, because only with the mutual accountability to and support of one another, and God, will we find the honesty and strength to lean into the work of our faith. It is brave and noble of you to be here, and I bless you for your earnestness. I bless you for your longing. I bless you in your doubts. I bless you, with trust in the grace of God through Christ Jesus, that you will rise and turn, confident in the faith Christ has in you to fulfill his gospel of mercy and peace through your living. Amen.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
March 11, 2007 - Jerusalem, Jerusalem
2nd Sunday in Lent
4 March 2007
Luke 13.31-35
Jerusalem, Jerusalem
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
So you may have seen by now that we have finally determined that the Presbytery of Geneva is going to install me as your pastor on April 1st. Everybody has a wisecrack about this, so it’s as good a time as any, to turn to the person next to you and say it . . .
Okay, now that we’ve got that out of our system, it is important for you to know that my mother will be coming that weekend to visit, because the old aphorism is true: Forewarned is forearmed.
I don’t mean to scare you. Just because my mother is a tireless, assertive and driven person with a keen eye for moral error and character flaws, you should not necessarily feel that she is watching your every move and analyzing your every personality trait. In fact, you will enjoy my mother a great deal if you can forget that she’s doing this. Just don’t notice it; that’s what I do! And yet I admit that I have not always been able to ignore my mother’s sense for the right and the good. She never did anything I can remember to be harsh or hurtful, but one thing was devastating. That was to disappoint her.
One year, Mom and Dad bought a little Dodge camper van. It was pretty basic. There was a sink of sorts with a faucet that gave us water by pumping a handle and a cooler that used block ice to keep a few things more or less chilled. A bed folded down out of the back seat—my parents slept in that, and we three kids slept out in a cabana style tent without a floor that attached to the side of the van. That was it. We walked to the bath house to wash up, or whatever. Cooking happened with a camp stove on a picnic table, and we cleaned up after meals at a cold faucet we hoped would be two or three campsites from ours. It was rudimentary.
Mom grew up on an old Michigan farm. She carried in water drawn outdoors by hand pump to fill the water tank of a wood stove that both heated the farmhouse and cooked the food. She never did understand why anyone with the modern conveniences of indoor plumbing and a gas stove would go out of their way to char perfectly good meat outside on a grimy grill as a form of cuisine, and she considered camping—sleeping out in the weather with no conveniences whatever, and all the rest—beyond comprehension. Still, my mother believed camping was part of a complete upbringing for children, and she wanted us to have the experience.
So we were in the glorious Sierras at California’s Shaver Lake, because that year my uncles and aunts were camping there, too. Uncle Dick took my brother Mark and me out fishing in his boat. One morning after fishing, Mark and I came back to our campsite excited about breakfast, because Uncle Dick said Aunt Dot was making him pancakes. Aunt Dot was making pancakes just for her family, of course, but it was exciting to have that same idea for our family.
As soon as we saw Mom, we told her about pancakes for breakfast, which was an idea that had so far eluded her. In fact, upon hearing the idea, it did not impress her as worthy, or even interesting. She said, “We have cereal. Or toast, if you want to try to make it on the camp stove.” The classic mother-son fencing match had begun.
“But what about pancakes?” I challenged.
“I’m not making pancakes,” she parried. “You can have cereal.”
“Well, Aunt Dot,” I lunged back, “is making pancakes for Uncle Dick.”
That’s when Mom went into the van and shut the door. (Touché.) My dad went in after her, where he remained briefly before emerging to instruct me as to the nature of my forthcoming apology. I went in to find my mother lying on the bed sobbing, which was actually scarier than any time I remember her mad. I stooped under the low roof of the camper.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“Well, you did,” she said.
When Dad had ordered me inside for my apology, my intention was to give the perfunctory I’m sorry kids toss off as a way to be left alone by their annoyed, and annoying, parents, but the sobs changed my heart. I no longer felt overpowered by my father’s judgment. Nor did I feel afraid for being caught at something that was getting me in trouble. Nor did I feel ashamed for a bad moment of childish judgment. I felt something deeper than any of that, something unfamiliar. I felt tenderly sorrowful for letting my mother down, for disappointing her with my insensitive demands. Wanting pancakes for breakfast was no crime, I knew, but I felt guilty for not noticing that this vacation was her sacrifice to my childhood and for suggesting it didn’t matter by demanding more.
