Today I found an old sermon based on Luke 13 and I used a story from a book titled “Doing
Theology with Huck and Jim: Parables for Understanding Doctrine” by Mark Howard. The first time I heard this story was in Systematic Theology class at seminary. Even today it continues to speak to me anew:
"I woke up Monday morning in my parents’ Soweto home only to discover that I had become an insect. I had been a flesh and blood human being when I went to bed. But now I had a bloated, black, crusted body with many legs. Instead of my face I had a pair of hideous eyes, pincers, and long antenna.
I told my mother that I was sick when she knocked at the door of my room at 7 am. She called my father.
I scurried into the corner, trying to hide in the shadows. He tried to unlock the door. I saw his eye wandering about in the keyhole, searching the room. Then he saw me through the keyhole and screamed.
He ran back into the kitchen. I heard my mother’s screams and sobs. Then I heard the phone being dialed. They called my uncle.
My uncle was regarded by all as a holy man in my parents’ neighborhood with special connections with God. I heard them hang up. My mother kept screaming. I hated her for screaming. I hated my father for calling my uncle. I had, in fact, hated them for as long as I could remember.
My father demanded to know what I had done to his son. I told him that I was his son but had woken up as an insect. My father began yelling and calling on God.
When my uncle arrived, he came to the door and talked to me.
I loved my uncle, but I did not trust him, for after all he was my father’s brother, and with what good could my father be ever associated? I told him my story. Then he brought me food, knowing that I was hungry. Then he left and went back into the kitchen. I savagely ate the food he left. For the next two days the same things happened: my uncle brought me food, I talked with him, his words comforted me, and then he left. My parents kept away completely.
On Thursday, my father told my uncle that he would report me to the authorities. My uncle tried to persuade him that he should tell no one. My mother kept screaming and sobbing. I felt itchy and my room was filled with putrid odors.
Friday morning my father left for work and my uncle stayed and talked to me all day. He told me about his memories of my birth and reminded me of many things we had done together. He had been saddened, he said, by the rage he saw building up within me, rage about the apartheid, my parents, my limited future, my life.
At 6:30 I heard a crowd of people moving in the dark, and my father was at the front of the crowd. My uncle went to the door. My father told my uncle to come out with my mother, for they were going to burn the house. My mother left, but my uncle refused to leave. He said that he would not let me be burned to death. My father yelled back that his son is already dead, that the insect had eaten him and that some magic had given the insect power to mimic his son's voice.
My uncle told them that there was no evil magic at work except the power of sin. I had become an insect because I was consumed by the raging power of sin in my life. I would become a man again if the power if sin was broken. The righteous anger of the high God against sin itself had created two insects: me and the mob. In response, the mob threw a rock that cut my uncle’s forehead and made it bleed. He picked up the stone, gripped it in its fist, and after staring into the mob, went back into the house.
Then as I was watching through the keyhole, I saw my uncle stretched out on the floor in tears, talking as though to some unseen person. Then a great odor filled the house, his face disappeared, and legs began to wriggle from every part of his swelling body. He had become an insect. He shuffled toward the front door.
The mob threw fire on him and his legs burst into flames. He fell on his back in the middle of the dark street, screaming in anguish as his brittle body crackled and curled with the burning.
The mob watched in silence as the insect died. They had finished the work they came to do.
The insect burned all night. I slept off and on throughout Saturday, finally waking in the deep darkness of Sunday morning. I slowly crawled out of my room into the street. My eyes darted in every direction to be sure no one was watching. I stood in the midst of the smoldering ash.
These ashes should have been mine, I thought, I am the insect that should have died. I rolled my bloated body in the ashes and cried for revenge. But the ashes refused to assist my rage. They swirled about me, filled my eyes and throat and stuck to my legs. They choked my screams. I felt a crack in the depths of my sinfulness. Something had broken in the hidden labyrinths of an insect heart.
I opened my eyes. I had become human again, with my own fingers, my own legs, my own face. I ran toward the house to look in a mirror. My uncle was standing in the living room grinning at me. My dead uncle was alive before my eyes. He looked unscathed, except the scratch of the stone.
He reminded me of his words. Sin makes insects out of people. God gives them up to that change so that they can have their wish to devour all around them. But when the power of sin is broken, the power to be human returns. He then pointed behind me and told me that our work was just beginning. We would gather up the ashes and feed our neighbors and care for them.
Then we would repeat the story of the last few days to them so that they could be well. I turned around and looked out into the street. It was filled with human-sized insects, old and young. We immediately gathered plates of food, mingled with ashes, and began to work for the coming metamorphosis."
