Sermon

March 11, 2007

“Journey with Jesus:  To Repentance”

Luke 13: 1-9

March 11, 2007

On the front of your bulletin today is a picture of the contemporary sculpture on display at the Nasher Sculpture Center in downtown Dallas.  It is entitled “Walking to the Sky” by Jonathan Borofsky.  It soars 100 feet into the air at a 75-degree angle and features seven life-size figures walking briskly up a stainless steel pole toward the sky, and three more on the ground watching their ascent.  It is made of painted fiberglass, and the figures are of different races, ages, and genders and seem to be defying gravity, ascending to new heights.  According to Borofsky, “It is all of humanity rising upwards from the earth to the heavens above striving into the future with strength and determination…Ultimately this sculpture is a symbol of our collective search for wisdom and awakened consciousness.” 

The sculpture was originally inspired by a story Borofsky’s father told him as a child about a friendly giant who lived in the sky.  During each tale, father and son would imagine walking to the sky and visiting with the giant, discussing what they could do to help everyone on earth.  For us Christians, we must take the same walk to develop our relationship with God, to reflect on God’s Word and on Jesus’ teachings, to discern what WE can do to help everyone on earth.  For us Christians, we are on a journey with Jesus, and as Jesus continues his journey toward Jerusalem, He makes it clear that repentance is essential if our faith is to bear fruit that helps everyone on earth.

In today’s scripture, some people had a particularly troublesome question.  They had heard of some Galileans whom Pilate had killed while they were in the very act of worship.  I imagine that the truth is they were just as appalled by the fact that God would allow such a disaster to come upon people, especially in a time of worship.  Why?  Why would God allow such a thing to happen?  Why would God allow a group of innocent Mennonite girls to be shot down in their school?  Why would God allow a bus driver and his wife and five baseball players to be killed? 

Jesus reminded His audience of what had happened in the village of Siloam.  During construction of an aqueduct, one of the towers had collapsed and killed eighteen people!  Why?  Why those eighteen?  Jesus’ listeners believed fiercely in the justice of God, so they concluded that it was because a person or a nation was being punished for evil that had been done.  Jesus’ message, though, is not about why bad things happen to good people but that our time will come.  We must stay in a state of readiness.    

In 1927, Thornton Wilder, an influential American writer of the 20th century, was walking across the campus at Princeton University.  He, like many others in that time, was pondering God’s plan in allowing the horrible carnage of the First World War, ten years earlier.  Wilder was a veteran of that War; he was well read in Greek, Roman and Catholic writings.  He was a graduate of Yale.  He went home, and in a period of months, conceived and wrote the novel that made his name as a writer.  He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  The plot centers on five travelers in Peru who are killed when a foot-bridge across a canyon collapses.  A humble monk - Brother Juniper - witnesses the catastrophe.  For him, the questions are inescapable.  Why this day?  Why this place?  Why these five?  It’s a question as old as the human race. 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is set in the jungles of Peru.  Brother Juniper is determined to prove that the reason the bridge collapsed is to be found in the moral flaws in the lives of those persons who were killed.  In an attempt to explain the workings of divine providence, the monk interprets the story of each victim – the rich, elderly woman who had finally found peace from unrequited maternal love two days before; the identical twin who, on the brink of suicide, had finally agreed to embark on a long voyage with someone he respected; a sickly young boy who was going to Lima for an education.  Of course, we know that all such efforts to try to understand why disasters happen to people, fail.  The monk, for his efforts, was condemned as a heretic and burned on Lima’s central square.     

Jesus rejects such attempts at calculation.  Jesus answers that those who had died were no worse than their fellows.  The point is that death is inevitable, and if death is inevitable and unpredictable, we must live our lives in a state of grace.  We must repent!!

We are now in the third week of Lent.  Traditionally, people give up small pleasures; we also learn how to confront temptations and how to live as God would wish us to live.  For most of us, Lent provides a time of reflection and repentance.  Sometimes that repentance doesn’t always mean on bended knee.  Sometimes it means that we come to acknowledge that the way we are living our lives is not always the way Jesus would have us live it.

In the movie Chocolat, it is Lent when Vianne Rocher and her daughter move to a small town and open Vianne’s tempting chocolaterie just as the Lenten fast begins.  Everyone else in the town, it seems at first, is on their way to Jerusalem.  As events unfold, the town mayor is seen to be a very rigid Christian, rewriting all of the new young priest’s sermons and demanding that the young priest practice them before him every Saturday, judging others for giving in to buying chocolate, as well as many other indulgences.  Vianne, the chocolatier, becomes a Christlike figure who delivers people from hardheartedness, misguided piety, and self-deception.  The last holdout is the mayor.  He has fasted all of Lent; he is in the process of rewriting the young priest’s Easter sermon on the Saturday before Easter when he sees the woman that he secretly loves and has regarded as the paragon of piety enter the chocolaterie.  He begins to weep.  He prays to God for discernment.  He then takes a stainless steel letter opener across to the chocolaterie, breaks into the business and begins to slash all of the chocolate figurines in the display window.  As he does so, he gets a taste of the chocolate.  Starved and emotionally distraught, he begins to taste all of the chocolate in the window, eating until he falls asleep for the night in the showcase window.  (Play scene from Chocolat.)

Repentance is not exclusion; repentance is inclusion.  As Rebecca said at the Ash Wednesday service, repentance is not so much that you give up something; repentance often means that you give of yourself.  In the parable of the Fig Tree, the people on the journey are to repent.  A sure sign that they have repented is that they will bear fruit.  The GOOD NEWS is that even though that fig tree has been totally unproductive for three years, when the gardener implores the owner to give it another chance to bear fruit, he does so.  Perhaps next year, with more tender care, it will bear fruit. 

Today’s message is a look at the balance of God’s judgment with God’s mercy.  Yes, there is judgment.  Yes, we are to repent – now!  But yes, my friends, the resurrection is real; we see it over and over in all the second chances that God gives us – second chances provided by our crisis fund, second chances provided by Amigos when they repair someone’s home; second chances provided by you when you try new ways to make this sanctuary welcoming and meaningful for others; second chances provided when someone wants to start a new life - again.  Thanks be to God for the God of second chances!!  Amen.