Third Sunday in Lent

March 3, 2013

Third Sunday in Lent

Isaiah 55:1-9 (NAB)

(1) All you who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat; Come, without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk!
(2) Why spend your money for what is not bread; your wages for what fails to satisfy? Heed me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare.
(3) Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life. I will renew with you the everlasting covenant, the benefits assured to David.
(4) As I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander of nations,
(5) So shall you summon a nation you knew not, and nations that knew you shall run to you, because of the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, who has glorified you.
(6) Seek the Lord while he may be found, call him while he is near.
(7) Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked man his thoughts; Let him turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.
(8) For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
(9) As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.

1 Corinthians 10:1-13 (NAB)

(1) I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea,
(2) and all of them were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.
(3) All ate the same spiritual food,
(4) and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ.
(5) Yet, God was not pleased with most of them, for they were struck down in the desert.
(6) These things happened as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil things, as they did.
(7) And do not become idolaters, as some of them did, as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel.”
(8) Let us not indulge in immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell within a single day.
(9) Let us not test Christ as some of them did, and suffered death by serpents.
(10) Do not grumble as some of them did, and suffered death by the destroyer.
(11) These things happened to them as an example, and they have been written down as a warning to us, upon whom the end of the ages has come.
(12) Therefore, whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall.
(13) No trial has come to you but what is human. God is faithful and will not let you be tried beyond your strength; but with the trial he will also provide a way out, so that you may be able to bear it.

Luke 13:1-9 (NAB)

(1) At that time some people who were present there told him about the Galileans whose book Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices.
(2) He said to them in reply, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?
(3) By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!
(4) Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower  at Siloam fell on them - do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem?
(5) By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!”
(6) And he told them this parable: “There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none,
(7) he said to the gardener, “For three years now I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. [So] cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?”
(8) He said to him in reply, “Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it;
(9) it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.””

The scripture lesson this morning is a little different. We have two, seemingly separate pericopes. It begins with Jesus giving some words that can seem very different than we usually hear Him. These are not the words of the Jesus we like to think about, anyway. This is the fire and brimstone Jesus, the one who doesn’t tell us what we want to hear, he tells us what we need to hear. Then, he lapses into a short parable. Parables, of course, are nothing new for Jesus, he uses them consistently, this we know. This one, though, is slightly different because it ends and we are left to think about what it means. There is no explanation, there is no attempt to explain it to his apostles. The only meaning we can pull out of it is on our own, making some implications based on the few lines above.
I guess maybe that is par for the course, here we are in the middle of lent and the lectionary gives us a passage that causes us to dig a little bit, to search around for the meaning. We are not given a passage that makes everything clear, not a passage that tells us in no uncertain terms that we are loved and children of God. Not a passage that tells us how grace covers our lives when we see it and when we don’t. Not a passage that brings us up to feel God’s presence in us, but a passage that causes us to stir, to dig, to shuffle our emotions until we can’t see which way is up.
After all, isn’t that what lent is truly about? A time to reflect on the sufferings that Christ undertook on behalf of all of us who millenia after the fact continue in the same circles of sin and selfishness that we have since time began. Here we are, two thousand years after the fact, still living in our sin, still suffering for our sin, still asking Christ to come to us, to suffer again for us, to help us find the way to redemption.
That is where we are today, in search for redemption. It is through the lens of the search for that redemption that we read these words this morning from the Gospel of Luke. Now, I have been here officially since last july. I was here, unofficially for two years prior to that. I have preached on a lot of subjects during that time, some better than others. Yet, it is no surprise that I tend to favor preaching on what it means to live in the community of faith, and I do that because I think it is an aspect of religion, of our faith that we tend to overlook in our society. The politics and economics of our life put a huge emphasis on the individual at the expense of the community.Through my eyes that means that we have come to see our collective responsibility to each other and to our world as either irrelevant or indifferent.
Yet, preparing these words for today, made me realize that sometimes I put so much attention on our collective responsibility to each other, that I have unintentionally minimized the importance of individual faith and our individual relationships to God. This is an aspect of my ministry that is still developing and I thank you for helping me realize that our emphasis has to be on both the collective and the individual rather that one at expense of the other.
Lent, then, is a time when we can inwardly focus our faith journeys. It is true that we journey together, but we each do that in unique and complex ways. It is to this individual journey that we turn this morning. Our society has many ills, it often lacks direction, strength, and responsibility. And when we suffer from those ills, so many times we point at the problem. When we lose our jobs, we blame the employers who seem completely aloof to our daily concerns. It is just greedy business owners that cost us our jobs. It is easier to do that than to say, I never got to work on time, or I didn’t work as hard as I could have. When our families fall apart, we say it was my husband or my wife who lied to me, who cheated on me, who fell out of love with me. It is easier to say that than to look at ourselves and see the times and places when we weren’t the partner they needed. When wars break out, we say it is all because of those others, it is their fault, for they hate our freedom, or they despise our faith. Because it is easier to say this than to look at ourselves and see that maybe we haven’t always played our decks above the table, that we have failed to be of assistance in disasters or we have been too uncaring when we demand that the poor countries in the world pay debt they can’t afford even when doing so means their citizens can’t eat. We are a society, we are a people who too often look at blame as being that of someone else. We define our world in terms of black and white, of good and bad, of them and us.
Yet, Christ himself tells us what happens when we act in that way. When we look at this scripture there is one benefit in reading it two thousand years later. When Jesus talks of the Galileans, when he talks about the eighteen who perished when the tower of Siloam fell, we can look over them because we don’t necessarily have any context for who these people are. It is easy for us to say, Jesus is talking about people who don’t exist anymore. When we do this, it undermines the message for us. Because while there may be no more Galileans, at least not in the biblical sense, the idea still remains today if we put it in context. The underlying message is don’t assume that you are ok just because you can point to others who are worse. The underlying message is that it isn’t a competition. So, let’s replace the words Galileans and the group who died at the tower of Siloam with some of our “others” today. Maybe this will give us some sense of what this message could sound like today.
Let’s rephrase this with some things we hear today, even in church.

