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A Sermon for Judson Memorial Church
March 11, 2007
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Clear the Haze
I was just with an old friend's 94-year-old mother. Word was out was that she was breathing her last; I rushed to the hospital. When I got there, I saw a fully intibated woman moving her head back and forth in nervous distress. The doctor was there and remembered the "pad" trick. She could at least write, so he got her a pad and she weakly scrawled on it, "Water." He said to her - we think that hearing is the last function to go - "Anita, do you want something to drink? Are you thirsty?" Instead of getting what we thought we would get, which was a pathetic but certain yes, we got an angry shake of the head NO.
Back to the paper. When I returned the paper to her, she scrawled on it with even greater effort, "Water the plants." She was not ready to die. She was still caring about something outside of herself. And here we were having the "turn off the intibator" conversation in the waiting room! How wrong we would have been. Having said that, and hoping the reader appreciates the gallows humor of the situation, permit me to move on to my real subject. It is not that you water the plants. Instead, it is that you receive the water. For today I want you to be the plant, not the waterer. I want you to be the fig tree, not the gardener. I want you to be the fig tree, not Jesus. This Lenten transformation is important to me because of many things I notice about you, as individuals and as Judson.
Just look at the calendar of events in the bulletin. Please, don't go to all those things. And when the announcements start, and soon they will - the only question is whether they will stop - I beg of you not to be personally involved in all that is beckoned. Trust the community to be involved, or if you are already comfortable with being a fig tree, trust the land. Atlas needs to shrug more and lift less.
Let's be clear about this fig tree business. Somebody owned a fig tree. For three years it did not fruit. The gardener was in trouble. The gardener asked for one more year and got it. In the NRSV we have the delicate language, "Let me dig around it and put manure on it." In other words, let me cultivate it, aerate it, feed it. Why should the poor tree have to fruit if it doesn't have the nourishment it needs itself? Why should the poor have to produce? Why should the empty have to give out? That tree was starving for some missing nutrient. It was not fruitless for no reason. In the King James version, the gardener simply says, "Let me dung it." I doubt that many of you will find this form of nourishment appealing, especially since today my message is that someone needs to dung us, which is to say to feed our roots, to dig into the soil around us and put something that is missing in it. Yes, that is to say put s@#% all around us and dig it in.
Yes, this sermon is all about selfishness. It is pro-selfishness. It is about clearing the haze that comes from moralism on behalf of the clarity that comes from sustainable selves. Many of us are just plain foggy most of the time. We don't know what is really important so we do everything. Selfishness clears the haze: it says know who you are and take good care of who you are. Selfishness starts with the self and moves to the world and does so for two large sets of reasons; the first set are spiritual, the second set practical. I'll start with the spiritual. Who did my deathbed friend think she was? She thought she was who she has been for 94 years: a matriarch (I think she was born that way), the last Samurai of the "save the world over lunch" set. Yes, she ran a UN women's group, you know the kind: why bother with the local garden club when there was a whole world to consider? She had allusions of grandeur, which a little cancer and pneumonia did not stop. She was a giver, not a receiver. To call her imperialist or idolatrous would be unfair, but to note that even under conditions when a little giving back to her might have been warranted, she could not receive. When we only give and don't receive, only fruit and never fallow, only imagine ourselves as the gardener and never as the tree, we stand comfortably on the threshold of both idolatry and imperialism. These are forms of spiritual impoverishment, not wealth.
From these idolatrous places, we get tired. We just get tired. We get tired of hearing about how warm winters have upset the rhythms of maple sugar. Like the maple, we get tapped and we get sapped. You know what I mean by sapped: where we want to press the pause button on life. There sits global warming - we should, must do something about it but what might we do? We are tapped out of ideas and sapped of spiritual strength. The accumulation of things about which we might do something is such that the bulletin has turned into a nearly punitive document, as has the New York Times. I keep obsessively clipping stories about which I might say something to you. The message of no fruit goes on and on. The war. The endless tyrannical absurd fruitless violent dangerous terror producing rather than terror abating war. When I say that, most of us click into Atlas mode. We say, "I gotta do something about it." Gotta, gotta, gotta, and gotta we do. We gotta fruit about this war and produce instead of devastate in the Middle East. Oh, did I mention Colony Collapse Disorder, the sudden death of beehives? Did I mention justice for Sean Bell and Amadou Diallou? Or children being thrown out of windows and fires burning nine of them to death? Did I mention Ann Coulter's use of the word faggot to talk about people? And did I mention Scooter Libby taking the hit for the government of the so-called freest country in the world, a government not able to abide criticism about its policies? Did I mention the FBI and the thoroughly predictable and widely predicted dissolution of civil liberties?
Have I taken into account what many of our days are like? Some of you are the directors of endless forms and computer complexities. My own husband may be chair of his department but most days he is filling out forms that someone somewhere else thinks are necessary. How do forms get the teaching of history done? And how dare we not fill them out? Some of you have cell phones that didn't reset for daylight savings time. Some of you, like me, went to the drug store only to be snarled at. You thought your doctor would have done what she said she would do. She did not. You were upset. You told the pharmacist that you would be thrilled to come back on your lunch hour, again, tomorrow, to pick it up. You thanked them for giving you another opportunity to stand in line. But the people at Duane Read weren't amused. Added to the astonishing fruitlessness of the world is the astonishing amount of time most of us have to put in just to pick up our prescriptions, do our taxes, work our jobs, undress in airport "security" lines...
