GOD

Psalm 95: A Season for Worship

shelliwilliams Awareness, Desire for God, GOD, Joy, Worship

Girl WorshippingPsalter:  Psalm 95 (Lent 3A)

O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!  Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!  For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.  In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also.  The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.  O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!  For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would listen to his voice!  Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.  For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.” Therefore in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest.”

Sometimes I think that “worship” in our culture is defined based on how gratifying it is to us, on whether or not it is meaningful to us or leave us feeling “spiritual”.   Our worship is sort of graded based on how good the sermon is, or how wonderful the music is, or how it makes us feel.  I know I fall into that trap.  There are just certain styles of worship and worship music that do not feel “worshipful” to me.  But, really, is that what worship is?  What is the point of worship?  Worshippers in Early Judaism believed that God was actually IN the worship space that they carried with them.  And so they would approach the tabernacle with awe and joy.  They didn’t get wrapped up in worship styles or whether or not they liked the sermon.  Worship was about God, about coming into the very Presence of God with thanksgiving.  Worship was about realizing that there was more than us, that God held all of Creation in the Divine Hands and was worthy of worship.

So, when did we lose that?  When did we lose the notion that worship is not about us? Soren Kierkegaard, when talking about worship, asked that we think about what it means to us.  Using his depiction of worship as a theater, think about your own notion of worship.  Where is the stage?  (Most would say the chancel or the altar.  (Newsflash:  It’s really NOT a stage.))  Who are the actors?  (Most would say the clergy, the choir, and perhaps the ushers and acolytes, those that “make it happen”)  Who is the audience?  (Well, of course the congregation.)  But Kierkegaard would say that the stage is the whole sanctuary, perhaps the whole world, all  of those places where worship happens.  And the actors?  Well that would be us–all of us, all of us bowing in worship.  And the audience?  The audience is God.  I love that.  I think it reminds us that we are not the center of worship.  It is not about us.

The Psalm reminds us that God is the God of all, that everything is within God’s realm, resting in God.  So we are called to make a joyful noise.  It doesn’t call for happiness.  Happiness, that self-gratifying feeling, is always a little bit elusive.  But joy–joy resides in the deepest part of our being.  It is that sense of awe and presence when we know that God is there, always there, and can do nothing else but come into God’s Presence, nothing else but worship the God of us all.  God desires our worship, not because God is selfish, not because God wants to be honored, not because we in some way owe God that; God desires our worship because God desires us, wants desperately to be with us, for us to feel and know and live in God’s Presence.  And, there, there in God’s Presence, we worship.  Our whole lives, we worship.  Every moment, every place, every piece of our being, worships. O Come, Let us Sing to the Lord!

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.  (William Temple)

On this third Sunday of the Lenten Season, think about your own worship.  Who is the audience?  What would it mean for your worship to be solely about God and not about you? 

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

As If Everything Were Downside Up

shelliwilliams Change, GOD, God's Kingdom, JESUS, Lent, Resurrection, Temple, Worship, Worshipping God , , , , ,

 

upsidedownworldScripture Text: John 2: 13-17

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

 

We don’t know what to make of this passage. Oh, we try to make sense of it, sort of clean it up so that it doesn’t look so bad. After all, what happened to that loving, mild-mannered Savior that we knew? What happened to the consummate storyteller that knew how to get everyone to listen to him? What happened to Jesus? Here he is, whip raised like some sort of drunken cowboy herding all the sheep and cattle out of the square outside the temple. And then grabbing all of the baskets of coins from the money changers and throwing them on the ground. So, when he walked away there were animals scattered into the town, tables turned over, coins strewn everywhere, and, I’m assuming, some pretty flabbergasted merchants standing around not knowing what to do.

 

Well, of course, we know why. After all, the temple is God’s house; the temple is a place of reverence and worship. Well, OK, BUT, remember that God dwells everywhere—in you, in me. Remember…God made flesh, Emmanuel, Dwelt among us,..all that stuff. So what exactly was wrong? After all, that was the way society ran. No one was breaking the law. No one was mistreating anyone (or at least not in any way that was not properly sanctioned by both the community and the religious tradition) So what was wrong? Why was Jesus so upset? Because, there they were…essentially selling worship, selling religious practice, selling God.

