First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
14 March 2004
One More Year
Thomas Long1 is the preaching professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, and he tells this story:
In the little Georgia country church of my childhood [he writes], there was a story the old folks loved to tell...embellishing it [as they repeated it year after year]. It was about a Sunday night in October, 1938. Evening services were in full swing when a man named Sam... charged into the prayer meeting trembling with fear and excitement. He shouted, "Martians are attacking the earth in spaceships! Some of 'em have already landed in New Jersey!" The preacher stopped in mid-sentence; the congregation stared. "I s-s-swear," he stammered. "I h-h-heard it on the radio."
What Sam had heard, of course, was Orson Welles's Mercury Theater radio production of War of the Worlds, but no one in the congregation was aware of that... For all they knew, the world outside was coming to a flaming end. The little flock looked apprehensively at the preacher, but he was mute and indecisive, never having had a sermon disrupted by interplanetary invasion. Finally one of the oldest members of the congregation, a red-clay farmer of modest education, stood up, gripped the pew in front of him with his large, callused hands, and said, "I 'speck what Sam says ain't completely true, but if it is, we're in the right place here in church. Let's go on with the meetin'." And so they did.
Spaceships landing in New Jersey? Signs of the end of the world? The old farmer sized it all up, measured it against his sense of divine providence, and decided it was better to be in church praising God than running around the cow pasture shooting buckshot into the night sky.
According to Jesus, most of us are not nearly as astute as that farmer when it comes to distinguishing what matters and what doesn't in this life, when it comes to perceiving what is truly happening in God's world and how to go about dealing with it wisely. Right before our gospel story for today begins, Jesus has been questioning his listeners' ability to read the "signs of the times" and to adjust their lives to them accordingly.
He tells them that they are much better at observing the subtle changes in the clouds that foretell rain than they are at perceiving the subtle signs of God's revolutionary presence—a presence that spells judgement for the unjust, vindication for the poor, and a change of regime for everybody; a presence that brings with it a new way of being together as creatures in the here and now.
Jesus challenges his listeners to take their heads out of the sand of self-preoccupation, evasion and denial, to open up some new eyes of faith, and to start paying attention to the evidence everywhere around them that God's judgment is already at work sifting lives and weighing hearts. He urges them to be alert to the signals that a different world is materializing in a painful but hopeful process, like a baby's birth.
II
Then, some people in the crowd start to take Jesus up on his challenge to try reading the signs of the times. (And this is where today's story begins.) These folks tell Jesus all about the gruesome slaughter of some Galileans that had recently been carried out by Pilate's henchmen for reasons we know nothing about. It happened, they said, while the Galileans were offering sacrifices, and the harsh treatment they got may have had to do with the Roman fear of social unrest. Jesus responds to this report of sacrilege, "So, you think maybe that that was a sign of the times? That it's evidence that God's judgement has come at last? Maybe that tower collapse that killed 18 people over by the pool of Siloam was also a sign?"
Yes, apparently they do think so. And apparently they are hoping that this regime-changing God who has suddenly sprung into action by means of these calamitous invasions into their lives is aiming retribution at only the very worst sinners—which, if true, would mean that small-time offenders like them (for that is how they see themselves) won't have too much to worry about.
But Jesus tells them that the Galileans and the city people crushed by the wall in Jerusalem did not die because they were worse sinners than anyone else. There is, he states, no connection between the number or kind of one's sins and whether one ends up at the point of a soldier's bayonet or under a pile of rubble at the base of a city wall. There is no direct causal connection between the way they lived their lives and whether commuters made it home alive to Pozo and Alcala de Henares on Thursday in Spain. God is not using Roman goons, terrorist bombs on commuter trains, falling towers, earthquakes, space invaders or AIDS to bring judgment upon the earth.
