Lent III Year C |
St James’, Peace River |
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$20,000 for a gold medal; $15,000 for silver, $10,000 for bronze. Own the podium. Go big or go home. For all the excitement and enjoyment of the Olympic Games, it sure brought home how inescapably results-oriented so much of our culture is. In the marketplace, what you are worth depends on what you achieve, measured strictly in financial terms – and we are always finding ways to spill that over into activity which is not directly economic. We can measure the “cash value” of just about anything. And so we approach life with this attitude that you get what you deserve: you receive what you're worth. We're not altogether comfortable with that standard. We know that superstar athletes and actors and chief executives aren't really that many times better than ordinary people. And in real life, we know that good parents don't love their children more or less based on their ability; good doctors don't pick their patients based on their income; good teachers don't give less attention to the kids who are struggling. But the overall shape of our world still suggests that some people are worth more than others, because they are more deserving. Most telling of all is that we let that attitude creep into our perceptions of spiritual worth. Some people are closer to God than others – we may not say it in so many words, but we mean it. You used to hear, more often than you do today, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” And that seemed to mean that you could tell from someone's personal hygiene, something about their holiness. Today our standards of judgment are more diverse but they are still there. Many of us think that a person's honesty or decency reflect their relationship with God; sometimes we look instead at their addictive behaviours, or the way they dress; some so-called Christians even come right out and say that prosperity reveals a person's blessedness. On that last point, it amazes me how the idea of what we deserve from God so easily becomes a political football. It seems that whenever there is a natural disaster, an epidemic, or even a terror attack, someone wearing the label of Christian always pops up to imply or even say outright that the victims deserved their fate. Apparently a lot of bibles are missing the beginning of Luke 13. Because that's where Jesus skewers the whole idea that any of us can deserve God's love more or less than anyone else. The first few verses of the chapter are like an episode of Law & Order “ripped from the headlines” as the TV Guide likes to say! A violent act by the Roman oppressors, and a deadly accident. Sure enough, people are saying – or at least thinking – the victims must have done something to deserve it. Were the people of Port-au-Prince worse than anyone else? Actually a lot of people in our world thought they were – because Haiti is after all the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, and their poverty likely multiplied the destructive scale of the earthquake. We do blame people for being poor – at least when we're not poor ourselves. But what about the people of Concepcion in Chile? A little more like us, a little harder to blame for their own misfortune. And that's the point Jesus drives home. The question to ask of God, he says, is not “How did those victims sin?” but “Why have we been spared?” Jesus puts God in the position, not of seeking out a few people to punish, but of protecting almost everyone from the consequences of our own actions, in the hopes we will see how God cares for us. The supernatural act, the miracle, isn't the vengeful earthquake or the angry thunderbolt from heaven: the miracle is that the world continues at all from one moment to the next, that any of us gets to draw another breath. In the end, of course, we don't: our lives end, quickly or slowly, today tomorrow or 40 years from now, in a public catastrophe or a private one. In that, none of us is different from anybody else. And in the time between now and then, the question that matters is not, how much were we worth – not how good or deserving were we – but did we turn around, did we change, did we learn how much God cares for us, and did that make a difference. The other part of the gospel reading reinforces that message. It's a bit of a conundrum because on the surface it seems results oriented too. The landowner plants a fig tree, and you can imagine it's a beautiful tree: glossy bark, shiny leaves, lovely shade. The only thing missing is – figs. Now from the fig tree's point of view, all is well. It's clean, beautiful, decent, prosperous, growing, all that it wants to be. But from the landowner's perspective, it's a waste of space. It's as though Jesus is saying in this parable, if you want to measure God's love by what you deserve, just make sure you have the right standards: not yours, but God's. The only thing that matters in God's sight is bearing fruit: the fruit of repentance, the fruit that feeds the people around you. A lot of the time we pick up that message and run right back into our frenetic striving to deserve God's love. I want to bear good fruit: I bet you do too. The mistake we make is in thinking that if we try hard enough, if we work at being good and godly and spiritual people, God will appear and bless our actions, and the fruit will grow. The mistake we make is in thinking that holiness is an achievement; that God is a destination, the point towards which we strive. But the whole biblical story seems designed to remind us that God was with us before we even began, and that the way to God is not a way forward, not a path of building our tower back to heaven, but rather a turning around. Today's other readings offer glimpses of that. Isaiah offers, in God's name, what I like to think of as the original No Money Miracle: “come to the waters... buy wine and milk without money and without price.” God's love and care isn't something you have to earn or deserve or achieve. Then he goes on to say that all our striving does not satisfy; and that all we really need to do is return to God. (Notice that: return.) And Paul, writing to the Corinthians, offers further commentary on that 40-year epic journey through the wilderness which is a pattern for our 40 days of Lent. He talks about how we are just like the people of God in that time: we have the same spiritual food and drink; we are tested in the same way; and we are being invited to learn the same dependence on God, because when we are tested it's only God who can give us the means to pass the test. The point of the wilderness journey was not for God's people to win through, to cross the desert on their own strength in order to find God on the other side and earn the right to the promised land. The point was to learn that God was with them at the beginning, would be with them at the end, and would stay with them however far they wandered. Paul uses a marvellous image to describe that: “they drank from the spiritual rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ.” Imagine Christ following you on your journey. He is never far away. When you need a rock to lean on he's there; but when you need to split the rock to find water in the desert, he can do that too. For me though there's another dimension to the picture. Maybe it's a silly comparison, but it makes me think of how “everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.” Christ the Lamb follows us because he loves us, and because he wants our attention. All we need to do to find him is – turn around. That's our mission in Lent. Not to work hard at being better people who will deserve to be admitted to Easter glory. Though in God's grace, when we try that path we usually fall flat on our face and learn, sometimes painfully, why it's a dead end. One way or another, what we learn is that we don't deserve God's love any more than anyone else – but that's OK, because God is like the good teacher, the good doctor, the good parent. Or the good gardener, tending the fig tree to make it bear fruit. God's love is not the reward for meritorious achievement, it's the gift that allows us to achieve anything at all. * |
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