 

“Horrible!,” we sigh. But think about our own society.  Think about us. Our lives are reward-driven and because of it we live with the idea that we should get what is “due” to us. We believe that by working hard and doing the right things we will be rewarded. And often that carries into our spiritual lives. How many of us do the things we do because we think we should, because we think that it will in some way earn us points with God, or, even, because we think that we are the only ones that can do them? Oh, you know the stuff. If I pray really hard, God will answer. If I have faith, God will reward me. If I serve God, I will feel good. If I study and try my best to make sense of God, God will guide me and everything will turn out alright. It is our own way of merchandising. What do we do because we love God and what do we do because we think that will reap a reward (or at least insure us against future calamity)?

 

Meister Eckhart (13th-14th century German mystic) said that “as long as we strive to get something from God on some kind of exchange, we are like the merchants. If you want to be rid of the commercial spirit, then by all means do all you can in the way of good works, but do so solely for the praise of God.” Eckhart then exhorts us to “live as if you do not exist…then God alone dwells there.” So what would that mean, then, to live as if we do not exist? It means to live without an “if-then” statement. It means to live “as if”, as if God’s Kingdom is here in its fullness and glory, as if all of Creation echoes the song of God, as if God dwells in our midst and you are God’s holy temple (oh, yeah…that one IS supposed to be an already one). We live between the already and the not yet. This season of Lent makes that oh so much more real to us as we journey in the wilderness knowing that the Cross, and, indeed, the Resurrection, God’s ultimate act of bringing the downside up, is up ahead.  But that does not mean that the tables cannot be turned—even now. So, to live as if you do not exist, to live as if God dwells in you as a holy temple, what tables in your life does Jesus need to turn downside up to get your attention? (Or what do you need to do to at least live as if it were that way?)

 

The noblest prayer is when [one] who prays is inwardly transformed into what [one] kneels before. (Angelus Silesius, 17th century)

 

FOR TODAY:  Think about what tables Jesus need to turn downside up in your life so that you can live as if you do not exist.

 

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Lessons From the Desert Fathers

shelliwilliams Awakening, Becoming, Darkness, GOD, LENT, Presence of God, Wilderness , , , , , ,

 

 

The Judean Wilderness, February, 2010
The Judean Wilderness, February, 2010

Scripture Text:  Mark 1: 10-13

10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” 12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Jesus was baptized by John and then the version of the Gospel by the writer we know as Mark has immediately being driven into the wilderness.  Still wet with the waters of life, Jesus began his 40-day quest filled with danger, temptation, and probably questions about his own identity and the ministry that would come.  We struggle with this.  We often get hung up on the whole temptation thing, trying to come up with reasons why Jesus, of all people, would have been tempted.  But the writer of this version of the account doesn’t offer more than a mere mention of that.  Instead, we have Jesus being driven out into the wilderness and then the story picks up a few sentences later.  You see, no one followed Jesus out in the desert to get the first hand account.  He was on his own, alone in the wilderness.

We’re not big fans of wildernesses.  In fact, we try to do everything we can to avoid them, or at least find one that has cellular reception and free WIFI available.  And yet, Jesus was driven into the wilderness, as if he had no choice.  Jesus was forced to spend 40 days in what is essentially a wasteland.  The wilderness was waiting for him, offering something that the crowds and the towns and even the synagogue could not.  The wilderness, the place that no one owns, the place that no one has tamed, the place that no one really wants to beat, the place that will never become something that it is not offers just that–itself.  Jesus is not the first to wander in the wilderness and he was not the last.  A few centuries after this, orders of monks in Northern Africa began to make their way into the desert, into the wilderness to experience God’s Presence unhindered by what humans have attempted to create, unhindered by expectations and schedules.  It was the place where they went to renew their prayer life, to begin again.  There were those, like Jesus, that returned to their lives but with new eyes and new hearts.  There were also though that chose to stay , even though they would remain visitors in a place that was not theirs.  In the wilderness, nothing exists but you and God, and, uninterrupted and unhindered, God can create you yet again.

