31 At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” 32 He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. 33 Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ 34 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 35 See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ”
Year C
Second Sunday of
Lent
February 21, 2016
Cross~Wind
February 24, 2013
Cross~Wind UMC
March 4, 2007
Crawfordsville First
UMC
Title: Recovering
our Spiritual Center
The Movie: Life as a House, in which a man rebuilds a house
with his estranged son. The Scene: When Sam puts the Christmas lights on the
house, so his father can see them from his hospital room where he lies dying.
Introduction
I am thinking about homes today. Suzanne and I have thought a bit more
about them as we age. United Methodist clergy do not generally get to buy a
home during their careers.
I recall being on a mission trip to South Carolina several years ago.
We were working on a home on John’s Island. Several persons said it would have
been easier to build a new home. I asked Bruce, our project leader, about that
observation. His response was simple. “The foundation was good.” Therefore, we
ripped out almost everything for the week, and prepared the ground for the next
work team to start building the home.
A house is so important to us. The building is what you see. You do not
see the foundation. The most important aspect of the house is that it becomes a
home for a person or family. It becomes the hub of activity and rest.
I thought of this as I read an article about the collapse of a house in
Maine. I can just hear the soil engineer say, "There's a solid ledge under
this dry ground." I have found many images of houses in Maine along the
coast. Most of them do fine. In this case, the house became a home for a
family. Sadly, twenty years later, after the sea had done its secret work, a
rain from an offshore hurricane came to wash away the remaining silt and sand
from beneath the so-called solid ledge. Half of the home tumbled into a
suddenly created hole where once there was solid ledge. A family lost its home.
Another image of the home has been the home foreclosure crisis. Many
communities have desolate houses. With no one tending them, the buildings start
to crumble, eaves begin to sag, windows get smashed, mold becomes a problem,
yards become overgrown and vandals, squatters or drug dealers add to the
deterioration. The houses begin to die and so do the neighborhoods in which
they sit.
Is it natural for us to have some sadness when someone loses a home?
We might consider the difficulties of another building.
Take the Italian engineers trying to save the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The work on the tower began August 9, 1173. The people who worked on it
designed the 177-foot structure to be perpendicular. The combined weight of the
32 million pounds of marble pressed onto and into the soft, silted soils,
squeezing water from clay underneath, bulging into the dense sand beneath. Since
then, the building seemed constantly verged on collapse. Its 5.3 degree tilt is
a full 15 feet out of plumb. Finally, computer models proved that the tower was
going to fall. Thanks to some hi-tech engineering the Leaning Tower is now
moving, centimeter by centimeter, in the right direction. Of course, it will
still lean a little - preserving the tourist trade for the city.
Application
Each of these stories can remind us that spiritual health is not always
easy to detect.
The beautiful thing is that God is the master builder, if only we would
listen.
First, I am asking you to recover your spiritual center.
Among the lessons from physical buildings is that the “center” of a
house is not the geometric center of the house. The “center” is outside the house,
being the foundation. If the foundation is not solid, the house is in trouble.
We, too, need to stop our spiritual house from collapsing. After all,
none of us, to use the example of that leaning Tower, is perpendicular and in
plum. We will not reach moral perfection. God does expect us to listen to the
witness God has given us in the Bible. God expects us to be faithful in
aligning our lives with that witness. Of course, we are fallen creatures. We
are “crooked timber” as Immanuel Kant put it. We are capable of so many great
things, and at the same time so deeply flawed. Yet, if we ignore the warnings,
it will fall as surely as that home in Maine fell and the Tower of Pisa would
have fallen and as, indeed, the house (Temple) of Jerusalem did fall.
Perhaps it is time to do a soil and soul analysis. Lent is a good time
for that.
Albert Camus, the French existentialist and author of The Plague and other works, approached
Howard Mumma, the pastor of the American Church in Paris. "I am searching
for something I do not have, something I'm not sure I can define," he
said. Maybe you are like that.
Are you searching for that center?
Will your faith stand the rising waters in life's tempest? Will trouble
or temptation undermine your soul's foundation?
We are in a political season. I know some people vote of habit. Some vote
of disgust with the opposing party. Think seriously about your political
center. What are the core principles that guide your vote?
One of the reasons I have enjoyed our Lent emphasis on the Jesus Creed
is that it provides a center. We can, with a little work, recite it: Hear, O
Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with
all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. With a lot of
work, we might build our lives upon it and organize our lives around it.
Second, I am also suggesting that change
is not easy.