I wished I could un‑want my wants and un-say my words, and I learned that there are certain mistakes I can’t undo or smooth over or soften or wash away. I learned there is a kind of disappointment from others that inwardly changes who I am, and if I’m not careful, disappointing another in certain ways will change me beyond recognition—maybe beyond recovery. When Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” I hear him saying something like this to us about his disappointment. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem… How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
It may be that there is something about God we can learn only by noticing and remembering our mothers. God is a hen who gathers her brood under her wings, and there is something about us that stays away from the protection and care of such love. We think there is something more out there in the world that God is keeping from us—that God is holding us back from—but Jesus is saying that there is nothing out there to get that is worth forsaking the sheltering care of a loving God. Jesus is saying that the heart of a God like that can be broken, and when you break God’s heart, you change. Something tenderly sorrowful rises from your own heart to tell you that you are not as near to God as you once had been.
What is it that convinces us that the love and goodness of God is not enough? And what is it that, when we lurch and stagger toward the empty promise of the world’s allure, stifles the voice within us that might have alerted us to God’s heartbreak. That voice might have softened our own heart and lit the revelatory candle of sorrow by which we might have found our way back under God’s protective wings?
I wish I knew. I wish I understood.
I wish I understood why one of our favorite things about the Super Bowl is the advertising made worth its $5 million dollars a minute, because we will apparently chase anything out there in the world that will make us feel wealthy, self-confident, sexy, or safe from the shame of looking out of fashion. The safety of God’s moral protection can’t compete with the safety of a Lincoln Navigator.
I wish I understood why our favorite politicians are not the ones that actually lead us to become a stronger, more self-giving society but the ones who promise us tax breaks during a time of budget deficits. The leadership of God’s compassionate care can’t compete with the passion to spend even just a little more.
I wish I understood why our favorite bumper stickers display God’s name over our nation’s flag, under the apparent impression that God can only approve of one country at a time and never disapprove of our country at all. The fierce devotion of God for the brood—for a people—has earned our confidence only to the degree that we have fortified that devotion with our own ability to threaten others with our collective coercions.
I wish I understood why we increasingly raise our children to appreciate only their next moment’s pleasure, buckling under fear that failing to supply them pleasures will prove our failure as parents. The teaching of our children about God’s abundant provision for any moment ever has lost its conviction in an adult generation that may already realize, however darkly, that we have indulged ourselves at our children’s expense in ways that they will discover plainly only after we have passed.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus says to us, when all he can think of is to call us who we are—the city of peace that, while marching in place, has lost its way.
Well, what a crummy lot of stuff to have to think about for a whole sermon. So it must be Lent. This is, in part, what Lent is for. We look around, we look at ourselves, we look into our heart, and we pay particular attention to what’s missing. We pay attention to what’s there that is no good for us or for God, how we have turned blessing into curse. That all is hard, and discouraging.
Remember, then, this. The Christian faith has established Lent as a collective and a personal discipline especially because we trust that anything we find in ourselves that is destructive, corrosive and hateful can been redeemed. Indeed, the path to redemption is made plain by the light that illuminates both the ways we have distorted the our soul and the discernment of our path back to wholeness and God. The light that shows us who we are also shows us our path.
“The Lord is my light and salvation,” we said in our call to worship from Psalm 27, “of whom shall I be afraid?” This is the deep comfort we receive during Lent, that we can finally stop being afraid of what we’ll find out when we see who we are, because the light by which we see ourselves is the Lord.
When I saw myself through my mother’s tears, I learned something important that not only improved me but strengthened me. When we see ourselves through God’s tears, how much truer, stronger and more agile we will be as moral and spiritual agents in this troubled world. This world where the instruments of corruption, pollution and death have reached orders of magnitude unimagined in generations past must be met today with spiritual agents of life and creation unmatched in any previous generation.