Our wildernesses come in all forms.  Some are self-imposed and others are those to which we are driven at a time that we have no control over where we are going.  The wilderness is hard and dangerous and uncomfortable.  Some are filled with grief and despair.  Others are wrought with a feeling that we will never get out.  Sometimes the wilderness seems unforgiving, as if it’s only focus is to push us into vulnerability, to push us into temptation.  But the lesson that we learn from the wilderness is that, when everything else is gone, when the clouds make us unable to see the way out, when we feel that it will never end, God is there.  And we have become someone new.

Most of us will not drop out of society and make our way to the wilderness.  Even Jesus returned to Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel.  But in this season that remembers Jesus’ time in the wilderness, we can learn what it means to awaken to God’s Presence, to be mindful of this Presence that is always and forever with us, to, day by day, strip those things away that have our attention.  We can learn what it means to enter an intentional wilderness, a place and a time where God is all we have. These forty days are our emptying time—the time when we strip all of our preconceptions away and meet God where God is—right there with us.  We do not walk this road alone.  God is always there.  And when we are tempted to once again take control, God will still be there.  Lent is the time when we allow God to work on us that we might burst forth on Easter morning in radiant bloom.

We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only the wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.  We can never have enough of nature.  We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. (Henry David Thoreau)

FOR TODAY:  Think of what it would mean to enter an intentional wilderness this Lent, to, day by day strip all those things away that have your attention until all that is left is God, who is recreating you even now.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

 

Always

shelliwilliams Awakening, Awareness, GOD, Listening, Openness to God, Prayer, Preparation, Presence, Presence of God, Response , , ,

Presence of God Scripture Text:  Thessalonians 5: 16-19
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit.  Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.  May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

Pray without ceasing?  Are you kidding me?  Think how much we have to do in this season!  I mean, prayer is a good thing, a great thing in fact.  We all know that.  But pray without ceasing?  As in ALWAYS?  So, what do we do with those distractions, with all those who need us to do something?  What do we do with life?  What do you do with all the preparations that the season holds?  How do you fit that in?  Uh oh…Spirit effectively quenched!  Not good…I hate it when that happens!

 

The truth is, Paul was not telling us that we had to spend our days body-bent and knee-bowed.  The truth is, there is WAY too much work to do.  We’ve got some Kingdom-building to do, after all.  Paul was not calling us to a life spent in prayer but rather to a prayerful life, a life that is sacred, hallowed, a life lived in the unquenchable Spirit of God.  This has nothing to do with counting the number of hours or minutes or nano-seconds that you spend in prayer.  A prayerful life is one that sees everything as hallowed and holy, sees everything as of God, embraces life as a gift rather than a vessel to be filled with things and to do lists and results.  Praying without ceasing is not about “doing”; it is about being. Olga Savin says that “[the Scriptures] tell us that ceaseless prayer in pursuit of God and communion with [God] is not simply life’s meaning or goal, the one thing worth living for, but it is life itself.”  And a life lived the way it is called to be lived is the very will of God, the very will of, as the Scripture says, the one who is faithful.  It is prayer–ceaseless prayer.

 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if in our Advent waiting, we found a time of prayer, we found a time, as Mary did, to ponder (Luke 2: 19).  Maybe THAT’S what’s wrong with us.  Maybe we’ve lost our ability to ponder, to be attentive to what resides in the deepest part of our soul, to be aware of God’s Presence in our lives.  Maybe this time of waiting is so that we’ll take the opportunity to do some serious pondering, to pray without ceasing.  After all, what in your life is NOT holy?  What in your life is NOT positively bursting with the Divine?  What in your life is NOT a gift from God?  Well, the answer is nothing.  There is NOTHING in your life that is not full to the very brim–spilling-over-chock-full-seemingly-unable-to-put-anything-else-in-brim–with the presence of the one who calls you, the one who is faithful, the one who is ALWAYS there.  Make everything you do an offering to God.  Let everything you have and everything you are be a preparation for God’s coming.  Offer it to God.  G.K. Chesterton once said “let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”  Praying without ceasing is probably more about living, about loving, about holy waiting, than it is about prayer as we often define it.  It has little to do with the words we say and everything to do with tuning ourselves to the conversation that God is already inviting us to live.

