Sinners

1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

I don’t really want to think of myself as a sinner. Do you?

Some of us have been fortunate enough to encounter the kind of church tradition where calling ourselves sinners is a way to really deeply appreciate the gifts and love and mercy of God. Others of us have been injured by church traditions that have used the term as a weapon: a label to divide, reject or isolate people. Many of us are simply uncomfortable around the term, not sure what’s actually a sin, or a sinner. Or steeped in the culture of tolerance and self-esteem that makes it seem wrong – either mean or offensive, and certainly “judgmental” – to call anyone a sinner, even ourselves.

But whatever your background; whatever your comfort level with your understanding of sin and the label of sinner, we’re going to have to wrestle with it today, because both Jesus and Paul are calling us – all of us – sinners.

Paul and Jesus are both challenging the first-century equivalents of the modern notion that you and I – most people – are basically good people, who make some bad decisions, and can fix them.

Paul is trying to show the Corinthian community that being pretty sure of your own righteousness – pretty sure you’ve protected yourself from sin – is close to a guarantee that you’re actually riding for a fall. That, in fact, you’re in the middle of both sin and denial.

Jesus challenges the local gossip and news network that is repeating the common idea that the victims of disaster and massacres brought it on themselves. These days, we tend to overtly or unconsciously blame poor preparation or poor choices for accidental deaths, or death from disease, while first century Israel looked to see how the dead had offended God, but the impulse is the same.

“The Galileans killed by Pilate in the middle of their worship? The folks who died in the tower collapse?” Jesus says, “They were no worse sinners than you. In fact, you – all of you listening right now – are going to experience the same bad death unless you repent in a hurry.”

Jesus sounds remarkably, well, “judgmental” here. Like a fire and brimstone preacher. This isn’t the merciful, tolerant, comforting Jesus we’d like to hear.

Except it is.

Judgement – God’s judgment, which Jesus is preaching today – is actually an act of mercy. Because judgment – God’s judgment – measures us against God’s standard of righteousness and shows us accurately how we’re doing. God’s judgment shows us what we’re doing right, even if the world around us doesn’t recognize it. And God’s judgment shows us how and where we fall short of God’s righteousness, which is measured in selfless love and generosity; unbiased, generous justice; and faithfulness to God and to God’s will and work.

God’s judgment is the honest mirror that means we don’t have to try to lie to ourselves to look better. In that honest mirror, we can see all of what is wrong in us not as punishment for our failures, but as the pain God is longing to heal. We can see all of what is right in us not as fragile success, but as enduring gifts of God’s love. And we can see that what’s right and wrong in us is not always what we think it is.

I want to be a good person. I expect you do, too. I hate to admit that I’m personally responsible for any small or serious wrong in the world, because guilt is a nasty, slimy, painful feeling, and I want to protect myself from it. Maybe some of you feel the same.

So I don’t want to hear Jesus call me a sinner.

Except maybe I do.

Because when Jesus calls us sinners, warns us that we are worse off than a lot of the people we are tempted to judge (and yes, we’re all tempted that way, whether you notice or not), and warns us that our sin is enough to kill us…. Well, Jesus is the only person I trust to say that looking out entirely for my interest, and not his own.

I’ve often heard it said that Jesus tells his fig tree parable today to remind us that Jesus wants and works to save us from God’s righteous wrath.

But I suspect there’s something else that Jesus meant.

I think Jesus would like us to be the gardeners in this story. To recognize that our souls are meant to bear God’s fruit, and that God can’t wait forever for us to start growing.
(Well, God has forever, but we don’t.) To recognize the urgency, and make a special effort to tend our souls, to dig the soil we’re rooted in to bring fresh air and nourishment. To spread a little manure – let honest reflection and repentance bring nourishment out of the discards and waste in our lives. To accept God’s love not as a blank check, but as an invitation to grow and give and share now, and to accept God’s judgment whether we do or don’t.

Lent is a good time for this. A time of “self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting and self-denial” (to quote the Ash Wednesday service) which is what brings the nourishment, the fertilizer, out of our lives’ manure.
From time to time, in Lent, I turn back to the Ash Wednesday service in the prayer book and pray over the Litany of Penitence (p 267-69), reflecting on how I, in my own life, do these things we confess together, on who is hurt by them, and how I might accept God’s help to change.

The Litany of Penitence reminds me that certainly there are things I do wrong and must change in myself. But also that we all live lives that are too broken, and in a world that is too broken, for us to fix it by ourselves. And seeing that brokenness clearly lets us see what healing and help we must ask God to give.

Lent is also a good time for reading scripture: reading the testament of both God’s judgment and God’s love through many generations, so we can recognize it in our own.

