Return to the LORD
“Return to the LORD”
Third Sunday in Lent, Year C, March 20, 2022
Isaiah 55:1-9, Luke 13:1-9
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Pastor Andy Kennaly
Through attention, time, and dedication, we learn that conversations with God are a two-way situation. Not only do we ask God to hear our prayers, but we must consent to God’s action and activity in our lives and open ourselves to the ways God would have us grow and deepen to experience God’s love in Christ. The catch? This friendly dialogue often becomes a wrestling match for the ways God would have us learn and grow are often uncomfortable and involve suffering. Rather than wrestle or suffer, we switch to monologue mode and our resistance becomes insistence as our prayer often settles into a list of things we want God to do. This dynamic is at the heart of Isaiah’s passage, as we are invited to return to the LORD, and in Luke as Jesus calls us to repent.
Holy reading, spiritual reading, Lectio Divina is intended to help us grow and deepen, and build a sense of belonging in God’s love as we pay attention to and actively participate in a dialogue through the text. If we quiet ourselves, invite God’s Spirit on God’s terms, and give consent to God’s living Presence in Christ to speak to us, then scripture stories or other holy readings begin to shimmer in ways that before, we may not have noticed. This is not always obvious. Maybe it’s a felt sense, something from our inner experience stirred, or a qualitative presence that serves to guide us. Maybe it's not when we’re reading at all, but later as we go through life, like biblical parables doing what they do: spiritual time bombs, exploding into our awareness when we least expect it.
Lectio Divina at its finest is more than repetitive reading or slow reflections. Even as a dialogue, it’s a different kind of conversation. Instead of filtering through our mind or our ears, we employ our heart, soul, and gut to take the point position. We don’t turn off our thoughts or listening, but we don’t give our cognitive preferences the center stage they demand in this age of dominating mental structure. We reign in the mind and lean into our body, trusting this technique of broadened perception.
In doing this, we learn that there are things we can let go of that may once have helped us but no longer serve their purpose; they only take us so far. What once was creative and life giving is now deficient and keeps us caught in circles. To “wait upon the LORD” or “return to the LORD” is a way to give God time and space in our lives to unfold gifts that are waiting to be opened.
Let’s look at this morning’s scriptures to illustrate what I’m talking about with Lectio Divina. We’ve already begun. We’ve read them, and familiarity is the first step. A second step involves meditation. We look for things that distract us so we can let them go, and we seek what is drawing our attention that may be beneficial. Meditation involves active discernment.
For example, in Luke we read about “Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” That one statement is filled with religious imagery, political tension, theological assumptions, and cultural taboos. Then we hear, in a similar way, about, “those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them.” After each of these, Jesus asks, “Do you think…” as rhetorical questions to recognize these as surface-level perspectives, as thoughts.
One dominant assumption in that honor/shame society was that if bad things happened it’s because God was punishing you for your sin. Yet the story that comes next about a fruit tree that doesn’t produce yet is not cut down negates this cause and effect, reward/punishment system they thought was so true. Again, Jesus moves deeper than thoughts.
We, too, could focus on the details and look at cultural aspects or political nuggets. We could mine these texts for contextual data to help set the stage and inform us of a larger setting. Those images of Pilate’s Rome attacking faithful Jews in a massacre, and that tower falling as stones crumble; these are very powerful. The historical, religious, cultural, and political tidbits are very interesting and important, at one level, the level of the mind.
While the ideas we may learn from this can be informative, that information does not require our transformation. To say “we believe” in an intellectual way asks nothing of us and we can go on with life as it is. In spiritual reading, that second step of meditation helps us notice that it’s easy to read scripture and stay in our brain. The temptation is to allow juicy details to become the main drama and focus of our attention. Yet in meditation, we can honor this, thank those who do this sort of research, and then set it aside, trusting there is more to the story. But to go there, it may feel like God’s messing with us. No wonder Jesus invites us, like the gardener, to dig around a little deeper, and it involves putting manure on it to see what comes.
We’ve been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass in the adult formation class led by Sharon Anderson. One of the chapters talks about the traditional, indigenous practice to harvest the sugars that come from the Maple Nation. Sugar Maples have sap that runs in the spring. But the sap is heavy on the water by a ratio of 40 gallons of water to 1 gallon of syrup, and sugar crystals are even more diluted. Spring temperatures of 40 degrees in the day and 20 degrees at night invite the sap to flow in the veins of the trees. Humans tap into those veins and collect the sap, then use various processes to isolate the sweet part. Traditionally, native people would collect the sap in buckets made of birch bark, then pour it into log troughs hollowed from basswood. At night, ice would form on the surface so in the morning that layer of frozen water was removed. Over time, the sugars become more concentrated until the water is no more.
At Honey Frame Place, which is what I call my house where I have honeybees, I also dug swales. These act as seasonal ponds that slow the flow of water in the spring and during storm events throughout the summer and help saturate the ground more slowly. This helps feed the roots of plants rather than wash all that water away down the ditch and into the creek.
The other morning, the main swale was choked with leaves, dead grass, and debris that clogged the outlet pipe. I used a variation of that ancient technique. Most of the dead leaves floated and had been trapped in the top skim of ice from the night before, so I took a rake and removed pieces of ice. This cleaned the water.
As I did this in the garden, not only was my body active, but my spirit was engaged and this scripture bounced around in my conscious awareness and I realized that Jesus asks rhetorical questions to help us learn what we need to let go of. Those dead leaves that last summer were green and brilliant, now they’re in the ice, and like them our lives can get clogged up with debris and our minds frozen in our own perspectives.
As Jesus says, “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did,” he’s pointing out the human condition that we need transformed through the renewing of our mind. This is true for individuals, this is true for cultures, this is true at an existential level for the human species.
Jesus is basically telling us how important it is to pay attention. In those early morning moments, I was not harvesting sugar, but rather cleaning a swale, and even though it’s 2022, I used ancient techniques. There are things in our past, cultural, religious, political, personal, and social, that help us, and there are things that don’t. To repent involves noticing the difference, and while keeping attention on the LORD, to allow God to help us focus on what helps the fruit grow, fruit that will last.
When I started raking the ice out to clean the water, I was bundled up with a heavy coat, a scarf, and my hood on. But the sun was out and even though it was a cool morning, that radiant heat and the work of reaching and raking warmed me up to the point I needed to shed. I took off the coat, hung up the scarf, and what once felt cold now felt refreshing and the beauty of a late-winter-morning-turning-into-spring, soaked in. To repent means to notice what we need to shed, to allow God’s radiant glory to help shape our response so we can focus on what’s life-giving, and in this work, to be held as one unique part of life’s larger tapestry, the seen and unseen. Soon, through the eyes of our heart we now see that we aren’t just chipping ice but we’re participating in God’s creative purposes that expand across the eons and into the core of our own soul.
As we follow Jesus grounded in love, may Peace and All Good be with you, Now, even as forever. Amen.