A Fourth Church Sermon by Rocky Supinger | Sunday, February 21, 2016

Second Sunday in Lent, February 21, 2016 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 63
Luke 13:1–9, 31–35

Could it be that our own abundance has been given to us
in an effort to lead us to bear fruit,
to share those resources,
to share of ourselves?

Justo Gonzalez

One of the valuable things about Lent is that it is an interruption. This season of purple and penitence interrupts the flow of weeks that has already established itself, not even two months into the new year. I like that Lent is an interruption. A lot of interesting things can happen in an interruption.

Some of the most interesting things that happen in the Gospels happen as a result of an interruption. The story is going along in one direction—Jesus is teaching, Jesus is healing, Jesus has set his face to go to Jerusalem—and then someone or something intrudes upon that trajectory.

We are in the middle, here in Luke chapter 13, of a long stretch of teaching. Jesus is teaching about greed. Jesus is teaching about wealth. Jesus is teaching about himself. He’s warning people against hypocrisy. He’s urging people to settle their lawsuits out of court. He’s pleading with people to choose the narrow door.

He’s in a teaching groove. And then, “at that very moment . . . at that very hour,” some people interrupt him.

Some of the most interesting things that happen in life are interruptions.

● ● ●

We are in the midst of political elections, so let me dive right into my first sermon here with you all by talking politics. That seems like a good idea, right? What could go wrong?

It seems to me that one of most difficult things about running for office in this day and age has to be the need for one’s candidacy to speak and appeal to a wide array of agendas. It’s not enough, is it, to have a platform and policy proposals—or even experience—for voters to consider.

You’ve also got to win the endorsement of various (and sometimes competing) organizations and causes that have their own agendas, like raising the minimum wage or cutting corporate taxes. These might be powerful CEOs or labor union leaders. Either way, they need to see your campaign as the best vehicle for their agenda.

Maybe not the best. Just better than the other candidate’s.

Jesus isn’t running for political office, but still he knows this pressure to appeal to other peoples’ agendas. Take these people who interrupt him here at the beginning of chapter 13 and then again in verse 31.

The first group, the group that tells Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, they want Jesus’ endorsement of a kind of nationalistic, take-down-the-empire agenda.

They relate to Jesus a horrible story. Pilate has mixed the blood of some Galileans with their sacrifices. Let’s break that claim down.

Pontius Pilate, the governor of the Judean district of the Roman Empire, has sent Roman soldiers into the temple in Jerusalem, the capital of Jewish religious and political life in first-century occupied Palestine, with orders to slay a group of Jewish pilgrims who are there while they are offering the sacrifices required of them by the Jewish law. And not just any Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem. These ones were from Galilee, which is where Jesus is from. It’s a bloody outrage.

Now, Jesus has no way of vetting this story, and neither do we. This is the only mention of this incident in all of the New Testament, and it’s not attested in any source outside the New Testament.

But it feels like a very Pilate-like thing, and the people who interrupt Jesus here to tell him about it expect him to respond by getting with their agenda of righteous indignation—or even armed resistance—against Pilate and the whole complex of Roman occupation that so shaped Jewish life during Jesus’ day.

And then it happens again. Again he’s interrupted, this time in verse 31, but by a group of Pharisees who warn Jesus that Herod is trying to kill him and that he should get out of there as soon as possible. Likewise, this one needs a little breaking down.

These are Pharisees. You don’t have to read very far into the Gospels to know that their agenda and Jesus’ agenda are almost always in conflict. They want religious laws about things like sabbath observance observed and enforced to a T; Jesus, not so much. Jesus thinks the sabbath was made for people, not the other way around.

And many, many people are responding to Jesus’ views on these things. The Pharisees don’t like that.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that they would have an agenda to get Jesus out of their backyard. Even if it means threatening him, telling him that King Herod is trying to kill him, these Pharisees-—and perhaps Herod too—just want Jesus to be someone else’s problem. That’s their agenda.

Jesus has lots of different agendas dropped at his feet.

And it’s not like he doesn’t have an agenda of his own. Jesus announces his agenda pretty early on: to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.

And to that end, gathering the people of Jerusalem is a big part of Jesus’ agenda, a part that is going nowhere.

Jerusalem is the jewel in the cultural and historic and religious crown of the people Jesus is trying to speak to. It’s the very place he’s now headed, the place he’s certain will meet him with threats—and much worse. And he’s right.

His efforts to gather the people of Jerusalem together never get off the ground, and I think he can see, at this point, that they never will.

And so he laments. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.”

Both Matthew and Luke describe this lament for Jerusalem, but Luke is unique in that he puts it before Jesus has ever even been to Jerusalem; in Matthew, this comes right after he’s entered the city, which seems to make more sense.

But both Matthew and Luke employ this powerful image of Jesus as a hen attempting to gather her unwilling brood under her wings. If there’s a fire in the barn, a hen will die trying to keep some of her chicks alive beneath the shelter of her wings.

