Being There, a movie from 1979 starring Peter Sellers, tells the story of Chancy Gardiner. His real name is Chance, he grew up secluded in a house in Washington DC the apparent offspring of a very wealthy eccentric named Jennings. Chance is always fed on schedule, by the long term cook who has known him all his life, is allowed to garden in the small plot in the walled in backyard, and dressed in expensive handmade suits. His only knowledge of the outside world comes from watching television. But when Jennings dies, and no provisions are made for Chance’s up keep, the attorneys kick him out and sell the house. Chance walks out of the house for the first time in his life and encounters a street gang, which he tries to make go away with a remote control TV changer, and then, in a freak accident ends up in the home of a wealthy but dying industrialist and his wife, played by Shirley McLaine.
McLaine’s character misunderstands Chance when he says his name is Chance, the Gardner, she thinks he says Chancy Gardiner. Over time the characters in the movie find great wisdom in Chancy, his simple minded statements about gardening are applied to life as if they exemplified the greatest wisdom.
He says such things as:
“First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.”
- On economics (actually on gardening):
"In a garden, growth has its season...as long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden."
The movie is a political satire commenting on American culture; of people persuaded by appearances, Chancy wears very expensive clothes and in 1979 they couldn’t Google him to learn more, these high powered wealthy people judged him on his appearance and found wisdom where there may only have been a simple minded innocence.
The movie reminds us that we are a people looking desperately for meaning. We want to know that our lives have a purpose.
We just don’t always look in the right places…
Often we want to believe that we can create that plan ourselves and direct the course of our lives. First college, then a career, then relationship, marriage, family, house, fulfillment.
I went to college in 1974, I was 17 years old, having graduated from High School a year early. I chose to major in Agriculture. I had this naive dream of having a small farm and raising all my own crops and a flock of chicks. I thought it would be a lovely life, raising kids, raising food, living simply off the land. But then, I was only 17 and it was 1974.
Within a year or so I changed my major, and then I changed it again.
The naiveté of childhood grows up and we have to face the reality that life is full of change, and sometimes bad things happen to good people.
People get sick.
People lose their jobs.
We struggle.
We wonder where God is.
We wonder why bad things happen.
And sometimes we may wonder why God is doing this?
Is this God punishing people?
In the 21st century acts of terrorism and natural disasters catch our attention most. And in the midst of these disasters some people will point out that somehow “they,” whoever the injured might be, deserved it….This kind of thinking, blaming the problem on some action of the person or community, begs the question asked by the Galileans: “Will this happen to us too?”
To this, Jesus responds:
“Do you think that these Galileans suffered this way because they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you, unless you repent you will perish as they did…”
As always, Jesus points us to stop looking at others, and to look at our selves first.
What are we doing?
Regardless of whether are lives are going well or are filled with challenges, we are called to look at own lives, judging, if you will, where we are, and not judging others. Yes, bad things happen. No we can’t prevent every thing that happens.
And, no I don’t think God is doling out punishment for our benefit.
Bad things just happen.
So, remember, to repent means to turn to God. Jesus is telling the people to turn to God. To turn or return to God, because if we don’t we will loose our grounding in life, we will wander lost and confused. We will “perish.”
With God at the center of our lives we can be rooted even in the worst of times.
God may not cause the bad things to happen to us, but God will help us through them.
In Lent each of us are called to ponder if God is at the center of our lives.
Or, do we need to turn back to God?
Do we need to work at ways to have God be an active presence in our lives?
In times of strife this is all the more challenging. But it is also the time we are most likely to invite God in.
This morning Jesus reminds us that we are not to wait until problems come to nurture our relationship with God. We are to do this all the time. No, I tell you unless you repent you will perish as they did…
turn and return to God.
Seek ways to be firmly rooted in God.
“For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?”
Nurturing our spiritual lives, our lives of faith, needs to be an ongoing process. We are shaped and formed as Christians over a life time. The purpose of our intentional formation is to give us deep roots into fertile soil from which we can produce good fruit.
Deep roots of faith.
Deep roots of connectedness.
