Good morning! Grace and peace to you all this 3rd
Sunday in the Lenten season. It is
indeed well into the Season of Lent and as such, I feel compelled to be honest
with you: I really wanted to preach another sermon this week. Oh, I had a number of things floating around
in my head and after hearing Craig’s sermon last Sunday I thought I’d just spot
off of him. He brought up a number
really excellent points and given our church’s mission to really grow this year
I thought they bore repeating. I still
think that, but as so often happens Sunday’s plans wind up in Monday’s garbage
can, and so I wound up writing a very different sermon.
My
friends, it is 2016, and in case the incessant ads, the mudslinging and the personal
attacks haven’t made it obvious, it is most definitely an election year. Let’s make no bones about it, a lot is at stake
this year. As a nation we must decide
what to do about the so-called Islamic State, the Syrian refugee crisis, there
is China and their ecological disasters, there is continued questions of global
warming, what to do about Planned Parenthood, America’s Silent Prison dilemma,
Marijuana Legalization, and racial tensions the likes we have not seen in
decades. Indeed, if there can be any adjective,
any one word that can be used to describe the years 2015 and 2016, it is the
word “Unrest”. People sense that life is
coming to a turning point, that we are on the verge of great change either good
or bad. Anxieties are very high and
tensions politically, socially, and economically loom like a shadow over
everything – neither the dinner table at home nor the water cooler at work is
safe from it. What has become even more
evident to me this week, however, is that in light of these great questions we
as Americans are taking every opportunity to treat one another like garbage. In this week alone I have personally
witnessed more blatant racism, violence, and self-righteous indignation than I
have since my children were born, and I want to entreat you all as fellow
Christians to have nothing to do with it.
I
remember looking up our gospel text early this week, and remember being struck
with how incredibly apt it is for the times we live in. You see the 21st century and the
first century were not really all that different. Political unrest, danger from armed
terrorists, failing religious institutions, corrupt people in power, and a
culture’s dying way of life - All of these were just as much the terrible
realities of 16 AD Judea as they are in 2016 America. It is almost as if the times might change but
people just never do. And just as we
face the same realities as they did so we see the Jews making the same kinds of
mistakes we do. Did the Jews of Jesus’
time sit down as family and truly seek good answers to their problems? Did they join together across religious and
political barriers, reaching across the aisle so to speak to make the world a
better place? No. No I dare say they were just as prone to
splitting into political parties and religious movements as we are, and in a
world so full of differing points of view, with so many people with so many
competing interests, the humans did then as the humans do now. They blame.
They point fingers, the find someone, ANYONE, with whom they can say
“See how life would be a virtual Eden if these
people just…weren’t…here.”
The
fact is, ladies and gentlemen, Jesus has an opinion about this kind of
behavior, and we find it in our gospel lesson for today. In the ancient world, calamity and tragedy
were often thought to have happened because of the person’s sin. Even though the Hebrews had in their
Scriptures the Book of Job which makes it very clear that sometimes what
happens to people has absolutely nothing to do with a person’s own righteousness
and relationship to God, people still come up to Jesus to point the
finger. “Jesus,” they say, “did you hear
about those Galileans Pilate had executed at the altar, mixing their blood with
the sacrifices? How terrible they must
have been! Can you imagine the
sinfulness of those men that they should die in such a way? Imagine
what the rest of the family is like.”
This
last part is very, very important. It is
the unwritten understanding that would overshadow this entire conversation from
front to back. When we read these ancient
texts with modern eyes, we must understand their culture is not ours. Individualism as we know it does not exist in
these ancient cultures. A son or the daughter is not a person unto themselves
but they are the extension of their family.
If the son or daughter is evil or is guilty of sin, it is because the
entire family is evil and guilty of sin.
You don’t have this kind of conversation with someone just to bring up
an interesting anecdote; you bring it up because you are looking for a
scapegoat; you are looking for living prey.
But Jesus
will have none of it. “Do you think
these men were worse sinners than all the others because they died in this
way? You think these people were garbage
to be burned when the reality is it is your attitude that’s garbage. This is not how God expects you to treat
people and unless you repent you too are going to perish - only in a far worse
way. You think those eighteen random
people who died when the tower fell were more guilty, you think those families
were more despicable than any other living in Jerusalem? Unless you all repent of your attitudes, you
too are going to perish. And let me tell
you why. A man had a fig tree you see,
planted in his vineyard, and when he came to inspect it he saw that it has
failed to yield any fruit for years. He
tells the manager of the vineyard to cut it down, because if it hasn’t born
fruit by now it never will and it is just wasting soil. But the manager pleaded with the owner, sir,
let me pay special attention to it. Let
me dig around it and fertilize it. Let
me give it every opportunity to succeed and if by this time next year it still
hasn’t yielded a crop then, yes, it deserves to be cut down.
