When I was a parish priest, it was just about this point of Lent when parishioners would sidle up to me confessing that they’d faltered in their Lenten discipline. They were discouraged, ashamed and feeling like a failure.
It’s easy to feel that way when we haven’t reached a goal we were so committed to.
In the book, Flunking Sainthood the author, Jana Reiss speaks to this very issue. The premise of Flunking Sainthood is pretty simple: God’s grace, and our receiving of it, comes in many different forms and our job, as people who long for that grace, is to find the method of “reception” that best works for us. Not what works best for your neighbor, not what works best for your spouse, or your parents or your fellow parishioners…what works best for YOU.
Because while we’re all very similar, we’re also quite different. Since the beginning of time humans have been seeking, searching, longing to engage with, be touched by, The Divine. We search for meaning; we long for protection, we hope for the Grace of God to pour over us and all those whom we love.
But we’re also different, so vastly and wonderfully different in how we search, in how we long and in how we hope.
Where we run into trouble is forgetting that God LOVES our differences and willingly—longingly---reaches out to us in these varied ways, relishing in the truth that what you find sacred I may find silly and what I find sacred you may find absurd.
I think it’s just human nature that we really want our way of prayer, of worship, of being receptive to God’s Spirit, to be THE way and we spend a lot of energy trying to PROVE that another way, a different way is the wrong way.
Because if your way is the wrong way then my way must be the right way.
PHEW. It’s all very competitive. And exhausting. And frustrating.
And for God? Exasperating!
Speaking of exasperating—listen to the folks in today’s Gospel. “Jesus, did you hear what Pilate did? Jeeeeeeesus did you hear…Those Galilleans …how bad was their sin, how much did they mess up? C’mon Jesus, SPILL---how BAD WERE THEY?” They want Jesus to tell them that they’re better, that they’re right, that they’re not flunking sainthood, that, instead they’re excelling at sainthood.
Of course, Jesus doesn’t do that at all. In fact Jesus puts them in their place…and in turn, of course, he puts us in our place too.
Jesus says ---it isn’t the sinning that gets us into trouble, it’s what we do about the sinning that gets us into trouble. Sinning—making a mistake, moving farther away from God—is unfortunate. None of us really want to do it but we all do…not because we’re bad, but because mistakes are simply a part of the human condition…. we all sin and Jesus is saying: “listen folks, YOU’RE ALL SINNERS. Get over yourselves. Instead of being so concerned with your neighbor’s mistakes, why don’t you spend some time with your own—come to terms with them, accept that they’ve been made and set out to learn from them! Repent, and move on.”
Jesus is telling us to engage in reflection and amendment of life. To take stock of all that we’ve done and all we’ve left undone and make a decision to learn from our mistakes, get up and try again. To, like that fig tree we heard about at the end of the Gospel, loosen up our soil and try this fruit-bearing thing one more time.
By reading today’s Gospel at face value only, one might presume that God is in the judging and punishing business. But I think, delving a little deeper, it becomes clear that God is, instead, in the witnessing and urging business.
God is always present, God sees what we do, God knows our intent, God witnesses the result. When we miss the mark, when we move away from instead of toward God, God has one hope—that we realize our misstep and, in the words of the church, Repent.
Repenting is realizing a mistake. Repenting is admitting that mistake. Repenting is learning from that mistake and moving on. Our mistakes define us only when we wallow in them, when we’re paralyzed by them.
Our mistakes won’t define us as long as we learn from them and move on.
So back to this idea of Flunking Sainthood; in the book Jana, in her effort to find the perfect spiritual practice to bring her closer to God, the perfect practice to make her an excellent Christian, makes a ton of mistakes. And for a good portion of the book she allows those mistakes to define her…but, in the end…she realizes that the mistakes aren’t the end of the journey, they are simply part of the journey.
The journey is what matters. All of us are on a journey that begins and ends in God.
Each of our readings this morning reflects this journey of longing, deep in our souls, for God. A yearning expressed by the psalmist as a “thirst for God.” A thirst for God that at times causes us to feel so parched we fear never having that thirst quenched. But, as Paul reminds us in his letter to the church in Corinth, God is faithful. God will never let us die of that thirst, for God is always with us on this journey, offering the refreshing, life-giving cup of eternal salvation. All we need to do is take it, in whatever way works for us, and drink.
Amen.
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