Luke 13:1-9
I wanted to begin
today by discussing Lent. Lent is a time to repent - or, to put it in less
“churchy” words, to look at our lives, to reflect, to try to make some changes,
to turn from one direction and go in a new direction, to grow, to try to be
more worthy and more whole and just plain more Godly, as we anticipate what
Jesus sacrificed, as we remember the things that we are a part of that lead and
led, inevitably towards the cross.
As part of that,
what is the most common Lenten practice that we know of? Giving something up.
What kinds of things do people give up? There can be something good and healthy
about giving something up: if we are really looking at our lives and we find
something that is getting in the way of our wholeness, of our serving God and
others. Then we can decide to make a practice of limiting, for a set period of
time, but perhaps with the idea that if we can do it for a short time, we might
be able to do it for longer, whatever it is that is interfering in our growth,
wholeness and service to God.
But I found myself
thinking about the falseness, so many times, of these deprivations or
sacrifices. A good friend of mine told me that for years she gave up chips
every lent. Chips were her favorite food and a staple in her diet. Every lent
though she went through the tortuous ritual of throwing out all of her
unfinished bags of chips. Of course there weren’t many by lent; fat Tuesday,
otherwise known as Mardi-gras, allowed her to gorge and cram down as many as
she could ahead of time. And she told me that every year she felt sick for the
first three days of lent; whether it was withdrawal symptoms or whether it was
a chip hang-over from Fat Tuesday she was never sure. But after six long weeks
of agonizing deprivation and anticipation, lent finally came to an end. The day
before Easter her kids would go out and buy every kind of chip they could
imagine, open the bags, and line them up in front of my friend. They would have
a count-down and at the exact moment lent was officially over she would eat and
eat until she was too full and sick to eat anymore, leaving her, once again,
sick for the first few days of Easter.
These sacrifices
on many occasions are almost like a game we play - “let’s see if I can give
this up,” or they are a way of feeling like we’re really doing something in the
name of our faith. But they represent a choice that a privileged or wealthy
person (and we are all wealthy here by the world’s standards) makes for a short
and specific period of time: a choice that can be “cheated” and even changed at
any moment.
What do these
deprivations actually mean in the bigger scheme of our faith? What does it mean
in terms of our dual call to love God with all our heart, soul and mind and to
love our neighbor as ourselves? What does it mean to the people God really
calls us to care for - the oppressed and the poor?
To put it in more
concrete terms, what does it mean to those who can’t afford and therefore don’t
own a television that you give up watching TV for a month? What can it possibly
mean to the person who struggles to find enough of any kind of food to eat that
you give up chocolate or ice cream for a month? What does it mean to God that
you “give up” something but aren’t giving to someone else who might really need
it? The intent of these sacrifices is to focus on God. But often the Lenten
practice of sacrifice gets warped and trivialized. And do we then use those
deprivations to focus more on God, or do we end up focusing on something else -
like on our own “religiousness” or even more, on a sense of deprivation? Are we
taking the time that we would otherwise use watching TV or whatever else it is
we have given up to volunteer with the poor, to meditate on the direction God
wants for our lives or even very simply to pray?
As I said before,
this Lenten practice started with good intentions. Get rid of the things that
separate you from God and develop a closer relationship with God through doing
so. But I think that many of our spiritual practices, this being one of them,
have instead become bargaining chips in an “If I do x, God, will you please give
me y” kind of way. You may not be familiar with the term “prosperity gospel”
but it is what is espoused by many of our rich and powerful preachers and their
followers in the United States, people like Joel Osteen. It was reflected in
the theology of the movie, Leap of Faith
that we showed here on our first movie night as well. It is an incredibly popular
theology because it promises that if you just do “a” right or “b” right, if you
give enough money to these prosperity gospel preachers, if you pray enough, if
you give up something for lent, that God will reward you with riches, with
prosperity, with “stuff” beyond your wildest dreams.
Just to be clear,
I find no justification for this in our scriptures. Today we hear in two
different gospels Jesus telling us that the rain falls on the just and unjust
alike, that bad things and good things happen to all people. We know the story
of Job. Despite his faith and goodness, he lost everything. And while at the
end, he is doing fine again, every time I hear the story now I am now reminded
of a wonderful poem by Carl Denis about Job that ends with these words, “How
foolish … To … assume that Job's new family, New wife and children and
servants, Would be an ample substitute for the old.” A loss like the death of
one’s children is a loss never to be recovered from. And no faith can protect
against that.
