Lent 3 Year C

Hello Friends,

Below is the sermon from last week. There was an additional paragraph that was not written beforehand. We had a great Sunday School class where we did an activity based on the Parable of the Sower, so I submitted that experience as a final text to consider for the day. I no longer remember quite where I went off script, nor do I remember how I came back....

As a whole I think this one kind of worked as a sermon. People seemed to like it. One person told me she got completely lost, but I am hopeful that not everyone felt that way.

At Early Church my simplified concept was to read the parable, and then focus on the fact that we are gardening with out knowing the whole plan. And to think about the many kinds of things we do to garden, plant seeds, tend small plants, nourish flourishing trees, cut back what is dead etc. I had pictures.

Readings can be found here.

            When I was a small child, probably three of four years old I lived at Union Seminary where my father was a student. He was supposedly finishing up his doctorate degree. A seminary can often feel like a family, and in my case it felt particularly so. My mother’s brother, my uncle, was also a seminary student and lived in the same building as we did. My uncle, being a bit “different” or perhaps strange would occasionally have me accompany him as we marched through the halls of the seminary calling for the students to repent. He would carry a drum and I carried a tambourine and I am sure we caused quite a scene. As I got older and looked back on these repentance marches I began to feel a little uncomfortable about the whole thing. Who was I--Who was my uncle—to suggest that anyone should repent? And what were they repenting from? At first it seemed scandalous to me to assume that anyone at the seminary might have sins that they would need repentance for.

            I think I felt uncomfortable because repentance is one of those big words. And there is some connection between it and our sins—which we are all vaguely uncomfortable with. And Gospel passages like this morning’s don’t really help to dispel the fear and difficulty with repentance. Jesus says: unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did. Of course Jesus says much more than this too. But there is undoubtedly a menacing tone to this. But it wasn’t until I got to a New Testament class at Union where we learned that repentance, metanoia in Greek, means to turn around. It doesn’t mean that we are so bad, or so sinful, it doesn’t mean we have to focus on all we have ever done wrong. But turning isn’t such an easy thing either. There is a very physical aspect of this word—turning, new directions, changing where we are headed.  

Today I want to examine the two halves of our gospel passage to try to understand why it is so crucial to turn, and what it might mean for us to do so.

            Our gospel passage comes as the ending of a very long sermon Jesus gives to his disciples and the crowds. You think my sermons are long? Well Jesus preaches a very long and rambling sermon that ends with our passage from today. And this ending is essentially two parts. The first part seems to be a reaction to some in the crowd who are telling him about some of their hometown friends who were killed in Jerusalem. Their upsetness about the death of their friends, Jesus transforms into questions about theodicy, questions about evil and suffering in the world and God’s part in it. Perhaps the crowd was asking Jesus why this happened, and Jesus dispels the idea that they suffered because they deserved it. He says they did not die because they were more sinful. And then he talks about a tragic accident, a tower that collapsed and killed 18 people. And again he reminds them that those 18 were not more sinful. It’s a very pastoral response to human suffering. But after each story he reminds people that unless they repent they will die. Does Jesus then suggest that if these people had repented that they would not have died? I don’t think so. I think that this is kind of paranoid Jesus—Jesus who is worried that the end could come at any time. Apocalyptic Jesus. Jesus who might say things like live every day like it’s your last one, or more pop-culture-y he is saying you only live once.

            And the second half of the Gospel passage is a parable. And like many parables it is a strange one. Parables as scripture function kind of like a tangent or a non-sequitur at first, but then they begin to dawn on you Some parables Jesus explains, he tells you what the various symbols equal. In those cases the parable is an allegory, but not all of them are. Some of them simply offer a new or different clue about God’s relationship to us all. Many of the parables are very earthy- they have plants, seeds and land in them. For 21^st century city dwellers some of these parables loose their meaning because we don’t know too much about growing patterns of fig trees. This parable is told with out explanation. The three main characters are the tree, the gardener and the fed-up landowner.

            In consulting some commentaries on this passage this week, I encountered an interpretation a few times where the fig tree is humanity, Jesus is the loving gardener, and God is the land owner ready to chop down the tree. But friends, this doesn’t work for me. My experience with God really cannot be compared to a land owner concerned with wasting space—so what if we try out some different interpretations? What if the tree can be humanity and the gardener can be God (all three parts) and then the landowner represents our systems of inequality like racism or classism. Or maybe the landowner are moments where we lack the faith or hope in the future—I am sure we are all familiar with that feeling. Perhaps by looking back at the passage as an entirety will shed some light on what Jesus is suggesting to us this morning.

            The connective tissue between these two halves of the Gospel is something about time. Jesus is reminding the crowd of the need to repent now, and the parable too suggests an impatience. But more than time, I think what binds these passages together is an uncertain future. This is something that we as a community here are pretty familiar with. But more than us here at our church, the economic downturn has created a feeling of uncertainty in many fields of employment as well. The Gospel this morning affirms the feeling that we don’t really know what is coming next. But this is not necessarily the most productive affirmation. However, when we think about that gardener who is determined to tend a fruitless tree because he is open to a future possibility that he can neither control nor manage. Shifting the role of the gardener to humanity then, our role might be to labor to bring about some future fruits. We don’t necessarily know what will happen. We must do the labor to bring about the kingdom of God-but we do not control what it might be like. We don’t really have the plans for the garden, we are just asked to plant the seeds we’ve been given. Both the openness to the future possibility along with the persistent farming are what we are called to today.

            Where then does repentance fit in with this striving towards a more fruitful future? Repentance is a conscious choice, it is a turning away from one thing and moving towards another. And there is indeed a connotation of turning away from the past and turning towards the future. It doesn’t mean that the past (and especially the difficult past) isn’t with us, but it does mean making a choice to do something else that is not the same as the past. Repentance is then the first step towards being able to labor while looking towards the future.

            Because it is just that, the physicality I suggested before, the turning nature of repentance, can and will be for us all a first step. Towards what? Well, that’s the part we are less sure about. That is the part that we hand over. We are the gardeners, not the master of all the plans, but as gardeners we are responsible for tilling that land, aerating it, we have to make sure we have fertilized it and continue our persistence in watering. I think as a community we are doing the hard work now to figure out how we water, what we are tending, and trying to make sure we are doing alright in our little corner of the garden, and perhaps we are sometimes a little too worried about what the results might be, and other times I think we as a community can focus a little too much on what happened in past planting seasons. As gardeners, we have to keep planting seeds so that there are opportunities for future generations to garden, we need to tend to the flourishing plants, and we need to consider the time and attention we pay to plants that are long dead, but due to our diligence we haven’t noticed. And we must continually be conscious of our turning and returning to God.