The Rev. Dayle Casey 3 Lent - C
The Chapel of Our Saviour
March 11, 2007
3 Lent - C
Exodus 3:1-15
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9
Why is the Bible so full of questions, especially, it seems, during Lent?
Two weeks ago Satan made Jesus
– and us as well
– face the question of what
it means to be a child of God. Last
week God was asking Abraham, who was already in his late eighties
– and God was asking us
– what we are planning to do
with the rest of our lives. And
this week Jesus asks some people in the Bible
– and us
– if we know what sin is and
where it resides?
Some people from
And then Jesus raises a question that really puzzles us:
“No,” he says, ”the fact that those bad things happened to them does not
mean that they were great sinners.
But I tell you this, unless you repent, you will come to an end just like
theirs.”
We were telling Jesus about this really big sinner Pontius Pilate and
wondering about those he killed, and the next thing you know Jesus has turned
things around and is telling us that we
need to repent. And then Paul
chimes in, too: “If you think you
are standing firm, take care, or you may fall.”
Can we take these readings seriously.
I mean, not just as some kind of pious “church talk” unrelated to life,
or as some moralizing exhortation meant for somebody else, but as truth meant
for us?
Can we take this seriously as a kind of truth that really touches our
lives and makes a difference?
That’s the question for this third Sunday in Lent.
My theology professor used to tell a story from his own seminary days
about when he was working with a youth group in a slum neighborhood in
Who asked Jesus to die for our sins?
What is sin anyway?
Or, to put the same question another way, who asks God to speak truth to
us? Who asks him to confront us
with lessons like these today which challenge us to take a hard look at
ourselves? Did
we ask him to?
The answer to this, like the answer to most hard questions, is yes and
no. Yes, we do ask God to speak
truth; but no, we do not ask him to speak the truth he speaks.
We want to know the truth, don’t we?
We want truth to reach out from God and grab hold of our lives, don’t we?
Isn’t that why we’re here this morning, why we put ourselves through the
hassles of this Church business:
Sunday morning rushes to be on time, commission and vestry meetings, youth
groups and Sunday School, and shelling out money for the privilege.
Don’t we come to church for the same reason Moses went to the burning
bush, for the same reason the Corinthians went to Paul and the folks in Luke’s
Gospel went to Jesus? Don’t we come
because we know that without truth to guide us, our lives, deep down, are empty
and incomplete? Don’t we come
because we know that without truth in our lives we’re just making do and marking
time wandering in the wilderness after someone else’s sheep?
And the Church, by the fact that it is good for nothing else
– “of no earthly use,” as
Michael Marshall used to put it –
the Church beckons us aside from our day-to-day business as the burning bush
beckoned Moses, to find the truth.
And then, before we’re fairly seated in our cushioned pews in
air-conditioned comfort, we hear the voice of God himself:
“Take off your shoes and keep your distance!”
(Could we, I wonder, take the voice of God more seriously if we
did take off our shoes in church, if
we swallowed our chewing gum and checked our water bottles and coffee cups at
the door and took off our shoes and felt the hard marble reality of holy ground
and real life beneath our feet?)
Anyway, shoes or no shoes, we hear the voice of God calling to Moses this
morning, and calling to us through Paul and Jesus:
“Let anyone who thinks he stands firm take heed, lest he fall.
Unless you repent,
you shall all likewise perish.”
We hear God confronting us, as he does one way or another every time we
come here, with his awesome Godness and his discomforting questions!
Are we to take this confrontation seriously?
Or are we to dismiss God’s awesome Godness as something that happened to
Moses “back then”? After all, God
doesn’t speak to people nowadays.
Or do we think that God’s questions are meant for others, for the folks who
don’t come to church? For the folks
who are on some bus this morning that might be about to fall off a freeway
bridge? We
have repented, haven’t we?
After all, we’re here in church.
Or, what is more likely, do we hear God’s confrontation as some kind of
obscure and confusing “church talk,” some assigned readings that make us yawn
and say “Thanks be to God” when they’re over, when what we need is some
practical truth
– like about how to solve
our problems with our kids or our marriage or our job or our health?
I’m hurting. I want help
from my church. What is it to me
that God sent Moses down to
Maybe so. Maybe we can’t
take these lessons seriously.
Maybe, if there ever was a fire in this bush, it’s gone out.
The honesty of the young girl in
Or maybe no. Maybe we do
take the readings and the questions seriously, but it’s just that the truth that
God speaks is hard to hear because it isn’t our truth, but God’s truth, a truth
that’s not a truth we want to hear.
Certainly it was hard for Moses to hear, wasn’t it?
Moses didn’t want to be challenged to go down to
If we read back one chapter earlier in the Book of Exodus, we find that
Moses had just come from
For like Moses, we, too, want a truth that delivers us
from the struggles of this world,
don’t we? Answers, not
questions: a formula for financial
success, a prescription for
Christian parenting, a guarantee of personal security.
These things are not bad, so why not let it go at that?
Why give us a truth we didn’t ask for?
Why tell us that unless we repent we’ll end up like those folks in this
week’s tornados and earthquakes?
Must we take God’s truth for us seriously this morning?