I have often wondered how prophetic ministry has a prayer in times like these, when speed up and fear is predominant at the work place and my job is to ask you to do things on top of that. How ridiculous. We might even say fruitless.
Thus I am changing my approach. I have long known that we live with contradictory biblical commandments. Are we to save or savor the world? I think the answer is both - and I think this little parable tells us that we are first to savor, then to save. My advocacy of selfishness, of taking care of ourselves first, is spiritual first, then practical.
Before we save the world, we must remember to savor it. Before we fruit the Middle East, we should fruit ourselves. Before we empty on behalf of another, we should fill ourselves up. And always we should interrogate the haze about fruiting: is fruiting that important, after all? Does just being without producing have a chance in this world?
Selfishness is willing to fruit but wants to think about it first. Selfishness understands the haze of commands and takes a good hard look at them. Selfishness sees that prophetic action, anything that saves any little part of the world, comes from the overflow of our full fountain. It is my cup runneth over time, not my cup empties out. We do care for the world, but we care for it from nourishment, not hunger or thirst. We are just trees. We are not gardeners. And we are not God. We are just trees.
We can grow a few figs, each of us, and that's it. Trying to be more or imagine that we are more produces Colony Collapse Disorder, the sudden death of hives, and the sure death of spirit.
So eat something. Dung yourself. Always fasten your seat belt in a plane that is bouncing around before you fasten that of the child next to you. Understand that you are a tree, not a gardener, a person, not a giving or doing machine.
What is the source of our activity of saving the world? I think Howard Moody said it very well last spring when he preached here a very powerful, very simple sermon. He said that his fertilizer was trust. He didn't know about belief so much as he knew about trust. The source of saving the world is our trust that another way and another world is possible. We are not the agents of that world. We do not "bring it on." That is idolatry and arrogance. Instead we trust something larger than ourseleves, like manure or God, each other or the poor, to bring justice and peace on.
Whenever we over-garden, and over-role ourselves as gardeners, we forget that we are trees. Just trees. Wow. What a great thing to be a fruiting tree. What a great thing just to be a tree. How dare anyone kill us because we haven't fruited for three years? God is giving us at least another year - and my bet is more, if we need it.
Spiritually, we replace trust and grace for arrogance and hyperactivity. Sounds like fun to me. Practically, we do less. We do less intentionally. And by that intentionality we do more. We work on fruiting a little bit, not a lot. We get a hold of the fog and haze of commandments and bring them to clarity about our fruiting. That task alone is manure for most people today. Very few us dare to clear the haze and think our own thoughts. We think we are supposed to be hazy or do everything that everybody wants us to do. That produces the over-doneness all by itself.
Everyone is talking about that film about silence. I wonder why.
I had Rip Van Winkle read on purpose today. We are Rip. We are just waking up in the 21st century and clearing the fog so that we can see who and where we are. It may be that demonstrations will no longer work to bring on peace. It may be that human beings need to reinterpret themselves before anything will be done about global warming, specifically this notion of ourselves as agents. We think we are those who water the plants, not those who need water. I think a redefinition of who first-worlders are will do more to save the air than any demonstration.
I also think a redefinition of Judson may do more to maintain our avant-garde legacy than anything else. Is new the same as it was "way back then?" Is creative the same? How blinded are we by our missing dog, our rusty gun, our old days and old ways? Can we really see over the hill to the next period of time or are we looking back? I say this both about Judson and myself.
A lot of haziness is the past itself. Sometimes it almost glows. The way it never was is part of the air we breathe. Consider one lover saying to another, over and over again, "Do you remember how great we used to be?" Wow. The past becomes haze. Then it becomes hazy. Then we become hazy. Clear the haze. Rip van Winkle did; we can, too. When people say "get over the sixties," what do they mean? I think they mean a missing nutrient in the land surrounding our growth. For me that missing nutrient is time, it is the time famine that we all experience. Human beings can't fruit when we are hyperactive. For others the missing nutrient is respect. I think of so many of us whose daily jobs disrespect us. For others the missing nutrient is trust. I don't recommend it lightly. Telling someone who has been hurt or abused to "trust the land" is ridiculous unless you plan on being trustworthy yourself. Surely the world, which should be our manure, is precisely the opposite: the free market system convinces us that our very bread depends on our own individual productivity. What a concept! How utterly wrong! But these commandments are in the very soil that grows us. So we gotta be productive, not just in the marketplace, but also at home, at work, at church, and in saving the world. The orders are out: be productive. Fruit, God darn it. Fruit. Some of us might want to say no, I like my tree just the way it is. Looking at the deeper demands of fruit may be just the sort of birth control the world needs.
Anyway, I read the fig tree parable as recommending selfishness. You are a tree, not a gardener and not God. Be selfish some way. Nourish yourself. And then water the plants. Amen.
Ancient Testimony: Luke 13: 1- 9
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