 

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw—and knew I saw—all things in God and God in all things.  (Mechtilde of Magdeburg, 13th century)

 

FOR TODAY:  Pray without ceasing.  Look around you.  EVERYTHING that you see, EVERYTHING that you touch, EVERYTHING that you imagine, EVERYTHING that you let loose, EVERYTHING that you pick up, EVERYTHING that you eat, EVERYTHING that you love, EVERYTHING that is you…EVERYTHING is full to the brim with God.  Pray without ceasing.

 

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

 

 

Psalm 95: A Season for Worship

shelliwilliams Awareness, Desire for God, GOD, Joy, Worship

Girl WorshippingPsalter:  Psalm 95 (Lent 3A)

O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!  Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!  For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.  In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also.  The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.  O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!  For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would listen to his voice!  Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.  For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.” Therefore in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest.”

Sometimes I think that “worship” in our culture is defined based on how gratifying it is to us, on whether or not it is meaningful to us or leave us feeling “spiritual”.   Our worship is sort of graded based on how good the sermon is, or how wonderful the music is, or how it makes us feel.  I know I fall into that trap.  There are just certain styles of worship and worship music that do not feel “worshipful” to me.  But, really, is that what worship is?  What is the point of worship?  Worshippers in Early Judaism believed that God was actually IN the worship space that they carried with them.  And so they would approach the tabernacle with awe and joy.  They didn’t get wrapped up in worship styles or whether or not they liked the sermon.  Worship was about God, about coming into the very Presence of God with thanksgiving.  Worship was about realizing that there was more than us, that God held all of Creation in the Divine Hands and was worthy of worship.

So, when did we lose that?  When did we lose the notion that worship is not about us.  Soren Kierkegaard, when talking about worship, asked that we think about what it means to us.  Using his depiction of worship as a theater, think about your own notion of worship.  Where is the stage?  (Most would say the chancel or the altar.)  Who are the actors?  (Most would say the clergy, the choir, and perhaps the ushers and acolytes, those that “make it happen”)  Who is the audience?  (Well, of course the congregation.)  But Kierkegaard would say that the stage is the whole sanctuary, perhaps the whole world, all  of those places where worship happens.  And the actors?  Well that would be us–all of us, all of us bowing in worship.  And the audience?  The audience is God.  I love that.  I think it reminds us that we are not the center of worship.  It is not about us.

The Psalm reminds us that God is the God of all, that everything is within God’s realm, resting in God.  So we are called to make a joyful noise.  It doesn’t call for happiness.  Happiness, that self-gratifying feeling, is always a little bit elusive.  But joy–joy resides in the deepest part of our being.  It is that sense of awe and presence when we know that God is there, always there, and can do nothing else but come into God’s Presence, nothing else but worship the God of us all.  God desires our worship, not because God is selfish, not because God wants to be honored, not because we in some way owe God that; God desires our worship because God desires us, wants desperately to be with us, for us to feel and know and live in God’s Presence.  And, there, there in God’s Presence, we worship.  Our whole lives, we worship.  Every moment, every place, every piece of our being, worships. O Come, Let us Sing to the Lord!

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.  (William Temple)

On this third Sunday of the Lenten Season, think about your own worship.  Who is the audience?  What would it mean for your worship to be solely about God and not about you? 

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Becoming Prodigal

shelliwilliams Abundance, Desire for God, GOD
"The Return of the Prodigal Son", Rembrandt, c.
“The Return of the Prodigal Son”, Rembrandt, c. 1667

This Week’s Lectionary Passage: Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 3So he told them this parable:…“There was a man who had two sons. 12The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. 13A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. 14When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. 16He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 17But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! 18I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 19I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ 20So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 22But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. 25“Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. 26He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. 27He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ 28Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. 29But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 30But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ 31Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”

This is truly one of the world’s best-known and best-loved parables.  In fact, it shows up even in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition as well as others, so I would surmise that everyone has a hard time figuring this out.  The truth is, we humans like the image of one being welcomed home.  And even though those of us who try to do everything right, try to be who we’re supposed to be, are a little bothered by our identification with the older son, we like that image of the safety net that no matter how badly we mess our lives up, we can always begin again.

