3-24-19
Grace to you and peace from God our creator and our Lord
and Savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
The news has felt pretty heavy the last few weeks…. And
then our Gospel this week start out with two big awful events that happened
lately “in the news,” so to speak.
Historians honestly don’t have any idea about either of
the events described at the beginning of this chapter. But neither of these
types of events are unfamiliar to us. Jesus was told about the tragic murder of
some Galilean worshippers who were murdered by Pontius Pilate during their
worship service, killing who-knows-how-many while they prayed – and by now, who
hasn’t heard of the horrendous shooting killing fifty people in the mosque in
New Zealand? Jesus then brings up a second tragedy – a terrible accident on a
grand scale, where eighteen more innocent people were caught underneath the
rubble with a building collapsed on top of them. When reading about this, it’s
hard not to think about the flooding happening in the Midwest which has already
claimed the lives of three people, and many more who died in floods around the
world. Or the thousands of people killed by the cyclone this last week in Mozambique.
History doesn’t remember, but people have always wondered
why bad things happen, especially to people who just seem to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Philosophers, scholars, theologians, and pastors
throughout the ages have spilled so much ink trying to reconcile the idea of a
good and gracious God with the reality of suffering and the existence of evil
in the world. And, spoiler alert, we haven’t solved it yet. Bad things in a
good world seem like a design flaw on God’s part.
At this time, the belief that people were to blame when
bad things happened to them was very strong. It’s no wonder that people are
asking Jesus about this “problem of evil,” as people much smarter than me have
called it. I mean, if you had a chance to talk to the son of God, wouldn’t you
too ask him, if God created this world good… why do bad things happen in it?
Jesus’s answer seems pretty unsatisfying, or at least,
startling: “Repent or die!” Yikes, Jesus! What a thing to say in the face of
the suffering of innocent people.
Perhaps it would be pretty insensitive if Jesus did
indeed mean that in order to live, we should feel sorry for the bad things we
do. Remorse is not actually the feeling that Jesus is going for. The word he
uses is “metanoia”, a word that is better translated “conversion, reformation,
or transformation.”
As we learned a few weeks ago during one of our Thursday
night “Eat, Pray, Learn” meals, sometimes translation are limited, and don’t
always give us the full, nuanced meaning of the biblical narrative. A better
revelation of what’s going on might come from a different translation, the
Common English Bible, where the first few verses of chapter 13 read: “Some who were present on that occasion told
Jesus about the Galileans whom Pilate had killed while they were offering
sacrifices. He replied, “Do you think the suffering of these
Galileans proves that they were more sinful than all the other Galileans? No,
I tell you, but unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as
they did ….”
“Change your hearts and lives” is way different thank
simply feeling sorry about our sins. Metanoia literally means “to turn around
and head in another direction.” Feeling sorry can be part of it and is probably
where it starts… but repentance is not where it ends by any means. Metanoia is
starting to do something different than what we have been doing in the past.
Some people seem to be capable of instantiations change.
I think we all have friends like that annoyingly fit this description. They go
on a diet and appear to immediately lose 20 pounds, or they instantly adjust to
daylight savings. But the rest of us, most of us I think, change takes time.
Change for us is more like sailing across an ocean against the wind – there is
a technique called “tacking,” where instead of going directly into the wind,
which would be exhausting, sail boats go on the diagonal, like this… it might
take you more time, but it gets you there without exhausting yourself. Or if
you have ever driving through the Appalachians or the Rockies… the road don’t
go straight up the mountain... because your poor little car couldn’t handle it.
Instead, the roads wind around, and double back as they progress, slowly but
surely up the incline.
Much like the poor tree in this parable that Jesus then
tells. A parable is a type of storytelling that you will learn more about next
week Buckingham Pizza as we talk about the Bible. But today, I give you a bit
of an advanced peek. A parable is a story that has a meaning and a moral, often
subverts our expectations, uses natural imagery that the people in Jesus’ time
would be familiar with…but it is INTO the same as an allegory! In an allegory,
every character and plot point has a one-to-one meaning. For example, Aslan is
clearly Jesus in the Chronicles of Narnia.
Things are not so simple in parables. Is God the owner of
the garden? Is God the gardener? Are WE the gardener? Who or what is the TREE…
it is US? It is God’s people? Is it the church? Is it this congregation? Yes,
maybe? We are left on our own to make meaning out of this story.
We know that the tree is not producing fruit, and the
owner is frustrated. We know that the gardener has advocated one more year and
will take special care to till and fertilize the tree. The tree doesn’t get one
more day, or one more month… it gets another full cycle of seasons – fall,
winter, winter, spring, summer. Because it’s probably going to take that long
to know if all of that hard work and TLC is going to, literally, come to
fruition. Transformation takes time. Metanoia takes time. It does not happen
overnight.
Pastor Katya Ouchakof reflects, “I like to
think that God shows up to us in the way that the gardener showed up for the
fig tree... When we are at the very end of our endurance, when it appears that
we no longer serve any purpose, God intervenes and gives us another chance.”
The tree in the story got another chance. But we don’t
know the ending of the story – did the tree bear fruit eventually? Did the
owner of the vineyard come and cut it down? We don’t know. And we don’t always
know the outcome of our own stories, especially when we are in a particularly
manure-filled part of the story, or when the wind is blowing particularly
strongly as we are trying to cross an ocean, or we worry whether or not our
little car is going to make it up the mountain. But we do know one thing from
this parable – the “same old, same old” is just not going to get the job done.
Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same
thing over and over again but expecting different results.” The good news is that God is doing a
new thing, rather than “the same thing” …. But are we following along with that
new thing? repenting… or rather, metanoia-ing? Are we reorienting, are we
turning toward the new things God has planned? Are we allowing the
transformation to happen? Do we dare to let God dig around our roots and throw
some smelly but nutritious manure on us? Or are we doing the same old, same
old… and expecting the different results?
So, the question we much ask ourselves – are we as a
congregation taking up precious resources that could be used for the Kingdom of
God? We say to ourselves, that we want to grow as a congregation. But
are we ready to welcome those who might not look or act like us, even if they
are part of the community we are asked to cultivate? Where are we putting our
energy that is not producing a lot of growth? Our time…. Our money… our
resources… our mental energy…. Are they producing the fruit that Jesus wants to
see?
Transformation doesn’t happen overnight. But it does
happen eventually. And sometimes it takes s a little digging, and a more than a
little manure. That is both good news and maybe some challenging news. Perhaps
our challenges at this moment are merely fertilizer for our us in this time in
this place. God is digging around us as tilling our soil. And we will just have
to see if God gives the growth…. Amen.
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