When faced with the three lessons appointed for today, the third Sunday in Lent, I have to tell you that I find myself drawn to the story of Moses’ encounter with the Holy One – with the disclosure of the divine – the Great “I AM.”  And I am repelled by the readings from First Corinthians and Luke.  So of course those are the readings I must address.  I can’t let them hang in the air unanswered, let them linger here without some kind of response.

I shudder when I imagine what lectionary preachers around the world are doing with the combination of the passage from First Corinthians 10:8:  “we must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did,” and Luke 13:1-9 with its repetition, “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did” -- they who were murdered by Pilate and they who had a tower collapse on them and kill them.  I shudder because of the ways that scripture gets misused by people in power – people in pulpits – as weapons against other people.  And these days, scripture often gets misused against gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered people, whose physical expressions of love regularly get mischaracterized as immoral. 

The measure of a moral sexuality, that is a sexuality that accords with the New Testament is this:  the degree to which the expression of sexuality is faithful in relationship and “the degree to which it rejoices in the whole creation, in what is given to others as well as to each of us, while enabling us always to leave the final word to [the One], who is the Beginning and the End of all things.” (1)   Listen:  that is a traditional moral understanding of scripture.

I also shudder at the idea that follows Paul’s argument that God never gives anyone more than they can handle, because that just seems like nonsense when I look around the world – or even the City of Boston.

Ironically (and suspiciously) the passage from First Corinthians stops short of verses 16 and 17, which say:  “The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?  Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”  In other words, we become the body of Christ by sharing our bread.   In fact, we do not fully become the body of Christ until we share our bread.  It is the act of sharing that makes us more of the body of Christ.  When we cannot or will not share the bread, we are poorer for it – we are all less of the body of Christ.  And Paul was talking about sharing bread as in sharing food, shelter, resources – what came to be represented as Eucharist, but for Paul, wasn’t limited to a ritual meal. 
Eucharist is meant to represent and remind us of how we are to be with one another – sharing food with friends and strangers.  Eucharist is a way to re-member the future – the future this afternoon, tomorrow, next week.  And one thing to remember is, according to our faith tradition, perfection or completion is not a prerequisite to sharing communion.  We can see that in scripture when we take a step back and view it as a whole.  Our scripture is not an account of the Holy One’s wildly successful work to prepare or produce perfect people, or peoples’ accomplishments in perfecting themselves before encountering the Divine.  Quite to the contrary, in fact, is the record of scripture – full of stories of imperfect people who stumble and misunderstand again and again – Moses and Paul, just to name two, have plenty of missteps and mistakes.  Our scripture is an expression of the creative and redeeming and inspiring power of divine Love (capital L), in spite of our best rejections, our worst transgressions; in spite of our worst offenses and our best defenses or fortifications that try to block Love out.  The Bible is a collection of stories of Love’s hunger for relationship with us no matter how broken or imperfect or muddle-headed we are.  

And so turning to the Gospel of Luke, I hear Jesus strongly cautioning us about two things.  The first caution is to not judge some as more sinful than others.  This is an incredible, a scandalous idea really.  It’s that the Holy One is so big, and we are so small, that the difference between us in terms of the measure of our sins is barely perceptible to the almighty.  The second caution is that we should not interpret or understand atrocities or incredibly bad luck as signs of Divine retribution.  Time is too precious, too short, according to Jesus, to spend it assessing who is more sinful than whom.  Jesus says twice, repent or perish.  And what I want to tell you is, that as far as I can tell, you are going to perish whether you repent or not.  None of us is going to get out of this alive!  The question is:  how do you want to live before you perish?  Do you want to change your ways to turn again toward the power of Love, or do you want to keep turning away from the power of Love? 

I hear Jesus saying that the time is short.  The urgency is not that you will benefit greatly by repenting – by turning again – by re-turning toward Love (although you will indeed benefit greatly by repenting).  The urgency has to do with how much the rest of us need you to turn toward Love more and more.  The world needs you – the world needs me – to believe more deeply in the power of Love and to give more freely and to act more boldly than ever -- to act more boldly than ever to feed those who are hungry, to free those who are oppressed, to befriend those who are friendless, and to heal those who are ailing. 

One of my seminary professors was The Rev. Ian Douglas (recently elected Bishop of Connecticut).  I remember an interview he gave some years ago about Christian mission and the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.  He was asked if he really believed that the goals will be achieved by 2015.  His response was:  “the goals are almost impossible to achieve by 2015.  So let’s get to it.”   Emmanuel Church’s Hope in Action campaign being led by our young adult leadership team has its own nearly impossible goals to get more than 65 people to  commit significant time and money to support the work of the Boston Public Quartet at the Chittick Elementary School in Mattapan.   Boston Public Quartet is providing long-term music education focused on academic and emotional needs of children who don’t otherwise have access to the arts.  They are currently serving 27 students and have 150 students on the waiting list.  The leadership team and I look at the goals and we think – there’s almost no way to achieve those kinds of numbers.  And I remember Ian Douglas’ words, “So let’s get to it.”

There’s one more thing in the parable of the fig tree that I hear Jesus saying.  I hear Jesus calling for patience in evaluating the fruit bearing in one another.  There is this curious tension between the urgent need to repent and the mercy granted to the fruitless fig tree which seems to be wasting the soil in which it is planted.  One more year the gardener pleads.  It occurs to me that each time that we hear this story in Luke’s gospel, the fruitless tree gets one more year. Jesus is telling a story about startling divine grace and mercy in contrast with harsh human judgment.  It’s not a story about responding to a hopeless case by doing nothing and seeing what happens.  It’s a story about actively nourishing and patiently caring for the fruitless tree, one more year – year after year after year.  Time is short.  Time has always been short.  Our bold action and our wild patience are urgently needed.