Lord of Mercy!
First Congregational Church Evanston
March 11, 2007 (Third Sunday in Lent)
Isaiah 55: 1-9, Luke 13: 1-9
An Old Man in Court
He was 84 years old, sitting there in the court room. His six children were there sitting in the front row. Nearly 10 other relatives were there as well, including some of the grandchildren. Some of them cried. They wanted to take him home.
The old man who was sitting there had enlisted in the army in 1942, and was in combat in Italy as a staff sergeant. He came home and married in 1951, and moved into the home where they have been since then. This gentleman worked in a factory, never had any trouble with the law, and was a good husband. He had even sold his own bone marrow when his family was in need, and the family “never went without.”
For the last 14 years he has been taking constant care of his wife who had Alzheimer’s disease. “His life and work has been caring for [his wife] for 24 hours a day,” one of the grandchildren said, “Every single day.”
But as his wife’s hallucinations had gotten more and more pronounced, it had gotten more and more difficult for this old gentleman. Some of the family wondered if the old man was suffering Alzheimer’s, as well.
So why was such an elderly gentleman like this, who had devoted himself to his wife’s care for so long, sitting there in the court room? It seemed like he needed some care himself. He must have been exhausted!
But the rest of the story is, that this old gentleman had admitted shooting his wife with a .38-caliber handgun in the middle of the night last weekend. She died immediately. And there he was sitting in the jail at a first-degree murder bond hearing even before the his wife’s body had been laid to rest.
His lawyer said that his wife “had been hallucinating...about intruders entering the house through the walls” and that the old man had “begun to believe her.” What was going on in his mind, and why did he snap and pull the trigger?
“Who knows what happened in that moment?” the lawyer asked. And none of us will ever know – not even the family who love them both. “Anyone who looks objectively at this can’t conclude he murdered his wife...I know this is a guy who failed his wife. Maybe his own mind and body failed him then too,” the lawyer said. The family saw their beloved father suffering and in need of love and care as together the mourned the loss of his wife (Chicago Tribune , March 6, 2007, section 2, p. 1-2).
The old man is a pathetic image. It is not hard to imagine that someone in that situation could crack – could do something totally out of character by committing what is certainly a heinous crime. There must have been something in his environment that predisposed him to such evil. Or was the evil already there within him? What could it have been? Why did evil overtake him?
Jesus and the News
Can you imagine? It might have been a Chicago Tribune that someone brought to Jesus: How awful it was that Pilate had murdered some of Jesus’ own Galilean countrymen when they were bringing their sacrifices to the temple in Jerusalem. Or maybe they all read about the disaster of the tower that had fallen in Jerusalem killing 18 people.
The people assumed that this was retributive justice – that evil fell on people who particularly deserved the evil. But Jesus turned it upside down reminding them all that each of them was liable for God’s judgement unless they would repent – turn themselves around.
I wonder if Jesus was in that courtroom last week. Was he condemning the old man for his actions? Or would he have been reminding everyone of the frailty of each life, and the edge that we all live on – asking each one to repent?
Parable of the Fig Tree
In this profound passage from Luke, we hear Jesus pronouncing judgement upon those who would themselves pronounce judgement. And then we hear him offering mercy and forgiveness to all. Luke has placed the parable of the fig tree immediately after this interaction with the news.
We mustn’t treat a parable like this as if it were an allegory – not trying to find particular things in the story that stand symbolically for other things. But to hear the story itself and ask what the whole story means. The landowner is frustrated. He expects the things he has growing on his land to produce well or else be removed. I have learned to do that in my own summer garden. When something is finished producing or has had sufficient time to produce and is not doing it, I pull it up and plant something else. There are only so many growing days in a summer!
Of course a fig tree is a greater investment than the radishes or beans. I believe that fig trees are expected to go for many years before they ever produce anything. And then they might produce for many, many years once they start. But in the vignette of the parable, the landowner has ‘had it’ with this fig tree and orders it taken out. But the one who takes care of the trees pleaded for more time. He would put fertilizer around it, he would pamper it for one more year. And if it was still unproductive in another year, then he would agree to take it out.
