Sometimes it takes a story

• Joshua 5:9-12
• 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
• Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
• Psalm 32

If someone were to ask you to explain yourself, to spell out what it is that makes you tick, or why you do the things you do, chances are you couldn’t do it.  You might fumble around for a while, trying to put into words the inner workings of your heart and mind, or to come up with nouns and adjectives that seem to describe your values and motivations.  But sooner or later what you’d probably do is tell a story.  Part of my job is to meet a lot of people, and to get to know them, and give them a chance to get to know me.  And while everyone is different, and the conversations we have as we are getting acquainted are all different, as people ask me questions about myself, to better understand where I’m coming from, I find that there are certain stories I tell over and over again. 

There’s the story of how I became a Zen monk and organic farmer, and my story of going from Zen monk to Episcopal Priest, and there’s the story of the rebirth of St. John’s, Petaluma, from the ashes of schism and how I came here to be the Rector.  I never tell these stories exactly the same way twice, and I never mind telling them again, because they are alive—they are stories that live in me, and I live in them.  And sometimes that’s what it takes to really come alive to the deeper truth about who we are, and the higher purpose for which we strive—sometimes it takes a story. 

So when some Pharisees and scribes were grumbling about Jesus, about the way he welcomed sinners and ate and drank with them, Jesus could have tried to explain to them in abstract terms about his own experience of the unconditional and gratuitous love of God.  He could have told them how he had come to give the last word about any idea or system of religion that seeks to put barriers around that love and control people’s access to it on the basis of human judgements about morality and justice.  He could have told them that he had come to identify himself completely with the people whom such conventional ideas and systems of religion had ruled out of bounds with respect to God, and to invite those people to feast with him at the inaugural dinner of a new creation, a world remade, where the only power is the grace of God, and love is the only law, where no one is excluded or estranged. 

I suppose that Jesus could have tried to explain himself in these terms, but no one would have had the foggiest idea what he was talking about.  You and I can talk this way because we have the advantage of being able to reflect on the whole arc of the gospel, and see the entire tapestry of Jesus’ words and actions that weave together to make it up.  Not only that, but the identity and mission of Jesus have had two thousand years to infiltrate and colonize our ideas about holiness and God.  Not that this process is complete, not by a long shot.  That is why we keep going back to the Gospel stories, day by day, week by week.  It’s why we keep placing ourselves imaginatively in the moments where people were seeing and hearing it all for the first time.  Because we know that the truth that Jesus was trying to get across in those moments, by saying and doing the things that he did, has yet to take full possession of us.

People sometimes complain that the teachings of Jesus and of Christianity in general are short on practical advice for the spiritual path.  There may be some lofty ethical principles to guide our behavior, in places like the Sermon on the Mount, but there is very little in the way of instruction on how to train oneself, and to surmount the psychological barriers to spiritual progress.  And I think that something like this is what got the goat of the scribes and Pharisees.  They were masters of the path, with a well-worked out system for what you had to do to get closer to God, and people respected them for it.  So it drove them crazy that Jesus didn’t show the slightest interest in being like them.  They could see that he was a person of extraordinary spiritual gifts, who could have been such an asset to their efforts to encourage and instruct the good and the faithful in the synagogues and in the temple.  He could have had the best and the brightest in the land as his disciples, and rallied up a real religious revival.  But instead he went around like a bum, squandering his talents on losers, on crazy people and prostitutes, on tax-collectors, lepers and Samaritans.

And when they grumble about it, he doesn’t have the decency to explain himself, but tells them another of his stupid stories.  It’s actually the third of three stories, the first two of which the lectionary left out, but they are all about losing something and finding it again, and a party to celebrate the finding.  So maybe Jesus really is explaining himself, and is simply on a mission of mercy to the outcasts and losers, to help them become upstanding citizens again.  Maybe his feasting with them is a celebration of their returning to the fold, and thanksgiving that one of the righteous men of Israel bothered to come looking for them.  This is a common enough interpretation.  It’s the sort of thing that has led generations of Christians to take up works of mercy to the marginal and poor, as if that were the preferred method to get right with God. 

