From the Pulpit:

One of the great Christian theologians of the 20^th Century, Karl Barth, gave a clear directive to clergy that we should always preach with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. One of the biggest responsibilities of the preacher is to make Holy Scripture more than stories about things that happened to foreign people in the long distant past; it is to make those stories relevant today, to connect their deep and profound truths  to the daily lives of people who live in a very different world, in our lives in the twenty-first century.

It looks like Jesus was doing that day just what Barth recommended when he offered his commentary on two recent tragedies. Neither of these events is recorded anywhere else, so all we know about the murder of Galilean pilgrims at the temple in Jerusalem and the collapse of a tower near the pool of Siloam is what he tells us. But he might as well be talking about the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile . He might as well be talking about the IRS worker killed by the suicide plane crash or the marine mammal trainer drowned by a rogue orca at Sea World or the beautiful 17-year-old runner murdered by a repeat sex offender. If each of us added personal tragedies that lie closer to home we’d be here all day, but the same question would always continue to ring in the air. Why? Why them? Why now? Why me? 

Barbara Brown Taylor, who is an Episcopal priest and possibly the best known preacher in our tradition today, tells a story about a mother she met when she was a hospital chaplain. Her beautiful five year old daughter complained one morning at the playground that she had a headache. By the time they got home, the child could no longer see. When Taylor met the mother in the hospital where her little girl was being operated on for a brain tumor, she said she was bowled over by a wall of cigarette smoke  the minute she stepped into the waiting room, and the mother’s first teary words to her were, “It’s all my fault. I promised God I’d quit smoking, and I hate these nasty things, but I can’t quit, so I’m being punished, and now my little girl is dying because I’m so weak.” Taylor had the sense not to argue with her. A mother with a child undergoing brain surgery is not going to be thinking logically, but there was more to her pastoral decision. She realized that the woman needed something to hang on to, something to impose order on unimaginable chaos, and that it would be unkind and insensitive to take away from her the one thing that gave her the illusion of stability even if it were dreadfully wrong.  

At another time and in another place I certainly hope the mother was assured that God does not punish people for smoking by inflicting brain cancer on their children. Jesus says so loud and clear. The Galileans were not murdered because they were more evil than other pilgrims and the victims who were crushed beneath the stones of the tower did not deserve what happened to them. If the story stopped there we wouldn’t have much to talk about today even though I imagine most of us still fall prey to asking why when tragedy strikes.

But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He draws his listeners in because he knows that they are asking not so much on behalf of the victims as on their own behalf. They’d like to hear him say, “Oh, yes, those were very wicked men and they got what they deserved.” But things are not that tidy and our God is anything but vindictive.

Jesus is quick to seize the teachable moment. He draws his listeners right into the heart of the story. At first it sounds like a threat – “unless you repent,” he says, “you will all perish just as they did.” And he said it twice.  It sounds like a threat, but in fact it is an invitation. An invitation into the fuller life that is available to them if they repent.

Lent is the season of the liturgical year when we talk even more about repentance that usual. Most of us have at least at some time in our lives practiced self-denial of one sort or another during Lent, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but when we think of repentance the image I had at least when I was a child in church was one of beating myself up for bad things I had done or just as likely for things I had failed to do. The notion of repentance left me feeling bad, not good. That is emphatically not what repentance is about. It is about accepting life in all its abundance. It is about getting out of blessing’s way.

I read a book about repentance this week. It is by Mary Karr, a Texan whose memoir The Liars’ Club was a best seller several years ago. Her family would be hard to beat in competition for the Olympic gold medal for dysfunctional families, and that’s the story she told then and continues in her newest book, Lit. She writes of living out the legacy of that dysfunction as an adult, married and with a child as she continued the life of a raging alcoholic.  I’m telling you it was some wild living, though she felt healthy relative to her own mother who had the bad habit of shooting at people when she was drunk. Lit is the story of her conversion, which began with hitting rock bottom, doing time in a mental hospital and registering the words of the doctor that she had a progressive disease that would kill her if she did not change.

Her conversion was not a Damascus Road experience. She stumbled and fell repeatedly along the way. It was a long time before she could even say the word ‘God,’ let along accept that there even was a God who might love her and want to save her, not to punish her but to give her abundant life. Tentatively she begins to pray, and I’ve got to tell you those first prayers are not only ungainly, but she calls God names that would get a movie an R-rating. She challenges God to answer her prayers, and when they are answered, she refuses to consider that God had anything to do with it. Not the poetry prize for $35,000, not the loan of a car when she most needed it, not even the synchronistic meeting with the literary agent who was enthralled by her storytelling and nagged and nudged her all along the way to writing The Liars’Club.

At least not at first. It is in hindsight that she sees the grace. It is in health that she perceives and accepts God’s presence. And in the telling, her story becomes an apologetic for trust in God. She becomes the poster child for repentance.

And that’s why Jesus follows this discussion with the bizarre little parable about the fig tree. It is very natural to try to make parables into allegories, that is, stories where everything really stands for something else and the meaning becomes clear and easily digestible rather than messy and challenging. Parables are messy and challenging. The essence of this little story is that the fig tree hasn’t borne fruit and the landowner wants it cut down. But the gardener steps in and asks for more time, time to fertilize it and give it extra care. To nurture it and hope it bears fruit.

That is the question we’re being asked today. That’s the challenge of Jesus telling us to repent. Not to correct us by cutting us down, but to invite us to bear fruit.  We are called in our lives to make choices, and Jesus is telling us that God is on our side, God is on the side of giving us another chance to choose life, and in choosing life, to bear fruit.

We all know that one day we are going to die, whether it is unexpectedly like the people on whom the tower fell, or as the result of disease, or just by the fact that human bodies will eventually wear out. We all know that we’ll read about more tragedies in the news this week, terribly bad things that happen to good people and bad people alike. Jesus’ invitation is for us to wake up and embrace the life we do have, not to live it on auto-pilot but to use this gift with joy and generosity, to rejoice in the gifts God has given us and to use them as Jesus would have us use them.

The question we should be asking when we become aware of tragedy is not why, but what do we do with the fact that we are not the victim this time, how do we live given the fact that we are alive, we have the opportunity to repent, to turn away from our unhealthy ways and to embrace this grace-full chance to be fruitful.

Amen.