The Christians in
And the folks in the Gospel reading, puzzling over the sin of Pontius
Pilate and the deaths and imagined sins of those Galileans, they didn’t want to
take God’s challenge seriously either.
They wanted a different truth.
They wanted Jesus to tell them that they would be spared difficulties and
pains and sorrows in life because, after all, they were following him, weren’t
they? They were “good Christians,”
not like those folks who had the tower fall on them in Siloam.
But Jesus insists: “No,
unless you repent you will all likewise perish.
Bear fruit in your lives, or, like this fig tree, you might get chopped
down.”
The truth, Jesus tells us, is that we can’t tell from what happens to
other people whether they are worse sinners than we are, or whether we are less
guilty than they are. The truth is
that we’ve got an awful lot on our own spiritual plates here at home, and some
of it will kill us if it isn’t taken care of.
We human beings have a way of seeing sin as something that infects the
other person, while the truth that shouts from the burning bush and the truth
that Jesus whispers from Luke’s Gospel, is that if we want to know where
culpability lies we might more profitably look to ourselves, where there is
plenty to hold our attention for a lifetime.
Have you heard about the seven killers at large in the Broadmoor
neighborhood this morning? Many of
us here know who at least some of them are and could turn them in at any time if
we wanted to. Their names are
Greed, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Anger, Pride, and Sloth.
They live in our homes. They
are seven ways of living and behaving and thinking the names of which Christians
of an earlier day memorized as children, imprinting them on their hearts like
wanted posters in a post office, because they knew these killers could be
counted on to ruin the lives of people and of the world, seven deadly sins which
Christians of an earlier day knew had to be controlled and ruled if they were to
be “defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all
evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.”
But how are they to be
controlled? Who is there to help us
order our lives and wills and affections so that the true joys of life may be
found? For as we prayed just a
moment ago, God knows we have no power to do it ourselves?
Greed, envy, lust, gluttony, anger, pride, and sloth.
It’s sobering, isn’t it, when we realize how many of these really vicious
killers have, in our day, been turned into virtues.
Envy, a vice, a sin? Surely
not. For without an appeal to envy
how could we ever stimulate the economy to create the commodities we want in the
year 2007? No, envying the Joneses
is surely, in our day, a virtue, not a vice.
Gluttony, a vice, a sin?
Surely not. The world as we know it
would fall apart if people were satisfied with modest consumption, even if it
were at levels our mothers and fathers would have thought absolutely luxurious.
No, surely gluttony is not a sin.
Lust, a sin, a vice? Surely
not. We have grown beyond the
simple-minded repressions our ancestors had about sex.
And anger, its cousin? What
about anger? Without lust and
anger, what would happen to the publishing industry and to movies and
television?
And the three remaining known killers
– greed, pride, and sloth?
Of these, it is perhaps only sloth, only indolence, that has in some
measure successfully resisted our tendency to turn vice into virtue.
“Unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
Is Jesus talking to us?
Sixty-four years ago, in his little book
Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis
reminded us that “the sins of the flesh”
– those sins that command
most of our self-righteous oxygen, especially when we think we see them in
someone else – “are the least bad
of all sins.... Though I have had
to speak at some length about sex,” Lewis says in concluding his chapter on
‘Sexual Morality,’ “I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre
of Christian morality is not [found] here.
If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice,
he is quite wrong. The sins of the
flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.
All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual, [not carnal].”
And then he ticks off a few of these vicious spiritual sins:
sins like “the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing
and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of
hatred. For there are two things
inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become,” said
Lewis. “They are the Animal self,
and the Diabolical self. The
Diabolical self is the worse of the two.
[And] that is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to
church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.
But, of course, it is better to be neither.”
Spiritual pride and lack of charity and forgiveness
– that is where Lewis
locates the center of the human struggle with temptation and sin.
Were those saying their prayers and making their pilgrimages in the path
of the bombs in
And, when you think about it, that is
great news!
Because of the bush, the fig tree.
You remember the fig tree.
“A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard.
He came looking for fruit on it, but found none.
So he said to his vine-dresser, ‘For three years I’ve come looking for
fruit on this lousy fig tree without finding any.
Cut it down. Why should it
go on sucking goodness from the soil?’
But the vine-dresser replied, ‘Leave it one more year, sir, while I dig
around it and fertilize it. And if
it bears fruit next season, well and good.
If not, then you can cut it down.’”
God is like that, Jesus tells us.
“Unless you repent, you too will surely perish.
And there is still time.”
The fig tree story is not a story about us and our
three-strikes-and-your-out mentality.
The fig tree story is a story about God, a story about mercy, about God’s
saying, “Give me some more time with these unfaithful people.
Let’s wait and see how they turn out.
Rejoice, there is still time.”
No one can go back and make a new start, of course.
But the good news is that anyone can start from here and, with God’s
help, make a new ending.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.*
_____________________
*The idea, and a good part of the substance, for this sermon come from a sermon
preached by John McCausland, a seminarian friend of mine.
Because his part of it and mine are intertwined in so many places, it is
impossible gracefully to tell you which is which.
Just assume that the good parts are his and any outrageous parts are
mine.