A sermon preached at Trinity Church by Terry Fach on 7 March, 2010

Scriptures:
Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9

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Having just returned from my old Oxford Blues Hockey Tour of Switzerland, commemorating 100 years of Canadians at Oxford University playing hockey in Europe, I have yet another perspective on our Canadian passion for hockey. Watching the Winter Olympics on television in Switzerland and England was an interesting experience. To watch Canada’s hockey teams play required much sacrifice of sleep since the games began at 1:30 or 2:30am. But most interesting was to hear non-Canadian TV commentators reflect on the place of hockey in the Canadian psyche. For the most part I think they got it right: Yes, there was an urgency to win the gold medals in hockey, especially the men’s hockey gold. Yes, it was a point of national pride. Yes, there was collective despair when we lost to the Americans in the preliminary round.

But what defined the sense of urgency for me was what happened back in Calgary last Sunday. I was flying home during the gold medal game and the Air Canada pilots were helpfully updating us on the score. By the time we landed in Calgary, the game had gone into overtime. Down in the customs hall the room was absolutely packed...but amazingly my line was moving ahead very quickly. In fact all the lines seemed to be moving very quickly. In fact all the customs agents were watching the overtime period “live” on a big screen behind us! My own agent never even asked me a question, and barely made eye contact! You’ve never seen so many people sail through customs so quickly! Clearly national security was taking a back seat to the drama of sudden-death overtime in Vancouver! Welcome to Canada!

There is much more urgency in today’s gospel reading from Luke. Jesus is asked why innocent people suffered by Pilate’s murderous hand. Were they actually worse sinners than everyone else? There was a belief in some circles that God allowed bad things to happen to bad people. But Jesus makes it clear that this is not how God works. But Jesus does use the opportunity to remind his listeners that how we decide to live our lives is about decisions that we all must make. The way we direct and respond to our desires can make the difference between life and death. Jesus sums up his point like this: Unless you repent, you will perish. That spiritual truth applies to everyone.

“Repent or perish!” That phrase can be heard in some very different ways. How we hear it will probably depend a lot on our hard-wired thoughts about God.

Let me take a quick poll and ask you a question. I need you to be really honest with me on this...don’t take long to think about the question...give me your first gut response. I want you to get in touch with your dominant and reflexive understanding of God that comes to mind when I say the word “God.” And I am going to give you two options: First, God is love and wants to care, nurture, and support you; or two, God is a judge watching to make sure you obey and do the right thing. So, if you can pretend you haven’t been listening to anything I have been saying the past few minutes and respond naturally, what is your reflexive, immediate response when I say the word “God”?

Even if you have spent your whole life reading the Bible and learning about God who is defined as love in John’s gospel and can’t shake that image of judge, can you imagine that those outside the Christian community have a more positive view of God? “Repent or perish” sounds to reinforce the view of God as a judge just waiting to hammer us when we step out of line. But I want to suggest that there is a very different way to understand what Jesus is saying. And it is a beautiful and life-giving message. It the best news you can possibly imagine. It’s like walking down to the baggage area and hearing the roar from the customs hall when Crosby scored the OT goal, and customs agents and drug traffickers embraced in joyous celebration...just kidding.

Every few weeks Pete Estabrooks writes a column in The Calgary Herald on exercise trends and products. His column this week really grabbed my attention. Instead of just another article on another passing exercise fad, he crossed the line from mere exercise advice to something much more profound when he began his article like this: “I had an exercise-induced epiphany this week. I realized that while silence is the moments between our words, peace is the moments between our thoughts. It’s why exercise is as important for our minds as it is for our bodies. To drive your body so hard that you know nothing but the beating of your heart in your chest and the gasping of the air in your lungs is a form of meditation.”¹ (emphasis mine)

That might not sound like fun to you, but some of you understand what Estabrooks is talking about. He is moving from the mundane to the sublime. He has found a window in his physical experiences to something that lies beyond it. His gasping for air, his hunger for oxygen, becomes a pointer to something deeper. And that is something deeply spiritual. We may not know what to call it...but it is real. Our desire for oxygen connects us with Desire.

In our reading from the prophet Isaiah, he connects the search for God with our desire for good food. “Why spend your money on food that does not give you strength?” Our desire for food—our hunger and our thirst—is a powerful metaphor for the spiritual life. Jesus never seems to waste an opportunity to connect the stomach to the heart. Once, when he realized he had 5000 hungry people on a hillside, instead of sending them home and apologizing for running his talk into the lunch hour, he sees an opportunity. It’s a chance to leverage their hunger for real food into a lesson on God’s provision.

Today, associations with food and our desire for it differ from culture to culture. A recent study by a sociologist and a psychologist surveyed people from around the world found that an American associates the word “chocolate cake” with “guilt,” and the word “heavy cream” with “unhealthy.” But they found that a French person associated chocolate cake with “celebration” and heavy cream with the word “whipped.” But in the cultures of the Bible, food and meals were about sharing life and relationships. These were cultures where eating was also about survival. The desire for food and drink can know many different modes.

