Come to the Waters (Have Patience) (2/28/16)

Isaiah 55:1-9; Luke 13:1-9

Ludovico Mazzolino, Parable of the Barren Fig Tree

When we think of what church used to be like, 20-30 years ago, we remember everything that was good and we tend to forget the problems. Now that church no longer looks like it used to, it seems like the problems are the only things we see. In this sermon, we explore some of the reasons that we have difficulty seeing new things that are going on around us.

Come to the Waters (Have Patience) (2/28/16)

Isaiah 55:1-9; Luke 13:1-9

Sermon

          Good morning! As I mentioned in the announcements this morning, I will be on study leave next week. I’m taking the interim ministry training that’s offered every year at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. On the surface, it might seem kind of odd that I’m taking this training now. I mean, I’ve been your interim pastor for almost six months. I think I know the drill by now—and I haven’t seen any of you carrying torches or pitchforks to chase me out of the pulpit, so I must be doing something right. Sit down, Dan!

          The interim training is designed for pastors who are already serving as interim pastors. It’s a forum for us to reflect on what we’ve done and it allows us to hear from lots of folks who are in the midst of serving as interims. It also gives us a space to look at the bigger picture and talk about where the church is going. When we’re busy with the day-to-day work of being pastors—getting stuff ready for the bulletins, going to session meetings, going to presbytery meetings—when we’re busy with the local details, we don’t always see the forest for the trees. So instead of trying to prepare us in advance for the experience of interim ministry, they gather us together in the midst of our experiences so that we can discuss the forest and the trees.

          I was at a presbytery meeting a couple weeks ago and I was talking to one of the other pastors at the meeting. I told him I was taking the interim training; the official name of the course is “The Art of Transitional Ministry.” The other pastor pointed out that all ministry is transitional. Nothing is permanent. No pastor is permanent.

          What’s more, each one of us is at different stages in our faith journeys and our life journeys. As your pastor, I need to be aware of the areas in your lives where you are in transition. Of course there are lots of things that we like to remember as they were when we were younger, and we tend to remember the good things we had and gloss over the difficulties. For instance, we remember a time when there were more people in church and the church schedule never conflicted with youth sports. Yet we never asked, “Why are so many people in church?” Or, “How come nobody ever tries to schedule youth soccer on a Sunday morning?” We didn’t question why things worked when the pews were full and the money flowed to the offering plates. In a similar way, we don’t ask, “What’s wrong?” when the temperature outside is 65 or 70 degrees in January or February. But change is always coming.

          That is certainly the case for the people of Israel in this morning’s reading from the Book of Isaiah. Most scholars believe that there were at least three different authors to the Book of Isaiah, and this week’s reading comes from the second of those authors. It was written during the period that many people from Israel were held captive in Babylon. Perhaps two full generations lived in exile, maybe more. Remember that these were members of ruling families, the upper classes and the priests of the Temple.

          The people who were taken into captivity were the elites of Jerusalem. Their descendants made good lives for themselves in Babylon. In chapters 40-55 in the Book of Isaiah, the author issues a call for a second Exodus; he wants the exiles to return to Jerusalem. He says: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” He is telling the exiles, God will provide actual food and wine, and also spiritual sustenance when they return to Jerusalem.[1] The food and the water and the wine are free because they are the products of the land of Israel, the birthright of the exiles.[2]

          Though the exiles have done well in Babylon, they pay a high price for losing what was theirs:

Those who lost their heritage to encroaching foreigners were forced to pay money even for natural resources freely found by those owning property. Not only fuel, but even water, had been commoditized. This harsh reality faced by the generation of the conquered makes the offer of free water, milk, food, and wine all the more moving.[3]

That is to say, the exiles succeeded, but they still had to pay a price to their captors. And yet, they still need to be persuaded to return to Jerusalem.

          In verses 8-9, God tells the exiles, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God’s plan is bigger than the lives of the exiles; God wants something better for them than the material success and comfort they have achieved in Babylon. The call is clear: the exiles can only live into God’s plan for them if they return to the land that God gave to their ancestors.

          I think that many of us are quite like those Jerusalem exiles. We mourn the loss of the church—and even the society—that we used to recognize. We wring our hands because there are so many empty spaces in the pews; we grind our teeth because our kids and grandkids have activities on Sunday mornings. I said it last Sunday and I’ll say it again this morning: I’m not willing to blame the culture for this because we are part of that culture. Also, I’m not convinced that the good old days were quite as good as we all remember them.

          Americans are frequently surveyed about their religious beliefs and habits. Pollsters ask people if they pray and if they’ve attended a worship service. “Since 1960, approximately 40 to 45 percent of Americans say they attended a church, synagogue, or mosque in the previous seven days,” and those numbers have held steady; even today, 40 to 45 percent say they’ve been to church in the last week.[4] Now we can look around and see that we don’t have anywhere near 40 to 45 percent of the population in church today, but that number has been consistent for over 50 years. Hmmm. Somebody must not be telling the whole truth when they answer those surveys. But guess what? Researchers have examined denominational records over that same span. They’ve looked at the attendance numbers that congregations reported and they found that actual attendance never reached the 40 to 45 percent of the population that people reported to the pollsters.[5]

          The numbers for prayer have also been remarkably consistent over the years. It turns out that since 1948, some 90 percent of the population reports that they pray at least on an occasional basis.[6] Now there’s no way to verify if people actually pray, but it suggests to me that a lot of people still believe. Even the over-reporting of church attendance tells me that people still value the Christian faith. If they didn’t, then why would they feel the need to tell an anonymous pollster that they had been to church in the last week?

