Spiritual Urgency

The Church of St. Paul & Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

March 24, 2019

Year C: The Third Sunday in Lent

Exodus 3:1-15

Psalm 63:1-8

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Luke 13:1-9

Spiritual Urgency

            On Thursday evening over 200 concerned Jersey City residents packed the First Wesleyan Church for a Jersey City Together action about the crisis – or, rather, the crises – facing our public schools.

            For me, as usual, the highlight of the action was when people told their stories.

Parents and students told stories of lead pipes and a limited supply of bottled water even during extreme heat and even for kids and adults with serious illnesses like diabetes – stories of broken bathrooms and flooded locker rooms and infestation of vermin – stories of a little girl with special needs who so wants to learn but whose desire seems not to be valued by the Special Education Department – stories of schools in some of our poorer and browner neighborhoods which have been neglected and maybe even nearly forgotten for decades – stories of a lack of municipal support and a quickly growing budget shortfall.

            There really weren’t any happy stories at this action.

            As is always the case with Jersey City Together, most of the action was carefully planned and scripted, including the demands made to the schools superintendent and the president of the Board of Education.

            Together they said yes (more or less) to all the demands made of them.

But, of course, that’s the easy part.

            The hard part is keeping after them – reminding them of their promises – holding them accountable – pressuring them to do the right thing for our kids and their parents.

            As I was watching and listening to this action play out, I was struck by the fact that for so long in our city there has been a total lack of urgency – a total lack of urgency about something that all of us at least say is important: the education – the future – of our children.

            After all, everything discussed the other night has been going on for years, for decades – the lead in the water didn’t just get discovered – the buildings didn’t just start crumbling – parents of Special Ed kids didn’t just start getting the runaround – and the city didn’t just start underfunding our schools.

            This has all been going on for years and years but there just hasn’t been any urgency.

            Of course we see this lack of urgency in other areas of life, too, like, for example, the environment and the scourge of gun violence.

            Just in the last week or two we’ve seen large areas of the Midwest drowned by floods and much of southern Africa was hit by a devastating cyclone that created giant lakes in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, forcing people to try to sve their lives by clinging to treetops and roofs.

            On the other hand, there was a story in the paper about how England – a land famous for its wet climate – is beginning to prepare for water shortages as summers become ever hotter and drier.

            And, yet, for most of our leaders – even those who acknowledge the reality of climate change – there is a real lack of urgency – and they and we seem to spend much more time addressing much less important matters.

            As for gun violence, mass attacks have become regular occurrences in our country – I’m tempted to say they’ve become routine - yet most of our leaders seem unable or unwilling to even examine why this keeps happening – why we seem to have so many armed-to-the-teeth men willing to slaughter as many people as possible - and our leaders certainly lack the dramatic urgency we’ve seen among the leaders of New Zealand in recent days.

            A lack of urgency.

            But we don’t have to look at the news to find a lack of urgency.

            We’re likely to find that same lack of urgency in our hearts – a lack of what we might call “spiritual urgency” - the issue that Jesus addresses in today’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke.

            Today’s passage is at least in part about the always-challenging topic of bad things happening to good people – or bad things happening to people no better or worse than most other people.

            First there’s what we might call a manmade disaster: the ruthless Roman governor Pontius Pilate killed some of Jesus’ fellow Galileans – and then, as if that weren’t bad enough, Pilate used their blood in sacrifices to pagan gods.

            And then there’s what we might call a natural disaster: the eighteen people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them.

            Then as now when bad things happen to people – when bad things happen to us – we tend to wonder what they or we did to deserve such misfortune.

            But Jesus – an innocent Galilean who will also be killed by Pontius Pilate – forever proves that this is not the way the world works – not the way God works – bad things happen to people who are better than average and bad things happen to people who are worse than average – bad things even happen to the blameless Son of God.

            So, Jesus says that the point is not that some people get the misfortune they do or don’t deserve.

            The point is that we don’t know how much time we have.

 We don’t know how long we have until we are going to have to answer to God for how we have lived our lives.

So we need to repent and turn back to God.

So we need to love God and love one another not “maybe tomorrow” – not “maybe next month”  - not “when some time opens up in my schedule” - but right here and right now.

We need to have a sense of spiritual urgency.

One of the things I love about Jersey City Together is that it is really good at getting the attention of our public officials.

On Tuesday evening, bringing out over 200 people definitely created a sense of urgency.

Forcing the leaders of our school district to sit in front of the crowd and hear the terrible stories from parents and kids created a sense or urgency.

Making those same leaders publicly make promises – and even forcing them to pose for photos next to a poster listing those promises – that created a sense of urgency.

The whole thing is artificial but quite effective.

And, you know, Lent is kind of like that, too.

Lent is artificial – for forty days we change some things around here in church – we offer Stations of the Cross and our book study and daily reflections – we’re encouraged to give up what we don’t really need and take on what we really do need – we’re encouraged to take stock of our lives.

Lent is all quite artificial but if we’re open it can create for us a sense of “spiritual urgency.”

(And, to give us all a little extra urgency, this is a friendly reminder that we’re already entering the third week of Lent – Easter is less than a month away!)

We might like to think that it’s only the “bad people” who face misfortune, but we all know better than that.

So, we must not waste too much time.

We must ask God to help us to change our ways – to help us love God and to love one another.

May God give us urgency to fix our schools and to save our planet and to bring peace to our land, and, most of all, may God give us spiritual urgency.

Amen.