Jesus wants us to know ourselves as sinners not so that we feel terrible, but because if we cannot see for ourselves what is wrong we will never be able to see the healing God is offering.

If we cannot see ourselves as sinners, we cannot see ourselves as saved.

And though seeing my flaws and faults in the honest mirror of God’s judgment is enough to make me cry, refusing to see that truth is enough to make God weep.

But when we do see – when the voice of Jesus calling us sinners rings lovingly true in our ears and hearts – then we can accept the radical gift of healing and salvation that actually transforms our hearts and lives.

I’m not going to tell you it’s easy.

Sometimes that healing is a lot of work: changing our habits and lives, seeking forgiveness, working to heal what we’ve broken.
Sometimes it’s challenging just because of how hard it is to truly believe in our own helplessness in the face of subtle, everyday evil.
Sometimes salvation is hard because of how difficult it is to be vulnerable enough to accept the help God offers, in our hearts, or through the hands and words of others.

But Jesus wants us to know that hard as that honesty and helplessness is, it is full of joy. Paul wants us to know the same thing.

Both of them call us to see ourselves in God’s honest mirror so that we can see how much God’s healing grace and gift of life can carry us beyond our own power or imagination.

And to open ourselves to God’s joy – and our own – when we know and accept that all the brokenness, shame, and failure within us can be healed, that we can be – in fact, we have been – saved.

So we can rejoice in being known to God, to ourselves, and even to others as sinners, accepting from God the gift of that identity that shows us all our brokenness filled up by love.

Psalm 27

Psalm 27; Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Luke 13:31-35

About 20 years ago this Lent, I decided it was time to improve my prayer life from largely non-existent to well, something. I’ve never been good at meditation. I didn’t understand the Anglican Rosary. Doing morning and evening prayer from the prayer book seemed too complicated. But maybe…maybe I could just read the psalms for morning and evening prayer.

So I did. Read a psalm or two from the prayer book on my morning commute, and right before bed. And I fell in love.

Every possible emotional and physical and daily experience of life is in the psalms, a lot of it or a little. Joy, betrayal, grief, anger, humor, hope, dullness, doubt, assurance, pride, shame, celebration. It’s all there. All jumbled together in the poetry of our personal and communal relationship with God.

I fell in love particularly with Psalm 27, which we read together a few minutes ago.

It had me from the very first verse:
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?

I’ve never led a very dangerous life, but I have spent some quality time with fear. Some of it at 30,000 feet in airplanes, more of it on the ground in fear of failure, disappointment, loss or pain. Maybe you know what that’s like. Maybe you, too, long to be free of that constricting anxiety, to live in the place that this psalm starts: Light and salvation and nothing to fear.

Anyone?

I really want the confidence of protection, the promise of beauty, and of closeness to God that the psalmist sings about in this 27^th Psalm. 
Some days, it feels like I’ve got it. All that light, and the life-giving closeness to God, and the spacious joy of nothing to fear.

And other days, well, life is heavy. Lonely. Angry sometimes. Oh so busy, sometimes, as I juggle all my tasks, and the fear of failure and disappointing others, of losing people I love, or not being able to help.

Some days, when I turn on the news, it feels like there are enemies all around. Like death is winning. And “false witnesses, and those who speak malice,” as the psalmist said.

And on many of those days, I feel disconnected from God. Promises of salvation seem flimsy and far off when the plague of terrorism and violence breaks out again and again, when planes fall, when innocent people get sick and hurt and plans go wrong, or when it’s just a long dull slog in the here and now.  It can feel crazy to try to trust the unprovable existence of God. And that feels, well, unfaithful. Like my faith isn’t good enough to call myself a Christian, to be a priest, or even to spend time or energy on.

But the good news repeated over and over and in lots of different ways throughout scripture, from Genesis to Jesus and beyond, is that feeling disconnected from God does not mean being disconnected from God. Doubt and grief and anger and loneliness and fear are NOT unfaithful, but in fact are a fundamental part of our faith.

Abram – so full of faith that he launches himself and his wife into a brand new foreign country on God’s say-so – makes no bones about the fact that he has been waiting far too long for God’s promises of a family and a homeland to be fulfilled. God doesn’t scold or reject Abram for his doubts; God renews God’s promises to Abram with new assurances: with a vision that Abram can count on every night (unless it’s cloudy) and a ritual that binds God more tightly to fulfilling the promise of making Abram a home.

And Jesus, complaining about the tendency of Jerusalem to ignore and kill the messengers of God, doesn’t reject them for their fear and distrust, but renews his desire to gather and protect and nurture all God’s people.

