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| Living with Contradictions |
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(please feel free to email questions or responses) March 7, 2010 Isaiah 55: 1-9; Luke 13: 1-9 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. I’d like to see if any of you can catch some of these bubbles. (Scatter bubbles around the congregation.) Even better, can you catch three of them and juggle them? Trying to catch and juggle bubbles is a little bit like trying to juggle all the contradictions in our readings today. Just when you think you’ve got a hold of one idea, poof, it’s gone as another idea floats into view. Pretty soon, you just want to give up. Ah, God will provide water for the thirsty -- a deeply caring, personal God. No, wait, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, God’s ways are not our ways. God is mysterious, distant, not-so-personal after all. Still, Isaiah’s passage mostly describes God as loving us, abundantly pardoning us as we stumble along. The passage from Luke has Jesus telling the crowd they had better repent now or else they will perish just like those Galileans who Pilate killed in the temple or just like those workers killed when a tower fell on them. But wait, the people say. Wasn’t it their fault they were killed? Weren’t those Galileans challenging the power of Rome, so Pilate had them killed? Weren’t those people working on the tower just plain old collaborators with the Romans? They were helping Pilate build a system of aqueducts in Jerusalem using temple funds and Jewish labor. Didn’t they sort of deserve what they had coming to them? Aren’t we better than them? No, says Jesus, it wasn’t their fault that they died. They did not die because they were any worse than the rest of you. But if you don’t repent, if you don’t change your ways, then when you die, your life will seem as hopeless as theirs does. It’s a harsh, judgmental God. Except … It’s a God who gives the fig tree yet another year. If things went according to the way of the world, this tree would simply be chopped down. It was draining resources from the rest of the vineyard. It was unproductive. Wait, says the gardener – think of the gardener as God or as Jesus. Let me dig a trench and spread some manure around this tree. Give it another year. Give me a chance to go against the norms of the world, the norms of productivity and good sense and see if this tree will do better. This is Jesus willing to get his hands right into the manure of our lives and using it to transform us. Or maybe the message is that you can never have enough manure for a sermon about these things. In any case … In this whole section of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is telling his followers in many different ways to change their lives in anticipation of the coming of God’s realm. Don’t worry about persecution; don’t cling to wealth; put your trust in God, who will give you this day your daily bread, who will forgive your sins just as you forgive others, who give you strength as you face the temptations of your culture. Be ready, Jesus says. The end could come at any moment. For individuals, that was true. But the coming of the kingdom did not happen quite the way people were thinking. The world has gone on for another 2,000 years. Persecutions occurred. People clung to their wealth. They did not always get their daily bread. They did not always forgive one another. Trying to hang on to all of these ideas is like trying to hang on to bubbles as they float past you. So how do we live with all of these contradictions in today’s readings? How do we live with all of the contradictions in our scriptures? We could just ignore them and go on blissfully as if we hadn’t noticed. We could dismiss the whole religion thing as too filled with contradictions to have anything meaningful to say to our lives. Or we could embrace the contradictions and try to figure out how to live with them. The contradictions open doors into the many rooms in our lives that we know have their own contradictions within them. Life, after all, is not filled with consistency and order. Because we live with a certain amount of daily chaos – more some days, less on others – we have a tendency to look for simple answers that will make everything right. When there is an earthquake in Haiti and the endemic poverty of the nation makes a natural disaster ten times worse, it is tempting to blame the people of Haiti for what they are suffering. If only they could have been like Chile. But life is not simple. Not on a global scale. Not on a personal level. We can get so caught up in the complexity and the contradictions of life that we begin to lose our orientation. We feel adrift. We feel alone. So here is one thread through this morning’s contradictions. See if it is helpful to you in living with these contradictions. First, there are Jesus’ words reminding us that none of us can feel we are exempt from suffering and death because we consider ourselves somehow morally superior to others. We all share a common humanity. And then Jesus reminds us over and over to keep on with that struggle to stay connected to God even when all the forces of the world and of our lives pull us in other directions. It is easy to be self-centered, self-righteous, focused on money and power and status, living for the moment. But that never ultimately satisfies us. So repent, Jesus says. Keep looking for ways to reconnect to God. And know that God will keep fertilizing the tree of our lives – maybe using grace instead of manure -- so that we live into fruitfulness. But that path is hard. It can be discouraging. Thus the invitation is a bold one – “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.” We may be only subtly aware of our thirst at times. We might be like those hikers in the Grand Canyon who need signs to remind them: “Stop! Drink water. You are thirsty whether you realize it or not.” We may not be conscious of that fact that we have drifted further and further away from a connection with God. We may be only dimly aware of our pursuit of status or stuff has undermined the meaning of life. And so we hear the words from Isaiah: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” God invites us to a feast that does not depend on money, to a place of wine and milk and rich food for everyone, regardless of how much money they have. All are welcome at this table where bread and wine are abundant. This is what God promises us. This is what God invites us to. There is that feast when our spirits are hungry, there is flowing water when our lives seem parched, there is a place to come home to when the journey is long, all included in a community based on hope and nurtured by love. That’s God’s invitation and that’s God’s challenge to us. Come, you who are thirsty. Come, you who are hungry. Come, you who are lonely or worried or sad. Come, join in this feast today and then share the good news of God’s love with those you encounter along the way. Amen. |