    

Such charity often imagines that the lost will dutifully express their gratitude for being found, and show themselves deserving by cleaning up their act.  And at first it seems as if the story about the son who was lost and is found, meets these expectations.  After all, the younger son in the story is shame-faced, and is prepared be a hired hand on his old family farm.  But there’s a lingering question in our minds about repentant he really is, or whether he’s simply figured out that this what he needs to do to get his three square meals a day.  Because while most of us have been in the position of the younger son now and again, we can more readily identify with his older brother.  It's not that we’re mean, or unforgiving.  We wouldn’t demand that our brother be sent away to starve.  We just ask for a little respect for fair play, a little accountability, a little incentive for good behavior, and consequences for bad.

But it is the father in the story who sees the bigger picture, who understands what is really at stake, which is not a goat or a fatted calf, or which son is the favorite, or who stands to inherit the family farm—what is at stake is life and death.   “This son of mine was dead,” he says, “and is alive again!” And so the party begins.  Pondering this, we might say that Jesus went to the tax collectors and sinners, not because they were the people who needed the most help, but because they, unlike the upstanding scribes and Pharisees, were able to understand the deeper purpose of his mission.  Which was not to show screwed-up people how they could get back in favor with God, but to put to everyone the question—can the dead come back to life?

It’s a question only God can answer, but in the company of Jesus, the tax collectors and sinners find it possible to imagine that the answer to that question might be “yes.”  And that is the possibility that animates not just the story of the lost son, but the whole story of Jesus.  Because the gospel is about more than helping losers become winners again, or readjusting misfits to polite society.  It’s a story about one who goes looking for all that has been lost, from the foundation of the world.  To do that he must become the lost, the outcast, despised and forsaken.  He must go in search of us even to depths of the earth, to lie, the dead among the dead.  The story of Jesus is the story of one who lives, not for spiritual progress, or moral perfection, but for love for us, and for hope in what could come to him, and to us, in that place of absolute surrender.

Don't give up yet

• Exodus 3:1-15
• 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
• Luke 13:1-9
• Psalm 63:1-8

On Tuesday, February 16 the small Pacific island nation of Fiji became the first country in the world to ratify the United Nations climate deal agreed on last December in Paris.  Four days later, Tropical Cyclone Winston, making landfall with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, slammed into Fiji, leaving tens of thousands homeless and 44 dead, by last count.   It was the strongest storm ever recorded in the southern hemisphere, and on Thursday Joanne Woodland, one of our parishioners who is vacationing in Hawaii, sent me a cell phone video of the massive ocean swell kicked up by the cyclone, pounding the north shore of Oahu.  That swell will get here later in the week, with waves up to thirty feet high forecast to hit the Sonoma Coast on Thursday night.

Unless we have relatives in Fiji, like the folks in the Fijian congregation that meets every Sunday at the Methodist Church over on the next corner do, we might imagine that big waves are the only impact that Cyclone Winston will have in California.  But maybe we feel differently about the eight people shot in Kalamazoo, Michigan on the same day that Winston tore through Fiji.  After all, that incident was in our own country, in a town like this one.  The victims were like us, a young woman watching children play outside the townhome where she lived, a father and son shopping for a car, a teen-aged girl and her grandma, and three other older ladies leaving dinner at the Cracker Barrel restaurant, when a stranger opened fire.

Whatever the case, I think we have a natural tendency to create a mental distance between ourselves and the victims we read about in the news.  It would be hard for us to live if we went around all day waiting for the bullets to start flying, or the wind to knock our houses down.  It is when people are forced to endure conditions like these that they become refugees, and leave behind everything they know and everything they own, to try to find a place to live a semblance of a normal life.  We human beings need to believe that on balance life is good, and the odds are in our favor of living in relative safety and health to a ripe old age. 

So when we hear about terrible events that call these odds into question, we look for explanations, so we can feel like they have causes we can understand, and maybe even control.  Cyclone Winston was so devastating, we say, because climate change is heating up the oceans, creating more powerful storms.  Or Uber drivers in Michigan go on shooting rampages because they are mentally ill, and gun laws are too lax, and media coverage of all these mass shooters is spawning copycats.  In the days before we had sophisticated scientific, historical, and psychological theories of causation, we explained such things in theological terms.  In today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus responds to the news of terrible recent events in Jerusalem.  And he asks his listeners if they really believe the popular explanation that the victims of these disasters were being punished by God for their sins. 

