“Give It Another Chance”
March 3, 2013
Pray
Here, in this space where we gather,
My hope is that each is touched by the Sacred — Not by my words,
But through the compassion shared.
May the Light of Life be yours.
FIRST READING: An Excerpt from Invisible Lines of Connection by Laurence Kushner
“If everything is connected to everything else, then everyone is ultimately responsible for everything. We can blame nothing on anyone else. The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.”
SECOND READING: Luke 13: 1 – 9. (from The Message by Eugene Peterson)
About that time some people came up and told him about the Galileans Pilate had killed while they were at worship, mixing their blood with the blood of the sacrifices on the altar. Jesus responded, “Do you think those murdered Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans? Not at all. Unless you turn to God, you too will die. And those eighteen in Jerusalem the other day, the ones crushed and killed when the Tower of Siloam collapsed and fell on them, do you think they were worse citizens than all other Jerusalemites? Not at all. Unless you turn to God, you too will die.” Then he told them a story: “A man had an apple tree planted in his front yard. He came to it expecting to find apples, but there weren’t any. He said to his gardener, ‘What’s going on here? For three years now I’ve come to this tree expecting apples and not one apple have I found. Chop it down! Why waste good ground with it any longer?’ “The gardener said, ‘Let’s give it another year. I’ll dig around it and fertilize, and maybe it will produce next year; if it doesn’t, then chop it down.'”
At the time that my late wife was quite ill there was a popular series of books around which seemed, at the time, to become a franchise of sorts. They were books intended to be read by people that were hurting to bring them comfort. They contained story after story about people in tough situations who found healing through prayer and Bible reading, and invariably every story had a happy ending. That is to say, after much prayer the people in the stories with the illness were healed. The books carried success story after success story about people who were sick, prayed really hard, and became well. The message, while never directly stated, was that if the reader only prays hard enough, he or she can beat whatever ailment they have.
The particular series then, fifteen to twenty years ago was the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. I hated them and the message they offered! I want to be quick to say that many people have found great comfort in those books. I know too a generation of people gained a great deal of comfort from The Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking, and I want to say that a person’s attitude can and does make a difference! I know that prayer can make a difference!
But – if the message is that your attitude, and the amount of prayer, and the strength of your faith can save you or your loved ones from dying … and you and your loved ones have a strong faith, good attitude, and pray all the time but still the person still dies, then the message can become “I must not have done enough”. So, in 1990, when my step-father, brother-in-law, sister, and nephew all died within six months that did NOT mean we weren’t praying enough. Stuff happens.
That is the same kind of issue that Jesus is dealing with in the text that Karen read for us from the thirteenth chapter of Luke. In essence, the people are asking Jesus, “Were the ones who were killed worse sinners than others because they were murdered?”
God is not our individual caretaker – but instead is present to us through the community of people that gather with us when the inevitable bad things happen.
The question posed to Jesus is, “Do you suppose these people murdered while praying were bad people, worse than the rest of us?” “Not at all!” is the answer.
There was another book out years ago entitled, Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People? . . . The book was good. It laid out a great theological argument, but the answer is simple in my mind, because they do. Bad things happen to everybody – they just do.
Repeatedly in the text read, Jesus seems to be saying that unless you come together to become part of the community . . . you face the end; and if a person only reads the first half of the reading that is all you hear. But then the next story is tied to it. Here it sounds like there is some urgency being applied, it seems the time may be expiring . . . but yet another chance is given . . . the gardener, the caretaker, the one looking after the planted tree . . . says “Give it another chance. Let me keep working on it a little more.” There is an ongoing message of compassion in this story, urging the coming together of the people.
The underlying message offers a continuing opportunity to have another chance to find community! There is compassion in community! There is comfort in community! There is peace and healing and wholeness … in community! It is the presence of the Sacred through each of us that creates community. It is our interconnectedness that brings comfort and wholeness and healing when the inevitable bad things do happen. Just as when a child who is hurt runs to someone for comfort; so we can turn to our community of Hope. There is always another opportunity to find the wholeness of community.
This interconnectedness of everything is a constant theme through all major religions of the world.
Gerard Thomas Straub quotes Hildegard of Bingen, in the book The Sun & Moon Over Assisi, as saying, “Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.”
Thomas Berry is quoted as having said, “Everything is integral and interacts with everything else. This means that nothing is itself without everything else. There is a commonality, an integrity, an intimacy of the universe with itself.”
Lawrence Kushner, who authored the first reading this morning, is a Reform rabbi and the scholar-in-residence at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. He is saying that through this connectedness with all things, “We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.” God does not have to be an entity, God may well be what we do.”
So, our faith, our prayers, and our attitude are not meant to be pleas to God to take away the bad, or keep bad things from happening to us – but they are important in the strengthening of community; giving each of us a level of participation in that sacred responsibility of caring for one another.
For me then, an understanding “God” is the sacredness of community acting together. In that context, I see the passage making a great deal of sense, as it urges us to become part of the community. If we continue to stand alone outside the community, or live in “separateness” in whatever way, then we are very likely to meet with an inner destruction. The depression, the pain of being alone, of being unfulfilled is part of that. And I don’t mean that in a threatening, “going to hell” kind of way at all. . . what I mean is, – we need each other – we don’t need the church, we don’t need a pope, we don’t need religion or the institutions created to support religion … we need to be in community – it is quite simple.
Now, if this place provides community for you – that’s AWESOME!! But what we need is the community where justice is sought for all people; where people are fed body and spirit, and where we work together offering the same to others. The homeless, hungry, thirsty of the world are not part of a healthy community! What much of organized religion provides is a place to provide those cast out with a place to be united – but it also, in many instances, gets in the way of real belonging to one another by overstressing its own dogma and doctrine.
We need, as always, to strike a balance. We need to recognize the urgency and give another chance. We need to be present for people without forcing a doctrine. We need to be the glow of the sacred and to further the opportunities for life. Jurgen Multmann said, “What furthers life is whatever leads to the new beginning of life in hope.”
Here we offer hope found in relationships, real hope that lives and breathes!
Blessings friends,
Amen.