“Do you think that these Republicans were worse sinners than you? I tell you, no!”
“Do you think that these Democrats were worse sinners than you? I tell you, no!”
“Do you think that these Drug Lords were worse sinners than you? I tell you, no!”
“Do you think that these urban gangs were worse sinners than you? I tell you, no!”
“Do you think that these homosexuals were worse sinners than you? I tell you, no!”

The list goes on, we could replace the word Galileans for any one of a million different people and groups we point to when we try to deflect blame away from us. They can be that neighbor that doesn’t respect your property. They can be that girl down the street who had an abortion. They can be that kid who hangs out on the corner opposite of your house who just looks like trouble.

Yet, today we are to realize that ultimately we cannot deflect blame to someone or something else. Today we are to realize that ultimately we each and every one of us falls short of God’s Glory because we all sin. It is true that the sin of stealing bread is vastly different from the sin of robbing someone of their life. Yet, at the end of the day, they are all sins, and we all commit more of them than we care to admit. That is, until today. Today, we are called to admit how short we have fallen. Today, we are called to recognize that, one day, each of us will be called to account. I don’t know exactly what that experience will be like, but I am pretty sure what it won’t be like. It won’t be a time when you will be compared to other’s sins. On that day, I would be willing to bet that you won’t be asked how sinful your neighbor or your friend or your enemy were. Because, on that day, there is only one competition to be worried about. That competition will be with yourself. And I guarantee you, that as you look into your life you will find much to be worried about. Indeed, it is likely that no matter how good you tried to be, it will not be enough to get you into God’s eternal home. Yet, I don’t say that to scare you, because you and I and everyone couldn’t even hope to measure up. That is the good news, because Christ has already filled up the gap for us.

This lenten season, we reflect upon ourselves, we think and pray and strive to get closer to who God created us to be. It is in this lenten season, that our minds and our wills remind us that at the end, we are all to go back to God. That is both a gift and a responsibility. As Saint Augustine sat down to compile his confessions he spends the last third of that book, more or less, to philosophical musings. At the very end, he speaks of that Sabbath day we all look to share in. In then end, that is where we are going. Augustine writes:

“But the seventh day is without evening. The sun does not set on it, because you sanctified it to last forever. For after all your works which were very good, you rested on the seventh day, although you made all these works in an unbroken rest. So, may the voice of your book tell us in advance that we too, after our works (which are very good only for the reason that you have given them to us), may rest in you in the sabbath of eternal life.