Luke 13:31-35

Division and Desertion

The readings for this week were baffling. Did you find them so? Animals cut in half to entice God’s favor? Really? Really? Darkness and terror, floating smoking-pots and flaming torches and out of that a covenant telling Abram he and his barren wife of advanced years will have as many children as the stars in the sky and he would rule over all the land from the Egypt River which marks the southeast border of Egypt to the Euphrates River marking the northern border of Judah…lands that we know have been fought over for thousands of years...

Then the gospel reading…I didn’t remember ever hearing it before…Do you remember “go and tell that fox for me”? I don’t know how I missed it but I am glad to know I am not the only person struggling with these passages.

These readings bring up, for me, visions and themes of separation and abandonment ….division and desertion. Both are concepts we tend to confront with a little more intention during Lent than at other times of the year although these themes seem to be ever present in life.

Division of course refers to that which divides or keeps apart. It could be a partition in a room or a barrier between lanes on a highway. It could be people whose words and/or actions intentionally cause us to be divided. It could even be ancient practices or beliefs, handed down from family to family over the centuries, that create and perpetuate fears that cause us to keep to ourselves or to avoid those who look, act or think differently than we do.

Perhaps this is what causes us to think of the Pharisees as bad guys. Generally in scripture the Pharisees are represented as being deceptive. They are the ones who try to trick Jesus into revealing he is something other than who he says he is. One of the places we see instances of this in institutions where those in the upper levels of management try to couch bad news to the underlings with good news words.

Here is a small example…When I was going to seminary I used to take advantage of the commuter rooms to stay overnight. The year I graduated the administration changed the requirement for on campus housing so that you had to commit to a minimum of two nights and three courses in order to get a room. This represented a big hike in costs of housing, tuition and time for students who were already squeezing seminary into a full life of work and family. They said it was to bolster community when in reality we all knew it was their bottom line that needed bolstering! It would have set better with all of us if they had just owned up to the real need they were facing rather than “pharisaically” trying to sugarcoat it as something they were doing purely for our benefit.

In today’s reading from Luke we wonder, what were the Pharisees trying to accomplish by telling Jesus to get out of town because Herod wanted to kill him? Was it really true that Herod was trying to kill Jesus?

One well known commentator, Luke Johnson says, “neither before this scene or after it are we given any indication that Herod wants to kill Jesus: he ‘seeks to see him.” So, instead of a warning, this may just be another test of Jesus to see if he will “show himself to be a fraudulent prophet by trying to save himself.”

What if Herod did only want to come see Jesus and it was only because of divisive rumors that we have pegged him as a threat to Jesus’ life? What if we were neutral or actually understood that he only wanted to meet with Jesus with no ill intent? Would history have turned out different?

How many times have you experienced a person’s intentions to be quite different from what you imagined them to be? So often we expect a certain behavior from a person, either good or bad, and that expectation shapes how we think and act and speak about that person. So often our thoughts create our reality. Jesus tries to lead us to have loving thoughts, which would lead to loving actions and a more just and peaceful world.

There is another view about the Pharisees that we can consider. Although they were always testing and trying to trip Jesus up, they are still included in the kin-dom. Jesus is seen to eat with some and respect others which points to the inclusiveness of kin-dom portrayed in Luke’s gospel.

When we divide, we necessarily desert. God is all about inclusion not division and as Christians this is what we profess to be about too. Love one another, love your neighbor, love your enemy…and if you do that you are behaving in a loving way toward God. And yet, as a nation that professes to be mostly Christian or certainly Christian at our roots, we seem to be pretty practiced at dividing and pretty rusty at including.

I was looking up the term paradox as I considered these bible passages and I came across this fantastic article titled “The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong.” I was both surprised and pleased to discover the author was Bill McKibben. Anyone recognize the name? If it were not for him we would not have been ringing our bells 350 times to raise awareness of climate change.

He wrote his first book on climate change 21 years ago in 1989. The following is a statement by him explaining why.

