March 11, 2007
(Third Sunday in Lent)
Frightening Holiness
By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean
Exodus 3:1-15 • Psalm 63:1-8
• 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 •
Luke 13:1-9
(From
The Lectionary Page)
[Parishioner Evelyn Toner told me last week that whenever things are going tough she never forgets that even Moses began life as a basket case.]
The miracle of the Swallows of Capistrano takes place each year at the Mission San Juan Capistrano, on March 19th, St. Joseph's Day. The famous cliff swallows of San Juan Capistrano are returning from their winter vacation spot 6,000 miles south in Goya, Argentina.
Each year the "Scout Swallows" precede the main flock by a few days and it seems to be their chief duty to clear the way for the main flock to arrive at the "Old Mission" of Capistrano.
Legend has it that the swallows took refuge in the Mission San Juan Capistrano from an irate innkeeper who destroyed their muddy nests. The swallows return to the old ruined church each spring knowing they will be protected within the mission's walls. In fact, the city has taken their safety seriously passing an ordinance against destroying their nests. (though one might wonder if legally protecting the swallows might somehow be connected to tourism and the economic benefits their return provides.)
The swallows travel to and from San Juan Capistrano because of instinct. It is long journey, fraught with hardship and death. Yet the instinct to survive drives them on until they find a home and are safe. As we continue on our Lenten pilgrimage, I invite us to ponder whether it is our instinct, our second nature, to embark on difficult journeys, or are we more likely to avoid such journeys, and thus, miss both the benefits of the journey and the homecoming at its end?
The burning bush at Mt. Horeb calls Moses to an identity and a mission of frightening holiness. He is a fugitive in a strange land, orphaned from both Israel and Egypt, and yet he finds himself standing in God’s space and time. He is called and sent to go first back to Egypt, and then eventually forward to the ancestral home, the land of promise. In a sense this orphan is asked to go home on both journeys, but these lands are dangerous. John Stendahl writes that this call uses majestic language proclaiming God’s adoption of Moses as God’s own voice, but this is a frightening call, and Moses understandably declines. The burning bush, aflame yet not consumed, does not offer Moses a glimpse of timeless serenity – an invitation to leisurely naval gazing. No, from the bush I Am demands a decision. (J. Stendahl, New Proclamation, 2000-01)
The previous Hymnal 1940 contained a hymn with the first line “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.” This text did not make the cut into our present hymnal. Most often the reason given was that the theology was all wrong. God comes to us over and over again, not simply once. (I think the hymn was cut because the tune sounded much better with other texts – such as our final hymn this morning.) Yet the text could easily have meant that there are indeed moments in our lives when we must make a decision. (Ibid.) When we must take a stand. When we must speak and act.
Anglicans can often be found on the fence – a tasteful fence built of the finest material, with no pointy picket ends, thus ensuring that we can sit on the fence as long as we like!
But there are undeniably moments when our baptismal covenant calls us to commit to frightening holiness. To accept God’s call to be agents of setting free those in bondage, to gathering up into one family all who are orphaned, to break down the last barriers that divide and segregate us from our sisters and brothers. In short, to be like the burning bush, on fire for God without being consumed.
In too many places today there is plenty of fiery rhetoric hurled about in the name of God, but is clearly not of divine origin, because the result of such fire is that people are being devoured and consumed. People carelessly torch one another, and all the while the prisoners remain in darkness, chained to injustice, starving for hope and light, existing without food and education, denied healing and liberty.
In an essay entitled "Lab Report" from her book A Wing and a Prayer (available in our bookstore) our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori laments signs of conflict in the world, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet she is most concerned with "some pretty profound disunity" in the Anglican Communion.
The source of this "pretty profound disunity" is, in the bishop's own words, is due to "primates lobbing fiats of dis-fellowship, edicts of impaired communion, and, when all else fails, [deploying] intercontinental ballistic bishops." The Church as the Body of Christ should be about responding to the call of the burning bush to respond to frightening holiness, while refraining from torching one another.
Moses is called to journey from his exile in Midian, back into bondage in Egypt to face his past, so that with God he might then bring Israel, and himself, through the wilderness into promise. A frightening journey facing one’s sins, yet he is the one to deliver Israel.
We, too, face frightening journeys that call us to account and atone, which then result in freedom. And though our language and culture proclaims that we love freedom, the fact is that freedom in Christ means that we must make choices and accept our responsibilities for those choices. But the cost of our facing our consequences sometimes causes us to choose slavery instead of freedom. To the Israelites in the wilderness, though no longer slaves but free, Egypt began to look like paradise lost, a land of free food and plentiful water. Never mind that the cost of the food and water was one’s soul. The journey seemed too costly.
So we must not be deceived. We can become addicted to the very things that enslave us, and we have a profound capacity to live in denial and deceive ourselves. Substances like alcohol and medications, unhealthy and abusive relationships, over-work and patterned behaviors that interfere with vows and commitments to the people we love most, can make slaves of any of us. We sometimes label such unhealthy things as “habits,” and what a powerful word that is. For the root of habit is the same as habitat, meaning where we dwell, and dwell too often in slavery. (F. Niedner, New Proclamation, 2003-04)
The Good News of the Gospel is that God did not create us to dwell in bondage. This is the God who meets Moses in the midst of the bush that burns and yet remains, the holy I AM who simply will not let us remain prisoners of our idolatries and impoverished imagination. (F. Niedner, Proclmation.)
