From Gales to Gentle Breezes
Year C
Joel 2:1-2,12-17
Psalm 103:8-14
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
May the words of my mouth O God… speak your truth…
We are all going to die… it’s not really… ever… a pleasant fact… but it is a fact of life… that the other end of birth… is death… and the vast majority of us humans… do one of two things… we either take our lives for granted… without appreciating the gifts from God that they are… or we spend a lot of time and money denying the reality of death…
But I wonder… if we didn’t take our lives so for granted… and by we… I mean the vast majority of people in every nook and cranny where people live… if we didn’t approach so many things as though we deserved them… then maybe biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann wouldn’t have noticed… that the Gospel has gotten all tangled up in a white western sense of entitlement… I mean… I bristle almost every time I hear that voice on TV tell me how much I deserve a new luxury SUV… or two… and it makes me wonder whether we really deserve all we say we do… it makes me wonder what we really do deserve…
And it makes me wonder… if the majority of us carried a deeply reverential awareness for the gift of life… how would our collective behavior change… maybe we would treat each other more gently… maybe we would do everything possible to honor that sanctity and that gift… maybe we really would love our neighbors as ourselves… and maybe we wouldn’t resist… or fear death so much… because we’d be too busy living…
We heard just two Sundays ago… about how the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable… and one analogy… is that it’s like turning in an old beater of a VW Beetle… one that’s really on its last leg… and getting a polished and brand new Rolls Royce in return… for free… and so when we surrender our perishable bodies… we get an imperishable one in return…
And we have some difficulty imagining how that happens… what that will look like… what it will feel like… but we also know from our own experience… and from scripture… that a seed must die so that it can grow into a tree which bears much fruit… and the seed doesn’t resist its purpose… it yields itself to what is greater than itself… and is transformed…
When I was fourteen… I accompanied my grandfather on a business trip to Texas… my grandmother… who often went with him… died earlier that year… so to keep him from being alone… and to have an adventure of my own… my parents allowed me to fly out west with him… and in the Braniff Airline’s in-flight magazine… there was a short science-fiction story… about a kind of transformation like this… it made quite an impression on me… and over the decades since then… I’ve made many attempts to try and find it… with very little to go on… but as I sat down to write a few days ago… I thought it would be so helpful an illustration… that I made another attempt… and found it… it’s a 1944 piece… [by Clifford Simik]… called Desertion… and I offer up now… the briefest Cliff Notes summary of it…
A survey team on Jupiter… is sending men out from its reinforced domed enclosures… to explore the planet’s resources… and determine its eligibility for colonization… but there are dangers… crushing atmospheric pressure… alkaline rains… miles of choking gases in the atmosphere… and two hundred mile-per-hour howling gales that sweep across the planet… ] though none of this seems to bother the speechless local inhabitants called Lopers… but somehow… as these stories go… Earth’s scientists have developed a machine… called a Converter… which will change a man into one of these Lopers… five men have been transformed… and have proceeded out of Dome #3 and into the Jovian atmosphere… they had their instructions… but they never returned… and now… the head of the Jovian Survey Commission… knew he could sacrifice no others… so he underwent the process himself… and when he left the dome… he could never have really expected… that the lashing downpour would be reduced to a drifting purple mist which moved like fleeting shadows over an expanse of red and purple grasses… or that a two-hundred-mile an hour gale… laden with what would previously have been deadly gases… just brushed against him with what seemed like gentle fingers… and that the scent of lavender… was more than just a smell which inhabited his nasal cavity… but seeped deep into his whole being… and he could know things just by wanting to know them… ] no wonder none of the other five returned… ] and while this may be fiction… it hints at how we will experience our imperishable bodies compared to these perishable ones…
There is great subtly in this evening’s Gospel reading… and I wonder… how do we practice our piety so that we gain God’s reward… and not the world’s… how do we know ourselves so well… that we can avoid any motivations which serve us more… than they serve God and our neighbors…
Kimberly van Driel… Pastor of Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Naugatuck, CT… writes… for those who follow Jesus… acts of devotion are not done for praise… visibility… or the building up of wealth and reputation… instead… the focus is to be God alone… hypocrisy consists of undertaking pious action in hope of earthly rewards… rewards that come from human beings instead of from God…
This principle of doing acts of piety… without concern for being seen… flies in the face of too-many-to-count subtle… and not so subtle temptations… shaped by social pressures… ] our post-modern culture is characterized by image and style… which is made worse by the effect that various kinds of media exert in our lives… ] remaining unaffected by it all… is almost as difficult as trying to swim straight up Niagara Falls… or it may be as challenging as unpacking our family of origin baggage… which may feed our false sense of self…
Fr. John Meulendyk, OFC… writes that… Lent is the church’s attempt to allow us time to turn our “false sense-of-self” into ashes. Arrogance, self-centeredness, bias, deception… and even our illusion of independence and freedom is on the line here… our ‘true-self’ is found only when we rely completely on God…
The Fire of Lent… he said… is like the fire in a steel mill… whose job is to expose impurities and allow them to rise to the surface… so that they can be burned away… and the disciplines of Lent… fasting… alms giving… and prayer… act like matches that ignite that fire… no discipline… no fire…
So we must not neglect the promised qualities of life in Christ… whose words… through the cross and resurrection… defeated the power of sin and death… and through whose grace… forgiveness is available… and it is this forgiveness which transforms us into God-centered people… this forgiveness transforms us into creatures who can walk head on into the social gales of conformity which now brush against us like gentle fingers… and when this happens… our Lenten disciplines can help us become more aware of God’s presence in our lives and in our world… a gifted presence which flows from God… through us… and to others… and the greater gift… is when our fear of death lessens… because we know that in God’s time… we will trade in perishable bodies… for imperishable ones…
For those interested in reading the entire science-fiction story referenced in this sermon, you can find it here:
