Beyond the Patio

Turn Your Life Around
Luke 13:1-9

Years ago, Paula and I were resource people on the National youth Conference held near Toronto, Ontario. We were responsible for some community building exercises at the beginning of the conference.  As I remember, we asked the young people to form groups of eight.  Four would form a circle in the center and the other four were to form a circle the outside facing the inner circle.  The people on the outside would face one person on the inside and they would share with each other such simply things such as “what is your favourite kind of food?” . After they shared this , the inside group would remain stationary but the outside people would move to face the next person in the inner circle and they would share another question.  They kept doing this each time with a different person and a new questions.  The questions were “What is your favorite TV program and why? ” What is your favorite movie of all time and why?”. “What is your favorite room of the house? “What is your favorite time of day?” etc . As the sharing went on the questions became a little more serious e.g. “If your home was on fire and you could only take three items from the burning house, what would they be?” They had to think of what was really valuable to them and what they represented.  The final questions was, “If you knew that you had only one year to live, what would you do?” and “Do we do the same things now and if not,  being that important to us, why not?

I think we any could ask those questions, because whatever we think are the most important things to do in life, we need to do it now.  As one person has said, “live each day as if it were your last and one day you will be right.” .

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In today’s reading in Luke’s Gospel, there is the same sense of urgency that Jesus presents to his followers. He urges all of us to change our ways and faces us with the fact  that we don’t have forever to do so.  Those Galileans the Jesus mentioned did not know what was going to happen to them.  The people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, didn’t know that they were going to die that day. Would they have lived any differently if they had known?  We don’t know.  But  we do know  that we are still alive and we still have a choice.  We just don’t know how long we will be alive so there is an urgency in Jesus call for us to repent.

To “Repent” can mean to turn around and to change direction.  It also has the meaning of  “going beyond that mind that you have been given and have acquired.” ( Marcus J. Borg The Heart Of Christianity Harper, San Francisco, 2003 p.180). It can mean going beyond that we have acquired by our culture to the mind shaped by our relationship with Christ.

The parable of the barren fig tree powerful and somewhat disconcerting to me.  It confronts me with the message that the fruit from a transforming relationship with God is expected.  It also challenges me with the urgency to act now.  The present is the only time we ever have.

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Faced with this urgent message of Jesus in the Gospel, what are we to do now?  We can say that we are to seek the mind of Christ and we are to seek God’s ways. But what is the mind of Christ and what are God’s ways? Truly God’s ways are not our ways.   God’s way is a way of giving, sharing and loving.  Our way seems to be that gathering, keeping and promoting self-interest.

Often I look out the front window of our house unto Georgia Strait and there are interesting cloud formations on the mountains that act as backdrop to the sea.  The clouds seems to hang on the mountains in the distance.  At times they almost seemed to flow down the mountains like white lava.  I have been so taken with this scene that I have grabbed the digital camera and took a photo and later did a watercolor of the whole scene.  I had the sense that if I could get close enough to those clouds I could touch them, mould them, shape them whatever way I wanted to.  However, I knew in my heart if I were ever to get close to them, all that would be there would be mist.  It would last for awhile and then it would be gone

So much of our life in this society is like that.   It is spent in the pursuit of as many possessions as we can and to control more and more.  Marcus J. Borg in his book The Heart Of Christianity, Rediscovering a life of Faith, (Harper Collins, New York, NY 2003)  talks about the three main values that our culture seems to be obsessed with.  He calls them the three As: Affluence, Attractiveness, and Achievement. I believe that another way of putting this would be that we are influenced heavily by the me generation,  the consumer mentality, and the desire for power, control and status.  Everything revolves around us as individuals often to the detriment to others and the community as a whole.

Although we try to gain self worth through these things they actually stifle our sense of self worth because they have such a hold on us that we find it so difficult to be free from them.  They besets us and holds us in a kind of prison. It is like the unending of death valley. It goes on and on and never satisfies our thirst.

There comes a time that we realize all those things do not satisfy us and they don’t bring us any more happiness. But we keep on doing trying to gather more and more around us as if possessed. We are like one of the self-indulging characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald books that says :

“We took what we wanted until we no longer wanted what we took.”

In the end what does it matter now much money we have, how attractive we are, or what we have achieved to gain status and power?  I’ve spent time with people who were dying.  They really didn’t talk about these kind of things. What seemed to be more important was whether they were loved and whether they were able to give love. When I think of my life now what really is important?  I don’t think that it is a question of what I’ve earned, how much money I’ve been able to accumulate or what kind of titles or status I’ve had. What am I to say? The bank and I have a house with an ocean view. We have nice furniture. We have all the so called comforts of life and a host of other things that we have been able to gather around us. How important is that in they end? Even when I look at the what I have achieved in the past, the degrees that I hold, the positions that I have. How important are they now?

Personal titles, achievements, attractiveness and affluence are like the clouds on the mountains.  They are like mist. You can’t hold unto them.  They are here for awhile and gone.

As the theologian Paul Tillich said in one of his writings:

The melancholy law of transitoriness governs even our most passionate concerns. The anxiety of the end dwells in the happiness they give. Both the things about which we are concerned and ourselves come to an end.

What lasts when everything else is gone? or as some people from the Ecumenical Institute in Chicago used to say:

“How do you stand before the going-down the drain-ness of life”

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The past is gone and we don’t know what our future will be. All we really have is the present time.  As Thich Hnat Hanh, the Buddhist Monk says in an interview with Oprah as recorded in the March 2010 edition of Oprah Magazine:

People sacrifice the present for the future.   Life is  available only in the present.  That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and now.

Later in the Oprah-Hahn interview Nhat Hahn talked about the importance seeing everything and everyone and all  times with the eyes of compassion.  It is seeing in every moment our connection with all  living things. He says, when you call me European, I say yes. when you call me Arab, I says yes. When you call me black, I say yes. When you call me white, I say yes. Because I am in you and you are in me.  We have to inter-be with everything in the cosmos.

Our sense of “One-ness” with all living beings is the basis of compassion. It is behind the compassion of all religions.  It is behind the compassion of Jesus. It is what lasts when everything else is gone.

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The good news is that we can move beyond the mind that we have acquired.  YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE BOUND BY THE KIND of WORLD IN WHICH YOU LIVE. You can change. The world can change. There is power to change. So his message of repentance is really good news.

As Elie Wiesel wrote :

(You can understand  the use of the word “man” for “all of us‘)

When God created man , God gave him a secret – and that secret was not how to begin but how to begin again….it is not given to man to begin; that privilege is God’s alone.  But it is given to man to begin again – and he does so every time he chooses to defy death and side with the living.” (Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God   Random House, New York:, 1976 p. 32)

This is a time to turn your life around,  to begin again and choose life.

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