He says, “But some years ago I took a trip to Bangladesh to do some reporting. And while I was there they were having their first big outbreak of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease now spreading like wildfire because of global warming. Since I was spending a lot of time in the slums, I got bit by the wrong mosquito myself. I was as sick as I've ever been, but because I was healthy going in, I didn't die. Lots of people did, mostly old and young. I remember standing in the hospital ward looking at rows of cots of shivering patients, and thinking to myself: these people did nothing to deserve this. You can barely measure how much carbon Bangladesh produces: a nation of 140 million, but most of them don't have electricity or cars. Whereas in the U.S. 4% of us manage to produce 25% of the world's co2. A quarter of those hospital beds were our fault.” When I figured that out in my gut, I came home and started organizing, and that's what I've been up to ever since.

This same man wrote the following:

"America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. At the moment the idea of Jesus has been hijacked by people with a series of causes that do not reflect his teachings. It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. We have made golden calves of ourselves --- become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols." Bill McKibben (biography)

The anger that you hear in Bill McKibben’s statement is akin to the anger Jesus expresses toward Jerusalem in the gospel of Luke. McKibben is angry that we Americans are behaving like Pharisees or even worse. We say we are Christian but we continue practices (business, political, and/or personal) that perpetuate separation and division.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the Holy City that pretends to be, and should be, the seat of righteousness and justice, protects its power base by eliminating God’s emissaries, those who might reveal the truth, set people free and erode the power base. Jerusalem, the Holy City, the city that houses the Temple, deserts and abandons Jesus instead of lifting up life eternal, freedom, peace and justice.

There are three definitions in the dictionary for desertion as a noun:

1. (noun) desertion the act of deserting or forsaking; abandonment of a service, a cause, a party, a friend, or any post of duty; the quitting of one's duties willfully and without right; esp., an absconding from military or naval service
2. (noun) desertion the state of being forsaken; desolation; as, the king in his desertion
3. (noun) desertion abandonment by God; spiritual despondency

Disertion or abandonment is something we all experience at some time in our life. Sometimes it is more apparent to us. And other times it lies dormant under the surface of our awareness. God’s act of incarnation in the flesh of Jesus showed unfailing love of us in the willingness to undergo all of the trials that humans might endure, right up to and including humiliation, a sense of abandonment, and ultimately an untimely death. All for the purpose of showing that as humans we might endure terrible pain but resurrection does occur. God’s presence with us never fails. In the end it is God’s love that we are absorbed into. All flesh may fail but God’s love, God’s presence with us and God’s commitment to us endures. What we need to be mindful of is when we abandon any of God’s creation we desert this loving God.

When you read this section of the gospel of Luke, you get a sense of the anger Jesus is feeling…perhaps brought on by the abandonment he is feeling by the people on whose behalf he has come. He came to heal our belief in separation and teaches that our security is not in the things of this earth. It is not in the clothing, the cars, the houses, the food our friends or our families. Our security rests in God. Even when we feel abandoned by God, God is still seeking us out.

Kae Evenson, a pastor at Mercy Seat Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, speaks of this eloquently in an article in Christian Century magazine. She says, “Woven throughout the biblical narrative is this tension between God’s faithfulness and our doubt, God’s unimaginable love for us and our inability to let go of our selves to live fully in that love or trust that, despite appearances, God will not leave us or fail us. In Christ, God longs to gather all his children, as a hen gathers her brood. Only a deep, resistant, stubborn and foolish love can speak like this, only a love that is willing to give all, risk all. Only a God who enters into death can promise that there is nothing in the whole universe that can separate us from who God is.

As we journey through Lent, let us consider sacrificing or giving up

addictions to whatever thoughts, feelings, behaviors numb you to the pain of your present sufferings.

Let us consider giving up fantasies of being rescued, or of achieving something meaningful without suffering.

Let us consider giving up prejudices and attachment to our own way of seeing things, to our identification with certain points of view formed in the past and used to define the present and future?

And as we give these things up to a higher power, let us also consider giving down. Following the model of Jesus Christ, let us surrender our spirit to full earthly embodiment and all the gravity and weight, boundaries and limitations, resistance and reluctance, endurance and forebearance, that that requires to lead us to a life lived with wholeness and integrity.

May it be so!

Amen!