Even in this psalm I love for its expression of confidence and fearlessness, there’s a picture of how it feels to be doubtful, lonely, disconnected, and fearful. And a picture of how it looks to be faithful in the middle of that. Not denying the fear, the aloneness, the doubt, but actually calling God’s attention to them: to our need for assurance, protection, direction, and response.

Right in the middle of my ordination process, when after years of waiting and longing, I was finally meeting with people to evaluate my call to the priesthood, the vivid sense of God’s presence in my life that I had started to count on started to dry up. So did my joy in the psalms and in the rest of scripture and in prayer. I felt alone, a bit abandoned. Tired and cranky and dull. Surely, I thought, this can’t happen to me now. Priests don’t have their faith fail like this. I kept trying to ignore it and press on.

But after a month or two, I finally confessed all that to the committee discerning with me. It was nerve-racking.

It turned out, though, that that confession was one of the things that assured them that God was, in fact, working with me, and that I could be a good priest after all.

And to my surprise, it assured me, too.

I don’t exactly like what I’m about to say, but I often need to hear it:
All that uncomfortable uncertainty, fear, grief, loneliness, impatience, or dissatisfaction I don’t want to feel – that I’d feel holier if I could ignore – may actually be essential in our relationship to God. In fact, when we deny our doubt, we deny the reality of our relationship with God.

A relationship with God would be much more comfortable if we got to arrive at that place of light and salvation and freedom from fear that I love so much at the start of this psalm, and to stay there.

But the psalmist – and Abram, and Jesus – model for us that to be in real, lasting, serious relationship with God – to have God as our light and salvation, our defender from fear – actually requires that we embrace, or at least accept, that we will feel, and sometimes get stuck in, those uncomfortable, dry, or painful places where we are full of doubt or surrounded by enemies – real or metaphorical.

And when we confess our doubts, fears, discomfort or distrust to God, that in itself can draw us closer to God. It does for Jesus, after he arrives in Jerusalem that kills the prophets, when he confesses his doubts and fear and loneliness in the Garden of Gethsemane. If does for Abram, more than once, when his confession of doubt brings him a deeper assurance of God’s love and plans and promises for him.

Confessing my own doubts, my spiritual loneliness, and my feelings of unfaithfulness to my discernment committee did, in fact, draw me closer to God years ago, because it made me confess my need for God’s help. Taking the risk of accepting my discomfort and fear also made me take the risk of trusting God to heal that deep, nagging, pain and free me from that fear.

In confessing my doubts, I finally was also able to hear myself confessing my trust – not that it would work out later, but that God could be with me now, even when I couldn’t feel the connection for myself. That it might be okay, even an act of love, to feel doubt and fear, and to want – to need – God to heal those things I can’t overcome on my own.

I think we need to confess our trust just as much as we need to confess our doubts. To accept – in our hearts, and in public – that we risk depending on God for not just light and salvation, but to hold our doubts and anger, disappointment and grief, our dry and painful loneliness in God’s own powerful trust and love for us.

Because when we confess our trust, like the psalmist, we hear the assurance that we can go into every place of doubt and fear, grief and disconnection, protected from the fear that God will lose us, or that we will lose God, in those dry and lonely places that are part of every human life.

So the psalmist’s final words ring true in us, with gratitude and power:

What if I had not believed

that I should see the goodness of the LORD

    in the land of the living!

O tarry and await the LORD'S pleasure;

be strong, and God shall comfort your heart.

Away From The Noise

Luke 4:1-13

Do you ever want to just get away from the noise?

It’s a very noisy world we live in, and not just because of the decibel level. There’s information noise, with torrents of things you need to know – and things you don’t – flooding through the internet and airwaves. Visual noise, with advertising and flashing lights and words and symbols clamoring for attention everywhere – and all the clutter we’re supposed to be clearing out of our houses.

One of the first things we learned in the RenewalWorks process so far is that busyness is the greatest obstacle to our spiritual growth in this world. Not trauma or crisis or ignorance. Busyness – that sense of how much we have to do, all the expectations we have to meet – is the single greatest obstacle these days to having a relationship with God at all, much less growing stronger and deeper and more joyful.

And I’m pretty sure Jesus understands that.

There might not have been cable news or internet; no flashing lights or heavy equipment noise in first century Israel. But “Messiah” or “Son of God” was a very noisy title or identity at the time of Jesus. A title  extremely cluttered with expectations to meet and things to do and be.

So Jesus goes to the wilderness to get away from the noise. To turn down the volume on all those tasks and expectations – and the everyday physical noise – so that he can hear God’s voice more clearly. So that he can hear God’s idea of his identity more clearly than the voices of those who want the Messiah to play politics, feed the world without our lifting a finger, and prove God’s worth with worldly success.

