Sunday, February 21, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.

The Church Goes to Marriage Counseling

Mark Eldred
Worship Coordinator and Interim Director of Adult Education

Psalm 122
Luke 13:1–9, 31–35

When I was a young boy, my grandfather Asa used to drive us places. Riding down a small Iowa country road in spring, Grandpa would roll down his window and yell, “Take a whiff of that! That is the smell of money.” What my grandpa was referring to was the smell of cow manure. In the spring in farm communities, at least in what were the farm communities of my childhood, farmers would spread manure on their fields to add nutrition to the soil in preparation for the spring planting season. What my grandpa meant in his annual spring cry was “Look around! Smell that prosperity, smell that opportunity, smell that family farm, smell that tradition, and smell that legacy!” In my young years, almost everyone that I knew had some kind of personal attachment to the family farm, whether they lived on one or not.

In all three snippets of scripture here, Jesus was talking to a planting people not so different from where I grew up—a people who lived from the ground, a people who knew where their food came from and who depended on the soil and their own ability to work it.

Today’s scripture has three parts. In the first, we are being given a serious charge from Jesus. The charge makes me think of the keynote address that we had here at Fourth Presbyterian Church this past January 18, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. On the topic of mass incarceration, Dr. Iva Carruthers encouraged the audience participants to “look around; the cries will be heard.” Jesus’ answer cuts straight to Dr. Carruthers’ request. Something tells me that Jesus must have known the famous Hebrew text of Micah. What is the Lord requiring of the human Jesus in this questioning by the crowd? “To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8). Jesus states boldly, “God doesn’t rank sin!” In God’s eyes, there isn’t a handy-dandy chart that lists different types of sins, ranking them from worst to least.

But remember, there actually were lists of sin in Torah, in Leviticus, Moses and the Ten Commandments. There were guiding principles regarding sin all over in the Hebrew scripture. Jesus would have known these Hebrew laws. Yet Jesus cuts a new path of a slate of sin that is set clean and equal. For Jesus, any other method looks like casting stones, and he knew that if we, as children of God and a sinful people, begin casting stones, there would be no one left unbruised. What a great assurance and grace this is through the message of Jesus.

Out of this assurance of an equal playing field came Jesus’ cry for repentance. Jesus is asking that equality and repentance function together. This is where Jesus’ cry of the kingdom of God enters the conversation. Jesus is presenting his audience with an alternative choice. You can come with me toward and into a kingdom of God or you can side with empire.

This choice wasn’t entirely risk free. Pilate, Herod, the Pharisees, and the chief priests and elders of the time amassed a wall of resentment toward the ministry and ideas of Jesus. When I think of Jesus trying to maneuver through this presentation of the mass deaths caused by Pilate and empire, I can’t help but think of the death of the family farm and family opportunity to big corporation. Repent. I can’t help but think of this very segregated city that we live in. Repent. I can’t help but think of a Chicago school system that is struggling, where some schools have an abundance of resources and finances and some barely survive on even one-tenth of those resources. Repent. Look around; the cries will be heard. Repent. I can’t help but think of the violence in our city and the “as long as it is not in my backyard” mentality that separates us as a family of children of God. Repent. And Jesus says, “We are equal in our sin” and so “repent.” How audacious of him and how absolutely awesome of him.

And then we enter a vineyard parable. While in Reidsville Georgia State Prison, a young Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter to his wife requesting certain books. One of them was George A. Buttrick’s The Parables of Jesus. In it Buttrick writes, “A wise interpretation of a parable will seek its salient truth. A parable is not an allegory. It is a flash of light, not an ingeniously devised mosaic” (George A. Buttrick, The Parables of Jesus, p. xxiv).

What are the salient truths of the audience of Jesus’ time? As I mentioned earlier, these are land people, and they would have known that most of the time when trees don’t make fruit there is an issue with the actual ground in which they are planted. They would have also known to listen closely to the characters that don’t get to speak—listening to the soil and to the tree!

In our first slice of scripture, Jesus asks us to repent. Here the gardener asks the landowner to relent. Being the gardener could be dangerous. This gardener sticks his or her neck out for a wounded tree and soil. The owner had the authority and could have so easily said, ”I have no time for you, and I will just cut both of you down.” The light is in the soil and in the gardener’s innate ability to listen to its needs without it having to say a word. Look around; the cries will be heard. If the soil and trees of our communities could speak, what would their stories be? Sometimes the silent cries speak the loudest. We must hear with our eyes for those who have no voice.

