Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent
March 20, 2022
Holy Spirit, Vashon
The Rev. Jeffrey Gill
Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
Our gospel today comes in two parts: the first is a little scene in which some people come to Jesus to tell him about a terrible incident where Pilate, the Roman governor, had ordered a whole group of Galileans to be slain. He did so in a particularly brutal and sacrilegious way, while they were in the act of making their temple sacrifices, in effect mixing their own blood with the blood of their sacrifice. Jesus asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”
He goes on with another example: “Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
These incidents and Jesus’ responses to them hint at the idea theologians call “theodicy” – a word that comes from the Greek roots of the words for God and justice, and is used to speak about how we are to understand the nature of God in view of the existence of evil. Why do good people sometimes suffer? And why do evildoers sometimes prosper? Why doesn’t “Being good” protect us from suffering such horrible evils?
In both examples, Jesus lays to rest the idea that people get only what they deserve. And after each example, he enjoins upon them lives of repentance.
And in the second part, he tells a parable about a man who had a fig tree in his vineyard, but it had no fruit. So, he told the gardener to cut it down since it was just wasting good soil. The gardener objected, promised to put manure on it and asked that he give it another year. And if that doesn’t work, fine, the man said – then you can cut it down.
These two parts of the gospel are about repentance and humility – the only way we have of dealing with the consequences of sin. Repentance and humility.
We hear the call to repentance often in the voices of the prophets throughout the Bible. It is a call to turn around and go another way. Do things differently! And we hear the call to humility perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in the prophet Micah’s summary of the law, when he says, “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
Tragedies have a way of making us ask the really hard questions in life, as they did for those who came to Jesus. The war in Ukraine is certainly doing that for us now as we confront the reality of senseless war and needless suffering. The death of George Floyd, as with so many before him and since, sparked a national and a global reckoning with racial injustice in its many forms, embedded in our history, active and living deep within our collective psyche.
When Bishop Michael Curry became the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church six years ago, he laid out a platform for his nine-year tenure that involved a turn toward evangelism and racial
reconciliation. It was a call to repentance and humility, a call to the Episcopal Church to turn and go in a new direction. Little did we know then just how excruciatingly painful and prominent issues of race in America would become in the coming years. I know that some of you here at Holy Spirit have joined members of Trinity in Seattle in the Sacred GroundA program to help unpack some of the roots of racism in our society, in our history, in our church, and in our own lives.
Before George Floyd there was Michael Brown – in Ferguson, Missouri. A few months after Michael’s death I was in a meeting with Mike Kinman, then the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis, now the rector of All Saints in Pasadena, who talked about how his life and his whole sense of his calling was changed by the death of Michael Brown and the painful events in Ferguson. Michael Brown was, of course, the 18 year old young man who was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer – and whose body lay in the street for four and a half hours. Dean Kinman told us how important it is to say that – “lay in the street for four and a half hours,” while neither his mother nor anyone else was permitted to go to him – he lay in the street, for four and a half hours.
The following year changed everything for this dean of a cathedral. As a white person, he realized he could not simply stand on the sidelines; he could not pretend that life could go on as it always had; he also could not simply be an ally to the cause; but that he had to actually put skin in the game. He had to march with lots of angry young black people. He had to open his cathedral to them, and do his best to bring its members along. He had to risk being arrested, or being tear-gassed along with them. He had to be in it for the long haul, and dedicate his life, his ministry, his whole being and purpose, to the cause of racial justice.
He titled his talk, The Sacrament of Discomfort – and in it he talked about how he was having to learn to listen to the voices of others teaching him how best to be part of this new civil rights movement, sometimes saying things that forced him out of his comfort zone, forced him to see and think about things differently and do things differently. He had to learn to trust the discomfort.
Mike’s “Sacrament of Discomfort” has offered me a new image for humility, and for repentance as he described putting aside his normal (privileged) ways of doing things, learning to shut up and listen, learning to be okay with making mistakes, but getting back into the conversation and into the fray to do what he can do. That’s repentance, and that’s humility.
The word “humility” comes from the same root as earth, the humus, that dark, rich, moist, organic matter – like the manure in Jesus’ parable – that provides the nutrients that sustain and support the growth of new life. It implies also getting down and getting our hands dirty in the stuff of life. Recently, Carolyn and I took a walk up into the dense woods on a part of our four acres down on the south part of Vashon, into what looked and felt like what I imagine a virgin forest looks and feels like. The only paths are those made by deer and other wildlife. There are fallen trees and rotting tree trunks and branches everywhere. The ground is spongy with all the leaves and branches rotting and going back to the earth. Moss covered trees are everywhere, and the forest has a primeval feel to it that is almost surreal. It feels and it smells moist and fertile. And in it is the stuff of life just waiting to take root, burst into life, and grow, and reach for the sky. All fed by the rich humus under our feet.
Ultimately, humility is the realization that we come from the earth. The words we heard on Ash Wednesday as we had the sign of the cross marked on our foreheads – “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” – are the beginning of our turn away from our self-centered lives to the God who gave us this one wild and precious life, as the poet Mary Oliver so beautifully put it, and in whom is the sum of meaning for our lives.
Sir Thomas More, in the 16th century, put it this way:
Humility, that low sweet root,
From which all heavenly virtues shoot
Humility calls us not only to listen to new (and sometimes discomfiting) voices and begin to think in new ways about things, whether it be race and privilege or the many social and economic issues impacting our lives. But humility also invites us to listen to the earth itself. The rising temperature of the earth puts all life on this planet in jeopardy. Repentance and humility call us to first of all be alert to the ways we are contributing to the problem, and turn away from them to new and life-sustaining ways of living on the earth.
Joseph Campbell once said in an interview with Bill Moyers, “The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life. Live,” he said, “with unremitting
awareness…”
Jesus had a warning for the people: You don’t want buildings to fall on you, like those eighteen people? You have to repent, turn and do things differently (like maybe put some new building codes in place in that instance). You don’t want people being killed and humiliated like Pilate did to those Galileans. You have to turn around and do things differently.
Pride and arrogance will not get us there, either for us as individuals, or us as a nation. Hubris is not the way, but humility. Humility is a virtue little tried, but with such ability to root us in the reality of our fragile existence, and, finally, in the life-giving power of God and of God’s life in us.