Luke 13:1-9 The Dry Places March 7, 2010
The Old Testament readings for today address hungry and thirsty souls. The body of an adult male is approximately 62 percent water, while an adult female is 51 percent water (www.faqs.org/ nutrition/Smi-Z/Water.html). There are serious consequences when we neglect replenishing this life enabling fluid. In a Rejoice! devotional reading last summer Ervin Stutzman shared a story about water and thirst. He wrote, “My friend Marie tells of a time she lived in Israel/Palestine. For months she suffered from headaches and other physical symptoms. Upon visiting a doctor, she learned that she was dehydrated. Even though she had access to a supply of clean water, she hadn’t been drinking enough in the hot, dry environment. As a result, her body began showing symptoms of dehydration. She needed to learn to drink water even before she felt thirsty (Ervin Stutzman, Rejoice! Aug 13, 2009). When we don’t drink enough water the body lets us know. When plants and fruit trees do not get enough water they do not bear fruit.
Fresh water is a priceless commodity be we in the Middle East, Africa, or a spiritual quest. Our scripture texts make no allusions that it is a desert out there: people are hungry; people are thirsty; mean spirited people torment us (Ps 63:9); people die at the hands of Pilot; friends die in random accidents. Jesus wants us to survive in the wilderness and he sees an impediment which keeps us from fresh spiritual water—an unhelpful theology. It is a twisted theology that Jesus addresses in Luke 13:1-9. He wants the trees of the forest to clap their hands(Is 55:12) and bear fruit (Lk 13:9), and he also knows that in too many cases it is our understanding of God which limits life giving water to ourselves or to those around us. To get at the problem I will share a Barbara Brown Taylor article which appeared in the Christian Century magazine some years back. It is the best reflection on Luke 13 I have come across, and I see no reason to repackage the goodness of it. Quoting now with minor changes:
When I was a hospital chaplain, the calls I dreaded most did not come from the emergency room, the psychiatric ward or even the morgue. They came from the pediatric floor, where little babies lay in cribs with bandages covering half their heads and sweet-faced children pushed IV poles down the hall. One day I received a call to come sit with a mother while her five-year-old daughter was in surgery. Earlier in the week, the girl had been playing with a friend when her head began to hurt. By the time she found her mother, she could no longer see. At the hospital, a CAT scan confirmed that a large tumor was pressing on the girl’s optic nerve, and she was scheduled for surgery as soon as possible.
On the day of the operation, I found her mother sitting under the fluorescent lights in the waiting room beside an ashtray full of cigarette butts. She smelled as if she had puffed every one of them…She was staring at a patch of carpet in front of her, with her eyebrows raised in that half-hypnotized look that warned me to move slowly. I sat down beside her. She came to, and after some small talk she told me just how awful it was. She even told me why it had happened.
“It’s my punishment,” she said, “for smoking these [bleeping] cigarettes. God couldn’t get my attention any other way, so he made my baby sick.” Then she started crying so hard that what she said next came out like a siren: “Now I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop. I’m going to kill my own child!”
This was hard for me to hear. I decided to forego reflective listening and concentrate on remedial theology instead. “I don’t believe in a God like that,” I said. “The God I know wouldn’t do something like that.” The only problem with my response was that it messed with the mother’s worldview at the very moment she needed it most. However miserable it made her, she preferred a punishing God to an absent or capricious one. I may have been able to reconcile a loving God with her daughter’s brain tumor, but at the moment she could not. If there was something wrong with her daughter, then there had to be a reason. She was even willing to be the reason. At least that way she could get a grip on the catastrophe.
Even those of us who claim to know better react the same way. Calamity strikes and we wonder what we did wrong. We scrutinize our behavior, our relationships, our diets, our beliefs. We hunt for some cause to explain the effect in hopes that we can stop causing it. What this tells us is that we are less interested in truth than consequences. What we crave, above all, is control over the chaos of our lives.
Luke does not divulge the motive of those who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices. The implication is that those who died deserved what they got, or at least that is the question Jesus intuited. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?”