Bad things happen
to good, God-fearing people. If you are faithful
to God because you envision God as a kind of Santa Claus that rewards good
action or even faith, and punishes the bad, or those who lack faith, you
might want to find a new religion, one that emphasizes karma more. Because that
just isn’t how the God shown to us by Jesus works.
As Cathleen Fasani
wrote in a recent article to the Washington Post, “Few theological ideas ring
more dissonant with the harmony of … Christianity than a focus on storing up treasures
on Earth as a primary goal of faithful living. The gospel of prosperity turns
Christianity into a vapid bless-me club, with a doctrine that amounts to little
more than spiritual magical thinking: If you pray the right way, God will make
you rich. But if you're not rich, then
what? Are the poor cursed by God because of their unfaithfulness? And if God
were so concerned about 401(k)s and Mercedes, why would God's son have been born into poverty?... Jesus was born
poor, and he died poor. During his earthly tenure, he spoke time and again
about the importance of spiritual wealth and health. When he talked about
material wealth, it was usually part of a cautionary tale.”
The bigger problem
with prosperity gospel theology is that it completely wipes out grace. In the
prosperity gospel model our faith becomes an economic system of rewards and
punishments. You get what you earn, you get what you deserve. But God isn’t
like that. God causes the sun to shine on all of us. The rain, too, falls on
all of us. And God loves ALL of us, no matter what.
I think
historically, people have done many things in an attempt to earn God’s favor. A large part of the protestant reformation was in response to the Catholic church
charging people “indulgences” as a way to pay off their sins and to earn God’s
forgiveness and grace. And if you are a person who struggles with guilt, it is
likely that that guilt is a remembrance, especially when things go wrong, of
the ways we have failed. We start thinking that somehow the bad things that
have happened to us are because we haven’t been enough, haven’t done enough,
haven’t been faithful enough. But the good news is that this is not true. God
love you just the way you are. And out of that love, God offers grace, free
undeserved gifts and forgiveness and love and care. God offers that grace to
all of us, not as a response to anything we have or have not done. You cannot
earn grace by its very definition. It is a gift freely given.
I believe with all
my being that Grace is always there for us. But receiving that becomes
possible when we see it, if we are able to connect the dots and trust that grace is from a God who loves us, if we can see the many beautiful good gifts
that surround us as the sign and promise of God’s love, as they are. But
whether we are able to see it or not, that grace is offered to everyone, NOT
because any of us deserve it, or have failed to deserve it. It is there because
that is the nature of God: God is the One who offers grace, every single day,
to each of God’s children.
So, then, if we do
not do our Lenten practices and other spiritual disciplines in order to earn
God’s grace, why do them? Again, the original idea behind any spiritual
discipline is to increase our closeness to God. We don’t do this to “earn”
grace because grace can’t be earned. We
do this out of gratitude and love for a God who has already given us grace. We
do it to build a relationship with the amazing God who does love creation so
much that She/He offers that grace to everyone. We do it because in growing
closer to God we find that, no matter what else we are going through, we come
to learn, experience and trust that we are truly held and supported and loved
by a God who walks with us graces us even through the hardest times.
Today’s story from
Luke is not an easy story. Jesus first says that bad things don’t happen to
people because they sin, but then he goes on to say “I tell you unless you
repent, you will all perish just as they did.” The second half of the lesson
isn’t much more comforting. The fig tree doesn’t produce fruit and so the owner
wants to tear it out. The gardener persuades the owner to give the fig tree
another year to produce, but even then, the owner still says that if it doesn’t
produce good fruit in another year, it will be ripped out. Not a really
reassuring story, is it?
Except that the fig tree is not left to
its own devices. The gardener promises to dig around it, to put fertilizer on
it, to care for it. That gardener working hard to make us into the beautiful
fruitful trees we are called to be is Grace, straight from God. That care for
us, that pruning, that nurturing takes many forms: our life lessons, the
church, the things that happen to us which confront us to change and to grow
and to truly be servants of God, the many places we experience God’s love. When
we remain open to God’s grace, we find ourselves in that place where we are dug
around, where the hard places are pointed out and softened with some digging,
some aeration, and in a place where we are nourished and fed, replenished, and
given the best nutrition possible in order to grow so that we, too may produce
fruit.
God does indeed
call us to be the people of love, finding, searching, seeking and serving with
that love. And when we follow God, we see grace all around us. But I remain
convinced that it is not because we have “earned” it that God gives us grace. Still,
through our faith and through our actions of faithful living we learn to see the
grace that is offered. So, do we do our Lenten disciplines? Doing anything that
brings you closer to God is always a good plan. And Lent is a good time to
begin to do it (though truly, any time is). But we are called to these tasks out
of love for God, out of gratitude for the grace already given. Amen.
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