Lent Series: Our Nonviolent Jesus for a Nonviolent America*
Scripture Luke 13:1-9
Central Themes ...
> The
Illusion of Immortality teaches us bad news: We won't and don't need to
die at all ... and in order not to do so we must act with some
sort of violence to quell what inevitably "mortalizes"
us.
> The
Reality of Resurrection teaches us Good News: Dying to self means
dying so we can live for our God of the common table.
I. Last Sunday, I suggested another way of looking at the origin of all human failing. I suggested then that Adam and Eve of biblical lore were doing just fine … until they began keeping score with their lives.
Now
I don’t mean to suggest that keeping score itself is a bad thing. That keeping
score in organized sporting competition is originally sinful. It’s hard not to
enjoy something the Walt Whitman High School girls basketball regional win
Friday night – where Rebecca Ford played a key part. Even this Bethesda-Chevy
Chase High parent can enjoy a game like that – as long as it’s not played
against B-CC, I suppose …
Sports
bar inebriates and belligerent rivals aside, keeping score in athletic
competition can sublimate the lesser angels of our nature. It can provide a
civil and civic dam for a vexing human condition that overflows all levees. And that vexing
human condition is this: Keeping score with the rest of our lives. We make ranks. We
mark turf. We black-ball; we red-line. We create firsts in classes and backs of
buses. Social peel-away is often used to affix so many of our labels.
Keeping
score throughout life: We hold fast and contrast, we compare when God calls us
to share. It seems to be hard-wired in us, to the point that others’ failings can
actually give us some pleasure. Here at BPC, we have been talking a lot recently
about the importance of joy in our worship and in our discipleship. And yet, there
is a particular joy of keeping score we generally wish to avoid and yet engage
in it we all do. A German word captures it well: schadenfreude – the joy we sometimes take in someone else’s
misfortune.
Examples:
“Ah, those Republicans! Come the fiscal cliff they helped us create, they got
what they had coming in those tax increases!” … “Ah, those Democrats! They
never met a government program they didn’t like. Now, with all those sequester
cuts, look at the suffering their spendthrift ways set up!”
And
our scripture today provides us a third example: “There were some present who told (Jesus) about
the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” You know
about those Galileans, Jesus – you are one yourself, one of the good ones as we
know. But those Galileans … they deserved what they got!
Keeping
score in life, the problem is always “the other”: Ah, those Democrats! Those
Republicans! Those Galileans!
We apply our
labels … We make our ranks. And we discover
– as Jesus implicitly and yet pointedly teaches all of us, his disciples,
today: that our rankest of sins may just well be our ranking of sins.
Perennial
rank-makers we are – keeping score in life – the ones we compare out to or who
we may believe compare out to us become all too often our adversaries … even,
our enemies. They may be persons; they may be nations, either one, nations often
provide us more convenient cover for our actions. Those we compare out to or
who compare out to us – “they” threaten “us”, either because we feel superior
or inferior to them. And “we” just can’t have the “them” of the world pollute our
righteous sense of self!
And
so, based on felt threat, we return rank unto rank … see where this is going? Ranking
ourselves with others in life, the other becomes the issue, and not we
ourselves. And if a person becomes pathological about this … or if enough
persons in a society are made to believe this: Killing the other that threatens
us so can become an option.
Think about it.
With our ranking
of the world’s sins,
killing can become an option. An option
built by societies upon a particular illusion each one of us has. It is the Illusion
of our Immortality. Immortality: The pernicious belief fed by pride that the ones who
really rank in this world – or who know they never will rank – can rise above
their mortality. And when a society feeds enough of those messages to us – the
ideal car, the ideal body, the ideal life – we must act with violence
overt or covert, upon ourselves or upon others, to achieve or destroy that ideal
… to quell and to repel what inevitably would remind us we are
mortal.
Take Jesus’ audience response, for
example, to those Galileans and Siloamites of today – those who fell far short
of social rank and approbation. Those who reminded them, deepest down, of their
own short-fallings … their own rankness.
Like Jesus’ audience of old, we are tempted
to feel we must rise above these unfortunate people – who probably deserve the suffering brought upon them,
anyway, they must have visited it upon themselves, or wait: God must have visited
it upon them. And yet, when we make divine retribution upon suffering an option
for God – when we make our retribution upon suffering an option for ourselves
–we come to forget our own mortality.
