Isaiah 55:1-9                    PERSISTENT GRACE                                         11 March 2007

Luke 13:1-9    First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, Alabama                Lent

J. Shannon Webster

 

Our New Testament lesson for today was in the Birmingham News on Friday. A story in the Religion section told of pastors giving aid and comfort to tornado victims in Enterprise, Alabama. It quoted Baptist pastor Gary Cardwell, who said: “God did not cause it to happen. It’s an unexplainable natural disaster… Our responsibility is to just help the people who are hurting.”   And of course he is right.  The same story recalled a very different theology offered awhile back by an Alabama state legislator from Montevallo, who said Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgment on gambling, sin and wickedness of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We don’t know whether he has tried to even drive through Mississippi since, but the newspaper is not letting him forget his words!

 

This same clash of theologies plays itself out in our Luke text.  Some came and threw out to Jesus what was going on in the headlines, that Pilate had killed  a number of Galileans in the Temple, and mingled their blood with the sacrifices (a horrible offense, in that culture.)  Perhaps they were baiting Jesus: “Here’s what happens to uppity Galileans who get out of line!”  Certainly they did believe that tragedy was evidence of God punishing sin.

 

We heard that theology from a state legislator, and we heard it from TV evangelist Pat Robertson – a strange worldview which believes God will kill a lot of innocent people to punish perceived sin.  Falwell said it when he said AIDS is God’s judgment on homosexuals. There’s a New Age version of that same theology, which holds that every event, beneficial or tragic, is something your soul chose for you.  Nonsense.   

 

Jesus’ response was to take the newspaper and pick his own story out of it.  “What about these people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them? Were they worse sinners than anyone else?  Or what about these people in Enterprise? Were they worse sinners than anyone else in Alabama?  I tell you, No.  You just worry about your own self.”  Or words to that effect.

 

What are God’s intentions toward humankind, and what does that mean for us? That question is currently under debate in the Presbyterian Church (USA), in some weird ways.  Language about “purity” started showing up about ten years back, in overtures to the General Assembly, and it seems to have replaced language about grace.  The debate is over who is in the church and who is out, who is like us and who is not, and what are the minimum standards you have to believe to be acceptable. I don’t want to have that debate, and you probably don’t either.

 

And yet we may have to admit that we think the same in subtle ways, more than we realize; our search for God, for the holy in life, takes us down the paths of cause-and-effect solutions, works-righteousness, the idolatry of thinking we can find our own salvation if we just work harder at it or find the right discipline.

 

This week a public argument began raging in evangelical circles. Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine has challenged James Dobson (Focus on the Family) to a debate. Dobson has charged that other evangelical leaders are distracting Christians from the major moral issues of our time, and for Dobson those issues are all about sexual morality.  Wallis and others are trying to ask how our faith leads us to respond to hunger, poverty, war and environmental degradation.

 

 How do we know what God wants? What do we do?  There are different worldviews, even in Scripture – places where God does use a Flood to cleanse or a Cyrus of Persia to bring down Babylon, and places where we imperfect sinners are welcomed without reservation. 

 

There is no way we can know the mind of God well enough to know what constitutes

purity and what does not, and there’s a spiritual arrogance in making such statements. Our meaning-making logic usually works to show God agrees with us after all – I’m right, they are wrong, someone else is to blame.  BUT, in Isaiah 55, we find God saying:

 

“My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”   

 

How can we ever truly know anything of God? That’s where Jesus comes in; that’s why in this meditative season of Lent we look closely at the person of Jesus, what he said and what he did.  The whole story of salvation history in Scripture is of God pursuing us with care, trying to get through our thick skulls that we are loved by the Creator!  And in Jesus God found a way to do that – translating those thoughts-that-are-not-our-thoughts into human experience as God became human.  Jesus is the one who welcomed the unexpected and the outcast, who said unexpected things and turned the world we know on its head. We have to look to Jesus Christ to find out what is really going on.

 

They told Jesus about the Galileans Pilate had killed in the Temple, implying they were sinners to have suffered such.  Jesus said no, and told a parable about a fig tree that didn’t bear fruit.  The owner wants it cut down; the gardener is willing to let things be, and says “Let me work on it awhile. If that doesn’t pan out,  you cut it down.”   That is, production is not necessarily associated with works-righteousness. The parable turns our expectations upside down.

 

Here is another way to say it – Jesus’ world is a different one than the owner in the parable, than the crowd who wanted to blame the victim.  It is a world in some ways more dangerous, because we cannot control it all with our behavior (tornados happen.)  At the same time it is a world more free and more filled with grace.  A world filled with grace is unpredictable.

 

Theologian Douglas John Hall says it yet another way:  Only a beggar can receive the free gift of grace, and we must stay beggars, and become beggars again and again. 

 

God does seem to use human need and human hunger to draw us together.  Isaiah again: everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. The grace of God is priceless; it’s a gift.

You may regularly hear me quote George Stroup, one of our theology professors, who put it like this: Others say “If you repent and believe, then God will bless you.”  Presbyterians say, “Since God has blessed us, therefore let us repent and believe and serve.”   The difference matters, because it says something not about us, but about who God is, and what God’s intentions are toward humankind. 

 

 This remains the point: When they pressed Jesus for the bottom line– ‘tell us so it will fit on a bumper sticker,’ he said: “Love god with everything you’ve got, and your neighbor as yourself.”   When they asked Paul to fit it on a bumper sticker, he said: “Faith, hope and love; but the greatest of these if love.”

 

That ought to tell us who God is, and what we are supposed to be about. And it is not that we can, with only a little effort, get the norms down so that we can be justified in what we already thought. It is this: sinners though we are, every one of us, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. 

 

Come and buy wine and milk without money and without price. God’s love and God’s grace is a gift.  And in our common hunger we find the love of Christ.  Could that be the task in this Lenten season – to peer into each other’s faces, and find there the face of Christ Jesus? 

 

The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose

I will not, I will not forsake to his foes

That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake

I’ll never, no never, no never forsake. 

 

It’s not about purity, it’s about grace – especially in hard times.

For grace that never gives up, never lets any of us go, thanks be to God!