Year C,
Lent III
March 3,
2013
The
Reverend Dr. Brent Was
“Unless you repent, you will all
perish as they did.”
Everyone hearing this story would have
known the Jesus was talking about rotted manure, compost. Fresh manure, when it is actively breaking
down, ties up so much nitrogen that it can actually kill a plant. But let it sit for a while, turn air into it,
mix it with leaf mould or other brown organic material and it is straight up
alchemy. The diversity of life that
develops in short order in a compost pile is staggering and very poorly
understood. What we know though, is that
from a pile of poo and the detritus of any natural system evolves the stuff of
life: humus.
Now this story that Jesus is telling
is not about compost. It is about
repenting and returning to God. This is what Lent is all about, repentance and
return. What most of think of when we
think repentance is stopping our naughtiness and being sorry so that we may be
forgiven our sins. That isn’t it. Sin isn’t naughtiness. Sin really is about distance from God. Things are sinful in that they increase our distance from God OR they result from our distance from God. It is kind of hard to tell which is
which. Are we violent because we do not
feel the love of God or do we not feel the love of God because we are so
violent? Which comes first the distance
or the sign of the distance, I do not know, but repentance and return is what
we are called to do make things right.
Repent and return is not just about ceasing sin, turning
from sinful activity, but, in the words of a Jesuit scholar, it is more
importantly “…an acceptance of the visitation of God in the proclamation of
God’s kingdom.” In lay terms, true
repentance and return happens in seeking, accepting, inhabiting the Kingdom of
God proclaimed by God in Jesus Christ.
It is at hand, that Kingdom.
I recently had a bit of a revelation about this Kingdom
of God that we (and Jesus) talk about so much.
I am learning that God’s kingdom is not something mythical, not other
worldly, not something we need to wait for until the eschaton, the prelude to
the end of days… No. The kingdom of God
is something far more ordinary, far more commonplace that that: The kingdom of
God is simply how things are supposed to be.
Think the archetypical Eden before the apple incident. Think the fine balance of wilderness. Think the activity of the Horsehead
nebula. The kingdom of God is when and
where things are the way they are supposed to be. From Paul Tillich’s towering “the arc of the
universe is long and bends towards justice” to the base understanding that the
concentration, the hoarding of wealth has been a primary source of human
suffering since people considered things ownable;
it is all the same. We know how things
are supposed to be, we can smell it, we know it when we see it. See the quite joy of a mother nursing an
infant. (Well, ideally it is a quiet
joy). Sneak a peek of two sisters
pretending together, or a mighty river endlessly coursing or a sea lion
floating peacefully in the chaos 100 meters off of the beach. How do they do that? I don’t know but that is the way it is
supposed to be.
That is the most devastating thing about all of this, the
world. We know what is right and good
and joyful when we see it. We know what
to do. We know how to be. We know to be ourselves as God intended us to
be, but goodness it is hard to stay on that path. Well, it is for me, anyway. Besides a tiny percentage of severely broken
people with deep pathologies, we know the difference between right and wrong,
truly; we know the difference between good and evil, between what we should do
and what we should not do, how we should conduct ourselves in the world and how
we should not. Sure we have lots to
learn because much of the world is not as it seems and is not as we have been
taught, but in our hearts we know light from dark. You know when you are on the
wrong side. You do. But if only it were as easy as knowing. We must repent and return, constantly.
One of the key understandings of
repentance and returning is making things as they are supposed to be. Now that is exceedingly hard to do in the
context of a society (if not a civilization) founded on principles directly not in line with the way things are
supposed to be, but it is possible. We
can repent and return. We can take baby
steps towards the kingdom, which, brings us back to the matter of compost.
“O how can it be that the ground
itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of
spring?...
Are they not continually putting
distemper’d corpses within
you?
Is not every continent work’d over and
over with sour dead?”
Walt Whitman wrote these words
reflecting his experience walking across the hallowed fields of Gettysburg when
it was still littered with the dead in various stages of disrepair.
He continued:
“Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d
part of a sick person – yet
behold!
The grass of spring covers the
prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through
the mould in the garden…
The resurrection of the wheat appears
with pale visage out of
its graves…
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is
that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such
corruptions…
It gives such divine materials to men,
and accepts such leavings
from them at last.” That is just a snippet of a longish
poem,
but you get the point.
Compost, the process of compost turns
the sick into the healthy, the broken into the whole, the dead into the
living. This is the way it is supposed
to be. The complex economy of life and
death, of desiccating or mouldering into the next generation… that is the way
of life. It is the way of the kingdom.
War is one of the great manifestations
of human sinfulness. It breaks the
bodies, minds and spirits of everyone involved and rains desolating sacrilege
on the land upon which it was fought.
But in due order, that desecration is reconciled. The kingdom is poking through the mould in
those bean plants. The kingdom is
resurrected in the pale visage of wheat.
Horror and death happen. Brothers
rise against brothers, sisters rise against sisters (though less often and with
fewer weapons) but the kingdom of God, the way things are supposed to be… it is
right there. Waiting. Sometimes waiting in that top five inches of
soil, but always waiting. Waiting to
take the filthy and make it clean.
Waiting to turn the foul into flowers, stench into sweetness, disease
into health.
What do we have to discard of
ourselves on the compost heap of existence?
What in our lives, our beings do we need to excise and purify in the
mighty 150 degree furnace of a good compost system? This is a way to approach repentance. This is a way to understand our return to the
kingdom of God.
Is this that unlike God’s definitive revelation to Moses
on Mt. Horeb? “I have observed the
misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of
their taskmasters… So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the
Israelites, out of Egypt.” This is not
the way it is supposed to be.
Empire. Slavery. The subjugation of a people under harsh
taskmasters. This is not the kingdom of
God, and here, God in God’s self intervenes and ordains a man; an orphan, a
refugee, a survivor, God ordains Moses to go down to Pharaoh and lead God’s
people to the promised land. The
promised land flows with milk and honey, cultural code words for life much like
grapevines and fig trees were code words for God’s blessing by the time Jesus
walked in Galilee. (Micah 4:4; Joel
2:22)
Life and Blessings.
These are Godly ways. These are
kingdom ways. Life flows like milk and
honey. Blessings increase like grapes on
the vine and figs on the tree. The
trouble is, we don’t go from bondage to the promised land in a single
bound. We don’t go from carcass to bean
plant overnight. We don’t move from
death to life, from curse to blessing without some form of trial, winnowing or
ordeal. Yes, that half eaten ham
sandwich will compost eventually, but it is quite a thing to go through to get
there.
This is the journey of Lent. This is the journey of repentance and
return.
Because like those Galileeans
slaughtered in the midst of worship, or the workers killed as the tower of
Siloam collapsed, the end often comes unexpectedly. We only have today to work on our
relationships with each other and with God.
Repenting and returning is a daily process, a daily reconciliation of
the way things are supposed to be. It is
no less than a daily practice of envisioning and realizing the kingdom of
God. We have our work cut out for
us. Repent and Return. AMEN.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment