The Boy Scholastic Wants to be Awake When It Happens

His death, that is. He wants to be awake, to be there. He figures that the anxiety about death is a fundamental part of the human experience, and that it would be far better to experience the possible horror and to know for certain than to slip away into something or nothing...

At chapel this week, a sermon was delivered on Luke 6:43-45 -- until I have time to do my own translation, here is the NIV (you can't get NRSV on-line, sigh):

43"No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. 44Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. 45The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.

The sermon which was given was, in my opinion, meaningless as a sermon. This is not to say that the sermon didn't have a point, but that the preacher decided instead to use the scripture as a segue into discussing a social justice issue rather than using a social justice issue to segue into discussing the scripture. The pulpit is not where we proclaim our social justice-- we do that with our hands. The pulpit is for elevating the truth of God with our words, hopefully inspired by the Spirit.

It was good, however, that the sermon was a failure in my mind, because it gave my mind the excuse to ignore what was being said by the preacher and focus instead on what was being said by the Spirit. And the Spirit is certainly needed with this piece of scripture, because it is not easy to understand. The passages leave us in a difficult place, for we recognize as Christ ians that we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We therefore could not be the good tree, could we? Yet this morning we had come together to worship Christ, and to call that an act of evil would be to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and so we cannot in any way call this act bad. This is simply a conundrum, for Jesus did not give us a third tree -- the tree which is simul iustus et peccator does not exist in this narrative.

Are we then to say that Christ is wrong? an equally unacceptable option, for it would be an act of vanity and blasphemy to say that we could judge Christ with fallen reason. As with all interactions with the Spirit, we must reconcile ourselves with the Word. How, then, do we understand ourselves in regards to this interaction with the Spirit?

The Psalmist tells us that the Lord delights in a broken and contrite heart. Indeed, if God loved us for our blamelessness, we would not be loved, nor would God delight. Rather, God loves us despite our sin, and delights in our genuine repentance, for it is in that act that our love of God (given through grace), repulsed by our sin, turns us towards God. And how then can we call that result bad, for we have returned to God? Certainly each day we play the Prodigal Son, forsaking God only to realize that we are naught without Him. We are Christians not because we do not sin or even because we do not sin more or less than others, but because our sin turns us to the Cross. This is not to say that sin is good, but that even though our sin exists, Christ's light shines through and illuminates our lives despite our sin. we are the good tree and we bear the good fruit: that is what it is to worship Christ. But what we cannot, cannot forget is that the fruit is good not because of he who bears it, but because of He who causes it to grow. All goodness belongs to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.