First
Presbyterian Church of Watertown
“There is Always Time for Amendment of Life”
The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry
March 11, 2007
There is always
a danger in naming people after people. The comparisons are inevitable as are
the attempts to find reflection. If you
are named after someone inevitably you will ask, “Am I like that person?”
This isn’t a
bad thing. In fact I count it as a
strange and poignant connection to life beyond myself. My name came from my uncle and his from a
grandfather. During the five brawls
Kathy and I had in naming our children we were on the same page with one thing:
the third time was the charm. No need
for a fourth round of Freds.
My great
grandfather was the fish and game warden of San Diego. I have pictures of him standing next a white
tail deer and a proud hunter. He lived
in San Diego when it was not much more than citrus orchards and a resort hotel,
long before it was more than a million people.
I have his membership card to the fish mongers club. It seems to have been an excuse for a group
of men to eat and drink wine. I know
this from photos of families gathered around long tables and there he is, Fred
Smith, in the middle with a gavel in hand moderating some sort of
happiness.
He was known as an easy mark for a
dollar. The story goes he always
carried a dollar just in case someone needed help. I thought of him when after a few years in ministry it became
clear that I was an easy mark as well.
With adjustment for inflation, I am an easy twenty.
From time to time comments and comparisons
will be made by family members. I am
not sure if it is a true reflection or just the association of names. It’s hard to say. He died before I was born.
My uncle, Fred Tritle, is not as ambiguous. I grew up as did my cousins in awe of his size and ferocity. He lived large and hard, wild and even
violent. As a child and in the years
after his death there have been times when I looked for images of
comparisons. Yet, for the most part, I
found more contrast. One thing though
seems much the same, a restless pursuit of joy.
When I was sixteen he showed up at our
house and tried to coax me into a drive.
It was out of the blue and I was just about to leave for work when he
showed up so I declined. It seemed like
a strange, odd, even random event until he took his life a few days later.
I will always carry with me the memory of being in algebra class
and the summons to the hall and then to the principal’s office where I was
told. As a teen the incursion of death
upon the boundless sense of time can be surreal and it was for me. It was as is a whole fabric of meaning and
measures were just wiped clean and life was the same yet now foreign. Intentions and schedules, desires and
expectations were simply put aside.
I was reminded of this when walking through
Boldt Castle. Perhaps it is just lore,
but the story goes that Mr. Boldt called the workers from their stations and
completely stopped construction after his wife died- there now being no reason
for the castle. It is said that workers
were called to literally put down the tool they were swinging and walk away. I found it to be a true picture of what it
means to be young and live as if life is boundless and then in a moment it is
not. There are things that are just
simply put down and left behind.
The story brought to Jesus and the one he offers, the Galileans
sacrificed by Pilate and the people who suffered the accident of the tower are
both offered for a kind of shock. Each
story is meant to convey the precarious quality of life, the way it changes in
an instant. The sacrifice of the
Galileans was meant to entice Jesus into redefining life in light of such
intentional death; the demise of those who lost their life when a tower fell is
offered as a contrast by its lack of intention. In effect Jesus dismisses their question and curiosity by
offering its opposite: be it on purpose or without purpose, death is
death.
And then he offers a parable, the barren
fig tree. There are about a thousand
ways to read this little story, hence it is a parable. Yet, just as he contradicted the notion that
there was a purpose to the Galileans death with the accidental death of those
who died under the tower of Siloam, so is the parable a kind of contradiction
of both of these. As he often does, his
parable is meant to be a kind or redirection to a better question.
The moment before I learned of my uncle’s
death, in the twilight of innocence I was hoping to see if a beautiful young
girl named Tiffany would laugh if I spoke to her. Her pity and kindness were matched only by her beauty. This was the image vanishing as I stood with
my grandmother sobbing in my arms. Again
and again, she me asked a question, a question much like the one posed to
Jesus. Why she begged? Why Freddy, why my little boy?
This is a question of purpose marked with
the heavy hand of loss. It would take
me years to see the question for what it was.
Jesus was much faster than me.
What took Jesus a moment, took me the remainder of my adolescence, a Bob
Dylan song, and a moment of grace to see the answer as to why someone would
die, the answer was a better question.
Jesus doesn’t answer the question of the Galileans, he
contradicts it with an opposing picture; he creates a paradox as it were. In
this contradiction he poses a new question.
And the question of the fig tree is this: how do you see your life? Do you see your life as a moment of bartered
grace? The act of Pilate was contrasted
by the tragedy at Siloam to show the mysterious quality of death. With one you can argue a kind of value, a
kind of purpose. But if you put them
together, the value goes away and you are at the edge of reason, what Isaiah
heard, “My ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts.”