We are all being watched, Jesus
says, we are all trees in a vineyard being inspected and indeed being specially
cared for so that we can be as successful for the kingdom as possible. It is fruitfulness; not purity, not
righteousness, nor even being correct, that God is looking for and if we want
someone to be worried about, Jesus says, be worried about that person you see
in the mirror first.
Ladies and gentlemen, we think we
have moved beyond these lessons. We
haven’t. We think somehow we’ve become
better sorts of people these past 2000 years but let me tell you the same
issues that plagued them still plague us.
We think we have become the exception rather than the rule. We aren’t.
We are still a people who would rather be right than be good and there
is nothing, there is no one whom we will not grind into the dirt to get that
feeling.
I am Pro-life, like I suspect many
of you are. I do not doubt for an
instant that an unborn human life is still a human life with its own rights and
protections. The child deserves to be
recognized for the life that it is. But I
was challenged, you see. I was
challenged by my Pro-Choice counterparts and I realized something. I wasn’t really pro-life. When it came down to actually saving the
lives of unborn children I in fact bore no fruit. I could not point to one human life that I
had saved. There were no babies alive
because of me, I did nothing to alleviate all the social pressures that our
women go through when forced into the question of whether to terminate the
pregnancy. I could have stood up for
equal pay, I could have stood up for a living wage so having an unwanted child
wasn’t an economic death sentence. I
could have lobbied for more affordable adoptions. Of the nearly 300,000 children in the United
States that have no permanent home, only 7000 parents adopted in 2012, leaving
a mother choosing between abortion or adoption with the terrible reality that
her child might never find a permanent home. Tens of thousands of potential
adoptees age out of our foster care systems every year, and with it the very
large likelihood of never graduating school, never holding a job, and with
roughly half of them falling victim to substance abuse. I didn’t want to actually save babies,
because if I wanted to do that I was given plenty of opportunity. The end result of my actions was not to
reduce the number of abortions in my country but to make young women feel
alienated and abandoned when they needed a brother most.
Now you may say to me, “But Keven,
wait just one minute!” I want you to
stop, I want you to stop right there. That
feeling you have, that emotion that is making you uncomfortable right now, I
want you to stop and look at it. All
those arguments you are mustering in your head, all those indignations you are
feeling right now. This is what Jesus is
talking about, valuing our positions more than we value other people. Just as ancient peoples valued the belief
that a person can be judged by the family they belong to, so we value the
belief that a person can be judged by the party they belong to. We blame them, we turn our nose up at them, we
judge them as unworthy because after all it is just so obvious how wrong they
really are. We do this for hours on end
but never once do we ask the question, “Am I being fruitful?”
Now I don’t care what side of any issue that you are on. Pro-life, Pro-choice, Pro-business,
Pro-Earth, less filling or tastes great – Every single issue we as humans side
upon is just right enough to win followers and just wrong enough to earn
enemies. None of us is so without sin
that we can pretend we don’t taint everything that we touch. Ladies and gentlemen, it is not about who is
right, it is about who is teachable. It
is about who is willing to be challenged into growing into something
greater. If we are so sure, so
completely convinced, so thoroughly loyal to our particular understandings that
we would sooner lose our soul than admit maybe the other side has a point – that
maybe they are just as human, just as right and just as wrong as we are…well, guess
what? Jesus says we might just get our
wish. Unswerving loyalty and Unrepentence
are two sides of the same coin. If we
want to be unswervingly loyal to someone, if we want to pour our hearts and
souls into a cause that’s right, Scripture is very clear on Who that is
supposed to be and He cares far more about how we act toward each other in our
disagreements than what those disagreements actually are. Let us resolve to better this election
season. Let us stand out amongst the
name-calling and the backstabbing. Let
us be an island of refuge from the destructiveness of self-righteousness,
because no matter what side we hold or what philosophies we adhere to we
realize that above all we are Christians first.
Amen and Amen
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