March 20, 2022 Lent 3
Prayer of Illumination
God of all Wisdom and Glory,
grace us today with the presence of your Spirit
that we might hear today’s word
with understanding and imagination.
This we pray in your holy and good name. Amen.
First Lesson: Isaiah 55:1-9
Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
3 Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.
4 See, I made him a witness to the peoples,
a leader and commander for the peoples.
5 See, you shall call nations that you do not know,
and nations that do not know you shall run to you,
because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel,
for he has glorified you.
6 Seek the Lord while he may be found,
call upon him while he is near;
7 let the wicked forsake their way,
and the unrighteous their thoughts;
let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
I had a hard time starting this sermon. The first two examples speak of sinfulness and repentance as groups are compared for their behavior. Are they “worse sinners” or “worse offenders?” We do that enough in life wondering where we fall in the comparison scale, who is better or worse. I certainly don’t want Jesus to ask me that question. Then they both conclude threatening “but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” Those words strike fear in my heart and make me want to be perfect, to try harder to be a good Christian. It feels a bit like much of life where we are asked to do more, be more, produce more as we climb the ladder of success. But that expectation applies to our home life and retired life as well. Comparing ourselves with others and finding ourselves lacking. Brene Brown writes, “Comparison is all about conformity and competition” (The Gifts of Imperfection, 94). Comparing ourselves is a driving force in climbing the ladder instead of tending to our spiritual garden.
But then Jesus tells the story of the fig tree. It is three years old, which is how long it takes for fig trees to start bearing fruit. The landowner compares this tree to others and finds it lacking and wants to cut it down. The gardener, however, encourages him to give it a year, while he tends to the tree and nurtures it with fertilizer and TLC.
At issue is the fig tree’s productivity. How useful is this tree, does it deserve to use the soil or is something better suited there? We as Americans find value in our productivity. We call it type A personality, or ambitious, or successful. But we might have the balance too far towards work. The French have a saying; “Americans live to work. The French work to live.” This speaks to our driven nature. Kate Bowler tells the story of the creation of the treadmill as a way to occupy prisoners who were becoming more hardened just hanging out with other prisoners. So William Cubitt invented a massive paddle wheel to step on an endless staircase as the wheel turned. Sometimes life can feel like an endless staircase: a treadmill of productivity, comparison, not enoughness. But that leads us to wanting to “get off the treadmill” and find some peace.
So, I ask you, “Do you feel like the fig tree?” Never enough, God wants more, family needs more, wondering should I do more? Or maybe you can’t do what you once did so you are feeling useless. Or your body has betrayed you and no longer works as it once did, and you wonder how you have value in God’s sight. In this world we can feel unproductive, unworthy, unloved and unhealed. We wonder how to move forward and where is God in all of this?
Our need to be productive might have its foundation in the Christian debate of what make us worthy of salvation… is it faith alone or the work that we do to follow rules and answer God’s call? Many have wanted an easy answer, “just tell me what I have to do to enter the kingdom of heaven!” But God’s love and grace comes without price and making ourselves sick with overwork is not the answer to what ails us. (Marcia McFee, Worship Design Studio).
This takes us back to repentance. Typically, we think of repentance as turning back towards God. But what if repentance is not just moral character and turning towards God but rather be a new way of thinking. One commentator wrote, “Repentance becomes less interesting when people mistake it to mean moral uprightness, expressions of regret, or a “180-degree turnaround.” Rather, here and many other places in the Bible, it refers to a changed mind, to a new way of seeing things, to being persuaded to adopt a different perspective…. the Christian outlook on repentance arcs toward joy. And it finds grace experienced within the awful precariousness and strange beauty of our fleeting existence” (Working Preacher, Matt Skinner).
Kate Bowler wrote Good Enough the book that sparked the theme for our Lenten series. She is a young mother, divinity school professor who faced stage four cancer and wrote about it in Everything Happens for a Reason. In her TED Talk she shares, “I am a historian and an expert in the idea that good things happen to good people. I research a form of Christianity nicknamed “the prosperity gospel,” for its very bold promise that God wants you to prosper. I never considered myself a follower of the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel believes that God wants to reward you if you have the right kind of faith. If you’re good and faithful, God will give you health and wealth and boundless happiness. Life is like a boomerang: if you’re good, good things will always come back to you. Think positively. Speak positively. Nothing is impossible if you believe…
If you live in this culture, whether you are religious or not, it is extremely difficult to avoid falling into the trap of believing that virtue and success go hand in hand. The more I stared down my (cancer) diagnosis, the more I recognized that I had my own quiet version of the idea that good things happen to good people. Aren’t I good? Aren’t I special somehow?”
Pausing here, I have to wonder if we all don’t have some of that and we strive to be productive as a way of wanting God to bless us. Kate faces this, “That was the most difficult moment to accept: the phone call, the walk to the hospital, when I realized that my own personal prosperity gospel had failed me. Anything I thought was good or special about me could not save me — my hard work, my personality, my humor, my perspective. I had to face the fact that my life is built with paper walls, and so is everyone else’s.”
She concludes, “Life will break your heart, and life may take everything you have and everything you hope for. But there is one kind of prosperity gospel that I believe in. I believe that in the darkness, even there, there will be beauty, and there will be love. And every now and then, it will feel like more than enough (Everything Happens for a Reason, June 4, 2019).
So can we, like the gardener in the parable, be our own gardener who says to our demanding and productive self, “I am giving you this time, I want to tend to you David, Mary Ellen, Pam. You say to yourself, I want to embrace and claim God’s deep love for me and during this season of Lent, take the time to turn the soil, to be kind to myself and to see myself as more than good enough.
Brene Brown offers several suggestions, several sources of medicine, in this self-care. First to know because we are loved by God that we can show ourselves Self-compassion. Self-compassion wards off comparison and competition. Self-compassion means we can see our imperfections with tenderness and honesty without shame and fear (The Gifts of Imperfection, 59). We don’t need to produce in order to have value. We find peace in our self-compassion. We get to rest as God’s beloved children.
Let us push back against our need to produce by cultivating laughter, song and dance. Mark Twain wrote, “Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on Earth (Ibid, 117). Brown looked at these traits and concluded, “Laughter, song, and dance create emotional and spiritual connection: they remind us of the one thing that truly matters when we are searching for comfort, celebration, inspiration or healing: We are not alone” (119). You are not alone. You are loved by God. You are enough in God’s sight. You can find joy in repentance and embrace grace. Because when all is said and done will your tombstone say how productive you are, or will it hopefully say beloved mother, husband, or friend.
Life is not how high we climb the ladder, but how deep we root in God. Can we take the time we need to cultivate our relationship with Jesus? Do we turn the soil with reading devotionals during Lent? Do we claim our loved by God status just for being a child of God? And that is more than good enough. Amen.
A blessing for Ukraine by Kate Bowler
God, the unthinkable has happened.
Swiftly, relentlessly,
by stealth and through open destruction,
the peace and beauty of the ordinary,
has been shattered in a day.
O God of justice and might,
We call to you to come and bring this suffering to an end.
Comfort these trembling hearts.
Shield the vulnerable.
Strengthen those with the resources and the resolve
to protect what they love
in the face of such overwhelming force.
Grant wisdom to the nations of our world, to our leaders, and to us,
to grasp the unfathomable,
to see evil in its true light,
and come against it unflinchingly.
Dear Ukraine,
though we shudder to watch what is happening
We will not look away.
