Grace Cathedral

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“O God… my soul clings to you; your right hand holds me fast” (Ps. 63).

The time has come to change your life. Alex Ross writes about a sound and light installation by the composer John Luther Adams (1953-) at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.[1] It is called The Place Where You Go to Listen. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a beach on the Arctic Ocean, where a particular Inupiaq woman could hear and understand the voices of whales, birds, other creatures and even the whole planet around her.[2]

The music comes from electronic data gathered by seismological, meteorological and geomagnetic stations. A computer translates this into a “luminous field of electronic sound.” One first notices a, “dense, organlike sonority which Adams has named the Day Choir.” It sounds like, “the rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string.” After the sun goes down one hears a moodier set of chords.[3]

Adams says, “My music is going inexorably from being about place to becoming place.” He describes his inspiration. Although he loves winter in Alaska he had to leave his home in order to teach at Oberlin college. Flying over the central peaks of the Alaska Range, he looked down at Mount Hayes. At that moment he said, “I was overcome by the intense love that I have for this place – an almost erotic feeling about those mountains.”

For fifteen minutes he furiously sketched out his ideas. He said, “… I realized, There it is. I knew that I wanted to hear the unheard, that I wanted to somehow transpose the music that is just beyond the reach of our ears into audible vibrations. I knew that it had to be its own space. And I knew that it had to be real…”

The theologian James Alison writes, “It seems counterintuitive, but Lent is all about abundance. When we focus on a time of renunciation and discipline, these are not ends in themselves, but the conditions necessary for the enrichment of our imagination. Almost nothing is more difficult for us to imagine than something coming from nothing. Yet that is the signature of the presence of God.”[4]

Jesus helps us to hear what would otherwise be unheard. In our constant preoccupation with scarcity, Jesus introduces us to God’s abundance.

In today’s gospel we have what seem like three unconnected stories. We will talk about how they are related in a few minutes but first we need to consider the context of these stories in the Gospel of Luke.

Thousands of listeners crowd around Jesus. He talks to them about metanoia, the Greek word for changing our deepest innermost being, for transforming our thoughts and imaginations – how we see the world. Christians translate this word as repentance but that doesn’t capture Jesus’ sense. Jesus is not talking about one part of us that needs to be tweaked but about our whole self. Furthermore, he tries to communicate a tremendous urgency – story after story, metaphor after metaphor. We need to change.

He talks about a self-centered rich man who resolves to build larger barns and dies that night (Lk. 12). He describes us as servants “dressed for action” with our “lamps lit” so that we are prepared for our master to return from the wedding banquet. We are like slaves managing an estate. We are like someone who is walking to court with our accuser – we need to settle our case together before the judge throws us into prison. We need to change right now.

Jesus seems to be answering questions that are not recorded, stumbling over himself in his urgency to communicate his message. Then, “[a]t that very time” (the Greek words are Kairos = a significant moment; the first word of the sentence is related to Parousia=the coming of Christ), Jesus is interrupted by people telling him news (apaggellō related to our word for angel).

Jesus talks about two kinds of human suffering. The first arises from human evil. Pontius Pilate the fifth Roman governor of Judaea killed pilgrims from the region where Jesus grew up. It was not just cruel but sacrilegious. Their blood mixed with the blood of the animals they sacrificed in the temple. It is hard to know what the people who bring this news intend. Are they warning Jesus? Threatening him? Commiserating? They seem to imply that these Galileans somehow deserved what happened to them.

The second kind of suffering is accidental. It is suffering because of bad luck or someone’s mistake. People visited a pool in Jerusalem called Siloam to be healed (Jn. 9). Jesus pointed out that 18 were killed when a tower fell on them there. It was a terrible tragedy and today we would ask if it had been constructed and maintained properly but it was not deliberate just an accident.

Accidents are bad enough, but there is something so much more heartbreaking about damage that has been inflicted intentionally. For many years we did not understand how human actions were destroying our planet. But now the evidence is clear. And we are not doing nearly enough to care for the earth. In fact, some politicians take a kind of spiteful pride in hastening its destruction with subsidies and other support for fossil fuels. A well-informed friend of mine told me that the federal government is requiring their offices to use plastic drinking straws (precisely because other kinds of straws are better for the environment). We need to change how we live. We need to repent.

