Tim's "Crappy" Sermon

Sermon for Synod Convention

Friday, June 4^th, 2010

Augustana Campus, Camrose

Pastor Tim Wray

(Hymn: There’s a wideness in God’s mercy)


Grace to you and Peace from God our Father, through our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.
As I studied this pericope I began playing a game with my eleven month old son. The game goes like this....”mercy...mercy...mercy...JUDGEMENT!” It gets him every time; tears, screaming, red in the face, filled diaper...He hates it. And here I am this morning patterning my sermon on this game that’s not a game.


The parable of the fig tree is the second half of a Lukan judgment text. Yes, you heard me, Jesus is talking about judgment. Are you listening, ELCIC? Are you listening, Alberta Synod? Are you listening, preacher boy?


In the absence of fruit, regeneration emerges from manure.
And yet, there is a tendency in our industrial, virtual, processed, protestant culture to think of manure as the enemy. Among us float fruit filled fantasies, “if we could just build a church free of all the manure we’ve been wading through since 1986 (and earlier) everything would be so much more…fruitful.”


And it makes sense that we might believe this…if you want your engine to run efficiently, get rid of the build up. If you want your plumming to run swift, flush the pipes. If you want your computer to avoid crashing, keep ahead of the viruses. It’s all simple enough. And simple it is. So simple are human beings, that our most advanced technologies require clean and sanitary environments to work. And we think we’ve really done something special. But dump a load of manure in the middle of Apple or Black Berry’s dust free production line and see how many workers come running with buckets, not to harvest ripened fruits from the richness of the earth’s humus, but to whisk the contaminant away.


Engineers have built empires out of silicone and steel, but measly manure and all its lively bugs threaten global scale production. Ask Cargill how much research they have put into living fertilizer products and they will teach you that there is just no money in manure, it’s tough to market, hard to control where it will seeps, it’s often laden with weed seeds, and is expensive to transport, not mention a host of other quality control concerns. The stuff is just not conducive to industrial agriculture. And it’s not that there is a shortage of it. Manure is everywhere. In this room alone there are piles of it (literal and metaphorical) just waiting to seep out of us today. We are steeped in the stuff, and yet our accepted way of dealing with manure is to try and flush it away. Make it go away. Take it away.
Manure is of no use to a man made machine and our negative attitude towards the stuff reveals our allegiances to such man made things.


God, on the other hand, has no aversion to manure. I suppose its because God is old and maybe doesn’t care about human inventions like micro chips, mega bits, miles per gallon, margins of profit and manmade efficiency quotients. God seems to care more about growing fruit. Tasty, labor intensive, harvestable fruit. Fruit that you can sink your teeth into. Fruit that can nourish a starving soul. Fruit that is so imbued with life that if it froze and fell on the ground into a pile of manure, by next spring it would morph into a generative tree that could feed the hungry.


The image of fruit from manure piles places God’s glory and God’s ways of doing things in direct contrast to humanities sanitary idols. This is why the parable of the fig tree is part of a judgment text. Judgment that looms heavy upon us as the manure piles up in our lives, in our neighborhoods, in Christ’s church, and a judgement that will soon call us to account for what or who we have put our trust in.


This impending judgment arouses feelings of fear and thoughts of escaping in all of us until the Word of God pierces through the muddle and calls us to resist escapism and root ourselves in the only one who can bring fruit out of all the uncertainty and crap that God’s faithful are wading through.


Jesus teaches us that judgment is clean and swift and on the way, but the cruciform truth is that mercy…mercy graciously percolates in the filth around us, buying us the needed time to return to the Lord. The only down side is that piles of mercy have a tendency to attract maggots and produce smells so uncomfortable that some will not wait around for fruit. Lutherans are no exception. As much as anyone else, we are prone to believe that we might build something better in the absence of all this crap. A church more attractive, efficient, comfortable, and pure. But the text reminds us that manure is our best friend, because in the presence of all this mess is where God stirs us to faithfulness, brings us into fruitfulness and reckons us as righteous.


At this convention, in our prayers, deliberations and conversations, may God stir up poop, merciful mounds of messy manure that safe guard us against ever confusing the church or its fruits or its future with a mechanism of human design. But rather, may we be rooted in the organism of Christ – the one who mercifully farms fruit from those mired in the messiest of situations. Amen.