this one's a doozy: Luke 13:1-9
Stanley Yelnats, (yes, that’s a palindrome) was walking home from school one day when a pair of shoes fell from the sky. They hit him on the head, actually. After his initial shock of encountering shoes falling from the sky, he bent down to inspect them. To his astonishment, these were really nice shoes; a pair of baseball cleats signed by the famous Clyde “Sweetfeet” Livingston. Astonished by his luck, and aware that he has never held anything worth this much money in his life, he picks up the shoes and starts to run. But that is where his luck ends, because, as is the the family lore, all of the Yelnats family has been cursed because of Stanley’s “no good-dirty rotten-pig-stealing-great great grandfather.” See, since the poor decisions of his ancestor, Elya Yelnats, Stanley’s entire family has been cursed with bad luck, all the way down the line, father to son, right down to Stanley himself. So as he is running home, amazed by his incomprehensible luck, he hears police sirens blaring, getting closer, and finally pulling up behind him. He is accused of stealing the shoes from a charity auction to help orphans, is convicted of the crime, and is sent to a juvenile detention “camp” called “Camp Green Lake,” which, it turns out, is not a camp, not green, and not a lake. It is a dry expanse of land in the Texan desert, where he is condemned to dig six foot holes in the ground, one a day, for the purpose of “building his character.” And so begins the 1998 Newbery Medal Award winning book, “Holes” by Louis Sachar.
Every day, Stanley is forced to dig pointless holes in the desert ground in grueling conditions for a crime that he did not commit, simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although his bad luck has been taken to the extreme now that he is at Camp Green Lake, this has been the way of his whole life, his father’s whole life, his grandfather’s life, and his great grandfather’s life, ever since his great great grandfather made a promise that he didn’t keep. And so the generational curse continues on down the line.
While at camp he meets a kid named Zero. Zero doesn’t say much. He’s small, but feisty, and full of anger. He’s not good at much, he doesn’t have friends, no family to send him letters, and even if he did get them, he couldn’t read them. But he’s really good at digging holes. He’s always the first one done. So Stanley and Zero strike up a deal. Stanley will teach Zero how to read, if Zero helps Stanley dig his hole every day.
As their unlikely friendship grows, Zero comes to a revelation. It’s his fault that Stanley is at Camp Green Lake in the first place. He was at the orphanage the day of the charity auction, he was the one who tried on Clyde “Sweetfeet” Livingston’s shoes, he was the one who raced out of the building with them still on his feet, and when he discovered that folks were chasing after him and he was going to get caught, he pulled off the shoes and threw them over an overpass, where they hit Stanley in the head, landed on the ground, and the rest is history. Zero feels guilty about this revelation, but he keeps it to himself.
A whole bunch of stuff happens, and you really should read the book, or at least watch the movie, and Zero and Stanley end up wandering the desert alone, in a futile attempt to escape from Camp Green Lake. Without water, in the blazing heat, they get a bit delusional. And Stanley begins to tell Zero the lore of his “no good dirty rotten pig stealing great great grandfather.” The story goes, his poor great great grandfather had fallen in love with a beautiful girl from his village. But having nothing to offer her father in exchange for his daughter’s hand, the beautiful girl was pledged to marry the pig farmer, in exchange for one of his pigs as dowry. Desperate, Stanley’s great great grandfather goes to the village gypsy, Madame Zeroni, for advice. She offers him a pig in exchange for one thing, that when the time was right, he would carry her up to the top of the mountain. He accepts. But Stanley’s great great grandfather gets his heart broken by the rich man’s daughter and runs off to America, completely forgetting about his promise, and thus, incurring the curse upon his entire family line. And ever since, his family has had nothing but rotten luck, all the way down to Stanley, who is forced to dig holes in the desert for a crime that he didn’t commit.
