THERE’S A WILDNESS IN GOD’S MERCY

SCRIPTURE READING: Luke 13:1-9

In today’s gospel lesson there were people who wanted to play the “Ain’t it awful game.” Even if you don’t quite understand that grammatical construction coming from someone who is supposed to know better, you do understand the concept behind that grammatical lapse. It happens when people gather and discuss any tragedy and speculate about its cause. You may remember how after 9/11 when the terrible shock of the event eased a bit, people, especially pundits and preachers, were trying to make sense of this terrible tragedy. Questions were raised about how some who would normally have been in the World Trade Center were not there that day due to family emergencies or were out of the office for whatever reason and escaped the fate that befell those who were there and perished.

There were those who speculated on the moral correctness of those who survived and God’s blessing on them, as if God wished this awful event on anyone, and it was not the work of some politically and religiously crazed individuals.

Something of the same thing was going on when Jesus was confronted with one more of Pilate’s excesses in the Temple precincts in Jerusalem. Some who were present with him wanted to make a judgment as to the reason for the suffering of those who had been killed in the Temple while there to make sacrifices. “Ain’t it awful,” or the Aramaic phrase appropriate to their time, was on their lips. They were hoping to hear some word of judgment from Jesus as to the reason this happened to these particular people. They were hoping to hear him say that those who perished did so because they sinned and this was God’s punishment for their wayward lives. Jesus was having none of it. He would not consent to the idle speculation of those who wanted to play “Ain’t it awful.” Jesus brushed their speculation aside and in essence, in silence, said, “Things happen.” What he did say was, in effect, rather than indulge in idle talk about what someone else may have done, look to your own spiritual life and address the need for the correction of your own spiritual deficiencies. In short, repent.

I hope that you have not forgotten that this is the Lenten season and that the overriding theme for Lent is repentance. Now I know that technically Sundays are exempt from Lenten observance and that every Sunday no matter what time of the year is a time for celebrating the resurrection, and if you are good at math and count the forty days of Lent you will know that you must exclude Sundays. But this text will not let us off the hook for the need to look to our inner being. If you were here on Ash Wednesday and you received the imposition of ashes, you were reminded that, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” We cannot ignore Jesus’ call to repentance.

Now you may ask, “Repent of what?” “I’m a pretty good person, I’m not an axe murderer, nor do I defraud anyone, nor am I an adulterer, nor an abuser of children.” Therein is the rub. Of course our faults are not obvious to us or to others.

There was an incident in which James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, recorded an encounter of Dr. Johnson with an elderly woman who was homebound. The woman told Dr. Johnson that she wanted a priest to come to see her so she could make her confession. Dr. Johnson was amazed at this and he said to her, “Dear lady, how could you possibly have anything to confess confined as you are to your quarters?” She answered in one word, “Vanity, Dr. Johnson, vanity.” So it is with us when we think we are not sinners of the obvious sort that allows us to think we have no need of repentance. That is when vanity rears it ugly head. It is self-righteousness that is our great enemy, for we stand before God as dust. Recognition that we are dusty folk reminds us that God is willing to dust us off if we don’t wallow in self congratulation and self deception.

We can be caught up in lies about ourselves which will not allow us to see that we need forgiveness for our lapses of character as we engage in the character assassination of others, or in our uncharitable attitudes toward others or our downright judgmental attitudes toward others which will not allow us to see our own flaws.

There is a wonderful story of two monks told by Irmgard Schloegl in The Wisdom of Zen Masters that I would like to share with you.

Two monks on a pilgrimage came to the ford of a river. There they saw a girl dressed in all her finery, obviously not knowing what to do since the river was high and she did not want to spoil her clothes. Without more ado, one of the monks took her on his back, carried her across and put her down on dry ground on the other side.

Then the monks continued on their way. But the other monk after an hour started complaining. “Surely it is not right to touch a woman; it is against the commandments to have close contact with women. How could you go against the rules of monks?”

The monk who had carried the girl walked along silently, but finally he remarked, “I set her down by the river an hour ago. Why are you still carrying her?”

Now you know why Jesus calls us to repentance. Even the most righteous of us fall into uncharitable pitfalls of our own making.

Having examined our human foibles, let us turn our attention to Jesus’ parable which ends this gospel text. Our Bible study groups this week pronounced this one of Jesus’ weakest, least impressive parables.

In this parable Jesus tells the story of a landowner who was dissatisfied with a fig tree that was growing in a vineyard that had not produced fruit for three years. He was ready to have it cut down. The gardener wanted to give it one more chance. He wanted to cultivate the dirt around the tree, presumably where it was packed down and to spread a little manure around it and give it another season’s growth. Then if it didn’t produce after a year, cut it down.

It is interesting that in that parable the gardener has the last word. The landowner never responds to the gardener’s proposal. This leads me to believe that the gardener would each year plead for saving the tree and not cut it down. He would intervene year after year after year, in the same way that Jesus intervenes day after day for us, for there is wildness in God’s mercy that will pursue us to the very end. God’s patience with us endures so long as we admit that God is God and we are not God. The only time we are lost to God is when we withdraw and don’t acknowledge that we are not the keepers of our destiny.

It may be a weak parable, but it speaks to the depths in me which acknowledges my weakness and repents and trusts in the wildness of God’s mercy in the face of my failure. How about you?

Sermon preached by Reverend Jake Close at First Congregational United Church of Christ, Appleton, Wisconsin on March 11, 2007.