March 7, 2010
The Third Sunday in Lent (Year C)
Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 62:1-8; I Corinthians 10:1-13;
Luke: 13:1-9
This week I attended a lunch time program at the cathedral in Boston. I was there for a morning meeting, and decided to stay for the free lunch and program! The speaker was part of an ongoing Lenten program where people of other faiths come and speak to the gathered over a box lunch. Their faith and faith practices are discussed, and then people may ask questions.
The guest speaker was a former Roman Catholic who has become a Buddhist. He spoke enthusiastically and calmly of what he had learned from the practice of Buddhism which, of all the great faiths of the world, is really much more about practice than faith. He showed us a chart that he said contained one way of studying, a description of how to work toward Enlightenment, for there are, as nearly as I can gather from a short talk on a lunch break, as many ways of practicing Buddhism as there are ways of practicing Christianity.
But what they all seem to have in common is a sense of cause and effect. If you do this, then the consequences are thus.
Cause and effect are part of the Buddhist understanding of the way to Enlightenment. If you do this, then you will step closer. If you do that, then you will not.
The gospel lesson today shows the prevalence of cause and effect thinking in the first century in Israel also. And if we are honest with ourselves, we adhere to the practice of cause and effect over and over in many areas of our lives even to this day.
But let’s think about ‘cause and effect’ as we examine the gospel this morning. The people asked Jesus if the tower of Siloam or the mingling of the blood of the martyrs was a sign of their evil? Did they do something awful to cause them to be punished so terribly? Cause and effect!
For Jews blood was sacred, and it would not ever be mingled with other blood, certainly not the blood of sacrifice. One of the things abhorrent to Jews that Jesus did was talk of drinking his blood. It is a reviling thought to drink any blood and mixing it would be even more abhorrent. So it was a horrible, defiling, repulsive thought to the ones who were part of the conversation. I cannot think of a food that would revile us in our culture so vehemently. We have become, as a culture, very adventurous in our eating so perhaps it would be like eating some of the Asian delicacies. There is, certainly, a cultural dissonance between American food and Chinese peasant food that would make some squeamish!
And the falling of a tower on innocent bystanders would also be unthought of. They must have done something to merit, to cause, such a disaster. Cause and effect! Such thinking leads to people saying things like the “people of Haiti or Chile must have deserved the devastation of the earthquake. And, if it was not they themselves who were so deserving of the evil, it was surly the fault of their ancestors.”
This cause and effect thinking also works the other way around. If we do all good things, then we will earn – well, what do we want to earn? Wealth, good health, prosperity, good relationships, happiness? All these have throughout time been seen as “rewards” for good behavior, and conversely, their counterparts, disease, divorce, depression, to name a few, are seen as punishment for doing something wrong.
But the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that cause and effect thinking was destroyed by the Resurrection. We do not get what we deserve; we do not get what we deserve. There is no cause and effect – because of Jesus.
Grace is freely given to ALL! Good, bad, and in between. Like rain, it falls on parched land and swollen streams alike, without discrimination, no cause and effect. Grace simply doesn’t look at what we do. Rather it is a sign of what God gives.
Happiness, big houses, good health, prosperity, are not the bribery tools or the tools at all, that God uses to get us to behave ourselves or as a reward for being extra special good! There is no cause and effect. If we do things honorably and with great integrity, we do not get more or less grace than the thief, liar, murderer, or gossip.
The fig tree that produces, lives and produces; the fig tree that doesn’t produce, is worked on harder and hopefully will produce. Grace, more time; grace, more attention; grace, is what God intends for all of us.
We can live with integrity and honor, and we will have the delight of the fruit of such a life – the figs if you will; or we can lived dishonorably and without integrity, and God will simply give us more attention because God’s hope, God’s deepest desire, is our fullness, our happiness, our joy.
There is no cause and effect to the way God treats us. And when we try to make our sense of judgment or justice or fairness or whatever we want to call it, when we try to say, “This happened because you did this!” we diminish God’s grace.
There is much to think about in the world right now. The two earthquakes, one in Haiti and one in Chile, remind us of the power of the untamed world, the not yet finished nature of creation, and how we truly are dependent upon grace. And frankly, it reminds us of the good fortune that we have, not because we deserve it, but simply because life’s circumstances birthed us here instead of in Chile. The people of Chile did not deserve their earthquake, the people of Haiti are not paying for the sins of their forefathers, the dead at Siloam were no more sinful than you or I. And conversely, we are no better than they. We didn’t deserve to live in an area free of such devastation any more than they deserved to live in one.
Getting at that fundamental lack of cause and effect is what Jesus tried to teach over and over again. Grace, love, forgiveness, serving others, these are the tools God uses, and which we are invited to use also to live our lives faithfully.
I admit I didn’t understand much of what the Buddhist spoke of and I was sidetracked by the many cause and effect symbols in his cosmology. But I do know that Jesus taught us repeatedly not to blame victims or point fingers when someone appears to be suffering from natural disasters, or for that matter any sort of disaster! Instead, pray for grace for them, not in judgment, but out of kindness and love. Then allow our actions to follow that kindness and love with concreteness.
May we all flourish as a fig tree given extra attention and may we recognize that the fruit of our labor is worthy of God’s grace because of what God does and not what we do.
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd