3 Lent Cycle C March 20, 2022
Ex.3:1-17 Ps. 103:1-11
1 Cor. 10:1-13 Luke 13:1-9
The Bible is a book about Time, telling us how an Everlasting, Timeless God is involved in our history.
In the Burning Bush theophany to Moses, the name of God is revealed: "I am what I am. I am continuous Being within all beings in time. I am always total becoming what I am becoming."
God as pure becoming, omni-becoming, comprehending everything as time moves on and as every change makes the God environment larger and larger, and about the environment God provides, St. Paul wrote, "In God, we live and move and have our being." We live and move means change and becoming, and so we are a moving and changing total number of occasions of existing.
The nature of God's becoming is pure, continuous creative freedom. And God’s great gamble in creation is that creative freedom is shared in degrees with all lesser beings that live in God's creation.
This freedom means that all the events of the past are absolute events which happened and contributed to the causing of all future events.
And because there are so many creative beings, human and non-humans, we cannot know with precision exact causation. What does science try to do? Scientists observe behaviors to establish significant causal connections which allow us to understand better how we should live to promote best probable outcomes for our future.
It is easier for scientist to establish causal connections in the physical world; but in the realm of human behavior, the ability to be exact in our understanding of cause and effect is more difficult.
We as human beings are engrossed with causes of human behavior or understanding why good and bad things happen to people in apparently some rather random ways. And because we are insecure about the mystery of causality, we whistle in the dark by speculation, we find speculations of all sorts.
Why did those poor folk from Galilee end up dead and their blood used in Pilate's sacrifices? What did they do to cause this? And what about those poor people on whom fell the tower of Siloam? And what about all those innocent people and children who are being bombed in Ukraine? What did they do to deserve this? Surely Putin's bombs were not so smart as to single out individual men, women, children, and buildings.
We think that we can know specific causation sometimes, but in very important areas of our lives it is a mystery; the mystery of an entire chain of indispensable former things which all contributed to what is happening now. And we can’t know the precise connection of everything, and so we speculate as our coping mechanism.
In the face of speculation about the causes of tragic deaths, what did Jesus say? He was less concerned about the cause of death, and more concerned about how one entered the portal of death.
And what does Jesus recommend as the ideal way to enter the portal of death? In the state of repentance. Repentance is the best way to respond to Freedom and Time. Repentance is learning and working at trying to be better today than yesterday being drawn by the magnetic lure of God's perfection. No one enters the portal death perfect; but the perfect way to enter death is in the state of repentance.
If you and I are living in the state of repentance, then you and I can be the very best compost, after we are gone, for a more fruitful world after we are gone. Compost and manure does not seem like a very romantic mode of our afterlife, but think about it: the past is dead and gone but the residue traces of how we have lived and left our influences can be rich compost for the future, or it can be waste that needs to be forgotten.
I believe that Jesus is asking us to live repentant lives so that we can be deep, rich, fertile, holy compost for a better future world. By being holy compost is the way in which we remain literally in this world after we are gone.
Today let us worry less about past causality and let us embrace repentance causality to pay the goodness of our lives forward into the future. Our lives as God's compost can be used to give the future world another chance at surviving and bearing fruit. Amen
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