We have an almost instinctual need to make sense of bad things that happen. We want to know what went wrong and who caused it. Jesus’ disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents, that he was born blind” (Jn. 9). Jesus responded, “neither.” The whole Book of Job was written to show that we cannot draw moral lessons from people’s suffering

This is not just what people did in the ancient world. It is part of our modern consciousness too. After Kate Bowler was diagnosed with stage IV cancer she observed, “Most everyone I meet is dying to make me certain. They want me to know, without a doubt, that there is a hidden logic to this seeming chaos.”[5] There is something in our DNA that makes us always ask, “why do bad things happen to good people.”

Jesus utterly rejects all our tendencies to use someone else’s suffering to craft a story that will make us feel better or for any other purpose. God does not cause someone else pain in order to punish us. Jesus says, “do you think [those who died] were worse sinners? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did” (Lk. 13).

In short, Jesus turns us away from the blaming question “why did this happen?” so that we can embrace a different question, “what can I do?” In place of a tower-destroying, tyrant-manipulating superbeing who punishes sinners, he gives us the image of a gardener providing rich soil and water, who protects us from being chopped down so that we can bear good fruit in the future.[6]

3. So what are we to do? What might metanoia or true repentance look like for us? The theologian Katherine Sonderegger writes that we have a hard time thinking about God because nothing is like God. She exclaims, “God is utterly, absolutely unique!… God’s reality is without limit.” But God is also lord of our knowledge of him and so, “God’s Reality can be… encountered… within the world…”[7]

Martin Laird writes that we meet God when we enter into what he calls the Silent Land. “Communion with God in the silence of the heart is a God-given capacity, like the rhododendron’s capacity to flower, the fledgling’s for flight, and the child’s for self-forgetful abandon and joy. If the grace of God that suffuses and simplifies the vital generosity of our lives does not consummate this capacity while we live, then the very arms of God that embrace us as we enter the transforming mystery of death will surely do so. This self-giving God, the Being of our being, the Life of our life, has joined two givens of human life: we are built to commune with God and we will all meet death.”[8]

He goes on, “Silence is an urgent necessity for us; silence is necessary if we are to hear God speaking…” Silence, “disposes us to allow something to take place. For example, a gardener does not actually grow plants. A gardener practices certain gardening skills that facilitate growth that is beyond the gardener’s direct control… The skill required is interior silence.”[9]

This week for homework I want you to spend some time in silence, to make room in your life to hear the voice of God.

In 2002 the children’s television host Fred Rogers (who was also a Presbyterian minister) delivered the Commencement Address at Dartmouth College. This is what he said, “I’d like to give you all an invisible gift. A gift of a silent minute to think about those who have helped you become who you are today. Some of them may be here right now. Some may be far away. Some, like my astronomy professor, may even be in heaven. But wherever they are, if they’ve loved you, and encouraged you, and wanted what was best in life for you, they’re right inside your self. And I feel that you deserve quiet time, on this special occasion, to devote some thought to them. So, let’s take a minute, in honor of those that have cared about us all along the way. One silent minute…”

Mister Rogers continued, “Whomever you’ve been thinking about, imagine how grateful they must be, that during your silent times, you remember how important they are to you. It’s not the honors and prizes, and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted. That we never have to fear the truth. That the bedrock of our lives, from which we make our choices is very good stuff.”[10]

It is time to stop asking why and to begin wondering what we can do now. Let us hear the unheard, transpose the music that is beyond our reach. Let us give abundantly, love intensely and welcome the silence that will allow us to hear God. The time has come to change our life.

Production Notes:

John Luther Adams

Alaska Mountain Range

James Alison

Katherine Sonderegger

Mister Rogers

Martin Laird

[1] Alex Ross, “Song of the Earth: The Arctic Sound of John Luther Adams,” Listen to This (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) 176ff.

[2] https://www.uaf.edu/centennial/uaf100/ideas/the-place.php

[3] I listened to The Place Where You Go to Listen as I wrote this section of the sermon.

[4] James Alison, “In the Lectionary, Sunday March 3, 2013…” The Christian Century, 20 February 2013. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-01/sunday-march-3-2013?code=m3w9CWh9QPvbiGgTMhuE&utm_source=Christian+Century+Newsletter&utm_campaign=991157d227-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_SCP_2025-03-17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-31c915c0b7-86237307

[5] Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (NY: Random House, 2018) 14.

[6] Malcolm Clemens Young, “A Scout Is Reverent,” Christ Church, Los Altos, 3 Lent (3-7-10) C.

[7] Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015) 26, 40.

[8] Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation (NY: Oxford University Press, 2006) 1.

[9] Ibid., 3-4.

[10] https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/fred-rogers-one-minute-of-silence