Sunday: The 4th Sunday in Lent
Reading: Luke 13:1-9
Preacher: Anne Benvenuti

In the name of God, source of all that is and that shall be, father and mother of us all. Amen

I note with interest how often the preaching line-up here at St. Paul and the Redeemer makes reference to the strangeness of the readings of a Sunday morning. And this little observation makes me wonder sometimes just what kind of religion we are in, or what kind of relationship we are in with it. It seems rather parallel to sitting down to dinner with your spouse and children, giving them a careful once over and announcing, "How strange you are!" Though it may be true, it hardly sounds like the language of familiarity, much less commitment. But if we here at SPR are in a strange religion, or in a strange relationship with our religion, we are at least honest, and we are certainly not alone in a world where all religion seems at least uncertain, and much of it strange indeed. We welcome all seekers and we know ourselves to be more seekers than certain, much as we may love our congregation and spiritual traditions.

It's commonly understood today that we live in a time in which the old ways of doing religion are no longer credible. We no longer have the old comfort of believing that our way is true and other ways are wrong, even dangerous; this stance too easily smacks of that egocentric and ethnocentric bias we have learned to question. To be sure, we love our way of being, our spiritual practices, our church, our coming together at the Eucharist. But we also learn from other traditions, encountering them as we do in ways which are new to our generation - we are exposed to not only other forms of Christianity, but to traditions that frame the spiritual questions of life quite differently. Eastern traditions, for example, don't ask about the connection between sin and salvation; they use an entirely different kind of language. One of the core issues, though, that I think every religion tries to address is that of suffering and of death, so seemingly intertwined in our human psyches as to be almost one construct.

So, I found myself thinking that today's readings were not so much strange as illogical and disconnected. They are about suffering and transformation, I think, but what they say about it is far from clear. As a critical thinking teacher, I'd not give them a passing grade. But I confess that from the point of view of my Buddhist background, they made perfect sense to me, in spite of being illogical. The readings talk about who suffers, who does or doesn't deserve it... and there seems to be some kind of connection to repentance, seemingly necessary yet frustratingly undefined. Yes, these readings repeatedly make the point that some kind of repentance will save us - not from suffering, but in spite of suffering.
Jesus addresses, obliquely, the fact that we have a habit of thinking that if someone is suffering, it must be because they're bad, stupid, lazy, inattentive, somehow different from us... we quietly, even unconsciously, close our eyes to the suffering of others as a kind of magical assurance that would keep it away from us, as though we might catch it. Without even noticing, we harden our hearts and isolate ourselves within our own minds, constantly plotting and planning safe courses for ourselves and those who we think of as our own. And perhaps it's from this hardened isolation, this goal-setting ego of our own devising that we most suffer, and from which we must repent.

I have learned this from Buddhism: that we have to choose daily - even moment by moment - to open our eyes and to soften our hearts to the reality of the world around us, a world not made to our designs or for our personal comfort and customer satisfaction. The first of the core teachings of Buddhism is simply this: that life means suffering. To live is to suffer. But the Buddha taught that we can become free of suffering by a process of conversion in which we attend to and cultivate the conditions in which we open our eyes and soften our hearts to life as it is, and not as we would have it to be. The more deeply we see and accept our limitations, vulnerability, and impermanence, the more fully we can live. The more we are aware of the state of our own hearts and minds, the more we see the seeds of our behavior, our patterns of motivation, before we act them out. Something like the gardener's advice regarding the poor fig tree, the Buddhist way cultivates the ground of our experience in order to gradually bring about the conditions that will produce the behavior that we deeply desire yet cannot simply will into being. Buddhist practices cause us to become aware of what's going on in our hearts and minds, in a way that makes us honest and real, opening our eyes to the reality of our own imperfection and vulnerability. In the process, our hearts soften in compassion toward ourselves and toward others.

