Hilton Head Island, SC – July 20, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 5:1-7; Luke 13:1-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “And if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” – Luke 13:9 (RSV)
How many times does something like this happen: You forgot to pay your car insurance bill on time, and two days after you inadvertently let it lapse, you have a much-more-than-mere-fender bender. Nobody is hurt in either car, but your car looks like it tried to run down Godzilla, and the other person’s car looks like he tried to stop a Category 5 tornado all by himself. Or you just bought a new car and you are taking your four-year-old granddaughter home to baby-sit her. She is in strapped in the back seat in her car seat eating a chocolate ice cream cone, which she drops onto the seat. But she doesn’t tell you, because she thinks that you might be upset, about which she is certainly correct. By the time you get home there is a gooey pool all over the car. Or people are telling falsehoods about you, like in Psalm 12, except you don’t know it, but everyone else knows it. People are treating you like a pariah, but you don’t know why.
A few months ago I decided to preach a sermon on the inevitable messiness of life, and then, a few weeks ago, there was an article in Christian Century called “Why We Mess Things Up.” What timing! It was written by Charles Hefling, who is the editor of The Anglican Theological Review and an instructor in theology for candidates for the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. The article focused on the doctrine of original sin, which essentially declares that it is not possible for anybody not to sin, that sinning is inevitable for everyone. Charles Hefling wrote, “One thing that makes the traditional concept of original sin difficult is the way it has been bound up with the story of Adam and Eve. An elaborate doctrinal formulation and a seemingly ingenuous episode from Genesis have been presented as a kind of package deal. The conflation was unexceptional, if not inevitable, so long as it was possible to believe that the first few pages of the Bible constitute a straightforward factual record. That is still possible although it requires some pretty desperate maneuvering,” he said (CC, p. 22, June 25, 2014).
I agree with everything he wrote there, and I also agree that the concept of original sin probably creates more theological problems than it solves. Then Mr. Hefling refers to a book by Francis Spufford, called Unapologetic. In it Spufford wrote a memorable phrase, in which he cited “the human propensity to mess things up.” Actually he didn’t use the word “mess;” he used another word, but since I am talking about the messiness of life, I am sticking with my word, not his. He further quoted Spufford, who talked about “nor just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident,” but “our active inclination to break stuff, ‘stuff’ here including moods, promises, relationships we care about, and our own well-being and other people’s.”
There is no one alive who has not screwed things up by accident or by perverse and pervasive intent. Charles Hefling began his article with an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, although by now, sadly, all Calvin and Hobbes cartoons are old, since their artful creator ceased drawing them years ago. Calvin was a little boy of six and Hobbes was his imaginary tiger friend, named after the gloomy English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who memorably if grimly declared that the lives of all human beings are “nasty, brutish, and short.” Calvin asks his sidekick, “Do you think babies are born sinful? That they come into the world as sinners?” “No,” says Hobbes, “I think they’re just quick studies.”
What we may deduce from all this is that sometimes we mess things up because we act sinfully, but other times life gets messed up by accident, not design, and perhaps entirely because of others and through nothing we ourselves did. We should have paid our car insurance premium, and in retrospect maybe we weren’t so smart to have given our granddaughter an ice cream cone while she was sitting alone in the back seat. Nevertheless, sin is not the main cause of the messiness of life; happenstance or bad decisions or accidents account for much of the mess.
In another article in the same issue of Christian Century, Tom Montgomery Fate, who teaches creative writing at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, told of an incident from his youth. His father was pastor of the Congregational Church in Maquoketa, Iowa. Many times he had heard his father say, “Doubt is not the opposite of faith, but a part of it. The point of faith is not answers, but meaning. Live in the questions, in the mystery.”
Well, it was time for the catechism class to be received into membership, but 14-year-old Tom decided that in good conscience he couldn’t affirm answers to all the questions for which the catechism required answers. He declared he wasn’t going to be confirmed. His dad said, “Why did you wait until the last minute?” Although his father was miffed and embarrassed, and knew that he had one fine mess on his hands, he ruefully concluded, “Maybe the problem is that you were the only one listening.” And maybe that was right. Maybe the Church makes its own messes by demanding affirmations to things which are very difficult for some people to affirm, and by ignoring other things which perhaps deserve far more attention.
Last week the Church of England voted overwhelmingly to ordain women as bishops. They have ordained women as priests for twenty years, so it seems only proper to ordain them as bishops as well. But what will happen, for example, if a traditionalist bishop refuses to allow the laying on of hands of any bishop, male or female, who had had hands placed on his or her person in the Episcopal ordination by anyone who had ever participated in the ordination of a female bishop? People with the best of intentions can mess things up for other people, never anticipating the messes that might be made. Whoever would have guessed it?
The opening verses of the 5th chapter of Isaiah are a famous parable about wild grapes. The story suggests that God planted a vineyard called “Israel.” But instead of it producing proper domesticated grapes, it produced wild grapes. So, says the parable, God tore down the wall around the vineyard, and let it grow wild. Isaiah concludes his parable with these words, “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting; and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry!”
For many reasons, life gets messy. We mess it up ourselves, others mess it up for us, or it just gets messed up through no particular fault of anyone. Someone you love is engulfed by a situation over which neither of you has any control, or he or she is afflicted with a serious illness, or she or he is the victim of a stolen identity, or someone from the past has surfaced to vex him or her, and now both of you are victims of the vexing. Someone close to you spends money like water, and it results in a constant financial crisis. It’s a mess, a colossal mess. How are you going to resolve it? Is it resolvable?