And when we forget our own mortality,
we come to live be default in a place of immortality. “We” don’t deserve to die
– but that’s not all! To be “im-mortal” – non-mortal – literally means we never
have to die! We can live forever …
just the way we are, only more so. (Isn’t that the popular image for heaven for
many?)
Jesus dashes
that Illusion of Immortality and replaces it with true healing – true joy –
true Good News. Jesus replaces that our Illusion of Immortality with something
much greater, much more profound. As his disciples, we call it the Reality of Resurrection.
Hear
again Jesus’ response to the rank-makers in his midst – those who believe some
truly deserve to die: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in
this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? … Or those eighteen
who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them? … No, I tell you; but
unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”
“Unless
you repent!” – meaning, unless we die
to self! Dying to applying our labels … making our ranks … separating our
Edgemoors** from the edges of D.C.
Repent: Die to
self. Which is really Good News! For what repentance – a word that’s gotten a
lot of bad press – really means is, we die to self in order to be
transformed. We die to self – we don’t kill self, we die to it! – in order to live
for our God of the common good ... represented before us by this common table. Dying to self means we
cease keeping score.
And now we find ourselves in these climate-changing times keeping score over flora and fauna as never before. Here Jesus’ parable of the barren fig tree1 speaks to us today. Here, he calls us to be participate in the Reality of Resurrection in an even deeper way: to discover that all life is inviolable, subject not to our immortal fantasies. Subject de facto neither to exploitation or extermination.
That’s
good news to the Farm Market shopper next door this very hour, and it can be to
us all. It might sound exotic to our 21st century “civilized” ears
tht Jesus of Nazareth – a Mediterranean peasant –was not and could not be the
synthetic utilitarian we so honor today, to the detriment of ecological balance
and harmony. Jesus of Nazareth was an organic agrarian, lifting up in our
scripture parable today that life found in even a fruitless fig tree is worth
preserving for a time.
His
parable today is metaphorical – certainly, it is. And yet the creation-grounded
audience of our servant Lord’s day connected intuitively with this story in a
way we may not: in a way that appreciates the long-term investment of Creator
with all Creation. That intimate relationship of our Creator and Creating and
Creative God with what a famous theologian once called this Body of God.2
And
yet, the Illusion of Immortality seduces us still – beginning with humanity,
and now with flora and with fauna. The Illusion whispers to us, “We must
sequester our care for any living being that does not seem to be ‘producing’. Their
dormant ways threaten us; they do not rank so highly in our eyes. Now, don’t
get us wrong: We don’t want to kill anyone – though in extreme circumstances, we
must, and the lower the food chain, we will. For we do not want to die – nay,
we need not die – to the lifestyle we
have rightly earned.”
V. Which sets this
Communion table today for the Reality of Resurrection: Each of us dies – and, each of us
should. Today, tomorrow, and till we take our last breath. Lest we perish, as
Jesus says. Perish, to the living hell of our ranking ways.
It’s the Reality
of Resurrection that takes place around this table … and not the Illusion of Immortality. Completing
our nonviolent discipleship journey from killing –based on the Illusion – to
dying – based on the Reality.
Dying,
each day – so we might rise again. All new people. All new ways. All new
nonviolent ways. For
there is no way to nonviolence, my friends. Nonviolence … is the way! Jesus’ way – where the judgment of killing is off the
table! The judgment seat has been removed! This table of nonviolence, where all
are freely welcomed … where all are freely served!
Nonviolence is
not possible without rank removed – and social intimacy of some kind then made
manifest. And here, spread before us, is the greatest social intimacy one could experience in Jesus’ day and
culture – and to some degree still in ours: eating together at the same table. For
“greater sinner” of Jesus’ day to break bread with the “lesser sinner” of his
day – for the poor, in other words, to share it with the rich … Why, that was unheard
of! That was absurd! That was heresy! And given the prosperous faces I see before
me, it may not be widely practiced today.
What
would this common table parallel for such social intimacy be for us today? Who
here belongs to a club or country club (you need not raise your hands)? Who
here belongs to an organization where some are in, and some are not? What would
or could you do to break down a few
social walls?
Consider
that – ponder that – as we bring our ranking ways and rankest of ways – all of our illusions of immortality –
to this cleansing, dying, life-giving table spread before us here today …
**Edgemoor is the affluent community bordering BPC to the west and southwest. The D.C. city limits are located roughly three miles to the southeast.
1Luke 13:6-9
2See Sallie McFague,
The Body of God: An Ecological Theology
(Fortress, 1993).
