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.