The promise of Lent is that as we better see the enslaving troubles of our day, we shall surely become a force of redemption. The promise of Lent is that our tender sorrow today will find solace in the gracious simplicity of God’s love tomorrow. The promise of Lent is that, whatever obtains in the time from now until the farthest day, we shall in time rejoice in proclaiming, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” Amen.
4 March 2007
Luke 13.31-35
Jerusalem, Jerusalem
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
So you may have seen by now that we have finally determined that the Presbytery of Geneva is going to install me as your pastor on April 1st. Everybody has a wisecrack about this, so it’s as good a time as any, to turn to the person next to you and say it . . .
Okay, now that we’ve got that out of our system, it is important for you to know that my mother will be coming that weekend to visit, because the old aphorism is true: Forewarned is forearmed.
I don’t mean to scare you. Just because my mother is a tireless, assertive and driven person with a keen eye for moral error and character flaws, you should not necessarily feel that she is watching your every move and analyzing your every personality trait. In fact, you will enjoy my mother a great deal if you can forget that she’s doing this. Just don’t notice it; that’s what I do! And yet I admit that I have not always been able to ignore my mother’s sense for the right and the good. She never did anything I can remember to be harsh or hurtful, but one thing was devastating. That was to disappoint her.
One year, Mom and Dad bought a little Dodge camper van. It was pretty basic. There was a sink of sorts with a faucet that gave us water by pumping a handle and a cooler that used block ice to keep a few things more or less chilled. A bed folded down out of the back seat—my parents slept in that, and we three kids slept out in a cabana style tent without a floor that attached to the side of the van. That was it. We walked to the bath house to wash up, or whatever. Cooking happened with a camp stove on a picnic table, and we cleaned up after meals at a cold faucet we hoped would be two or three campsites from ours. It was rudimentary.
Mom grew up on an old Michigan farm. She carried in water drawn outdoors by hand pump to fill the water tank of a wood stove that both heated the farmhouse and cooked the food. She never did understand why anyone with the modern conveniences of indoor plumbing and a gas stove would go out of their way to char perfectly good meat outside on a grimy grill as a form of cuisine, and she considered camping—sleeping out in the weather with no conveniences whatever, and all the rest—beyond comprehension. Still, my mother believed camping was part of a complete upbringing for children, and she wanted us to have the experience.
So we were in the glorious Sierras at California’s Shaver Lake, because that year my uncles and aunts were camping there, too. Uncle Dick took my brother Mark and me out fishing in his boat. One morning after fishing, Mark and I came back to our campsite excited about breakfast, because Uncle Dick said Aunt Dot was making him pancakes. Aunt Dot was making pancakes just for her family, of course, but it was exciting to have that same idea for our family.
As soon as we saw Mom, we told her about pancakes for breakfast, which was an idea that had so far eluded her. In fact, upon hearing the idea, it did not impress her as worthy, or even interesting. She said, “We have cereal. Or toast, if you want to try to make it on the camp stove.” The classic mother-son fencing match had begun.
“But what about pancakes?” I challenged.
“I’m not making pancakes,” she parried. “You can have cereal.”
“Well, Aunt Dot,” I lunged back, “is making pancakes for Uncle Dick.”
That’s when Mom went into the van and shut the door. (Touché.) My dad went in after her, where he remained briefly before emerging to instruct me as to the nature of my forthcoming apology. I went in to find my mother lying on the bed sobbing, which was actually scarier than any time I remember her mad. I stooped under the low roof of the camper.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“Well, you did,” she said.
When Dad had ordered me inside for my apology, my intention was to give the perfunctory I’m sorry kids toss off as a way to be left alone by their annoyed, and annoying, parents, but the sobs changed my heart. I no longer felt overpowered by my father’s judgment. Nor did I feel afraid for being caught at something that was getting me in trouble. Nor did I feel ashamed for a bad moment of childish judgment. I felt something deeper than any of that, something unfamiliar. I felt tenderly sorrowful for letting my mother down, for disappointing her with my insensitive demands. Wanting pancakes for breakfast was no crime, I knew, but I felt guilty for not noticing that this vacation was her sacrifice to my childhood and for suggesting it didn’t matter by demanding more.