They continue to wander the desert as Stanley tells the tale, and they become delirious with dehydration. With the situation becoming more desperate with each step, they come upon the mountain shaped like “God’s Thumb,” which is rumored to have the only source of water for miles around. They begin to climb. But Zero is in worse shape than Stanley, and can’t make it up the steep mountain. So Stanley begins to carry him. To keep him conscious, Stanley talks to him, and at one point they rest, and he says, “Hey Zero, what’s your real name?” Zero chuckles to himself, and blurts out, “my real name is Hector Zeroni. And I was the one who took the shoes. You’re here because of me.” But suddenly Stanley realizes that it’s quite the other way around. Zero is the great great great grandson of that gypsy who cursed his great great grandfather. Zero is here because of him. Stanley sees his family story in a new way, and in the act of carrying his friend, the great great great grandson of Madame Zeroni, up the mountain, the curse is removed, and they are both unbound by their recent and distant pasts. They confront, honor, accept, and embrace the messy manure of their histories, and they use it to grow.
The book is better.
But it’s this story of generational trauma, passed down from one generation to the next, through Elya Yelnats all the way to Stanley, through Madame Zeroni all the way down to Zero. This story is a great, and often humorous, allegory of what we often do as humans -- what we do to ourselves, and what we do to each other. We think, surely there is a reason for this hurt we are suffering. Surely there is a cause for this pain we are enduring. Someone, somewhere along the line screwed up, and now, here we are, paying for it years and generations later. And this helps us pretend that we are safe from future hardships because if we follow the rules and don’t do anything wrong, we’ll be safe from the tragedies of life. Bad things happen because someone, somewhere along the line, did something wrong, and they’re getting what they deserve. So we, too, can keep bad things from happening to us by always doing it the right way at the right time for the right reasons. Pain can’t be random after all, and that’s way too scary, there has to be a reason. Right? Right?
That was certainly the Jewish-Galilean approach to understanding life. Someone must have sinned, either in a past life, or right here and now, since that man was born blind, or since that woman is barren, or that wife has been widowed so many times. Someone must have done something wrong to deserve their affliction, or their poverty, or their round of “bad luck.” Because if it’s not this way, if there isn’t a reason, then we could be next. And we all just can’t handle living in that kind of fear every day. So we create stories, we place blame, we find reasons for why terrible things happen, and then we live by them, creating a cycle of self-fulfilling prophesy that seems to prove the stories true. Some folks from the crowd ask Jesus, “Haven’t you heard about these atrocities? Haven’t you heard about what Pilate did to them, killing them, and then mixing their blood with the sacrifices at the altar? Terrible, just terrible.” But Jesus reads beyond the words into what’s going on inside of them. He asks them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way that they did anything worse than any of you? Or what about that horrible tragedy with the falling of the tower of Siloam, where eighteen people died, do you think somehow you’re exempt from such a horror? Nope. You’re no better than they.”
They suffered. Suffering happens. Tragedy happens. Sometimes, there’s an explanation, and sometimes there’s not. But if you keep looking at the world in this way, in the way that makes the so called good kids the winners and the supposed bad kids the losers, if you keep thinking that everybody always gets exactly what they deserve, then you’re going to suffer just as they have. You need to repent. You need to change your minds. You need to see the world in a different way. We’ve got to let go of this idea that we get what we deserve or that there’s some reason why we’re suffering. We’ve all got no good dirty rotten pig stealing great great grandfathers. We’ve all stolen a pair of shoes and let someone else take the blame.
Those folks who were murdered by Pilate were a mixture of sinner and saint, just like we all are. They didn’t deserve what happened to them any more than we would. We have to repent - metanoiete - literally, to change our minds - about this idea that if we are suffering it must be because we, or our ancestors, have done something wrong. It’s not so black and white. It’s not so either/or. I suffer the sins of my fathers. And I commit some sins of my own.
This is generational trauma. This is trauma that has happened to our ancestors, to our people, to our culture, that can literally switch certain genes on or off, and this suffering can get passed down from one generation to the next. The children of Holocaust survivors carry their parents’ trauma inside of them, in their very genes, and they pass that trauma on to their children, even as they tuck them in safe in their beds thirty, forty, seventy years later. The decedents of slaves still carry inside of them the trauma of over two hundred years of brutality and oppression, and they pass that trauma on to their children and their children’s children. What trauma will the children of those people who were murdered by Pilate in the Temple and whose blood was mixed with their sacrifices carry? And what will they pass on to their children and their children’s children? Will they blame the victims, believing, like most of us do, that they must have done something to deserve it? Or will they lash out at the oppressors, binding themselves to a life of hatred for what has been done to them by their perpetrators? And what about Pilate and the trauma he's placed upon himself? Upon his children?
