-- The Rev. Leslie Barnes Scoopmire
Readings:
The cool thing about stories and movies is that you get to watch from afar. You get to experience things you normally would not all from the comfort of a movie theatre seat, or a cozy seat in your house or at the library. You can even watch, read, or listen on your phone.
That’s why almost thirty years ago I enjoyed the movie Twister. Having grown up in Tornado Alley, I cheered on the heroine, Jo, a scientist and storm-chaser. Jo was driven to study tornadoes as her life’s work because her father died in a tornado when she was a child—to the point of obsession. At one point, defending her relentless pursuit of her work, she reveals the way her trauma still drives her: “You’ve never seen it miss this house, and that house, and come after you!” she yells at her estranged husband. For all her scientific acumen, that devastated little girl still rages in grief within her, desperate to know why. Having had great grandparents who had died in a tornado, I understood her devastation all too well.
It's a lot more fun to watch tornadoes on a screen than to hunker down in the dark while they pop up like a game of whack-a-mole all around you, of course. Two Fridays ago, many of us got a vivid reminder that spring in the center of the country is no joke. After a day of high straight-line winds, we had an outbreak of tornadoes go all around where we live. We were lucky, though—the closest tornado, an EF2 which blasted a trail of destruction about a mile and a half away, snapped trees and electrical poles like matchsticks, ripped off roofs, and ripped away siding and possessions.
And of course, we know tornadoes are not sentient, and weather still remains very unpredictable in the particulars, for all our scientific advances in the last few decades. I am, after all, the great-granddaughter of two people killed in a huge tornado in 1946. Many of us know that feeling of helplessness as storms rage around us, both literal storms and figurative ones. But it is absolutely human to want to know why, especially why bad things happen.
Our gospel portion for this 3rd Sunday in Lent deals with similar questions of “why?” in the face of calamity. In our reading from Luke 13: 1-9, a shocking act of violence and desecration is brought up. Some Jewish worshippers had been slaughtered while at prayer in the Temple on Pilate’s orders, and their blood used to desecrate the altar. Jesus is asked why. Assigning the blame somewhere allows us an illusion of control. Is it God who punished them? Is it the brutality of Rome?
Jesus responds by bringing up his own example of random tragedy: a recent incident when a group of people were crushed to death by a tower that fell. Jesus thus acknowledges the randomness of life and unjust death and does not dismiss the suffering involved. However, he also deliberately avoids appearing to foment rebellion against Rome, which would be a greater disaster not for himself but for the Jewish people, inviting swift and brutal suppression by Pilate, who historically was a supremely vicious tyrant, his depiction during Holy Week notwithstanding.
The use of the parable of the barren fig tree as an illustration can make it sound like Jesus is reinforcing the idea that God will swiftly and harshly cut down those who have gone astray. This is where perhaps we get the intent of this parable wrong. God is not the owner of the vineyard urging the destruction of the fig tree. God is the gardener urging a reprieve for the fig tree and further care for it as it is somewhat slow in reaching maturity and fruitfulness. If God were the vineyard owner, the miracle would be that any of us could live, sinful and often unfruitful as we all can be.
There is something worse than death—and that is to live a life in which we allow our spirit to languish through persistence in turning away from God and each other. We are the fig tree—and we have the gift and opportunity of now to start moving toward fruitfulness through deliberate, thorough self-examination and repentance.
Jesus emphasizes instead rejection of the common belief that somehow the unfortunate victims of these two random acts had done something wrong to “deserve” their fate as a punishment from God. Jesus redirects his audience’s attention. Instead of asking “Why?” Jesus urges his listeners to ask, “Now what?”
How do we respond in times of turmoil, in times of crisis, in times of rapid change, in times in which hope is in all too short of a supply? Do we respond by lashing out? Do we respond by trying to cut each other down driven by the scarcity mindset that drive our world and encourages us to look at each other as competitors and therefore enemies?
Many of us find ourselves in the midst of a storm. We do live in a time of turmoil right now. There have been so many natural disasters that they begin to blur together in our minds. Our children and grandchildren, if not ourselves, worry about the state of the world that has been left to them—or worse, they bitterly subside into nihilism in the face of hopelessness in the pursuit of the so-called American dream of work that provides security, a home, and a sense of belonging. Many of them can’t even concentrate on that distant future as they live in a constant state of fear from intruder drills, daily school shootings, and food insecurity that affects about 20% of the children in the United States. Parents and grandparents struggle to pay their bills, worry about keeping a roof over their heads, and wonder if they will ever get to retire.
And on top of that, we live in a time when we are fractured as a community, which is what a nation should be, and in which we have lost the ability to disagree with each other with civility. Instead, we are fragmented along lines of race, gender, religion, wealth, and national origin. Fragmented, and therefore easily controlled.
It is therefore both a blessing and a challenge to attempt to live a life of faith in times such as these. We claim, after all, to not just believe in but to follow a living Savior who himself lived in a time of turmoil and modelled for us how to live a fully human and God-oriented life in the midst of that turmoil. The instructions are all there in the gospels. What do we learn there?