Jesus doesn’t go to the wilderness in order to pass a spiritual test, or achieve something. He goes to the wilderness to focus on the voice of God.

Just the same way, in Lent, we don’t fast – give things up – to prove we can do it. We give things up to clear away the noise so that we can more clearly hear the voice of God.

And that’s why we tell this particular Jesus story today. Because this Lent – any Lent – we are trying to imitate Jesus in his dedicated focus on the voice and will of God, his deep and all-powerful trust.

Of course, you may not have forty days off work (or parenting, or school, or the daily tasks of life) to go sit alone and listen. Like me, you might be terrible at wilderness camping.

So we need other ways to turn down the noise.
Because that noisy busyness is, in fact, the greatest obstacle to our relationship with God, our ability to hear and know God, to trust in God.

I have friends who give up Facebook for Lent. Or turn off the TV, the internet news feed, or the radio to turn down the noise.

Some find that giving up a food or an indulgence helps to quiet the inner noise.

Others might take on more time with scripture. More time in silence. Even five minutes a day.

What kind of wilderness experience could you have commuting or running errands with silence, or prayer, instead of with a podcast or the radio?

I tried that this week, actually, and it was stunning how much inner quiet I could actually find when I turned off the radio in my car, and tried to turn my ears toward God. Not every time, but amazing some times.

And one of the things that happens when you turn down the noise is that the voice of evil – of everything that draws us away from God – gets quieter, but much clearer, too.

It’s so clear in the wilderness that you and I get to hear it along with Jesus in Luke’s story today.

The “temptations” the devil offers Jesus in this story are a distilled, clearer version of the clamor to fulfill expectations, get lots of stuff done, and be a worldly success that surround Jesus all the time, and make “Messiah” such a noisy word. They are specific versions of the pressure to provide security, accomplishment, power, comfort, and success that surround Jesus in his life – and, in different ways, surround you and me in our lives.

And in that wilderness, every time the devil puts these expectations and noisy needs into clear words and invitations, Jesus quotes scripture. Jesus chooses God’s voice, says YES to God, not “no” to the devil.

One does not live by bread alone, Jesus says. And the devil (who does know scripture), and many of Luke’s audience recognize right away that the rest of that quote would be: but by every word that comes from God. (Deuteronomy 8:3)

Worship the Lord your God, and serve only God. (Deuteronomy 6:13)

Do not put the Lord your God to the test. (Deuteronomy 6:16)

Over and over, every time he’s invited to make a choice, Jesus leans in to the word of God. He leans in to his focus on God, his obedience to God – which is a trust deep enough not to need to control my own way; trust open and honest enough to let God do the driving, and trust deep enough to know that God will be right there for every step of the journey.

Jesus isn’t just saying “no” to temptation. He’s demonstrating for us – for anyone who will pay attention – that all the other voices offering us power, security, comfort, success, and food really just don’t seem all that attractive when you have all those things already because of your trust in God.

That’s what God wants for us; what Jesus wants for you: For us to trust so deeply in God that we find these “temptations” around us all the time to be less attractive than what we already have with God. For it to be joyful to say yes, instead of hard to say no.

And Jesus is also demonstrating for us that we don’t resist temptation by ourselves.

We can’t.

There are far too many things – overt evil and mundane noisy busyness and cultural indifference and everything in between – trying to get between us and God, to draw our attention and trust away from God, for any of us – even Jesus, in his humanness – to resist temptation by our own strength and will and capability.

We have to depend on God. 

Completely. Profoundly. Persistently.

That’s the only thing that makes it possible to resist temptation.

I’d like to tell you that’s easy, but I can’t.

It is simple. But it’s a huge commitment. And an essential one. Because that complete dependence on God is the one thing that makes it natural to shed all the noise of other expectations, the stickiness of little everyday evils, the seduction or oppressive force of great evil.

We fast in Lent – we take on our own wilderness, whatever it is – to help us do as Jesus does. We don’t fast in Lent to strengthen our willpower muscles. We fast – give things up – to strengthen our profound dependence on God. To commit ourselves to God’s voice which resists all the evil that tries to control us, or tries to insist that we do it all ourselves.

God wants nothing more than to break through all the noise that clamors for our attention, to help us find that stillness and clarity of deep connection to God’s voice, the profound dependence on God that lifts the burden of doing it all off of your back.

God wants that heart-filling, spirit-protecting, joy-full trust for you.

For me. For each of us.

So God invites us to the wilderness.

Don’t you want to say “yes”?