But when you delve a little deeper, there’s always more to the story.  (Oh, come now, you didn’t think that there would just be one level to a parable told by Jesus, did you?)  So, think about the fact that in this time and in this culture, there were expectations.  Land and resources were viewed as a gift to be handled responsibly.  They were ancestral lands and were meant to stay together, to stay within the family, rather than being split apart and divided.  So, this was a shocking parable, far from anything that its hearers could have imagined.  This father who gave away resources to a younger son that then leaves the family was going against all that the culture prescribed.  And a father that welcomed him back was just being duped.  And then to essentially take him back into the family and heap more abundance upon him was just unthinkable.  Good grief, when will this father ever learn?

We have come to equate the word “prodigal” with one who returns.  But if you look up the word, it means one who is recklessly spendthrift.  It also means yielding abundantly.  So how can those two definitions refer to the same word?  Because the notion of abundance, the notion of offering all that you have and all that you are, the notion of being this prodigal father is deemed irresponsible in our world’s view.  And yet, this image of one who offers all as abundance is the image of God that we get over and over again.  God does not dole out riches or rewards based on who we are and what we do; rather God offers everything, pouring as much of the Godself into our lives as we can possibly hold (and then more that we might spill it out into the world around us).  This is a God of abundance.  We don’t understand it.  We can’t control it.  We can’t even really accept it half the time.  We look for a catch.  After all, the world tells us that we cannot get something for nothing.

But “something for nothing” is exactly what God is offered.  God’s only desire is that we open ourselves to this prodigal abundance that God offers.  You’ve probably often heard a description of this parable ending with something like “head home to the open arms of God, the feast is waiting.”  What if the ending was something more like “just open yourselves to the abundance that is right there.  You don’t have to go anywhere.  You don’t have to do anything.  You just have to desire in the deepest part of your being the incredible blessings and abundance that God is already heaping into your life.”

Here is the God I want to believe in:  a Father who, from the beginning of Creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting; never letting his arms drop down in despair, but always hoping that his children will return so that he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest on their shoulders.  His only desire is to bless. (Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 95-96)

So in this Lenten season, open yourself to this Prodigal God, this God of Abundance.  Think what it would mean to become a prodigal, spending lavishly the abundance that God offers and, then, becoming that very abundance yourself.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli

Waiting for Figs

shelliwilliams Forgiveness, GOD, LENT, Repentance

figtree1This Week’s Lectionary Passage: Luke 13: 1-9

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.2He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?3No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.4Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?5No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
6Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.7So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’8He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.9If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

We spend a lot of time trying to make this faith thing make sense, don’t we?  We try to offer reasons for what happens in our life, the good and the bad.  After all, we surmise, everything has a cause and every cause has an effect.  And so we live under the illusion that somehow we have control over things, that somehow everything in some way has got to make sense.  But truth be known, we really don’t have the answers.  In fact, our lives are really pretty precarious when you think about it and sometimes the answer is just that we have to wait and wonder and be willing to just let God be God.  And repent… 

And then we read this parable of the fruitless fig tree.  The owner waited and waited and no fruit appeared.  So, he got tired of it and told the gardener to cut it down.  After all, nothing was happening.  It was just wasting soil.  But the gardener stopped him, offering to nurture it just a little bit more than it had been, putting fertilizer around it, and waiting just a little bit longer. 

Now, granted, this is not one of our warm and fuzzy passages.  Jesus is not healing or welcoming or feeding a crowd.  In fact, this is downright hard, probably because we find way too much of ourselves in it.  We, too, want so badly to find answers to things that happen in our lives that we often lapse into that same notion of God rewarding and punishing based on what we do that these first century followers did.  After all, what other answer could there be?  And then, the fear factor…if we don’t bear fruit, we get cut down?  If we don’t repent, we’ll die?