I wished I could un‑want my wants and un-say my words, and I learned that there are certain mistakes I can’t undo or smooth over or soften or wash away. I learned there is a kind of disappointment from others that inwardly changes who I am, and if I’m not careful, disappointing another in certain ways will change me beyond recognition—maybe beyond recovery. When Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” I hear him saying something like this to us about his disappointment. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem… How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
It may be that there is something about God we can learn only by noticing and remembering our mothers. God is a hen who gathers her brood under her wings, and there is something about us that stays away from the protection and care of such love. We think there is something more out there in the world that God is keeping from us—that God is holding us back from—but Jesus is saying that there is nothing out there to get that is worth forsaking the sheltering care of a loving God. Jesus is saying that the heart of a God like that can be broken, and when you break God’s heart, you change. Something tenderly sorrowful rises from your own heart to tell you that you are not as near to God as you once had been.
What is it that convinces us that the love and goodness of God is not enough? And what is it that, when we lurch and stagger toward the empty promise of the world’s allure, stifles the voice within us that might have alerted us to God’s heartbreak. That voice might have softened our own heart and lit the revelatory candle of sorrow by which we might have found our way back under God’s protective wings?
I wish I knew. I wish I understood.
I wish I understood why one of our favorite things about the Super Bowl is the advertising made worth its $5 million dollars a minute, because we will apparently chase anything out there in the world that will make us feel wealthy, self-confident, sexy, or safe from the shame of looking out of fashion. The safety of God’s moral protection can’t compete with the safety of a Lincoln Navigator.
I wish I understood why our favorite politicians are not the ones that actually lead us to become a stronger, more self-giving society but the ones who promise us tax breaks during a time of budget deficits. The leadership of God’s compassionate care can’t compete with the passion to spend even just a little more.
I wish I understood why our favorite bumper stickers display God’s name over our nation’s flag, under the apparent impression that God can only approve of one country at a time and never disapprove of our country at all. The fierce devotion of God for the brood—for a people—has earned our confidence only to the degree that we have fortified that devotion with our own ability to threaten others with our collective coercions.
I wish I understood why we increasingly raise our children to appreciate only their next moment’s pleasure, buckling under fear that failing to supply them pleasures will prove our failure as parents. The teaching of our children about God’s abundant provision for any moment ever has lost its conviction in an adult generation that may already realize, however darkly, that we have indulged ourselves at our children’s expense in ways that they will discover plainly only after we have passed.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus says to us, when all he can think of is to call us who we are—the city of peace that, while marching in place, has lost its way.
Well, what a crummy lot of stuff to have to think about for a whole sermon. So it must be Lent. This is, in part, what Lent is for. We look around, we look at ourselves, we look into our heart, and we pay particular attention to what’s missing. We pay attention to what’s there that is no good for us or for God, how we have turned blessing into curse. That all is hard, and discouraging.
Remember, then, this. The Christian faith has established Lent as a collective and a personal discipline especially because we trust that anything we find in ourselves that is destructive, corrosive and hateful can been redeemed. Indeed, the path to redemption is made plain by the light that illuminates both the ways we have distorted the our soul and the discernment of our path back to wholeness and God. The light that shows us who we are also shows us our path.
“The Lord is my light and salvation,” we said in our call to worship from Psalm 27, “of whom shall I be afraid?” This is the deep comfort we receive during Lent, that we can finally stop being afraid of what we’ll find out when we see who we are, because the light by which we see ourselves is the Lord.
When I saw myself through my mother’s tears, I learned something important that not only improved me but strengthened me. When we see ourselves through God’s tears, how much truer, stronger and more agile we will be as moral and spiritual agents in this troubled world. This world where the instruments of corruption, pollution and death have reached orders of magnitude unimagined in generations past must be met today with spiritual agents of life and creation unmatched in any previous generation.
The promise of Lent is that as we better see the enslaving troubles of our day, we shall surely become a force of redemption. The promise of Lent is that our tender sorrow today will find solace in the gracious simplicity of God’s love tomorrow. The promise of Lent is that, whatever obtains in the time from now until the farthest day, we shall in time rejoice in proclaiming, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” Amen.
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