Deep roots of belonging to this faith community, to these people.
Deep roots that can sustain us and make us stable.
The roots of trees grow all winter long, that’s why we plant them in the fall, so the roots have time to grow. While the world seems cold and barren, covered in snow, the roots of trees are growing deeper into the ground, stronger, more firm. These strong roots are then able to support the rest of the tree as it blossoms in the spring and sends out green leaves and produces fruit.
The winter of our souls are also times for growing deeper roots in order to make us stronger, healthier, more stable and to prepare us for spring, to prepare us for producing fruit.
As a faith community we are living in winter. We have many worries and concerns. I encourage us to see this as a time to grow stronger roots, to become more stable, and to prepare for Spring.
“Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”
As we are seeing, this reading is a parable, which means that it has multiple layers of meaning for us to unpack.
In the end I think I’ve become a gardener of sorts. I’ve had small gardens in my back yard and raised lettuce, cucumbers, green peppers, the usual Midwest crop. But mostly I think I have been the gardener of my spiritual life. And I have also become the gardener of the spiritual lives of a congregation, a garden of people.
One thing I know, from a life time of gardening…it isn’t just about the quality and expertise of the gardener. That helps.
But gardening is about much more, and a good produce depends on other factors.
“Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”
So, consider that we are all the gardener, the caretaker of the fig tree. And the fig tree is a metaphor for our spiritual lives. We are supposed to nurture our own spiritual lives, to make ourselves available to God. We do this through prayer, through worship, through bible study, through our Lenten program, singing, helping others, and through our relationships with one another…it is in and through our relationships with others that we come to know God in ways that are most rich and full.
These are ways we fertilize our faith and bring nourishment into our lives.
But it also means we need to take action, to do something.
Nurturing our spiritual lives doesn’t just happen.
It requires us to be active in seeking out ways to grow.
So, even as I am a gardener, each one of you is ultimately responsible for how you respond to the opportunities offered to nurture your spiritual lives. Each one of us is responsible for our own spiritual life. And, each of us working together creates the environment for a healthy fruit to be produced.
We need to make the time to prune and fertilize our souls,
our spirits,
our lives,
in order that we can produce healthy fruit.
As a church congregation the healthy fruit we produce will manifest as an energy around vibrant and dynamic ministry, a focus for us, which will both nurture our faith and help the world around us. The church can offer us the soil in which to grow, the medium into which we can thrust our roots, the source of water and nutrients to nourish our spiritual lives.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Sermon Lent 2C: Oriented, Disoriented, Reoriented (Psalm 27, Luke 13:22-35)
Two particular components of worship are emphasized in our liturgy this season of Lent: singing, especially the use of Taize, and our healing service.
Taize music comes from a monastic community in France begun by Roger, a young man with tuberculosis in the early 1940’s. This was during WWII and Roger, a citizen of Switzerland had a dream to live in France, where his mother was born, and help young people affected by the war. He bought an abandoned house in Taize, along the demarcation line that divided France. It came with some buildings on the property and soon he began the process of setting up a community to house refugees. But within a few years it became too dangerous and they had to flee. A few years later they were able to return and have lived on this property ever since.
The community of Taize is now a formal monastic order made up of men from all denominations and backgrounds. A women’s monastic community set up near by and the two communities do a lot of work together. Taize models compassion and hospitality in a truly ecumenical sense. It is a community dedicated to helping the truly poor – poor in spirit, poor in body, poor in life.
The hallmark of the community is their simple worship marked by singing repetitive chants. These chants, made up of short phrases sung over and over invite the singer into a meditative place of prayer. Singing the words over and over allows us to let go of the hymn book, let go of the words, and open ourselves to God’s presence. The hymns are easy to learn with phrases taken from scripture. The one we will sing (at 10:00) as we head to the font for healing contains variations of the words of Psalm 27, which we prayed this morning:
O Lord, hear my prayer, O Lord hear my prayer, when I call, answer me.
The church, softly lit with candles invites us into a space where we can be present to God in the simplicity of the season, reinforced by the simplicity of the words. And God can meet us in that place of our inner most being that yearns for God.
