Rev. Stina Pope, Holy Innocents,
March 14, 2004

As Rosa Lee said, the Lenten readings are difficult, challenging, and
sometimes mysterious. The story of Moses and the burning bush has
held the imagination for centuries. The things that Jesus says are more
than a little alarming, and the epistle! Well, let’s just say it causes even
more problems. It puts the sin of grumbling right up there with immorality,
but I digress.

One of the things that preachers do is to read the lessons, hopefully early
in the week, and mull over them, letting them simmer, and seeing what
rises to the top. Sometimes I talk about it as the thing that “pops” for me.
Sometimes there is a thread that runs through all of the lessons,
or at least two of them, since usually the OT and Gospel are tied somehow,
and if the epistle goes with it, it’s a gracious accident. Other times something
will pop out of one of the lessons.

This morning’s readings reveal a thread to me, which rather radically
change the focus we make. First a word on focus, second some
background on the texts themselves, and then the thread.
You will find that focus is an incredibly important concept for me.
Where we focus our attention helps form our reality, since what
we perceive does form our reality. Does that make sense?
Perception is reality, that is, what we perceive as real makes it real for us,
and nothing else counts. Our perceptions can change, and when they do,
our reality changes, but until the perception changes, the reality doesn’t.
Therefore, what we choose to focus on has a great deal to do with what
we will perceive, and thus what forms our reality. Enough on that,
I think you get the point.

Now to the texts themselves. Good old Moses, he’s run away,
out to the desert and is tending his father-in-law’s sheep, and there
is an epiphany, a showing-forth from God. Moses is curious, a creosote-laden
tumbleweed on fire is not such a strange thing in the desert, tumbleweeds
do burn very easily, but this one doesn’t seem to be burning up in
the usual fashion, so he approaches it, carefully. Fire is a dangerous
thing, even when there is a lot of sand around.

Look at the words here. God sees that Moses has noticed the bush
and turned aside to see it. This language is very careful, he doesn’t
just look at it, he turns aside, he moves out of his normal path to go
look at this thing. God then speaks to him out of the fire, tells him to
take his shoes off because he is on holy ground –
interesting that the Islamic world understands this concept of holy ground
in a way that we don’t. Then he gets into a conversation with God,
who tells him to go back to the world he ran away from and to redeem it.
He argues with God, he engages in a little piece of trickery –
if he can get God to tell him God’s “name” he will have control.
God doesn’t fall for it, of course, he says, I AM, tell them I AM sent you.

Then, having a little kindness, God says, you can tell them that the
god of their ancestors, the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has sent you.
But God says, you yourself are the sign that I have sent you.
To my mind this seems disingenuous. I show up saying God sent me,
and that the sign that God has done this is that I am here? But one of the
things we have to understand is that our logic does not match their logic.
As delicious as picking apart the argument is, and what they meant here,
because it really is quite funny, I want to focus on Moses’ action.
Nothing really happens until Moses turns from his path to go see what
God is up to. When he does that, his life is changed.

It is this turning that I want to focus on this morning. When we go to the
Gospel, we find that for Luke, the good news is that repentance is possible
and forgiveness is given. Over and over we find Luke saying
“look, look, repent, you can still save yourself, and if you do,
God will forgive, isn’t it wonderful?” Now at first blush, the Gospel reading
doesn’t sound too wonderful. Some folks come up to Jesus and are
telling the story about how Pilate killed some Galileans as they were
making their sacrifice to God, with that rather intense phrase,
Pilate had mingled their blood with their sacrifice. Remember that Jesus
grew up in the Galilee. His response sounds rather severe, doesn’t it?
So you think you’re any better than them? Get over it! If you don’t repent,
you’ll end up the same. Everyone’s been talking about all the people who
got crushed when the tower over in Siloam fell on them. You think you’re
any better than them? Hah! If you don’t repent, you’ll end up the same.

Then he tells a parable. A man had a garden with a fig tree which
was not bearing. He tells the gardener to cut it down. Why should it draw
nutrients from the ground when it’s not producing? The gardener demurs.
Give me a year with it, let me fertilize it and tend it. If it doesn’t produce
next year, then yes, we’ll cut it down. Jesus is the gardener. Jesus invites us
to take in the nutrients he offers, so that we will produce good fruit.
We can’t just keep on the way we have been. We cannot keep going the same
way we’ve always gone. He’s very clear about that. That way leads to death.
If we keep on being the same way we’ve been, if we keep on doing the same
old things, keeping the same company, holding the same grudges,
we are on the road to death, pure and simple. We have to turn.

I wrote a woman who is a very good friend this week, it was a difficult post.
She has gotten increasingly angry at her parents, at her husband, and at the
whole situation she is caught in. She has not felt like there were any options.
She has been the good daughter, the good wife, the good citizen,
and it has been killing her. What I wrote her was that she was at a fork in
the road. She could keep on going down the road she was on, and it
would kill her. Or, she could choose to go down this other unknown path,
the path to life. There was just one problem. If she chooses the path to life,
she cannot keep the coping skills she has been using on the old path.
She will have to leave them behind. She will find immediate resistance,
because all of the people in her old life will most certainly try very hard
to make her go back into the old box. Some of them will leave her.
It will definitely be difficult. All I can offer her is that I will not leave.
I sent the email, knowing that she might blow it off, hoping that she wouldn’t.
It is all her choice. What she also knows is that I will not leave her,
no matter what she chooses.

It is all our choice, and it keeps being our choice. Jesus looks at us with pity,
and says look, look, here is another way. Come follow me.  That’s what
“repent” means – turning from one path to another, turning from the way
we have been going, turning toward God. Jesus offers us a way of life.
He doesn’t say it will be easy. We have to leave behind the comfortable
ways that we have used to deal with things. We may lose people in the process.
Ask any recovering alcoholic. The move to sobriety almost always means
losing the old people who helped keep the system intact, and those “old” people
may include biological family. That’s not fun. We don’t like to think about that.
Jesus warns us that he hasn’t come to bring peace in families –
so much for family values. Here are my brothers and sisters he says looking
around at the rag-tag group of disciples. The ones who are involved in doing
the work of God are my family. After a while his biological family got over it
and joined him, and became an important part of the early church, but it didn’t
come easily.

One last word. It is never too late. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis draws
a great picture of purgatory and the psychedelic bus that takes people to heaven.
It is a wonderful fun read. Slowly we realize that living in purgatory is hell,
and that it closely resembles how we often live here. Every day, the bus comes
to take people to heaven. There is room on the bus for everyone who wants
to come, and the people in purgatory always have the choice to get on the bus.
The visitor asks why everyone doesn’t get on the bus, after all, who wouldn’t
want to go to heaven instead of living in this gray place. The answers come
out of our own mouths. I’m busy with things as they are. I would have to
change too much. They want you to be real up there. I’d have to give up
my vices. And yet it is clear. It is never too late to change our minds.
God always invites us to turn towards life, invites us to learn to be real.
So where will you focus your attention this Lent? Are you feeling “God-filled?”
If not, will you choose to turn to God? Be careful, it will change your life.