Sermon for Third Sunday in Lent – Luke 13:1-9

So, two words. Urgency and complacency. You’ve got some thing you’ve got to do. You know the deadline. Do you get it done now, or do you put it off until the last minute? If we’re honest, I think we all know the right answer, versus the real answer. Or am I the only one who’s ever had a crisis? Speaking of which, have you done your taxes yet? Good news, you still have time. I managed to get mine done yesterday. If you know me then you know I’m obsessed with being organized. I love lists. I love making them. I love looking them over. I love checking things off. I love being responsible. I have the list of stuff to take to my tax person every year. Easy. Now, he’s pretty booked up, so he gets to call the shots. 9am Saturday morning. Fine. So guess when I was scrounging up all the paperwork? 11pm Friday night.

Why do we put things off to the last minute even though we know better? Because we love drama? Doubt it. Because we need someone to light a fire under us to get us moving? Maybe. Urgency and complacency. It’s like these two poles we revolve around constantly. It sounds a lot like what Jesus is talking about today.

He tells this parable of a fig tree. A man has a fig tree growing in his vineyard. He keeps looking for fruit and never finds any. He’s frustrated. He tells his gardener, “hey, I’m done with this tree. Three years! No fruit. Chop it down.” The gardener says, “hold on, take a breath. I’ll dig around it, spread some manure, we’ll give it another year. If it bears fruit, great! If not, then you can chop it down.” Now, it’s a quick little story, but it sure says a lot of different things. Which is probably why Jesus loves parables so much. We’ve got this landowner. Kind of demanding. He puts a lot of expectations on this fig tree, which makes you wonder why he only planted one. Clearly he’s not a gardener, so good thing he’s got people for that. We’ve got the gardener. Seems patient. Methodical. He’s got some chutzpah to tell his irate boss to have a little patience. And then we’ve got the tree. A little manure and care, and let’s see what happens. Maybe we’ll get some fruit.

Now, so far that sounds like gospel. Jesus isn’t just talking about trees. He’s talking about us too. Hey, we know the tree’s an underperformer. Complacency. Let’s give it another chance. Give it a little help. See what happens. Don’t count it out yet. The kind of stuff we want Jesus to say about us. We love the Jesus of second chances. But he doesn’t end there. He still gives a deadline. One year. Urgency. What’s going to be our story a year from now? Are we going to change, or is everything just going to stay the same? It’s like Jesus is saying he doesn’t know. That in itself is enough to get us all motivated to be better people. But truth be told, we know our track records, so we don’t have a good feeling about this.

Yet, a lot of Christians still use this story as a way to jump start folks into self-improvement projects, as if the only reason Jesus came was to just teach us how to be better people. But you don’t have to die on a cross for that. You don’t even have to believe in God for that. We get so worked up over behavior as if that were the sum total of what it means to follow Jesus. But it’s not. Jesus has something else in mind here. That’s why he doesn’t start out with the parable. He starts with some tragic news stories. Those 18 folks killed in that tower collapse in Siloam. We don’t know if they were righteous or not. We just know they didn’t get an extra year. Or the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their religious sacrifices. A bloody, vengeful act by Pilate against Galileans at worship in Jerusalem. Now, we don’t know exactly what happened there. No historical record. But we do have a gunman who live-streamed the video on Facebook last week as he stormed into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killed 50 people, and wounded 50 others, all in the name of white supremacy. In the face of that kind of tragedy and evil, who would even dare to ask whether the victims were righteous or not? Besides, where’s their extra year?

We want to turn Jesus’ parable into some kind of second chance promise of a magical extra year, but that’s not what he’s saying. Jesus is telling us the truth about this broken world where suffering and death comes to us daily and unexpectedly. Where we can’t take anything for granted. And we can’t bear to hear it. So we stop listening to Jesus and start playing a certain game with ourselves and each other and we’ve all heard it. It sounds like this. Life is short. Don’t put off what you can do today, because there might not be a tomorrow. Well, that’s not hope and that’s not the God of life. That’s us making death into our god, and we’ve given death the last word.

Friends, I’ve had enough of that, I know you’ve had enough of it, and Jesus has absolutely had enough of it. That’s why he puts death to death, on the cross, where he binds all our brokenness and hopelessness to his own body. Because in three days he rises from death in the glory of the resurrection, and he binds that power to our own bodies so that we would finally live in open defiance of death. So that we would be God’s new creation in this old, broken world. That’s the one thing in this world that we CAN take for granted, without question. See, Jesus doesn’t wait around wondering we’re going to bear fruit. He doesn’t mess around with tests or temptations. He doesn’t have time for any of that – it’s too urgent. He just up and does it to us anyway, before we could even think to ask him to, and even if we could, we wouldn’t because we’re complacent. But Jesus won’t let that be the last word for any of us. Jesus has the final word, the only word that matters, and it’s his unconditional forgiveness for you and for me.

The thing is, the parable’s a trick. That’s why Jesus tells it. He knows we don’t know much about vineyards. But he knows that no decent gardener would ever plant a fig tree in a vineyard to begin with. Fig trees are huge. They have deep roots. The leaves are wide and long. You plant a fig tree for figs and shade. That’s fine if you want an orchard, but it’s the last thing you want in a vineyard if you have any hope for wine. The landowner expects fruit after three years, but it can take up to six, not to mention that Leviticus forbids eating any fruit for the first three years of a tree. Remember, Jesus knows scripture better than anyone. But he has the gardener humor the boss anyway and offer to spread manure to fertilize the tree, except the nitrogen in manure is exactly the thing that can stop a tree from growing figs at all. You can’t speed up the process. See, Jesus wants us to realize that the landowner isn’t God. This landowner is entitled and used to throwing his weight around just to get what he wants right now. Jesus is talking about the world, who expects to force vain solutions to urgent problems. The God that Jesus knows doesn’t operate that way. Worse, when we obsess about the tree, we completely miss the abundant fruit growing all around us in the vineyard. We obsess over what we think our lives are supposed to look like. But we miss the fruit that God has been bearing in our bodies our whole lives. And Jesus knows that, so he plays with us because he can, because he fills us with faith to know the difference.

It’s this same faith that weeps for the victims of Christchurch, and for victims everywhere, who suffer unexpected violence or death. This faith that repents for the sake of the world. It takes this kind of faith to know against all odds that our gracious God really does hear the cries of the suffering, and really is doing something about it right now. God sends us. Because the time is urgent, everywhere, to console those who mourn, to fight against injustice and hate, to assure the world that these will never have the last word, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. To hold hope for everyone who can’t hang onto it right now, and that’s hard work. There’s nothing complacent about it. Not that we know how to do any of this, but our good and gracious gardener will heap his manure on us to fertilize us that we will bear fruit in his due time, the right time. Right now. We were made for a time such as this, and we certainly won’t have to wait a year to see it. Thanks be to God.