Isaiah 55:1-13; Psalm 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9
Third Sunday of Lent: March 7, 2010
As you might remember, during the season of Lent we are looking at different ways we might draw near to God – however we understand God. The first Sunday in Lent we talked about people who connected with God best through their heads – through study and reason, through scientific exploration and analysis. Last week we looked at how people find God – meet God – on all sorts of journeys. This week we will look at the “servant” types. These are people who find themselves in touch with the divine when they are engaged in direct service out in the world.
These are the people who can relate to the land owner in our parable who comes upon a fig tree that is not producing any fruit, and hasn’t for some time. Fruit is a visible sign that something is alive and growing. Servant types think service is like the fruit. If it is absent, their faith is dying. If it is present, they feel alive. Teaching, feeding, helping, healing, driving, visiting, working in the kitchen, serving on a committee – these things give servants life and energy. When that is missing, they feel dead. They get impatient with a lot of talk that doesn’t lead to direct action. For these folks, words and worship, prayer and study can take them to foggy places where God feels distant. Their clarity of purpose and connection with God comes in the doing.
Maybe you recognize yourself right away in this. Think about where you find your energy, your sense of purpose? If it is in the hands on, nitty gritty of life, your call is first and foremost to go serve.
And that would be a nice, neat – not to mention short – little sermon, but we can’t stop there. There is an important distinction to make when talking about service as a Christian practice: Some people serve to find God, and some people find God through other kinds of practices and then have the energy to go serve. This might seem like a minor distinction, but the importance of this distinction can be found in the really uncomfortable, harsh part of our gospel passage this morning; the part before the fig tree where Jesus tells people if they don’t repent, they will perish. [I think Jesus is making this distinction between serving to find God and serving because you have connected to God through some other spiritual practice. And the harshness of his words alone should indicate to us the importance of such a distinction.]
Because these texts are uncomfortable, we sometimes just ignore them and move on. But I don’t think this is the most helpful thing to do. To begin with, I think we can learn something about ourselves, and dare I say even Jesus and God, if we sit with our discomfort and struggle with our questions and concerns about how we hear these words. But more importantly, we can learn something by going even deeper into the text – stepping into the story and sitting with those who heard Jesus that day, with those who wrote this all down, and with those who would have heard the gospel read soon after it was written. If we set aside our own discomfort, which is really born out of our own fears and idiosyncrasies, we might see this passage from a different point of view and hear it in a new way.
Think for a minute about the people who told Jesus about all the death they had seen. There was blood in the streets. The Galileans were afraid – they were afraid of death. And this was true not just of those who lived when Jesus did. Those who wrote these gospels and heard them read had lived through the destruction of the temple – a bloody and violent clash with Rome when the Jews were nearly wiped out. All of these people were face to face with death in a way most of us are not.
When Jesus talks in stark and explicit terms of death and life, he names the elephant in the room. In a very pastoral move, Jesus addresses their fears and anxieties directly. It might seem harsh to us, but given the realities of their daily lives, might it not have been welcome talk to those living with death all around? They wanted to know how to move from living in fear of dying to just living. Kindly, directly, Jesus spoke to their deepest fears and greatest longings. And his words broke through old beliefs and assumptions that were getting in the way of life – the life he knew they yearned for.
First, the people believed you avoided death – or at least untimely death – by being good. Sin was the cause of death, and so following each letter of the law was the way you avoided death. Jesus names that anxiety immediately: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” And his answer is unequivocal and impossible to misinterpret: “No.” The bad news in this is that you can’t control whether you live or die by being righteous. But of course, the good news is no one deserves to die just because they can’t follow the letter of the law in every moment. I’m taking a wild guess here, but that might have sounded as good to the many sinners in the audience then as it does to this sinner standing up here now.
Second, Jesus addressed their fear of mortality – of death itself. They forgot that usually when Jesus talks about how to move away from death and into life, he understands those terms differently than most people. He really didn’t spend much time on death in the individual sense. Jesus spoke in larger ways: he spoke of a culture of death verses a culture of life. He spoke of new life as a new way of life – a whole new world that abolished the culture of death, the cycles of violence and revenge. He offered not freedom from their own personal death, but freedom from a world filled with death – both literal and metaphorical.
Jesus draws on the prophets like Isaiah when he speaks of this new world. In Isaiah, God tells the people – people also trapped in a culture of death – that your ways are not my ways. God assures them that there is another way, another possibility, and that this new way leads to life. Isaiah tells the people that new life begins with God’s abundant mercy. When you turn from the old ways toward God, mercy rains down on you, watering the soil of your soul until you become the bedrock of life that sprouts and produces and feeds.
When we’re honest with ourselves, we know we can’t avoid out own death – it’s a given. But what a joy to think we can, during the time we have, be a part of the source of life that will remain and grow long after we’re gone. And Jesus tells us how to get there. Repent, he says. Repentance is a big theme of Lent.
But, when Jesus says you will perish if you don’t repent, he doesn’t mean death is the punishment for not cataloguing your sins and saying you’re sorry. It’s not about punishment – at least not divine punishment. It is the reality these people face. “Look around,” he says, “it’s not exactly workin’ for you, is it.” They are locked in a cycle. If they don’t turn from the way things are, repent and turn toward God, the culture of death will continue. It’s a cycle with which we are more than familiar. Whatever we are doing is not working – so let’s turn from it to disrupt the culture of death.
The question is, “how?” How do we turn from the way things seem to have always been done? How do we turn toward God? Remember, Jesus makes it clear that this is not about not sinning – earning this new life by doing exactly what we think we should be doing. And this is where we reconnect with the servant spirituality type.
The idea of service as spiritual practice runs the greatest risk of all the spiritual practices of landing us into the trap of the Galileans, who believed you earned life through good works. “Works righteousness,” the reformers called it. It’s true that for some, service is what leads them, connects them, to God, and that brings life. For others, if this is the route they try to take purely out of obligation, thinking you have to work your way toward being a good Christian, it generally leads to frustration, resentment, tiredness, weariness of spirit. In short, not life.
Remember from Isaiah, new life starts with mercy. Not works. We need to bathe in God’s mercy. To live in God. In other words, to draw close to God. The life of faith begins by encountering the abundant mercy of God. Again, for some, they find this mercy in acts of service. But, some find it more easily in other ways. It’s just as important to discern for yourself if you are not a servant type than to decide that you are. And if you are not, then what?
Figure out what type you are. Start there and trust that as you draw closer to God – in ways that make sense for you – God will rain mercy on you, and you will respond with your life not out of obligation, but out of hope for this new way – for God’s way – for this culture of life.
If we find the ways we are best able to draw close to the divine, I have no doubt that the closer we get to God, the more we will all repent - turn from a culture of death toward a culture of life. I trust that the more we are in tune with the divine, the more we will serve others without being drained of life. I trust that when we find our new life in God, we will take that new life to others in myriad ways.
Isaiah understood this so well that he wrote a poem about it: “You shall go out with joy and be lead back in peace; the mountains and the hills will break forth before you, and all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands.” When you draw close to God and are fed by God’s mercy and life, you will go out in joy and the world around you will change – from a culture of death to one of life and peace. Instead of the fig tree that could not produce fruit, the trees will come alive and clap their hands. Instead of the streets running with blood, the mountains and hills will burst forth with life. So let’s find our way toward God. Let’s draw closer and closer to God as we walk this journey with Jesus. And then let’s go out in joy that the world might be led back in peace. Amen.