As a therapist, one thing I know is how many of us, at least in some spots, hate ourselves and in what complex ways; what then does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? But, in the process of seeing ourselves deeply, we learn to have compassion for ourselves, too, not despising that being whom St. Francis called Brother Ass, and we then naturally extend this compassion outwards. We learn that it simply isn't possible to selectively shut ourselves down, to screen out only the suffering or get rid of only the weakness. To shut down is to cut ourselves off from life itself, from the living God. It's from this shutting down that we must repent - and we do so by opening our eyes and softening our hearts...
Right now, if you take a peek at your own heart, do you find some hardened ground there, a place over the spot where a person or group you don't trust is located? A patch where there's someone you can't forgive? Is there perhaps a small obsession that keeps your attention from everything else? Yes? Well then, that's the place to put the spade of your attention gently to work, digging free the soil of your heart, so that it can receive the nourishment of compassion that will make of it a fertile place.

Jesus didn't teach the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, and his baptismal lineage didn't produce endless refinements of meditation practices and understandings of consciousness. But Jesus did embody these extraordinary truths. He lived with open eyes and soft heart, not because he was softheaded, but because he was a man of such great integrity, like us in all things but sin. He constantly challenged the variety of illusions that we humans cling to - the illusion that we are somehow in control of our own lives, masters of our own destinies - the illusion that we can save ourselves by our own efforts, or by our connections, or by our violent destruction of those things and people that seem to threaten our security. Jesus never turned away from the suffering of other people, in fear that he might be infected by it if he got too close. He never blamed them for their problems. He never plotted violence or destruction, never thought to snuff out those who would snuff him out. Though he expressed both fear and anger, he never cowered in fear, or sheltered himself away from others who were different, as if to protect himself from their reputedly dangerous impurities. And he didn't shrink from his own vulnerability, his need of others. Even the night before he died, while begging God to find him a way out, he asked his friends, "Couldn't you keep your eyes open with me for one hour?" Ah, that again. It's hard to keep our eyes open to reality, and some times are harder than others.

But Jesus embodied this too: that we cannot avoid suffering. Indeed, he showed us that in facing our suffering, we find salvation. In giving himself to the sacrificial fire, like the flaming bush, he was not consumed, but transformed. And when we pour out our molten mass of energy, like Jesus, like the sun, we constantly die and yet are transfigured, our energy renewed even as we spill it. If a tower falls upon us, so be it. If we are standing now and fall tomorrow, so be it. In this way, we no longer fight the terms of this life, but see them clearly and embrace them. In so doing, we are transformed and life itself is transformed. Accepting our fears, we open our hearts to life as it is, and to each other as we are.

This painted cross hanging over our Lenten altar is so... Zen! And it speaks to that transformation, to that embracing of life as it is, of death as it is. Accepting the terms of reality, our hearts become free to love and to live fully, and we never need do this alone, but, even in our darkest hour have the good company of Jesus.
For me, seeker that I am, it was my experience of Buddhist practice that gave me a means to understand this notion of sin and repentance, which had been quite a stumbling block for me as an earnest Catholic, always trying, always failing. But repentance, I think, means assenting to our own vulnerability, imperfection, and impermanence, so that what once threatened to harden us instead softens into love. For me, seeker that I am, I find in the deep and intimate company of Jesus a kind of inexpressible empowerment to go on pouring my life out, even knowing that one day it will all be poured out.

Now about those two living trees whose images framed our readings, the burning bush of Moses and the barren fig tree in Jesus' parable...My Bible Commentary says that Luke does not interpret this parable of the fig tree for us, but that it seems to indicate on the one hand a tale of compassion, and on the other a tale of crisis! Indeed. So like the lives we really live, living stories of compassion on one hand and crisis on the other, and we - consciously or unconsciously - choose whether it will be crisis or compassion by the attitude that we set our hearts to taking - by the way that we tend the soil of our consciousness.

Today, baptized into Christ's priesthood, in the deep and intimate company of Jesus, we approach this table under the sign of the cross, to accept the terms of life, and to lay our lives down with his. Are we willing today to open our eyes to the reality of our own vulnerabilities, and to the suffering of others? Are we ready to soften our hearts, so that we might pour ourselves out, so many burning bushes, our lives alight in the fire of God - trusting that we, too, will be not consumed, but transformed?