What Isaiah says directly, Jesus offers
with a story. You are not going to
determine the ways of God by finding the purpose of death; it is not yours to
determine. Yet, in this moment, in the
moment where time has been remade, where you see life in the shadow of death,
how do you understand your life, your time?
Although many have associated the song Mr.
Tambourine Man with the recreational drug use of Bob Dylan, I found
something different. I found a young
man, much like myself, struggling to answer the wrong question, struggling to
find the right question to answer sorrow.
Why, why my little boy is an exhausting question with little to no
fruit. It was this sense of exhaustion
I heard Bob Dylan sing when he wrote: “My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on
my feet, I have no one to meet and the ancient empty street’s too dead for
dreaming.”
Why someone would die is an exhausting
question. It is something that leads to
weariness and dreamlessness. For this reason Jesus doesn’t turn to the crowd
asking of Pilate’s misdeeds and the Galileans and try to provide an
answer. It was a question that would
yield no fruit. It was a path of
exhausting images that robs your sleep.
Instead Jesus told a story of fig tree and a new lease on
life. He gives the people, not an
answer, but a new question. At the end
of Mr. Tambourine Man there is a kind of admission of defeat, a kind of
appraisal of sorrow with a call for a new direction: “Then take me disappearin’
through the smoke rings of my mind, down the foggy ruins of time, far past the
frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach, far from
the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.” And
then the hope, “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving
free.”
Years of asking the question of “why my
little boy” had left me weary and ready to admit defeat. I felt obliged to answer this question for
my grandmother, to bring her something that could stand before her crazy
sorrow. Tracing and retracing steps of
scripture and theology, looking for images when it was “just a shadow” I was
chasing. And then one night I was
blessed with a new question. We were in
each others arms again, yet this time we were dancing together. It was in a driveway turned patio with music
and lights and everyone wearing Hawaiian shirts and leis, it was with Nat King
Cole crooning when I saw her joy return.
Sorrow had marked too many days for
her. Yet, in this instance I saw the
way life can be seen again, born again, as it were. In her joy I saw the parable of the fig tree, the purpose of the
story: a better question. Do you live
as if your life is a gift of bartered grace?
Do you see your time, your hands and feet, your sight and memories as
all purchased by the gardener saying, let me have it a bit longer, let me care
for the tree just a year more?
Dancing in the drive way I put aside the question of why and
found the mercy of a better question.
So it was with Jesus and the crowd. Were the Galileans greater sinners? What of those who were killed by the tower?
Why did they die? No, he says, there is
no value to be found in trying to grasp the verdict of God’s judgment. This is a long joyless path. There is a better question.
It would be wrong to preach on this story
from Luke and not mention repentance, to not address and define what repentance
means here. In the midst of Pilate and
the tower and the fig tree and the gardener Jesus says, repent or perish.
Repentance is often associated with guilt
and shame, with a sense of being bad.
By making this claim it is almost as if Jesus says, “everyone is a
sinner and worthy of death.” In other
words, don’t ask why some should die, but why not? Yet, such a voice is one that sounds like fear and self-loathing
and not the Gospel of the Christ.
I am a firm believe in sin and
sinfulness. They are real just as I am
a sinner whose guilt merits wrath.
Yet, in spite of such a grim appraisal, I have come to associate
repentance with joy instead of shame.
Repentance is not the moment where I know I am a sinner. Repentance is when I take up the joy of a
better question. Am I good enough? Have I done enough? Do I love as I ought? Am I worthy? These are the questions fostering guilt and shame. Do I see my life as the bartered grace of
the gardener, of Jesus saying to the Father, let me have him for just a
while? This is what repentance sounds
like to me.
Most people I meet are fully conscious of
their faults and failures. They know
their misdeeds with all clarity and live with the weight of self-doubt. I want to meet more people who have found
the joy of repentance born of grace. I
want to meet people who live as if their life is all a moment of bartered
grace. Have you heard the gardener say
of you, let me have this one for a time?
Instead of asking if you’ve done enough or
even done your best, what if repentance is when you ask of boundless joy. What if repentance is when we put aside the
measures we use to cope with our failures, wondering if we are still a good
person; what if repentance is when you open our heart to Christ and say, make
me unto your image. Can you open your
heart that much?
The great moment of repentance is when you
see your life simply as a moment of bartered grace and you put aside all the
faults, all the failures and the measures we use to excuse and accept them and
you abide in the grace won for you by the mercy Jesus Christ.
Know that he is the one that says, give me this one for a little
while longer; let me see if he can bear fruit.
What if true repentance is when you see your life as a moment of
bartered grace and it is Christ standing in the gap bringing to completion all that
God intended? It is at this moment you
no longer worry about why. Amen.