But they’re not willing. The fire is raging, and nobody’s listening. And so Jesus laments for Jerusalem.

It doesn’t work sometimes. Sometimes, despite your best efforts and intentions, people aren’t willing—or perhaps not able—to be helped, to be rescued, people you care dearly about and would give your life for. Sometimes it just doesn’t work.

Then all you can do is lament. It’s not your fault, it wasn’t up to you, it’s not on you. But you have to face the fact that there’s nothing more you can do to change a person—or a group of people—and all you’re left with is a lament that it hasn’t worked.

Other times it is on you, though, and there are decisive steps you can take to make things better and to advance your agenda. Like the vineyard owner in the parable Jesus tells here. You can just get out your axe and start chopping.

See that’s more my speed. Something’s not working? Change it! Diet not reducing my waistline? Switch to a new one. Hair getting too thin on top? Shave it. Books sitting unread on the shelves? Donate them.

I get this vineyard owner. He and I would be friends.

He’s got a dud of a fig tree on his vineyard. It’s a vineyard. He’s not a fig tree grove owner. His agenda is grapes, and a fig tree is a costly drain on the soil meant to sustain your grapes, especially if it isn’t producing any figs. This tree is all take and no give. It is extracting valuable resources and giving nothing of value back. It’s been there for three years, and that’s plenty long to show some growth.

Don’t waste another thought on it or another breath cursing it. Just cut it down. Fruitless fig trees are a luxury you can’t afford. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus encounters a fig tree with no figs on it, and he curses it, so that it withers and dies. It’s a symbol that appears more than once: a tree producing no fruit, an impediment to an agenda of growth.

Well, if we know anything about parables it’s that if they seem simple enough, we’re probably missing something. There is another character in this parable, a gardener to go with the vineyard owner, and the gardener is not so inclined to give up on the fig tree.

The gardener goes to bat for the fig tree. “Give it one more year. Let me dig around it. Let me put some fertilizer on it. Maybe then it will grow.”

Maybe. The gardener’s proposal, like so much of what Jesus is about, rests entirely on . . . maybe.

When I was a kid and I would beg my parents for something, some toy, some candy bar in the checkout aisle, a sleepover at a friend’s house, I lived for “maybe.” Because a simple “yes” to one of these requests was almost unheard of. Most of the time it was just “no.”

“Mom, can I jump off the roof into those snow drifts?” No.

“Dad, can I have just one more cookie?” No.

“Can I drive—?” No.

But “maybe” . . . there’s a world of possibility in “maybe.”

Maybe gives you wiggle room. You can strategize with maybe, improve your argument, practice your pitch—not too forceful, don’t pester. But don’t let them forget either. Yeah, I can work with maybe.

A “no” that follows a “maybe” will hurt twice as bad as a “no” from the outset. But a “maybe” that becomes a “yes”? That’s a whole new lease on life.

You see there’s grace hidden in the maybe. You can thrive in maybe.

Maybe is not a guarantee, though. If there still aren’t any figs on the tree at the end of the year, it’s getting chopped down. The gardener’s efforts still might not work. Which is how we know it’s worth trying: it might not work.

And the place where our best efforts end and the unpredictable grace of God begins—that’s right where we want to be. As people of faith and as a church, a community of faith, we want to live in that sweet spot where there are no guarantees and our best efforts might not work.

There’s a writer I particularly like who says, “At some level, ‘this might not work’ is at the heart of all important projects, of everything new and worth doing” (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/01/out-on-a-limb.html).

That could have been written by the Gardener from the parable about the fig tree. The digging and the fertilizing might not work, and I think he knows that. I think he wants to take it on not in spite of the fact that it might not work, but because of it.

This might not work. This ministry might not work. This fundraiser might not work. This mission trip might not work. This relationship, this career, this medicine—it might not work.

And that’s good news.

The call to be disciples of Jesus is to care about things that might not work and to care right now, not someday. Feeding the hungry and taking on racism and inequality at home and abroad; pouring your energy into children and teenagers and young adults; daring to connect—even this morning—with someone you don’t know and so add another stitch to the tapestry of community, these are things we can do right now. We don’t have to wait.

We live in a sinful world where Pilate is mingling the blood of Galileans with their sacrifices and Herod wants to kill us. None of us know what could happen on any given day, so it is just as much to us as to that original audience to whom Jesus says, “Repent.”

That sounds so judgy though, doesn’t it? Repent? You mean, all of us? I don’t need to repent. A tower didn’t fall on me. I’ve got nothing to hide. Maybe you need to repent, but me? No, I’m good.

New Testament scholar Justo Gonzalez says this about Jesus’ warnings to repent: “The surprising thing is not that so many die but that we still live. If it was a matter of sin, we would all be dead.”

Repent. The time to bear fruit is now. The day to get with God’s agenda is today. Let us do today what we can, trusting in the mercy of God to sustain us when it doesn’t work as well as when it does.

Amen.