To correct the Pisa tilt, they inaugurated three important processes:
The bad soil needed to be extracted, a solid foundation needed to replace the
bad soil, and steel cables need to hug the structure assuring it would tilt no
further.
Do you have bad soil to extract?
Do you have a solid foundation with which to replace it?
Do you have a structure built into your life that will hold your life
together in tough times as well as easy times?
If we do not, listen carefully. You might hear Jesus weeping over you.
The popular TV cop show The Closer, running from 2005-12, contains a
different type of failure to care for spiritual foundations. I have only
watched a few shows here and there. The show is on my Netflix list to watch
sometime. However, I came across a description of a powerful set of episodes.
The main character, Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, was an effective
police officer with an innate ability to discern who the bad people were and
wrangle admissions of guilt out of them. Nevertheless, she had one habit that
drove her family and co-workers nuts: When she was hot on a case, she focused so
intently that she usually deflected their requests for her attention, even if
they only wanted a brief moment, putting them off until "later." As
the series went along, it became obvious that she was always behind in tending
the most important relationships in her life, and in an episode near the end of
the series, it caught up with her.
In that episode, Brenda's parents, whom she loved deeply but too often
shortchanged with her time, are visiting in her home. Just after Brenda gets a
fresh lead on her current case, her mother asks for a moment to tell her
something important. Reluctant to look away from her case, Brenda promises to
give her some time over breakfast the next morning. Her mother agrees, but
looks disappointed. The next morning, intending to keep her date with her
mother, Brenda goes to the guest bedroom to awaken her, only to find that Mama
has died unexpectedly during the night. That episode ends with Brenda screaming
for her husband who comes and rushes her from the room.
The next episode, set a week or so later and after the funeral, has
Brenda, still grieving and badly shaken, back at work, where in a reflective
moment, she tells a co-worker that she's sorry for not listening to him better.
Then she adds, "Funny, I feel like I pay more attention to what murderers
have to say while ignoring the people I really care about." In the
concluding scene of that episode, her husband finds her sitting on the bed
where her mother died. She says to him, "The last time I saw Mama, she
asked me if I had a minute, and I didn't have the time just then. Now, I'm the
one who could really use a minute, and Mama has no time at all." The
episode ends with her weeping -- inconsolably -- in her husband's arms.
Conclusion
Improper or deferred maintenance is always bad for relationships, and
that includes our spiritual ones as well. We too often let the urgent and
trivial things in our lives to place such important matters as our spiritual
lives on the back burner. We will tend to it later, we convince ourselves.
Change is not easy. Yet a spiritual center of loving God and loving others is
as simple and as difficult as I can say it.
Even if you have laid the proper foundation, be careful how you build
upon it. An unattended spiritual house can yield a life that can look good on
the outside. Change is not easy here either. We can become accustomed to
repetition. It becomes a matter of going through the motions. Loving God and others
will keep your life spiritually fresh and renewed.
You do not have to wait until the crash. You can listen to the
warnings. Take some time this Lent to tend to your spiritual house.
Going deeper
Luke 13:31-33 is a pronouncement
story against Herod. The
story is unique to Luke. Luke recounts the events of the ministry of Jesus as a
long journey to Jerusalem taken by Jesus and his companions. The journey begins
in 9:51 and continues through 19:27. Luke breaks up the account of the journey
into three sections, each beginning with a mention of Jerusalem as the fateful
destination of Jesus in 9:51, 13:22 (the context for this incident), and 17:11.
Is Jesus still in Galilee?