We learn that Jesus lived a life devoted to healing, reconciliation, service, and wisdom. We learn that Jesus showed us that only love will defeat terror and evil. That the answer to feelings of vulnerability and anxiety is a life guided by two loves: love of God and love of each other. That these two loves eventually merge into one love: a love for this world, created out of the love of a God who is unity in community. This is the spiritual fruitfulness that we are called to embody as not just fans of but disciples of Jesus.
If that sounds counter-cultural, that is because it is. Jesus’s message spread from his own people to most of the known world because it was meant to break down barriers of inheritance, tribe, competition and scarcity that is used to divide us and control us. Instead, faith in God and in each other is meant to remind us that God’s intrinsic nature is rooted in mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and healing—even in time of disaster and turmoil. Especially then, in fact.
It is in this context that our bishop has written a pastoral letter today regarding the danger that division and contempt for each other poses for the common good. Christian nationalism is not a new threat, nor is it a distinctly American one. Christian nationalism is nihilism--- the idea that there is no hope for the future and only struggle in the present. And worse, it is neither true to the gospel of Christ nor to the history and ethos of this country—a country that was founded as a land of opportunity for all, including religious dissenters, convicts, and refugees fleeing oppression in their native lands. It is a country also built on the dispossession of its native people and the forced labor of enslaved people and indentured servants. But it is a country that in fits and starts has stood for the ideals of a more perfect union, the establishment of justice, domestic tranquility, defense of each other and promotion of the general welfare for the securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves the generations after us, all of us, as is stated in the preamble to the Constitution.
Christian nationalism in reality subverts both our domestic principles and our principles of faith. It gives up on the values that truly make a country great—justice, enlightenment, wisdom, and unity. It denies the reality of our motto E pluribus unum—from many people, one people.
It actually inflames the scarcity mindset to make its believers feel threatened and suspicious of those around them who differ even slightly. God’s commandment for us to love, however, is rooted in God’s abundant gifts to us—abundant grace, abundant mercy, abundant forgiveness. Jesus’s consistent message in the gospels is one of hope, of the power of love rather than the power of force. We see this in Jesus’s repeated refusals to become the leader of an armed rebellion against Rome, and instead focusing on healing, reconciling, and exemplifying a life lived for others by caring for their needs, including a need for belonging as he called his followers into a new kind of community that is open to all, and whose mission is to share his message of love and forgiveness with the entire world.
As we heard just a couple of weeks ago, Jesus faced three temptations at the start of his ministry—the temptation of hunger, of power, and testing God. Hunger is the feeling of scarcity and emptiness, a desperate feeling of never being satisfied. The world’s calculus of power that states that there is only so much power to go around, and that dominance must be sought. Testing God is an attempt to prove God’s favor to you by demanding signs. Christian nationalism weaponizes feelings of scarcity and hunger; of wanting to seize power and lord it over others; and of misrepresenting a country’s founding to claim it alone is favored by God.
Jesus, the Son of God, rather displays humility and trust in God, rather than his own resources and manipulations. Rather than urging his followers to grab what they can at the expense of others, Jesus instead models shared meals and conversations, egalitarianism that was striking for its day, and exemplified as well as commanded mutual aid and attentiveness to each other. Jesus calls us to develop our imaginations to creatively challenge this calculus of contempt and cruelty that emanates from the systems of the world far too often from our own faithlessness and fear.
By focusing on grievance, Christian nationalism tries to persuade its followers to dwell in a place of anger and resentment, and often chooses a scapegoat group, or several of them, for its supporters to target. And of course, these targeted groups are people who are vulnerable already: the disabled, the foreigner living among us; those who are not at least culturally Christian.
Jesus, however, calls upon us to care for those who are more vulnerable—even across national boundaries. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the twist in that story that was meant to challenge Jesus’s listeners is that Samaritans were never assumed to be good but were considered to be heretics who had married outside the Jewish nation. They lived separately and followed a different faith--- and yet, when confronted by the man who had been left for dead by thieves, the scribe and the priest passed by without helping. It was the Samaritan who stopped and tended to the man, got him to safety, and paid for him to be cared for. And in praising someone outside Israel for following God’s overriding precept of love, humility, and compassion, Jesus reminds us that people of different nations are children of God, too.
The life of faith is a life focused on living guided by certain virtues: virtues such as honesty, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, and above all, love. It is a life that is brave, because it is a life of trust in the power of God and in the ever-expanding community God calls us to form across any and all differences. It is a life of integrity by its very definition—of seeking unity, oneness, with God and with each other.
As our gospel today and every day reminds us, there is always hope. Because we are the recipients of God’s unending mercy and grace, called to do unto others as we would have them do to us. There is no time like right now to engage in self-examination and realignment with Jesus’s gospel of hope and compassion. To literally “turn around,” and have the peace of mind that only a life lived in an upright, faithful, and reverent manner before God can give.
Instead of fear, dread, or worry, Jesus repeatedly reorients his listeners, including us, to the intrinsic quality of mercy, compassion, and the power of relationship as central to God’s very being. But mercy is only possible if we first acknowledge our need for constant self-examination and determine to return to the Way of Jesus. The way of love. The way of community. The way of hope.
Amen.