What we are faced with in this final section of scripture are the building resentments of the Roman leader Herod; a power struggle between a peoples’ allegiance to empire and a covenant with God; and Jesus’ decision to forge ahead into Jerusalem. Through today’s scripture, we now have resentment, a relenting, and a request to repent. Resent, Relent, Repent.

With all of the resentments in the Gospel of Luke, I can’t help but notice how much this parallels a broken relationship or even a recipe for what could be a failing marriage. In and through Jesus’ life and ministry we are introduced to the new covenant of the kingdom of God. We are a covenant people, Christians. One of the greatest gifts of marriage therapy is how it can assist in one’s ability to communicate, and one’s ability to listen and to be able to affectively repeat what we see and hear.

I hear all the time that the church is dying. I don’t think that it is dying, but I do think the church, as a covenant people, could stand to seek a little covenant counseling. In a Huffington Post wedding blog, the author of the New York Times bestseller The Dance of Anger and Marriage Rules, psychologist and author Harriet Lerner, states, “It comes as no surprise that most of us are more motivated to improve our talking skills than to attend to the other half of the conversation equation. But listening well is the ultimate act and the greatest gift that you can give to your partner” (Harriet Lerner, “Overcoming Your Listening,” Huffington Post). I find this wonderful advice not just for those in relationships but also for individual children of God and for God’s larger-world church.

Repenting is a true, deep search into the ability to look within one’s self. When I think of the word repent, I used to think of a pouring out of all that is inside me, the “bad” things that I have done. Recently I have added a new addition to the recipe for my spiritual practice of repentance. The resentments of Pilate, Herod, and the powers that be rose out of the fact that they were in such a hurry to be right that they simply refused to listen to Jesus, to their very selves, or to anyone. In this solution-driven, fast-paced, fix-it-now, top-down, technological society that we live in, what does it look like for us just to listen—to listen to each other, to listen to those around us, to listen to those different than us, to listen to other denominations, to other world religions? Luke begs of us to “pay attention to how you listen” and to “strive for the kingdom” (Luke 8:18 and 12:30).

Our time is not so different from that of these scriptures, even with all of our societal progress and technological advances. If anything, repenting, a dying to self, has become even more challenging. In Jesus’ plea for us to repent, to die to self a little each day in a move with him toward Jerusalem and toward the kingdom of God, there is a glimmer of patient hope. But repenting isn’t the final step. We are being asked to walk humbly with our God despite the Herod resentments of this world. We are being asked to carry our own cross this Lenten season.

Lord, do we really need to carry our own cross and to die to self to live in you? Look around; the cries will be heard. Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Lord, we can’t love kindness with our eyes closed and our ear buds in our ears so that we don’t have to hear and we don’t have to taste and see, so that we don’t have to acknowledge that opportunity in this country is not equal; so we can just keep our ear buds in and keep listening to Taylor Swift and swiftly move past that homeless person, swiftly forget that person in need, that person less fortunate, so we can find every way possible to not look, to not see, to not hear, to not listen, to not seek the injustice of inequality that is in all, and let me repeat in all, (did you hear me?) in A-L-L of our backyards, not just on the South Side and the West Side of Chicago or in other states or in other countries. Sometimes walking humbly with God requires risk.

When I go home to Iowa the trees are mostly gone. They have been cleared by big farm corporations to get the most “yield” as possible out of the land—that extra acre of corn, that extra bit of land to plant crop. When I go home, the new manure for the fields is a chemical fertilizer and weed repellant that includes anhydrous ammonia. Anhydrous ammonia is one of the main ingredients of crystal meth amphetamine. Out with old opportunity of the family farm and in with the new opportunity, be it right or wrong. Few, if any, of my friends growing up still own their family farms or even work on a farm. The search for opportunity there looks drastically different. How has opportunity changed in your neighborhoods?

Look around; the cries will be heard.

Lord, are you really telling me that I am going to have to repent and die to self to walk with you?

And now we leave our scripture with a Jesus looking off to Jerusalem, and to this very day we are still all standing there with him.

Friends, look around; the cries will be heard! The question is whether our repentance will include enough intentional listening in order for us and for the church to be able to hear these cries. Amen.