How can we be healed of all the pain of those who have come before us?
Repent.
Repent, Jesus says.
And I know that we think that we need to wear hair shirts and kneel on a bed of nails and think about how awful we are and that’s what it means to repent. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus means. We are called to change our minds. To see the world in a new way. That’s metanoia. And I think a clue to the truth of this is found in Jesus’s perplexing parable of the fig tree.
A landowner gets frustrated with this fig tree that was planted three years ago. It’s not bearing fruit. “Cut it down,” he tells the gardener. “It’s a waste of resources, it’s not doing what it was made to do, so get rid of it.” But the gardener sees a potential in this tree that the landowner does not. “Give me one more year,” he says. “Let me aerate the soil around it, let me scatter some manure on it, and then let’s see what happens.”
We never know if the landowner agrees to the gardener’s request. Jesus doesn’t really finish the story. But I think that’s not the point. Jesus doesn’t want us to focus on the broken fig tree, or the impatient landowner. Rather, he wants us to see the world through the eyes of the gardener. The gardener sees, not how this tree is failing, but rather what it needs. The gardener sees that instead of treating this broken, ailing thing as a lost cause, it needs time, and tender care, and some manure spread around it. This gardener sees this suffering tree, and instead of blaming it for its suffering, or blaming its past, it listens to it, it gives it what it needs.
To repent means to see at the gardener sees.
The manure here, I think, is the key. Because what is manure other than piles of stinky, rejected, discarded waste? Old stuff that has been used up, passed on, and left to rot. It’s all those things in our histories and in our lives that we are ashamed of, it’s our past, it’s our interpretations of the past that so and so got what was coming to him, that somehow we deserved the sufferings that we’ve experienced, it’s all the old stuff that we have rejected that will come back to this tree and nourish and revive it. It’s crap. It’s what we reject. It’s what we think we don’t need that will feed us. It’s all those broken stories of alcoholic fathers and depressed mothers and unmentioned war wounds and the slave owner’s whip that can be turned around and seen in a new way. Not in a rose-colored glasses, God fixes everything sort of way, but in a way that lets the crap of our life feed us, rather than bleed and starve us.
Stanley takes the mistakes of the past - his and his ancestors' - and uses them to rewrite his future. He carries Zero up the mountain, and instead of blaming his great great grandfather for the predicament he’s in, Stanley fulfills his great great grandfather’s vow, breaks the curse, and his whole family starts anew. But it isn’t until Stanley sees his story in a new way that he’s freed from it. Once he can see it in a new way, suddenly there are possibilities for some fruit.
Repent, Jesus says. Change your minds. Go back to the manure, the things in your past, the things in your families, the things that have hurt and torn you apart and all the blame that you’ve place on yourself and others in order to somehow makes sense of the suffering, and see it in a new way. See how all this crap can nourish you. How it can bring you back to life. How it can help you bear fruit. Don’t reject your story, or throw blame on something else just so that you can feel safe from the suffering. Don’t ignore the pain of it. Don’t try to wash out its stink. In God’s hands, the hard stuff and the brokenness and the poor choices and the oppression and the pain that has come before you and still hurts you now can be fertilizer to a hungry soul. God takes crap and turns it into fruit. We can’t undo what’s been done. The pain is still there. The brokenness abounds. But God can make crap sacred, and healing, and even nourishing for new fruit.
Embrace the crap. It’s holy. That’s what it means to repent. How can you take the curse of your no good dirty rotten pig stealing great great grandfather and let it feed you and make you in to something new? You never know, if we repent, if we see our stories in a new way, maybe we’ll have the strength to carry a friend up the mountain and break the curse after all.
Maybe with time.
Maybe with room.
Maybe with a little bit of holy crap, spread around our roots.
Thanks be to God.