31 At that very hour some
Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod [Antipas,
Tetrach of Galilee, whose official residence and regional capital city,
Sepphoris, was four miles north of Nazareth.] wants to kill you.” [We
might infer from this that Jesus is still in Galilee. Luke 9:7-9 has Herod
confused over hearing about Jesus, thinking that he had already rid himself of
troublesome prophets when he executed John the Baptist. Do the Pharisees warn Jesus out of respect for him? Do they warn him
because they want him out of their territory? We do not know.]32 He said to them, “Go and tell
that fox for me, [Jesus assumes
these Pharisees have an inside track with Herod, which would be a safe
assumption]‘Listen, I am casting out
demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish
my work. 33 Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my
way, [Jesus reassures Antipas that
he is leaving, the reference to the three days foreshadowing the days
between death and resurrection] because
it is impossible [divine necessity
in that Jesus “must” fulfill his destiny] for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’[The taunt by Jesus might both reassure and
annoy. This statement would be disrespectful in the sense that Antipas is
incapable of killing him. Jesus has no fear of Antipas. He also anticipates
what will happen. He is a prophet with a message from God for that city, and he
will die there, like so many prophets before him. Thus, a prophet is not
welcome in his home country (Luke 4:24, Mark 6:4, Matthew 13:57, John 4:44),
but Jesus also makes it clear that he will share the fate of other prophets
before him. For the image of Jerusalem as the city that kills the prophets
and stones those God sends to it, we can go to Matthew 23:37-39 as well. In
Matthew 22:6 and Luke 7:52, Israel generally has a tendency to kill the
prophets. Jeremiah 26:20-23 has the
story of Uriah, who managed to escape to Egypt, but whom King Jehoiakim brought
back to the city to execute because he uttered a prophecy of which the king did
not approve. Jesus was well aware that his public utterances put his life in
peril. Herod has already killed John the Baptist. Luke 11:50-51 (also Matthew
23:29-37) relate the execution of Zechariah in the courts of the temple,
recording in II Chronicles 24:20-22. The king who executed Zechariah was Joash.
Interestingly, the father of the prophet was the High Priest, Jehoiada, who
saved the life of the king from the murderous Queen Athaliah. One can read of
this intrigue in II Kings 11:1-21 and II Chronicles 22:10-23:21. Yet, Joash had
Zechariah killed in spite of this. Among the parables of Jesus is that of the
wicked tenants. Jesus likens the prophets to the servants of a vineyard owner
whom the tenants kill. When the owner sends his son, they kill him as well. See
Luke 20:9-19, Mark 12:1-12, and Matthew 21:33-41 for this story.]
Luke 13:34-35 contains a saying
concerning lament over Jerusalem. The source is Q.
34 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, [the saying anticipates the arrival of Jesus
in Jerusalem and final lament in Luke 19:41-44] the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! [Barth reflects on the history of the
covenant Israel had with God, where the presence of the Lord elects them in
divine action and powerful work of faithfulness and goodness. Yet, Israel followed its ancestors in the
wilderness in complaint and disobedience. The elect people of God will not be
neutral in the face of what God said and did in Jesus. Israel had the
possibility of Yes, but it also had the alternative of a No of the most radical
rejection, repudiation, and resistance. He stresses they were not wicked. In
many ways, they were much better than their Roman and Greek contemporaries
were. Yet, everything was at stake. It was a matter of life and death. Israel
understood the question that Jesus put to it and the situation that allowed it
to arise. It could not accept it. It was inevitable that Jesus would meet
repudiation and resistance.[1]]How often [this would imply that Jesus made many visits to Jerusalem] have I desired to gather your children
together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, [an acceptable image of his time, taken from Isaiah 31:5, God as a bird
hovering protectively over Jerusalem. The image of the sheltering wings of God
under which the people find refuge is one we find in Deuteronomy 32:11, Ruth
2:12, Psalm 17:8, 57:1, 61:4, and 91:4. Here is the only time Jesus uses a
female image for himself.] and you
were not willing! [This saying seems to view the death of Jesus as a
prophetic destiny known in advance from the Old Testament.[2] 35 See, your house is left to you. [The house in question is the temple. Jeremiah 22:5 in the LXX has the
additional word “desolate,” a word we also find in most manuscripts of the
parallel in Matthew 23:38. I Kings 9:7, Jeremiah 12:7, and Tobit 14:4 focus on
the coming destruction of the temple of Solomon. This brief statement reflects a prophecy concerning the besieging and
destruction of Jerusalem as a judgment of God the people of God. Early
Christianity saw a fulfillment of this prophecy in the siege and overthrow of
the city by Titus in 70 AD.[3]] And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say,
‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ” [Quote from Psalm 118:26, which we will
hear again in Luke 19:38 and John 12:13. On Palm Sunday, Jerusalem greeted
Jesus as the heir to the throne of David, riding into Jerusalem on a royal
donkey, as did Solomon when he became king in I Kings 1:33-35. Zechariah 9:9
prophesied the coming Messiah in this way. Jerusalem spread its garments before
Jesus as Samaria did before Jehu in II Kings 9:13, and five days later the city
executed him. In essence, the saying
presents Jesus as a heaven-sent messenger and herald of the wisdom of God
commenting on the sad condition of Jerusalem. As such, this saying links the
idea of preexistence, which we find in Jewish wisdom speculation in Proverbs
8:22-23 and Sirach 24:3ff, to the figure of Jesus in the tradition concerning
him.[4]
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