The Psalms, sung or said, offer us a pathway into scripture and into the tradition of people searching for God. Walter Brueggerman, a scholar and theologian who has written extensively on the psalms breaks the psalms down into three categories:
psalms of orientation,
psalms of disorientation, and
psalms of re-orientation.
By these he means that psalms of orientation speak of God and as a known entity, the psalmist knows God and is confident in God’s presence.
Psalms of disorientation speak of a loss of God, a fear of abandonment, the psalmist is lamenting,
Oh God, where are you?.
Our psalm this morning is a psalm of disorientation.
O, Lord, hear my prayer, O Lord, hear my prayer…is a lament, a plea for God to be present.
Come, and listen to me…
these are words of one in sorrow,
in pain,
lamenting.
And they remind us that we yearn most for God when we are lost, feeling low and unwell.
The psalms remind us that every occasion of being lost and disoriented is followed by a new place of being oriented, a re-orientation in God. Because God never abandons us but journeys with us and in the process we are changed. But even as God journeys with us, God does not force God’s way into our lives. God waits for us to invite God in.
Our Gospel points us in that direction with the question, “will only a few be saved”? The fear is not, will I be saved, but how many will be saved? The Gospel points to a process of excluding some and not others. This kind of thinking can lead to panic and greed. “Lord, we will knock on the door and you will say,”
“I do not know you….”
We wonder, what does it take to be known by God, known by Jesus??
Jesus responds:
“There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and you will throw yourselves out.”
Did you hear that…
You will throw yourselves out…
It is we who throw ourselves out, fearful and feeling unable to do make it through the narrow way, we will throw ourselves out.
How does this happen? How do we throw ourselves out?
Listening carefully we hear Jesus say to the people, “strive to enter the narrow door”.
His response is not about how many, his response addresses the struggle of following Christ, of being a person of faith. This scripture tells us that we throw ourselves out, when we self-select, when we choose to do something else instead of striving for the narrow door…
The narrow door is a metaphor for the spiritual journey, the challenges we face just trying to be good Christian people who love God, love neighbor, and love self, with the radical hospitality that Jesus showed.
Strive to enter the narrow door.
The image of a narrow door tells us that the process of living a life of faith will be a struggle. We may feel as though the conflicting demands of life are pressing in on us, squeezing us.
The irony is that when faced with such a struggle the best thing one can do is let go.
Rather than force the issue or tighten up the best way to get through is to loosen up.
Those who open themselves to the struggle, will find peace in the process.
They will find God, and they will be known by Christ because the struggle will change their hearts.
They will come to know that in all their efforts to squeeze in,
it is in the letting go of anxiety,
letting go of anger,
letting go of fear,
that enables us to get through
and God to come in.
The irony of the squeeze is that it is an opening not a tightening…
From this open place in our spirits, in our souls, in our hearts, it is the grace of God that gets into us, not we who get into God.
God waits for us to invite God in.
The invitation from us comes in the effort to let go and yet squeeze through the narrow door. Maybe it helps to think of our spirits as pliable like water able to be big or small thick or thin, able to adapt to what is requires. Frozen water is not pliable, liquid water is…In this flexible way we need to shape and form ourselves as a people of faith, which actually causes us to open up to God, to trust God, and to follow God.
Someone once asked Fritz Pearls, a psychologist, if he was saved. His response was, “I’m not worried about being saved, I’m trying to figure out how to be spent.”
It’s not about saving, and its not about being narrow, it’s not about being frozen solid…its about opening up, being expansive, and it’s about spending…(and I don’t mean money, I mean)spending ourselves in the name of God…
I’m trying to figure out how to be spent…
The struggle through the narrow door comes with a cost, at the expense of opening our inner most being to God…
Spending all of ourselves in the effort is the price of being saved by a God who loves us.
This God yearns to be in us and with us and part of us.