It is a tempting equation that solves a lot of problems. (1) It answers the riddle of why bad things happen to good people: they don’t. Bad things only happen to bad people. (2) It punishes sinners right out in the open as a warning to everyone. (3) It gives us a God who obeys the laws of physics. For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Any questions?
It is a tempting equation, but Jesus won’t go there. “No,” he tells the crowd, “but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”...There is no sense spending too much time trying to decipher this piece of the good news. As far as I can tell, it is meant not to aid reason but to disarm it. In an intervention aimed below his listener’s heads, Jesus touches the panic they have inside of them about all the awful things that are happening around them. They are terrified by those things—for good reason. They have searched their hearts for any bait that might bring disaster sniffing their way. They have lain awake at night making lists of their mistakes.
While Jesus does not honor their illusion that they can protect themselves in this way, he does seem to honor the vulnerability that their fright has opened up in them. It is not a bad thing for them to feel the full fragility of their lives. It is not a bad thing for them to [consider their hunger and thirst]—not if it makes them turn toward the water.
It is that turning he wants for them, which is why he tweaks their fear. Don’t worry about Pilate and all the other things that can come crashing down on your heads, he tells them. Terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame. But don’t let that stop you from doing what you are doing. That [dry] place your fear has opened up inside of you is a holy place. Look around while you are there. Pay attention to what you feel. It may hurt you to stay there and it may hurt you to see, but it is not the kind of hurt that leads to death. It is the kind that leads to life.
Depending on what you want from God, this may not sound like good news. I doubt that it would have sounded like good news to the mother in the waiting room. But for those of us who have discovered that we cannot make life safe nor God tame, it is gospel enough. What we can do is turn our faces to the [life giving stream]. That way, whatever befalls us, we will fall the right way. “Life-giving Fear” by Barbara Brown Taylor in Christian Century, March 4, 1998: p. 229.
By way of summary
- We are encouraged to give voice to concerns we hold. We are to ask for eggs and fish (Lk 11:9-13), we are to ask for healing, and even that the cup might pass from us. The voicing of our deepest needs and longings is good for us and our spirits. It cleanses us. It prepares us for yielded-ness to whatever will come. Our requests, however, do not determine who God is or how the divine order operates. This may not sound like good news, but neither am I finished.
- Righteous and blameless people will hunger and thirst in the wilderness. Job suffers. Jesus suffers. Saints suffer. Deserts, wilderness, and dry places will happen. Expecting physical protection has little place in our biblical and Anabaptist traditions. Our theology does teach us, however, that God is with us in all things and will give us strength to endure. When we find ourselves in the desert our primary spiritual task is learning to notice the presence of God with us. It is good news that God is with us in all things. It is good news that Jesus approaches the barren tree. It is good news that Jesus gets dirty in the manure pile and soil so that we might bear fruit. Those in our congregation and community who are hurting need to hear that God has not abandoned them and that they are not less loved than others of us on account of their problem.
- In the voicing of this belief we informally commit ourselves to walk along side people in their desert. We have the opportunity to partner with the gardener in bringing new life to dried up trees. Sometimes we are the hands which massage the soil of those in a barren state. Sometimes we are the fruit bearing tree which provides nourishment to desert wanderers. Even as Christ and the church have aided us in the wilderness so too we are commissioned to assist others in their dry places. I know many of you are engaged in acts of kindness and goodness, so I hope you hear this as encouragement. Feed and water yourself on God and Christ so that you are strengthened in your service.
I will conclude this sermon with a prayer. Lord of famine and feast, we give you thanks that your love for us never ends. In trials, temptations and hardness of heart you seek to sustain us with not only what we need to survive, but those things which will allow us to bear fruit. Give us humility to accept your gifts. Give us thankful hearts. Let your good work in us feed those who hunger and sustain those who thirst. In your name we pray. Amen.
Patrick Preheim, co-pastor Nutana Park Mennonite Church