Well, do you remember the Book of Job, the quintessential story of all in life that makes no sense at all, that has no answer,  that comes to us from the margins of faith, those places where we’d rather not go?  You remember it…Job, righteous and reverent, loses everything he has.  And most of the book is about his so-called friends and even Job trying to figure out why.  After all, God doesn’t just pull life out from under someone for no reason.  Job must have done something.  He must have not been who he was supposed to be.  The truth is, Job and his friends, like us, I’m afraid, inherited a somewhat myopic world of retribution and distributive justice.  It is hard to imagine a God who loves us just to love us and who, when bad things do happen, when life begins to feel like a whirlwind, appears into the depths of our being to help us stand, to help us walk, and to wait…just a little bit longer.

That’s where that turning, that repentance comes in.  You see, our problem is that we see repentance as a negative thing.  We envision repentance as a change toward being “right” or “moral” or something else that will win us favor with God or rack us up enough points to get us into heaven.  That’s why we sometimes have this Job-like image of God as some controlling entity that pulls some sort of Divine strings based on what we do.  But what kind of God is that?  Repentance is not about losing who you are; it’s not about becoming a puppet of some sort of string-pulling God; it means discovering the wonder of who you are meant to be.

The Greek word that is usually translated as “repentance” is metanoia.  In Classical Greek, it meant to change one’s mind, one’s heart, one’s soul, one’s life.  Penance was not a part of it until later.  We did that to it!  It simply meant to follow a different road.  But, as Jesus said, unless you repent…unless you change course…unless you let go of the life that you’ve created and the image of this string-pulling God that you’ve somehow concocted, and listen to the road that beckons before you, you will remain comfortable and secure and right where you are.  And you will, surrounded by comfort and answers, die!  But, oh, what you will miss!  Frederick Buechner says, “To repent is to come to your senses.  It is not so much something you do as something that happens.  True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,” than to the future and saying, “Wow!” ( Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (San Francisco:  HarperCollins, 1973), 79.) 

So, what does this have to do with waiting on figs?  It sounds a little bit like a threat.  OK, one more chance you lazy fig tree.  Because if you don’t, you will die and that will be it.  You have one more chance to get it right, to repent, to turn, or, that’s it.  Well, you know as well as I that there are well-meaning people in pulpits all over the world saying exactly that.  You have one more shot!  And that it!  Oh, that’s not it at all!  Read it again.  There’s always another chance.  There’s always someone that will come along to nurture and wait patiently for us to turn, for us to change, for us to see what we’re missing.  You see, there ARE consequences for those who do not repent.  But it has nothing to do with punishment.  It has to do with missing who we’re called to be, missing out on the life that is offered us, missing out on being able to see what God is showing us.  And that, my friends, IS a form of dying.

You know, it’s an interesting thing about figs–the common fig bears a first crop, called the breba crop, in the spring on last season’s growth. The second crop is borne in the fall on the new growth and is known as the main crop.  But the fruits cannot happen without the first crop and, likewise, without the last season.  Essentially, the fruit sprouts from a seemingly fruitless crop.  Maybe the gardener saw that.  I think God certainly does.  See God sees things that we miss, things that our eyes, unadjusted as they are to the light, have not seen yet.  God is good at leading us through our darkness and nurturing us over and over again.  The truth is, God is pretty incredible at patiently waiting for figs.

And yet, with all the omnipotence that we imagine God to have, God cannot pull strings.  Because there is one thing that the Almighty cannot do because God in God’s infinite Wisdom placed the power to choose in our hands.  And so God cannot coerce us to love or to serve or to respond.  God cannot force us to see what God is showing us.  And so God waits for figs to bloom and the world to change.  And God holds us and guides us and picks us up off the bottom of our existence time and time again.  There’s always another season.

We read this passage in our Lenten season because it is our season to wake up, to open our eyes, to turn, to love, and to learn that sometimes the world that we see does not make sense.  But it’s not all up to us.  God is waiting patiently for our response.  God knows it’s hard.  After all, it just doesn’t make sense.  We wish it made sense.  G.K. Chesterton said “to let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”  You see, God just desires that we love.  And for that God waits.  God knows that there’s always a little bit more time to wait for figs. 

So in this Lenten season, turn toward God and wait for figs.

Grace and Peace,

Shelli