Like the words of our Taize hymn sung at the Offertory:
Within our darkest night, you kindle the fire that never dies away…
When God resides in our being it is a fire that sustains us through the darkest night. And as we sing it at the Offertory we add this prayer of assurance, “Within in our darkest night you kindle the fire that never dies away..”to that which we offer back to God, our bread and wine, our money, ourselves…
In the season of Lent we are invited to ponder the ways we seek to enter the narrow door.
And one way we do this is to examine the broken and spent places in our own lives,
the sorrow,
the pain,
the hurt,
the grief,
the anxiety,
the stress,
the strain,
the burdens,
the illness,
the disease,
and
in examining them to give them over to God.
In Lent we are invited to come forward to be anointed with the chrism oil, to open ourselves to God, to be healed of that which wounds us. This holy oil was used at our baptism to mark us as Christ’s own forever. That mark, the sign of the cross, leaves an impression on our foreheads, a pathway to the spirit. In the healing prayer the oil follows this same pathway to remind us of who we are and whose we are, a beloved of God.
God yearns to take our burdens, to lighten our load, and bring us into a place of wholeness. The prayer for healing is an invitation for us to open our hearts to God and give over our burdens and let God in.
In the prayers and the anointing we can be healed of our burdens. In the healing and the anointing, in the laying on of hands, all of our hands, and in the prayers Jesus comes to us, like a hen gathering her brood under her wings.
To love us.
To heal us.
To lead us through this life.
Strive to enter the narrow door
Let our lives be spent in loving as Christ loves.
Taize music comes from a monastic community in France begun by Roger, a young man with tuberculosis in the early 1940’s. This was during WWII and Roger, a citizen of Switzerland had a dream to live in France, where his mother was born, and help young people affected by the war. He bought an abandoned house in Taize, along the demarcation line that divided France. It came with some buildings on the property and soon he began the process of setting up a community to house refugees. But within a few years it became too dangerous and they had to flee. A few years later they were able to return and have lived on this property ever since.
The community of Taize is now a formal monastic order made up of men from all denominations and backgrounds. A women’s monastic community set up near by and the two communities do a lot of work together. Taize models compassion and hospitality in a truly ecumenical sense. It is a community dedicated to helping the truly poor – poor in spirit, poor in body, poor in life.
The hallmark of the community is their simple worship marked by singing repetitive chants. These chants, made up of short phrases sung over and over invite the singer into a meditative place of prayer. Singing the words over and over allows us to let go of the hymn book, let go of the words, and open ourselves to God’s presence. The hymns are easy to learn with phrases taken from scripture. The one we will sing (at 10:00) as we head to the font for healing contains variations of the words of Psalm 27, which we prayed this morning:
O Lord, hear my prayer, O Lord hear my prayer, when I call, answer me.
The church, softly lit with candles invites us into a space where we can be present to God in the simplicity of the season, reinforced by the simplicity of the words. And God can meet us in that place of our inner most being that yearns for God.
The Psalms, sung or said, offer us a pathway into scripture and into the tradition of people searching for God. Walter Brueggerman, a scholar and theologian who has written extensively on the psalms breaks the psalms down into three categories:
psalms of orientation,
psalms of disorientation, and
psalms of re-orientation.
By these he means that psalms of orientation speak of God and as a known entity, the psalmist knows God and is confident in God’s presence.
Psalms of disorientation speak of a loss of God, a fear of abandonment, the psalmist is lamenting,
Oh God, where are you?.
Our psalm this morning is a psalm of disorientation.
O, Lord, hear my prayer, O Lord, hear my prayer…is a lament, a plea for God to be present.
Come, and listen to me…
these are words of one in sorrow,
in pain,
lamenting.
And they remind us that we yearn most for God when we are lost, feeling low and unwell.
The psalms remind us that every occasion of being lost and disoriented is followed by a new place of being oriented, a re-orientation in God. Because God never abandons us but journeys with us and in the process we are changed. But even as God journeys with us, God does not force God’s way into our lives. God waits for us to invite God in.
Our Gospel points us in that direction with the question, “will only a few be saved”? The fear is not, will I be saved, but how many will be saved? The Gospel points to a process of excluding some and not others. This kind of thinking can lead to panic and greed. “Lord, we will knock on the door and you will say,”
“I do not know you….”
