Ten years ago this May, my husband John – the father of my two children – died suddenly while at work.  In the days and weeks that followed this devastating loss, I received an outpouring of love and support in the form of visits, phone calls, prayers, and condolence cards.  It was on one of these cards that a dear friend wrote some words I still remember:  “Jean, may your loss be fertilizer for new growth.”  And in the ensuing decade, I have experienced new growth, not just in spite of the loss of my husband, but in many ways because of it. 

 

Fertilizer.  And new growth.  Appropriate ways to describe aspects of my life – maybe yours, too.  And elements of this morning’s Gospel lesson.

 

The passage begins with a group of people approaching Jesus to tell him about the murder of some Galilean worshipers.  We can read in between the lines that they assume these murders are God’s punishment for sinful behavior.  But rather than comforting his audience with the assurance that tragedy will not befall them as long as they do the right thing, Jesus challenges their point of view and turns the question back on them:  “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”

 

Jesus calls his audience to repentance.  “Repentance” means turning around, and we often use it in terms of sin – we turn around toward God, we turn away from sin.  The Greek word translated as repentance is metanoia, which is the root of our word “metamorphosis.”  A caterpillar undergoes a metamorphosis as it changes into a butterfly, and once we see the beautiful butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, we focus not on what it used to be, but on what it has turned in to.  Similarly, when Jesus says, “repent,” he is not so much saying, “turn from sin” as he is saying, “turn toward God,” and he tells a parable about fertilizing a fig tree, that it may result in new growth.

 

Fertilizer.  It happens in life.  In this morning’s passage, the fertilizer was Galileans being murdered and eighteen people being killed when a tower fell on them.  In the news recently, it was a tornado which killed six students at an Alabama high school and a bus accident which killed five members of a college baseball team.

 

As I look out at your faces this morning, I know that many of you are experiencing fertilizer in your lives.  It may be financial worries, or feelings of inadequacy, a broken heart, a failed relationship.  The war.  The world.  Life.

 

I look at this blue sheet, filled with the names of people who need our prayers, and every name here represents a story – of struggle, loneliness, heartache, suffering, questioning.  And every week, there are new names – people whose lives have recently been turned upside down by an accident, a diagnosis, a recurrence of an illness, or some other kind of fertilizer that puts them in need of our prayers.

 

I know most of you have your own stories of fertilizer, of heartache and suffering.  The circumstances may be different but I think there is one universal:  the question why?  Now I am not going to stand here and tell you there is an easy answer to that question, nor am I going to offer up some saccharin platitude. 

 

Fertilizer happens.  If we’re fully alive, we are going to experience pain and suffering, but suffering can be transformative.  Our broken hearts can be renewed by God, and our broken lives can be revitalized.  But it will happen on God’s time, not according to our own schedule.

 

Let me share a personal story, one that some of you have already heard.  Many years ago, I watched my young husband Darcy suffer for 21 months with terminal cancer.  We had been married only eight months when he was diagnosed and given less than two years to live.  And I asked why – why God had doomed Darcy to an early death, why God would allow Darcy to suffer so, and why – 25 years ago tomorrow – God would leave me a widow at age 27.  But there were no answers to my questions.

 

Then eleven years ago, I was doing my student chaplaincy at Symmes Hospital in Arlington, and an interesting thing happened: I found myself time and again going back to the oncology unit.  None of my fellow students wanted to go near the place, but I felt comfortable there, sitting with patients as they underwent their chemotherapy treatments and talking with family members about the heartbreak of seeing their loved ones struggle with the disease.  It did not take me long to understand why I was drawn to the oncology unit.  Through my experience with Darcy’s illness, cancer – and cancer patients – did not scare me, and I wanted to minister in the service to which Christ calls all of us, just as we had been ministered to during Darcy’s illness.

 

Thus, fourteen years after Darcy’s death, I was finally able to understand the new growth that had taken place from that fertilizer in my life.  I was able to make meaning of it by taking the experience of Darcy’s illness and turning it into something positive by giving back to the patients and families in the oncology unit.  Although I still do not understand why Darcy had to die, I do know that as a result of his death, my ministry is more purposeful and profound.  I do not believe for one second that it was “God’s plan” for my husband to die of cancer so I would be a better minister.  I could not worship, much less devote my life to, a God like that.  But the fact of the matter is, I am a better minister because of this experience, for it has helped me to better understand suffering and to offer compassion.

 

Fertilizer and new growth.  We hear stories of it all the time.  John Walsh’s six-year-old son Adam is abducted and tragically murdered, and he takes that fertilizer and turns it into the new growth by his exhaustive efforts on behalf of missing and exploited children.

 

David Bloom, a correspondent for NBC news, dies of a pulmonary embolism while covering the war in Iraq, and his wife Melanie takes her loss and turns it into a crusade to educate people about Deep Vein Thrombosis.

 

Fertilizer and new growth.  On the tenth anniversary of her father’s death this May, our beautiful grown-up daughter Elizabeth will be celebrating at her senior prom.  And today, Peter and I are celebrating our second wedding anniversary.  I love you, honey.

 

It may take us years, even decades, to see new growth spring from the fertilizer of our lives.  For some, the new growth may never come, because not all suffering is redemptive.  Redemption means to change for the better, and it can be hard to find anything redemptive in famine, genocide, or physical or sexual abuse. 

 

Suffering is redemptive only if it transforms and brings new life – which is what Jesus came to offer.  Suffering is human, it’s a part of life.  It has been said that joy is not the absence of suffering, but the presence of God.  God does not instigate our suffering, nor did God decree the sufferings of Jesus.  Rather, God participates in them.  God abides with us and strengthens us.  Jesus calls us to repent, to turn toward God.  And God will help us find new growth springing from the fertilizer of our lives.

 

We began Lent two weeks ago by remembering Jesus’ time in the wilderness as he began his ministry.  Our wilderness times – our times of fear or illness or loss or loneliness – can be fertilizer which lead to transformation and new growth.  Christ shows us the way through suffering and offers us something beyond – hope, meaning, and new life.  That is the journey to the cross.  And that is the promise of Easter.  Amen.

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