Luke 13 has three little episodes which are not found in any of the other three Gospels. Some people who had been listening to Jesus referred to some rebel Galileans who had been slain by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who mixed their blood with the blood of animals which were sacrificed in the temple. Jesus asked, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners because they suffered thus? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will likewise perish.” Then Jesus reminded them of a disaster which had occurred several years earlier, in which a tower suddenly collapsed, killing eighteen innocent people: “Do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? No, but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”
Then Jesus told a brief parable, which may have been his own updated version of Isaiah 5. He said that a man planted a fig tree in his vineyard, but it produced no fruit. (In Isaiah the vineyard produced wild grapes.) So, said Jesus, the owner of the vineyard (God, perhaps? He does not say) told the vinedresser to cut it down. But the vineyard keeper asked to be able to dig around the tree, and put manure around it to give it a better chance to produce figs. Then, by the next year it might bring forth fruit, he said. If not, it could be cut down.
The family members of the Galileans whom Pilate ordered killed had a very large mess on their hands, as did the relatives of those killed by the collapse of the tower of Siloam. It was a bit of a mess that the fig tree was barren. Life is inevitably messy.
Scottish writer Melanie Reid broke her neck and back when she fell from a horse in 2010. She writes a weekly piece for The Times of London Magazine called, with wry courage and humor, “Spinal Column.” She began, “In a funny way, I can best describe it as a slow-motion surprise. The numb and narrow world I inhabit has, I realize, become comforting. Here I am, the me that sits up a hillside, typing laboriously with right forefinger and left thumb, flapping like a flamboyant pastry chef…. This is my life; this is what I can cope with.”
Ms. Reid said she had written earlier about the Riding for the Disabled group of Bannockburn, Scotland, who were running out of money because the landlord had raised their rent. Thousands of pounds had come in from Times readers to bring financial support. Melanie Reid said, “Thank you not just for the money. Thank you for teaching me, in particular, because I was ignorant, that the real world is a much nicer place than I ever realized. That beneath the surface manifestation of power in politics, celebrity and wealth, lies something with far more heft --- the ordinary spirit of humanity.”
Charlotte Bronte wrote in Jane Eyre, “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions beside political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.” Messes of various sorts force their way into the existence of all of us, and either we let them smother or crush us, or we do what we can to fix them or go around them.
Finding Forrester is a fascinating and captivating movie about a once-famous young author who disappeared for fifty years, only to reappear when he discovered a 15-year-old brilliant black boy who illustrated enormous promise himself as a would-be writer. William Forrester had written a single novel in his early twenties, which had sold millions of copies. But then, somewhat like J.D. Salinger, he had faded from public view. After several initial skirmishes, the boy, Jamal Wallace, befriended Forrester, who became his literary mentor.
Jamal knew a man who worked at Yankee Stadium. He arranged to take Forrester there one night when the stadium was empty. The man turned on the lights, and William and Jamal walked out to the pitcher’s mound. William told Jamal that his parents, his older brother, and he used to come to every home game back before World War II. Then his brother went off to the war. When he came back, he was an alcoholic; whether because of the war or despite it the famous writer could not say. But Forrester noted that one night after his brother had been drinking too much, he unsteadily drove off, and he who was not killed in combat was killed in the wreckage of a car driven too fast and erratically on the streets of the Bronx. Within six months, William also told Jamal, he buried his brother, his father, and his mother. He never wrote again for publication. But, he said, standing with his young protégé in the center of Yankee Stadium, in a remarkable admission from the crusty old curmudgeon, “This was one the best nights of my life.” He who had become a total recluse was grateful to his new young friend for getting him outside his once fashionable Bronx apartment and into the home of the Bronx Bombers.
Messes don’t have to start out as messes to end up as messes. A soldier coming home from the unspeakable horrors of warfare can turn into someone he never intended. A gifted writer can turn inward in a fifth-floor walkup apartment in a building which once had proclaimed opulence but now proclaimed decay. Once the eggshell is broken, it is impossible to get the contents of the egg back inside. Then what are we to do?
Sometimes we create our own messes. Sometimes others create them for us, either intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes messes just manifest their messy reality all around us, with no causality on anyone’s part, least of all our own.
It always behooves us to straighten out any messes we are capable of straightening out, or to allow others who can fix them to fix them. But we need to trust God to lead us through our messes when there may be no quick solution, or no solution at all.
Trusting in God means more than merely trusting in His existence. It means trusting in His goodness, trusting that His will for us is for good, and that even when we mess up, or others mess up and it affects us, or things mess up entirely on their own and there is nothing to be done about it, we particularly need to trust God.
That was the life lesson passed on to us by the man who healed the sick and gave hope to the brokenhearted and who told the parables which shone a new and glistening light on God the King and on the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, by Thursday of Holy Week the life of that man had turned into a fully indescribable mess, and by the next day he was hanged on a cross.
We must do what we can do to de-mess our messes, let others do what they can to turn them around, and look to God for His guidance and assistance when the messes are beyond human solutions. Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father…. O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come…. Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land. Often messes have immense influence and power. But God has immeasurably more power and influence. He is the Monarch above the Messes, the King above the Chaos.