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.