To listen to this sermon, click here.
New Testament Reading–Luke 13: 1-9
In the first semester of her senior year of high school, Jessica’s English teacher Rita Schwartz gave her class the following assignment: pick an issue that you know nothing about and write an essay in which you seek to persuade the rest of the class that they should be passionately concerned about that issue. Examples of issues included sex trafficking, racial discrimination, the death penalty, and prostate cancer. Jessica had no idea what she would write about. She didn’t really know much about any of those issues, but she wanted to find something that related more to her life or the lives of other students in her school. She thought to herself about how none of her friends talked about prostate cancer at lunch. She was then struck by an idea: That day at lunch they had talked about something that could be considered an issue. They were discussing a student named Mandy who happened to sit next to Jessica in Schwartz’s class. To be more accurate, Mandy had sat next to Jessica until that very week. Mandy was missing from school that week because she had seriously injured herself. She had intentionally cut her forearms with a razor. Her cut had sliced through an artery causing serious bleeding.
When her classmates talked about it at lunch, they said things like: “How could she doing something like that?” “What’s wrong with her?” “I would never do that to myself.” Jessica mainly remained silent. She didn’t like how judgmental the others sounded. She believed there must have been some reason for why Mandy cut herself. Finally, Jessica blurted out, “Maybe she was just really depressed.” Her comment didn’t seem to change anyone’s perspective. One of her friends said, “I don’t care how depressed someone gets. They should know that cutting themselves isn’t going to make them feel any better. That’s just stupid.”
This comment struck Jessica as insensitive and offensive, but she didn’t know how to persuade her classmates to think any differently. For this reason, it occurred to her that the issue of people cutting themselves would be the perfect issue for her to research. Jessica began doing just that after school at her local library. The librarian there informed her that the subject category that she wanted to search under was “self-injury” or “self-harm.” They quickly pulled up a couple of articles online from respectable sources. Jessica learned there were lots of different factors behind why people might cut themselves. Often they had had difficult experiences when they were younger. They might have been “separated from someone they loved.” They might have “been bullied, harassed, assaulted, [or] isolated.” They might have suffered from physical violence, emotional abuse, or sexual abuse. When people harm themselves, it can be “a means of communicating what can’t be put into words or even into thoughts.” Some describe it as “an inner scream.” The act of injuring oneself can also give people a sense of release from whatever tension they have bottled up inside. At times, it can serve as a physical distraction from an emotional pain that feels far worse.
The more Jessica read about self-harm the more she encountered a wide array of reasons and thought processes that led to it. For example, some people cut themselves as a form of self-punishment. They felt guilty about something they had done, or they might have felt like they deserved to be punished because they saw themselves as stupid or ugly. That night Jessica continued to do more and more research, and at one point, she was particularly troubled to read that in some cases religion was tied into the guilt people felt. She even read a Bible verse that troubled her. In Matthew, Jesus says, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.” Jessica could hardly believe what she was reading. That didn’t sound like Jesus. In a burst of passion, Jessica sent the pastor of her church an email demanding an explanation for how Jesus could say such an awful thing. She thought Jesus taught us that God loved us even when we sinned. This verse sounded like God wanted us to punish ourselves in one of the worst possible ways.
Pastor Peter Zuchnelli emailed Jessica a response the next day. Zuchnelli thanked her for her email and said that she was raising a very good question. He agreed that what Jesus said according to Matthew was troubling. He also observed that elsewhere Jesus does talk about God forgiving people of their sins rather than punishing them. Zuchnelli suggested that Jessica think of this apparent conflict in the statements of Jesus as being not so much about the views of Jesus as it was about the views of people in communities that passed along the story of Jesus. Those communities each told the story of Jesus in a way that reflected their own struggles and difficulties. On the one hand, early Christians believed in a God of love and forgiveness, but they also wrestled with how to still hold people accountable for their actions. Christians still wrestle with this. When people do the wrong thing, we want them to take responsibility and we want them to change their ways even if God does forgive them. Perhaps, the passage in Matthew was not to be taken literally,” argued Zuchnelli. “If everyone cut off a hand every time it was involved in doing the wrong thing,” he observed, “we would live in a handless society. Perhaps, the passage was less about punishment and more about simply getting people to take their own actions seriously. After all, just before these verses, Jesus encourages people to seek reconciliation before bringing a matter to a judge who would issue the punishment of prison.
Jessica was somewhat skeptical about Zuchnelli’s reply. It sure seemed like this verse needed a lot of explanation in order to keep it from sounding as bad as it did. That Sunday Jessica’s parents prodded her to attend church, even though she thought her time would be better spent figuring out what to write for her essay’s conclusion. She needed to think of what message other students needed to hear, so that their school might be a place that prevented self-harm before it even happened. With much reluctance, Jessica went to church. For his sermon, Pastor Zuchnelli preached on the parable of the fig tree. Zuchnelli liked to use pictures projected onto a large screen to illustrate his points. For instance, he asked the congregation to imagine what would happen if they viewed fruits and vegetables the same way humans sometimes view each other. “Would you spank a green tomato to get a ripe tomato?” he asked. “Only if you want a bruised tomato,,,and that can get messy,” he observed as he flashed a picture of a squashed green tomato across the screen. He then said, “To get the kind of fruit that we desire, we could do all sorts of things to beat or mold it into shape.” For this, he flashed a picture of watermelons that were not only identically shaped but identically shaped as square boxes of the same exact size. In Japan, they had grown these watermelons in glass boxes so that they could be compactly stored on supermarket shelves. Zuchnelli then flashed a picture of regular watermelons of all different shapes and sizes. “How many of you would prefer these watermelons?,” he asked. He then reflected, “With humans, we can do all sorts of things to try and beat each other into shape to get the outcome we think we most desire, but maybe the best thing we can do is to create a nurturing environment in which each of us can flourish in his or her own unique way so that we might bear the fruit God intended for us to bear.” He then paused for a second and said, “Isn’t that what we were born to do—to flourish and bear fruit like the fig tree?” He continued, “As a church, our job is to make sure each of our trees gets the nutrients and the cultivation needed to do just that. Our scripture calls it manure.” Zuchnelli added, “That’s why I entitled my sermon, ‘Holy Manure!’”
Jessica was inspired, not by the sermon title, but by the idea Zuchnelli gave her for writing the conclusion to her essay. What her school really needed was an environment in which students could grow and ultimately flourish. To begin with, such an environment would have persons in whom students could confide if they were having a difficult time. Her school could not always do much to control or positively influence what happened in the homes of students, but her school could become a place of safety, and a place where students knew that their struggles didn’t need to be shameful secrets but rather problems that could be sorted out with the help of a caring adult. School could also be a place where students could feel free to talk about their feelings without fear of being judged or ridiculed by their peers.
Jessica knew that more needed to be done than even a school could manage. That’s why people like the members of her church were important. In order to truly flourish, students needed to have lives in which someone was telling them that they mattered, that they were important, and that they had a tremendous amount of potential. Students need holy manure, even if Jessica preferred to call it plain old love. Amen.