The catholic writer Ron Rolheiser describes this very well when he says: “[Our desires] admit of different moods and faces. Sometimes it hits us as pain—dissatisfaction, frustration, and aching. At other times its grip is not felt as painful at all, but as a deep energy, as something beautiful, as an inexorable pull...toward love, beauty, creativity, and a future beyond our limited present. Desire can show itself as aching pain or delicious hope...Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire.”²

It would be a mistake to think of desire as something negative or somehow unspiritual. Desire is not the same thing as lust or obsession. Desire is not so much to satisfy our craving for short-term experiences as it is to awaken in us a persistent yearning for something we are all looking for to satisfy our souls. As James Nelson says, “I can experience lust for a new house, for sex, for better appearance, for certain achievements. But desire goes beyond a house to a home, beyond sex to love, beyond appearance to health, beyond achievement to respect.”³

In other words, the way we channel our desire is at the heart of the spiritual life. Our desires shape our actions. How we act is either going to bring greater wholeness and integration to our bodies and souls, or it is going to lead to destruction. How we act on our desires is either going to strengthen or weaken our relationship to God, to our loved ones, and to our world. Spirituality is what we do with the fire that burns in us (our desire). And that is why our habits with food, sex, and entertainment become such fascinating windows into the state of our souls. Because behind our desires for these things lie hints of our deepest desires for communion with Life itself. That is why in the season of Lent many of us engage in voluntary acts of self-denial through fasting or denying ourselves chocolate or coffee or Hockey Night in Canada. This is a very real and literally gut-wrenching way we can peer into our deepest desires and needs as people.

Let me give you an example of desire that is focused and handled well, and an example of desire run amok. Now it may strike you as odd to talk about Tiger Woods’ as having a spiritual life. But in the terms we are working with, this primal desire is universal. We all have a spirituality in this sense. Tiger Woods is an amazing athlete, has a nice family, is probably a very nice guy, and certainly is not evil. I am sure he feels terrible about what he has put his wife through. But he is a normal person who is full of desire, and his story is a warning that desire has as much power to destroy as it does to create. Woods’ sexual indiscretions are a fumbling and misguided attempt to satisfy a deeper hunger with reckless, loveless extramarital affairs. But what lies behind all this is a deep desire for something that can only be satisfied by the Holy. St. John of the Cross, the great Spanish Christian mystic, began his famous treatment of the spiritual life with these words: “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings.” Desire is the starting point of the spiritual life. The habits and disciplines we use to shape our desires are how we learn to channel and focus our desire.

I said I would provide a positive example. Have you ever noticed how much Winnie the Pooh talks about honey? He loves honey...and most of his day seems to revolve around his next meal of honey. He wonders who he should go and visit and wonders if they will be well-stocked with honey. He might be confused as having some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder. Yet when I read A.A. Milne’s delightful story I see signs that Winnie’s desire for honey is a window into something more spiritually profound than merely a belly full of honey:

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best”—and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.

The 4th century Christian mystic Gregory of Nyssa wrote these words: “Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden from what is constantly perceived.”

Read that through one more time and ponder it. What Gregory is pointing to here is that our experience of life in all its fullness—our communion with God—often begins in satisfying our desires for things like food and drink, beauty, sex, exercise. Our desires lie at the root of the spiritual life.

I admit it is easy to mistake Jesus’ call to “turn back to God or perish” as the harsh warning of a judging God’s messenger. But the story does not end there. Jesus then tells a story about a gardener who begs the owner of a fig orchard to leave a fruitless tree for one more year before it gets cut down. It’s a story about repentance and the desire of God that all who are thirsty, even those who have no money, no hope, no self-esteem, no merit of their own...would finally choose to turn back to him. It’s a story about a gardener who says: “Let me stay with this straggler for a fourth year...let me pay it some extra attention...let me surround it with more fertilizer. There is still time. Let’s see if it will bear fruit and be what it can be.” The offer of a fourth year is not the kind of offer you’d get from a ruthless judge.

The call to repentance is often misunderstood. It is simply a choice to turn our lives in God’s direction. Anything less leads to no good end. The point of the fig tree story is that God offers us many opportunities to respond to his call to follow him. In addition, it is interesting that Jesus is saying these words to good religious folks, not to pagans and atheists. We should all take note. I don’t know about you, but I am trying to figure out the spiritual life. I like to think I am taking it seriously too. But it requires a constant kind of life, with some meaningful practices and habits. That is where the church comes in.

The whole point of the church is to be a community where we can talk about and bring focus to our desire, our holy longing. Not to badger and judge, but to encourage and cheer each other on. Repentance is not just a one-time moment or experience, but a whole journey full of choices. Every choice is a renunciation. That is, to choose one thing is to turn our back on other things. To say yes to something is to say no to many other things. To say yes to God is to name him as our biggest desire, and to learn how to govern all our smaller desires in light of that. A church is a community where we have some support for that.

Jesus desires that our lives would bear fruit. I take that to mean that we know what it means to enjoy the goodness of our desires, and to experience in their satisfaction a foretaste of the divine. The urgency of this Lenten season is captured in the words: “listen to me, and you will eat what is good. You will enjoy the finest food.”

Sundays in Lent are feast days. It’s time to come to the Lord’s table and feast. If you’ve been smelling the freshly baked bread down here at the front this morning, that’s good. I was hoping it would make you hungry...really hungry. Jesus invites us to his table. And he always sees our hunger as an opportunity, not a predicament.

Thanks be to God!


¹ “Hot, hot, hot...yoga” (Calgary Herald, March 4, 2010)

² The Holy Longing, pp.4-5. Rolheiser writes with uncommon clarity on the universal experience of desire and its many manifestations. For him, Christian spirituality offers one kind of answer to this universal dis-ease, which is captured well in Augustine’s words: “you have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

³ Thirst, pp. 29-30