What Jesus seems to be saying here is that the distance our explanations create between us and the victims we hear about in the news obscures the truth that they are no different from us.  We may need that distance to insulate us from the fact that our lives are a gift that can be taken away, any day, any moment.  But the disasters that happen to others, says Jesus, are not only an opportunity to give thanks that we have been spared for another day, but to recognize our common predicament.  It’s a chance to really come to terms with how little control we have over what happens in the world, and how little power to keep ourselves safe from harm.  Not so that we will sink into helplessness and fear, but so that we will turn to our only secure refuge, which is the goodness, and forgiveness, and eternal loving-kindness of God.    

To underscore this message, the Gospel of Luke links this saying about disasters in the news with a story about a fig tree that doesn’t bear fruit.  It’s a story that shows up in a slightly different way in Matthew and Mark.  Mark’s version is likely the original, and it begins at Mark 11, verse 12, which, in case you want to look it up.  It comes right after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem that we’ll remember in a few weeks on Palm Sunday, at the conclusion of which Jesus goes into the temple and looks around a bit, before returning to his base in Bethany.  On the way back into the city the next day, he’s hungry and looks for fruit on a fig tree.  Finding none, he curses the tree, and says “may no one ever find fruit on you again.”  Jesus then goes to the temple, where he stages a protest, turning over the tables of the money changers, and shouting that they have turned the house of prayer into a robber’s den—you know the story.  The next day he and his disciples pass by the fig tree again, and find it withered to the roots.

By bracketing the story of the so-called cleansing of the temple with the parable of the fig tree, Mark makes a connection between Jesus’ physical hunger for figs and his hunger for God’s righteousness, which is the only hope for his people.  Jesus goes to Jerusalem, not in a bid for political power, but because he is on fire with a prophetic desire.  He longs for the people of Jerusalem, and especially the elite in the temple, to repent--to turn from their cynical, self-satisfied, self-interested ways and return to the ways of God.  But on coming there, Jesus finds no fruit to satisfy this hunger.  There is nothing to work with here, no openness to his message or willingness to act on it.  And this can only mean one thing for Jerusalem—inevitable destruction.

We can go further in understanding the story of the fig tree, if we consider the historical circumstances in which the gospels were written.  The author of Mark was likely writing just about the time of the doomed Jewish revolt against Rome in the year 66.  It was a period of extreme religious and psychological distress for all Jews (and the author of Mark was almost certainly a Jew), as Jerusalem became the focal point, first, of armed insurrection, then of savage civil war, and finally of a brutal Roman campaign of re-conquest.  So it’s not too surprising that the author of Mark wrote in an apocalyptic mood.  He sees Jerusalem’s inevitable fall, and connects it with the things that Jesus said thirty years before: his condemnation of the hypocrisy and corruption of the temple, and his warnings about the final judgment of the world.

But the author of Luke has a different perspective.  For one thing he or she is probably writing a full generation later.  For Luke the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans is a done deal, a past event as distant as the fall of Saigon or the Berlin Wall is for us.  And Luke is interested in what happens next.  For Luke, the death and resurrection of Jesus is not the last faint glimmer of light piercing the darkness at the end of history.  It is the light of dawn, at the beginning of an amazing new story that is already under way.  And Jerusalem’s part in that story does not end with Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.  The city and the temple will stand for another thirty years, and in that time it will be the birthplace of a new community, even a new humanity.  The power of the Holy Spirit will come upon the pioneers of this community in Jerusalem, and from there they will spread news of forgiveness and reconciliation in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, to Ethiopia and Syria, to Libya, and Asia, and Macedonia, even to Athens and Rome.

So Luke reworks the story of the fig tree, to say that God is not ready to give up on the world just yet, so let’s not give up on each other.  It’s as timely a message now as it ever was, in these days when people seem so ready to harden their hearts against the most desperate and vulnerable people in the world, so ready to blame them for the disaster that has fallen upon them.  When the church is true to Jesus, we are like the gardener he spoke about in Luke’s story of the fig tree, like the gardener he was.  He tells us to roll up our sleeves and go to work.   He tells us not to be afraid to dig around, to loosen the hardened of sin and injustice, and the tangled roots of deceit and delusion and denial.  He tells to be unashamed to scatter the manure of kindness and encouragement, compassion, and helpfulness, and prayer.  He tells us to be patient and watchful and not to lose faith in the power of God, because the old tree in the garden might still bear fruit.