          I’m reading a couple of books in preparation for my study leave. One of them is called Christianity after Religion. It has a really interesting subtitle: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. The author, Diana Butler Bass, believes that the institutional church is undergoing a great upheaval, but she refuses to give in to despair. Instead, Bass sees a great renewal taking place among the faithful all across this country. That renewal, though is not necessarily taking place inside the walls of our churches or in traditional denominational structures. In other words, the renewal doesn’t look the way we expect it to look. It’s taking new and unexpected forms. So why don’t we see it?

          I think we’re stuck. We’re stuck in our culture and we’re stuck in our churches. Diana Butler Bass offered a story in her book which I thought was instructive. She said:

I go to Seattle for business quite a bit. Once, I had dinner with a coffee executive and I asked him how many choices were possible in one of his stores. He said there were eighty-two thousand—give or take a few dozen—possibilities for a drink from the menu.[7]

Are any of you surprised by the number of choices? Are any of you confused when you walk into a coffee shop?

          Then it dawned on me: We are besieged by choices. There is too much information to make sense of it all, so we retreat to what is familiar. We choose a brand and we stick to it. We reject all ideas that don’t confirm our pre-existing notions. When this is simply a choice between Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Miracle Whip, it’s not that big a deal. But this isn’t just about coffee or mayonnaise. This confusion and frustration infects every aspect of our lives and are brand loyalty goes beyond McDonald’s or Starbucks. Our brands are also Presbyterian and Methodist, Roman Catholic and Orthodox, Jewish, Evangelical, non-denominational, or none of the above. The same is true with our political parties: Democrats and Republicans are convenient brand names. And once we’ve picked a side, we really don’t want to get bombarded by the messages from the other side. Remember, we’re busy trying to make up our minds at Starbucks, because there’s like eighty-two thousand options. Or we’re trying to figure out our value-meal options at the drive-thru at McDonalds. And we’re in the drive through so that we can get the kids to ballet and baseball. Or we need to grab a bite to eat before that three-hour session meeting at church. Ugh!

          We are overwhelmed and we can’t see the silver linings in the clouds. We just huddle together in fear and we hope we’ll survive the next big storm and the clouds will lift and everything will be better. And maybe it won’t get better, but at least the folks who still come to church feel like you do and they’ll listen when you wring your hands and gnash your teeth: if only they didn’t have youth sports on Sunday mornings… We’re so worn down that we can’t always see the grace that’s offered to us.

          We’re also infected by a culture that seeks immediate gratification. We want answers right away. We want to see change right away—even if we can’t agree what we want that change to look like. In this morning’s reading from Isaiah, God implores the Jerusalem exiles to seek the Lord and to return to the Lord and to the land that was given to them by the Lord. In doing this, the exiles are given the opportunity to fulfill their end of the covenant with God. Yes, they have been faithful in exile. They were separated from their birthright by the Babylonians, so they could not be fully faithful to the covenant. But God offers them a chance to repent; God will abundantly pardon them. They were several generations in exile, but God reminds them that they will be pardoned when they turn back to God.

          And the God who abundantly pardons continues to offer chances to us, too! Look at the parable of the fig tree in this morning’s gospel lesson. The owner of the vineyard wants to pull the fig tree out of the ground because it hasn’t produced fruit in three years. But the tender of the vineyard implores the owner to leave the tree for one more year, and then he promises to tend the tree and fertilize the soil, in hopes that the tree will again bear fruit:

Lent calls us to “seek the Lord” and to “call upon him.” Lent is an invitation and a reminder that this surprising work of God is open to us all—wicked and unrighteous alike—if we will return to the God who abundantly pardons.[8]

          We have to find more ways to tend our vines and fig trees. Our culture throws up a lot of clutter. We’re overwhelmed by the clutter, we can’t make sense of it all. We retreat to our brands and the sanctuaries of our churches. We need to find ways to cut through the clutter. I wish I could stand up here and tell all of you exactly how to do that, but I can’t. Each of us has a unique set of clutter. My clutter is different from everyone else’s clutter. What I can tell you is that we all need to spend more time looking outside of these walls. If a new spiritual awakening is happening, we’re not going to figure it out sitting in here. We need to go out and experience it. We need to be in conversation with folks who are feeling it. We also need to be in conversation with folks who aren’t feeling it. This work belongs to all of us. We can stay in here and hope the storm will pass or we can go outside and play in the rain and the mud puddles. We might get messy and we’ll surely get wet, but the Holy Spirit is a chaotic and disruptive. If it moves us in here, just imagine how much more it will move us and energize us when we discover the Spirit outside these walls! Thanks be to God. Amen.

Benediction

          Now, beloved, as you depart from this place, remember that this is the season to look cut through the clutter. Reflect on those things that are holding you back, and then work to prune those vines. Go forth and be instruments of God’s peace and reconciliation. Do not return evil for evil to any person, but know that we are all loved by God, and that we are called to reflect that love to everyone we meet. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, let all God’s children say, Amen!

---

[1] W. Dennis Tucker, Jr., “Commentary on Isaiah 55:1-9,” retrieved from: http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2785

[2] Patricia Tull, “Commentary on Isaiah 55:1-9,” retrieved from: http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1564 

[3] Patricia Tull, “Commentary on Isaiah 55:1-9,” retrieved from: http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1564

[4] Diana Butler Bass. Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. New York: HarperCollins (2012), 52.

[5] Bass, 53.

[6] Bass, 54-55.

[7] Bass, 42.

[8] W. Dennis Tucker, Jr., “Commentary on Isaiah 55:1-9,” retrieved from: http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2785