repentance, empathy, and uninspired fig trees: a sermon in lent.

Luke 13:1-9

a note:  this sermon was proclaimed at st. mark's lutheran church, san francisco, on march 3rd, 2013.

            I watched the news last night, here’s a sample of the stories being presented:

Man shot and killed in a high speed chase

Man presumed to have stolen a vehicle killed in yet another high speed chase

A suspected kidnapper is dead after a police standoff

Two Police shot in the line of duty

A 29 year old woman has been missing for 10 days

The effects of the government sequester cuts are said to effect many local programs and Limited access to health care is keeping many from receiving the treatment they need.

--All in the first 15 minutes of the programming. 

This is our world—Full of heartbreak, grief, brokenness, suffering, oppression, tears, hatred, pain—We are literally bombarded with the brokenness of our world.  Our access to 24 hour news channels, the internet, social media, or radio allows the hurt, the violence, the noise of our brokenness to permeate into our daily lives.  Yet, somehow, it is incredibly easy to tune this noise out.  It is incredibly easy to forget the calamities that saturate our world.  Somehow, I can gaze upon the news every night and not be absolutely horrified.  Why is that?  Why does it take a calamity so large that I can not ignore it for me to lament, “Christ have mercy!”? 

            Perhaps this overloading of reality has caused us to be numb.  News story after news story of painful brokenness—perhaps we protect ourselves by tuning out. Acknowledging the hurt of another human being causes us to see the suffering of our own humanity, thinking about the ways in which we too are broken—and that is painful.  It’s much easier to block out the realities of our world than to acknowledge the hurt that is so palpably present.

            I don’t believe that this is a recently developed phenomenon.  In the gospel text for today, the people surrounding Jesus are aware of the painful happenings of their world—murders by political figures, security threats, disastrous accidents that kill innocent bystanders—Yet they, too, do all that they can to acknowledge their own safety, assuring themselves that the brokenness of the world does not pertain to their own existence.  They distance themselves from the events, from their own reality, finding clever ways to explain away their own vulnerability or participation in the world’s brokenness.  After hearing their musings, Jesus firmly reconnects these people to the reality of their world.  While the people gathered wanted to distance themselves from those who suffered in the events of their time, Jesus points out their own vulnerability. The people gathered wanted to believe that the horrific events of that time happened to horrific people— surely those who perished must have done something to deserve it and that complacency of those gathered is warranted.

To this type of thinking--distancing, desensitizing, individualizing—Jesus responds: “Repent!”  To distance oneself from the world’s brokenness is to ignore the raw humanness that connects us all.  To desensitize oneself to the pain and hurt of our reality is to ignore the ways in which we all hurt.  And to want to believe that the oppression in our world does not pertain to us, or to our own realities, is to ignore the fact that we can indeed do something about it—and it is to this that Jesus says “Repent!”. 

The word, “repent,” in the original Greek is one that has been studied over and over again by pastors and theologians.  The way the verb is used in this text is a bit different from other uses: Here the call to repentance could also be a call to feel remorse, or to change the way we think of our moral, social, political, or religious relationships.  This feeling of remorse in connection to our relationships in the world, I like to think of as empathy.  In this text, Jesus’ call for repentance is a call for empathy.  When we empathize with another we connect ourselves to their story on a much deeper level.  When we allow ourselves to feel the emotions of another human being we open ourselves up to a world that is interconnected and mutual.  When we truly understand the hurt and pain of another, it is then that we are able to begin changing the systems that lead to that same hurt. 

This same form of the Greek verb to repent is used earlier in Luke where Jesus proclaims that the Kingdom of God is not possible until we learn to repent, until we learn to share our sufferings with one another.  This world cannot be the Kingdom, the beautiful place that God has intended, until we learn the reasons why our neighbor cries and the ways in which we can do something about it. 

As my husband Nikoli and I prepared to travel to El Salvador this past Thanksgiving, we watched a film on Oscar Romero that detailed the suffering, oppression, and deep pain of the Salvadoran people during the civil war.  The film came to a close and we let the credits role in silence until the screen went blank—then we cried.  We held each other and we cried for the people of El Salvador.  We cried for the people who lost loved ones unjustly, we cried for the people who witnessed the violent massacre of their neighbors, we cried for the people we would meet at Cordero de Dios whose memories will not let them forget the horrors of civil war.  We were not ready to travel to El Salvador, to walk alongside the people of Cordero de Dios, until we opened ourselves to feeling their hurt.  This process was uncomfortable—it hurt to acknowledge the pain that God’s children can inflict on one another and it was painful to gaze upon the messy chaos of our world—but in doing so we were better able to connect with our brothers and sisters in El Salvador, and while we were there, sharing stories and indulging in pupusas together on the dusty concrete floor of the sanctuary, we were able to get a glimpse of the Kingdom of God. 

Sometimes it’s easier to turn off the news than to acknowledge that the world we live in messy.  It difficult to do the hard work of understanding systems of oppression and it’s uncomfortable to sit in the suffering of another.  But we are not called to complacency.  We are not called to be flies on the wall.  We are called to be disciples—voices against oppression, agents for justice.  We are called to be a part of the good news that is the gospel—believing and standing firm in faith that a world can exist where no one will cry, where all of God’s children will be equal, and where peace, justice and love will prevail.  And if you think that this task at times seems too daunting, know that your God will walk with you always.  Like the story of the fig tree that just can seem to bear fruit, God will continue to encourage you, give you second chances, and believe in you even when you doubt in your own abilities.