But that does not mean God is not judging, Jesus says. God is scrutinizing human lives, and God will eventually get down the long list of sinners and arrive at their names. God will eventually get down the long list of sinners and come to us too, because we are all in this perilous, precarious life together. Not a single one of us will live out our days on this earth without adding something real and regrettable to the web of human sin and its collateral damage.
You can't link sin causally and directly to the disasters that befall us without notice, almost whimsically. But there will come a time, Jesus assures us, when in some form or another our life will be demanded of us for assessment. And in order not to perish then, in order not to perish utterly and forever when the light of God's truth exposes our truth fully, we need to shape with God and by grace lives of repentance and readiness now.
III
"Well, OK," you can just hear the people thinking, "if the massacre of the Galileans wasn't a sign, and the tower collapse in Siloam wasn't a sign, then what is? What are we looking for? What is a sign that God's judgment is working and God's re-ordering of the world and human relationships is breaking in and taking hold?"
Jesus tells a parable about a man who ordered his tenant farmer to plant a fig tree in among grapevines. He came out to check on it year after year. And year after year that tree took up the soil uselessly. It drank in the rain uselessly. It soaked up the sun uselessly. Long after it should have matured and borne fruit, it leafed out and quit. No figs. Not one. Not ever. Finally, the owner had enough and he angrily told the tenant to lay his axe to the trunk of that pathetic excuse for a fruit-bearing tree. But the tenant asked him to wait. He begged for permission to fertilize and hoe, he bargained for one more year, and his plea was granted.
That is the sign of the times. That is the key to the breaking in of God's reign and the clue to what God's judgment is all about. Not atrocities and earthquakes and falling walls, not the end of civilization that will surely come about if gay marriage becomes legal, but, as Thomas Long writes, "the gracious and patient hand that reaches out to halt the axe, the merciful gesture woven into the fabric of life that stays all that would give up on the barren and the broken, the merciful voice that says, 'Let's give this hopeless case another year.'"
Let's give this hopeless case another year. Will the tree ever bear fruit? We don't know. Jesus doesn't say. All his teaching points to fruitfulness as something very, very pleasing to God, so we can easily imagine that he hopes it will indeed bear fruit and lots of it. Will the owner really cut it down at the end of twelve months if it still sits there, figless? We don't know that either, although Jesus does imply that the tree has received a completely undeserved grace period, and that as a result, a timely reform had better be in order. There may well come a time when it is too late, and we should not pass over that possibility lightly.
We don't know. Therefore it is place to trust, and to let the farmer work. For what matters most at the moment is simply that he is at work, hoeing and fertilizing; what matters most is that he wants the tree to live; what matters most is that God is actively waiting.
We sing a lot about active divine waiting here at First Church, in Kate and Peter's hymn, "God's forgiveness waits..." God's compassion waits. God's mercy waits. We sing about the heart that cannot pray, but that will one day bear the fruit of praise. And God's people know how it is with our God, and so we live into the mystery of it, which helps to explain any really faithful church's odd attraction to lost causes.
Here is another one of Thomas Long's stories to end with:
There was a state-run mental hospital where truly hopeless cases were relegated to a back ward. The psychiatrists and other medical staff avoided this ward, making only the bare minimum of calls and writing off the patients there as unsalvageable. Then a women's group from a local church began to visit the patients in this hospital. No one had bothered to tell them that the ones in the back ward were abandoned cases, so they visited them regularly too, bringing flowers, cookies, prayer, cheerfulness and mercy. After a while, some of the patients began to respond. A few of them even became healthy enough to move to other wards.
Now, mind you, this was no miracle. It was church people doing what church people do. Nothing fancy. Something small. A crack of light under the door of despair. In a throwaway world, where people are discarded along with the trash, and no one is patient anymore, it is a sign of God's times. It is not far from the kind of "judgment" Jesus had in mind.
As he would surely say to us, "Go now, and do likewise."
1This sermon is based on Thomas G. Long, "Breaking and Entering," The Christian Century, March 7, 2001.
© 2004, Mary Luti