Repent or Perish
13 At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? 3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. 4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
The Parable of the Barren Fig Tree
6 Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. 7 So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ 8 He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. 9 If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
The summer before we got married, my husband and I spent a few weeks in Chicago, training to spend the year in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for my pastoral internship. About halfway through our training, they talked to us about insurance, wills, and powers of attorney. I remember them saying that they try very hard to keep us safe overseas, but it costs a lot of money to bring your body back to the United States in the event that you die. That stuck with us.
So the weekend after we got married, in all of our marital bliss and happiness, about five days before we left for my internship, we sat down with a lawyer friend and made sure we had all of our things in order. Even though we had no real “assets” to speak of, we wanted to make sure we knew what would happen if we died.
I was reminded of that when our first baby was born. And again when our second was born. And now again as I see everything happening in the news in Ukraine. I am reminded that life is short. And unfair.
This lament echoes the crowd’s from the gospel text this morning. Pilate had massacred Galileans recently. People are grieved. They don’t understand what is happening so they turn to Jesus. And Jesus replies with another story: one of 18 people who were killed in an accident when a tower fell on them.
These tragedies, like the ones we experience today, begin to turn the wheels of our minds and hearts. They made people feel anxious. The question on the crowd’s mind was, “why did these people die?” That’s often the question we ask when bad things happen, right? Why?
We are so often asking “why?”
Jesus replies that it is not a question of “why” they died, but that we will all die— perhaps not the most comforting of Jesus’ moments for these people who are deep in grief. But it does present us with another question: the question of how will we live in the meantime?
Jesus is explicit in the story this morning— life is fragile and short. That means that what we do in the meantime matters.
Lent is a time of preparation, a time of examining our lives, and ultimately, a time of repentance. That is what Jesus says in the text twice: “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. No, I tell you; unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”
Usually when I hear the word “repent,” I think about feeling really sorry for something, expressing regret for my faults and my sins, or even becoming more morally righteous. I should BE a better person if I’m truly repentant. And ultimately, I think about those preachers who stand up on milk crates on the green at UNF. I think they are concerned about how “good” we are on earth so that we don’t go to hell when we die. Of course, they define “good” and, probably, “hell.”
But repentance is less about where we go when we die, and more about how we live our lives today. If sin is turning away from God’s grace and neighbor, repentance is actively turning TOWARD God’s grace and our neighbor. Repentance is about accepting and living into the fact that God has already saved us from the power of sin through Jesus life, death, and resurrection.
When Jesus talks of “perishing,” here, he isn’t talking about some divine punishment in the afterlife. He means that when we deny God and God’s grace, we are not able to fully live into who we were created to be. Our souls are not whole. We perish in comparison to the abundant life we could be living in Christ.
In the parable, the tree is given time to bear fruit. This gracious gardener shows patience and mercy to the tree— but the gardener doesn’t just let the tree go by itself for one more year, he gives the tree everything it might need to flourish. The ground is dug up around the tree’s roots and manure is put down. The gardener gives extra attention to this tree to help it produce good fruit.
God has given us an incredible opportunity to seize God’s graciousness in this life. But God does not leave us to our own devices to repent and be made new. As Jesus’ parable suggests, God gives us everything we need to flourish and produce good fruit: we are formed and reformed in baptism, nourished and fed in the holy meal, reminded of God’s goodness and love in God’s Word, enriched and cultivated with the liturgy. God has extended grace upon grace to God’s people through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus.
And we are not called to bear fruit alone. We are gifted this community, and this week we celebrate the 65th anniversary of this parish. The saints here before us left their own legacies, in the examples of their faith, their gifts of planning and dreaming for this community— they are all a part of what is being cultivated here now. In the same way, we are given the opportunity not only to bear fruit today, but to be a part of what this community will grow to be.
After worship today, we will hear about what it means to consider the parish in legacy planning. In other words, we will talk a bit about our own deaths. A grim subject to mark the 65th anniversary of the parish, perhaps, but also oddly appropriate for the season of Lent and for the scripture we heard here this morning. Because God calls us not only into goodness, love, community, and salvation in this life— but for all of eternity.
We can be our own gardeners for the next 65 years of this place. Just like the saints who came before us had dreams and visions about what this community would be, we too can dream and prepare for the saints that come after us. Ensuring that they too have everything they might need to flourish and be vibrant bearers of God’s Kingdom, witnesses to the resurrection.
Therefore, for the rest of this season of Lent, I invite us to examine those things that may cause us to perish— as a community and as individuals— and lift up the hope of what God has prepared us for— the eternal and everlasting grace that God in Christ Jesus has gifted us on the cross. So that we might both be a tree that bears good fruit, and a gardener to the next generations. Amen.
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