I see in this parable a great picture of the mercy of God. Sin is real, and Jesus demands human repentance. But God’s mercy is also real. And each of us who is subject to God’s judgement is also subject to that mercy.
The words of the parable are words of comfort, “No, no, give the tree one more year. Dig around it and sprinkle it with manure. If it still does not bear fruit, cut it down.” These are some of the most hopeful words in the gospel. All of us live with the frustrations of things that do not work as we wish. Groups do foolish things – children are not wise – after trying and trying many of us are ready to give up on someone, or something or even on ourselves. This gospel lesson refuses to give up. We could put down Christ’s words by any hard thing in our lives. Give it own more year, he says. It could be a mantra for the church everywhere. One more year! One more year! One more year!
The elderly gentleman who stood before the judge accused of killing his wife will be subject to the judgement of the court. But his loved ones were pleading for the court’s mercy. The same mercy that the fig tree deserved in the parable. And lest we should remove ourselves too far from this tragic man’s situation, what happen to anyone who spends him/herself totally in the care of another – one who is so terribly ill – and for such a long time.
What would be your breaking point, or mine? Each of us might remember that God’s judgement on our sin, and God’s mercy toward us are very closely intertwined.
Abraham Lincoln Proclaimed a Day of Repentance
Abraham Lincoln certainly understood that intertwining and he dealt with it personally and he brought it into the public sphere – much more, than any of our current political leaders in either party are apt to. In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln recognized the need for human repentance, and so proclaimed April 30, 1863 as a National Fast Day. His words were:
It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize that sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord....
Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity, too proud to pray to the God that made us. (Emphasis March/April 2007)
Thus Lincoln called his nation to prayers of repentance for the evil in which the nation found itself engaged.
Lenten Journey
We find ourselves on our Lenten Journey. We observe Jesus’ journey toward Jerusalem – toward the center of the controversy. As he journeyed, Jesus taught about and surely felt very deeply, the intertwining of the judgement of God and the mercy of God. Can we feel it, too?
Each of us is far from perfect. We could pass off our own fallen-ness as simply psychological or sociological. But humanity’s lot is spiritual as well. As we walk to Jerusalem with Jesus, may we be humbled to repent of our own sin – our individual sin, which is surely real – to consider the sins of our church, which are as real as our individual sins – and to consider the sins of our land, which are also very real.
But when we turn in repentance for our sins, we can proclaim the joy of God’s mercy in the parable, but also in the wondrous poetry of Second Isaiah:
1 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.
In our first Lenten Bible study we were looking at chapter 53 of Isaiah and those of you who were there will recognize that we are in the same territory here. “Many scholars think that Isaiah 55 was written during the end of the terrible years of exile. Hope must have flickered low. After years and years of living in a strange land, hope must have been a rare commodity. So the prophet Isaiah used a word his fellow- exiles would understand: water. Water was as rare as hope. They were surrounded by the desert. Their forebears had once criss-crossed a wilderness desert for forty years. Jerusalem was surrounded by desert. The exiles had been dragged hundreds of miles across the desert to cursed Babylon. Without water, many of their ancestors and family members had perished.”
And so for the exiles, water became a wonderful symbol for God’s mercy toward them. Their suffering was long. They felt as if they had received more hard times than was their due. Repentance was a part of their existence.
“Isaiah called his people to a wonderful, hopeful truth. There was water aplenty and it had no price tag and it was available to all. Yahweh would protect the people of God. Never forget, Isaiah told them that ‘For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I propose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it’ (55:10).
What a picture of God’s wonderful mercy.
As we go through our own desert times – individually, as families, as a church, as a nation – let us accept our own need for the forgiveness of God, and then open ourselves up to the wondrous inflowing of God’s mercy.
“Martin Luther, beset by depression and many enemies, would say in his dark moments: ‘I have been baptized.’ On this third Sunday of our Lenten worship it might be good for us to pause and ponder the water of baptism that has touched our lives and how essential that water is to our survival.(quotes in this section from Emphasis, March/April, 2007).”
It is a reminder of God’s mercy. A fig tree needs one more year. A gentleman before the court needs love. You and I need God’s mercy.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 6, 2008