Whoever we are, whatever we do, we all share one thing in common and that is that we are sinful and in need of a Redeemer to deliver us. Saint Augustine wrote, "Whatever we are, we are not what we ought to be." Mark Twain, with his characteristic sense of humor, echoed that sentiment by writing, "Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired." (uncited website) But, Mr. Twain, we were redeemed on the Eighth Day, the first day of the new creation, when Christ rose from the dead.
The Burning Bush called Moses, and calls us all, to return home. To come to God and face what needs to be dealt with, to seek God’s health and forgiveness, and begin a new life freed from bondage. This is frightening holiness. It is journey through the wilderness, but it is a journey that leads us home.
This morning is a moment of decision. Let us cast aside the false gods we have created, those which drain us of love, life, and hope, which take the best from us and use us and reduce us to mere shells. There is One God, the GREAT I AM, who does not consume us, but forgives, restores, and empowers us. Let that one true God reign in your life, and through you reign in the Church.
Let us live as if we, like the fig tree, have just one more season to bear fruit. Let this fruit be sweet, plentiful, and offered for all.
The Fruit We Produce
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
We have a sweet gum tree in our back yard whose days, I believe, may be numbered. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s healthy. Believe me, it’s plenty healthy. In fact, last fall it did what healthy trees do best, especially in a dry summer: it produced a record number of those round spiny brown fruit things that now litter our backyard. The squirrels, chipmunks, and a woodchuck we’ve named Charles who all regularly visit our back yard ignore the sweet gum’s bounty, preferring instead the acorns from a nearby oak tree. Frankly, we can’t quite see the use of this sweet gum tree. It creates shade where we don’t much want it, it litters the lawn with messy fruit that is difficult to compost and which doesn’t seem to feed the local fauna, and is crowding out a silver maple and an oak tree whose growth we would like to encourage. Huh. Seems like a real no-brainer, doesn’t it?
Such is the power of home ownership – the capacity to make landscaping decisions based on our vision for our property.
And all I can say is that it’s just a darned good thing that the job description of property owners doesn’t look anything like the job description of God.
In our gospel passage for tonight, Jesus addresses an issue of theodicy. That’s the theological term meaning the capacity to speak justly of God in the face of suffering. He meets the implied question head on. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? Or the 18 who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think that they were worse offenders than all others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you.” He’s pretty emphatic. Suffering and death happen, sometimes due to human agency, sometimes due to nature’s fury, sometimes due to living in a world governed by the laws of physics. God does not abrogate the effects of certain causes, but neither does God link suffering and death to sin. We’re the ones who do that. We’re the ones who, over the centuries, have given ourselves spurious comfort by interpreting the suffering and death of others as evidence of God’s judgment. We’ve even codified it in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, for heaven’s sakes. Read Psalm 1 if you want a good example of what I’m talking about – God blesses those who are good and delivers suffering to those who are bad. A non-contextual reading of our epistle this evening seems to suggest this as well: the Israelites sinned in the wilderness and God struck them down. Even when we know better, we still have a tendency to believe this way because it’s easy. It’s a worldview that is neat, tidy, predictable, and best of all, seems to put control right where we want it most – in our hands. Don’t want to suffer? Hey, just mind your p’s and q’s. Besides, when we assume the hand of God in the suffering of others, we’re off the hook in terms of providing help and comfort.
In fact, the only thing wrong with this world view is that it’s false. We’ve known all along -- long before Rabbi Kushner wrote his best seller – that bad things do happen to good people. Bad things will very shortly happen to Jesus, bad things which in Luke’s gospel, Jesus has already foretold about himself.
So Jesus clarifies for the crowd that suffering is not God’s judgment on sinfulness. Rather, for us to assume that God demands blood to be shed in order for atonement to be made is for us, essentially, to choose death over life. This kind thinking postulates a God who puts divine imprimatur on violence. If gives humanity tacit permission to be violent because God is seen as violent. To equate suffering and death with God’s justice in fact perpetuates the realm of human suffering. It justifies victimage, and ultimately takes grace out of the picture entirely. Unless we repent of this harmful theology, we will perish because we will have cut ourselves off entirely from the God whom Jesus proclaimed, a God of infinite grace and mercy, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Unless we repent of this harmful theology, we will have chosen death. We will produce no useful fruit because the root of our being will have been grounded in a God of mimetic violence rather than in a God of compassion.
Hence, the parable of the barren fig tree. What we need to know about this parable is that figs were not harvested for the first six years of the tree’s life. So the tree hasn’t been standing idle for 3 years, but rather for at least 9 years with no benefit to the vineyard owner. Secondly, there is no evidence that such agricultural care as the gardener proposes to lavish on the fig tree was ever a standard practice in ancient near east fig orchards. The stunning picture this parable paints is of a useless tree that not only is given another chance, but also extraordinary, perhaps even prodigal nourishing care, so that it may bear worthy fruit. That’s the kind of image of God that Jesus taught and that he lived.
Which brings me back to our backyard sweet gum tree. Unlike the fig tree in the parable, it produces a prodigal amount of fruit with absolutely no horticultural encouragement from the Sommer family. It’s just that the fruit is useless to me and, near as I can tell, to the local fauna as well. But unlike either the parabolic fig tree or my all-too-real sweet gum tree, the fruit that we produce is not something that is genetically determined. The fruit we produce is determined by the life we live, the ground of being in which we are rooted. If we are grounded in a God of mimetic violence, the fruit we produce will not sustain life. Jesus calls us to a different way, a way that is life-giving, nourished by a God who delights not in the death of sinners, but rather that we may turn and live, and thrive.