We wonder, what does it take to be known by God, known by Jesus??
Jesus responds:
“There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and you will throw yourselves out.”
Did you hear that…
You will throw yourselves out…
It is we who throw ourselves out, fearful and feeling unable to do make it through the narrow way, we will throw ourselves out.
How does this happen? How do we throw ourselves out?
Listening carefully we hear Jesus say to the people, “strive to enter the narrow door”.
His response is not about how many, his response addresses the struggle of following Christ, of being a person of faith. This scripture tells us that we throw ourselves out, when we self-select, when we choose to do something else instead of striving for the narrow door…
The narrow door is a metaphor for the spiritual journey, the challenges we face just trying to be good Christian people who love God, love neighbor, and love self, with the radical hospitality that Jesus showed.
Strive to enter the narrow door.
The image of a narrow door tells us that the process of living a life of faith will be a struggle. We may feel as though the conflicting demands of life are pressing in on us, squeezing us.
The irony is that when faced with such a struggle the best thing one can do is let go.
Rather than force the issue or tighten up the best way to get through is to loosen up.
Those who open themselves to the struggle, will find peace in the process.
They will find God, and they will be known by Christ because the struggle will change their hearts.
They will come to know that in all their efforts to squeeze in,
it is in the letting go of anxiety,
letting go of anger,
letting go of fear,
that enables us to get through
and God to come in.
The irony of the squeeze is that it is an opening not a tightening…
From this open place in our spirits, in our souls, in our hearts, it is the grace of God that gets into us, not we who get into God.
God waits for us to invite God in.
The invitation from us comes in the effort to let go and yet squeeze through the narrow door. Maybe it helps to think of our spirits as pliable like water able to be big or small thick or thin, able to adapt to what is requires. Frozen water is not pliable, liquid water is…In this flexible way we need to shape and form ourselves as a people of faith, which actually causes us to open up to God, to trust God, and to follow God.
Someone once asked Fritz Pearls, a psychologist, if he was saved. His response was, “I’m not worried about being saved, I’m trying to figure out how to be spent.”
It’s not about saving, and its not about being narrow, it’s not about being frozen solid…its about opening up, being expansive, and it’s about spending…(and I don’t mean money, I mean)spending ourselves in the name of God…
I’m trying to figure out how to be spent…
The struggle through the narrow door comes with a cost, at the expense of opening our inner most being to God…
Spending all of ourselves in the effort is the price of being saved by a God who loves us.
This God yearns to be in us and with us and part of us.
Like the words of our Taize hymn sung at the Offertory:
Within our darkest night, you kindle the fire that never dies away…
When God resides in our being it is a fire that sustains us through the darkest night. And as we sing it at the Offertory we add this prayer of assurance, “Within in our darkest night you kindle the fire that never dies away..”to that which we offer back to God, our bread and wine, our money, ourselves…
In the season of Lent we are invited to ponder the ways we seek to enter the narrow door.
And one way we do this is to examine the broken and spent places in our own lives,
the sorrow,
the pain,
the hurt,
the grief,
the anxiety,
the stress,
the strain,
the burdens,
the illness,
the disease,
and
in examining them to give them over to God.
In Lent we are invited to come forward to be anointed with the chrism oil, to open ourselves to God, to be healed of that which wounds us. This holy oil was used at our baptism to mark us as Christ’s own forever. That mark, the sign of the cross, leaves an impression on our foreheads, a pathway to the spirit. In the healing prayer the oil follows this same pathway to remind us of who we are and whose we are, a beloved of God.
God yearns to take our burdens, to lighten our load, and bring us into a place of wholeness. The prayer for healing is an invitation for us to open our hearts to God and give over our burdens and let God in.
In the prayers and the anointing we can be healed of our burdens. In the healing and the anointing, in the laying on of hands, all of our hands, and in the prayers Jesus comes to us, like a hen gathering her brood under her wings.
To love us.
To heal us.
To lead us through this life.
Strive to enter the narrow door
Let our lives be spent in loving as Christ loves.
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