Göttinger Predigten
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Lent 3, 03/24/2019
Sermon on Luke 13:1-9, by David Zersen
At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? 3No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. 4Or 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? 5No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
6Then 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. 7So 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?’ 8He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. 9If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
GRACIOUS LIVING
Some of us seem born to be blamers. ‘He did it.” “You did it.” “God did it.” There’s always someone else at fault. Besides the TV commercials from pharmaceutical companies urging you to talk to your doctor about a medication no one can pronounce, the second most common commercials seem to be from lawyers who are assuring you that no one is going to get away it! If you’ve got mesothelioma or pneumonoconiosis, if you’ve got emphysema or lime disease, there is surely a contractor who put asbestos tiles in your basement, a coal mine owner, a smoking spouse or a wayward forest deer who could be responsible. Clearly everything has a cause, but if you get into the blame game, it’s more interesting to prove another’s guilt and your innocence. Of course there are law firms that assure you that they’ve saved a place for you in their class-action suit, but there are bigger problems than finding the right cause and the right lawyer. Bigger in the long run. Living in a litigious society doesn’t just mean that we can spend a lifetime trying to find who’s responsible. It can mean that we are conditioned not to take responsibility for anything ourselves. This can lead to a self-righteousness that is more than a spiritual problem. It can also make you the one person nobody really wants to spend time with.
Finding the right person to blame
Jesus has dealt with this issue many times, but in today’s lesson he seems to hit it head on. On the one hand, some local people are arguing about who was at fault when those sacrificing in the temple were killed by Pilate, and their blood was mingled with their own sacrifices—a pretty disgusting thought. And others were arguing about who was responsible when a local tower in Siloam fell and killed some people? In that case, was it the contractor, the poor choice of stone, the failure to check the foundation, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even God getting even with someone because they had offended him? Such argumentation can be endless and we can think of our own modern counterparts. Who was responsible in Christchurch, New Zealand, when fifty people were killed at worship in a mosque? The man who shot them, the manufacturer of the automatic weapon, the failure of the authorities of recognize the shooter’s extremist rantings on the internet, the desire of immigrants to posess differing views and clothing styles—the list can go on and on. And many of us can agree with one view or another and make it our own. Jesus comment to us seems to be, “Unless you ask yourself about your own role in this problem, you will be judged as harshly as the shooter.” Are you ready to accept that?
Let’s also look at the accompanying parable that may not have been told in this context, but which the Lucan writer felt was a part of this discussion. I appreciate this story because in our backyard in Austin, Texas, we had a fig tree, quite new to me as one who had grown up in the Midwest. It didn’t just grow on its own. It had to be pruned before the buds would swell in early spring and it had to be fertilized after the buds began to swell. And if thus nurtured properly, it should bear good fruit. Jesus, of course, is telling a parable, with a lesson as strong as the one given to the Galileans in the first part of our text. If all the proper nurture does nothing to produce growth—or to say it theologically, if all the grace given to you still results in your being a hard-hearted Hannah, a blamer who knows that only others are at fault, then you’re as useless as a fig tree that is so dead it needs to be cut down. It’s just taking up space! Wow. Is he saying this to you?
Recently I read about such people like us. Notice that I said, “like us.” “A commentator is reflecting on “blamers”: Someone is late to the family, holiday dinner and is treated by the host as a persona non grata for the remainder of the night—given the cold shoulder, given dirty looks, or even reprimanded before the other guests; a motorist goes down the wrong way in a parking lot and receives the middle finger from another motorist; a student fails an exam and subsequently becomes belligerent toward the teacher and makes nasty comments to other students about the teacher; a teacher consistently gets poor student evaluations and blames the students for being incompetent and too stupid to evaluate him; a man beats up his wife and blames the victim for not “understanding” him; a woman cheats on her husband and blames him for working too much; a manager does not get the promotion she wanted and blames her boss for being a ‘male chauvinist pig.’”
We have many words in our language to describe our need to be like this: finger-pointing, fault-finding, blaming, or scapegoating. And theologically we have a way to address this need as well. In Leviticus we learn about a practice in which the priest symbolically places the confessed sins of the people on a goat and then releases it into the wilderness—the sins to be taken away and known no more. The crucifixion of Jesus has for most Christians aspects of this practice of scapegoating. Horatius Bonar’s much beloved hymn tells it well: “I lay my sins on Jesus, the spotless Lamb of God; he bears them all, and frees us from the accursed load.”
Finding the grace that sets us free
Such language may be taking us ahead of ourselves, however. In today’s lesson Jesus is helping us to begin the process that “sets us free” by acknowledging our own guilt in the schemes of life. The activities and actions in which all of us participate are tainted with so much self-centeredness and self-righteousness that it ill-behooves us to try to address our problems by insisting that somebody else was at fault. One of the reasons that we publicly confess our sins—and even privately in some religious or personal settings—is because clearly there are things that we should not have done and there are things which we should have done. We want to acknowledge before we go any farther—in this Lenten season and, as the Publc Confession says, “our own most grievous fault.”
There. We said it. It may not have seemed hard. It should have been, however. It is much easier to say “How could he or she have done that to me or to someone?” I remember sobbing when Bobby Kennedy was shot—after John Kennedy had been shot—and Martin Luther King had been shot: “What kind of people have we become?’ And after all the school shootings and bombings and harsh judgements of others and outrageous anger spewed out at TV screens or at people involved with us in traffic accidents or at obnoxious relatives or even at our own children or spouses---that lament has to change to “What kind of person have I become?” For within each of us there is that possibility to become that which we can only abhor in others. We too, the most grievous “we,” have need of the very repentance that we demand of others. And with that repentance we find ourselves falling to our knees and knowing that before judgement points to others, it points to us.
That’s how the prodigal child felt when he fell before the anguished and waiting father. That’s how the people in Rwanda learned to cope with the terrible atrocities they levied on one another during their holocaust just a few years back. They learned that in repentance, repentance for all, there was a grace to be discovered, an embracing incomprehensible love that brought them to tears and then to their feet again. Thy dying fig tree was nurtured until it bore fruit. The bickering crowds who always wanted to know who had to pay discovered that they themselves, despite their failures and ignorance, had been embraced by grace and empowered to be generous in their opinions of others as well as kind in their outreach to those they had almost destroyed.
This was the Gospel lesson for last Sunday, one which we love very well. Jesus uses the lovely feminine image of a hen gathering her chicks under her wings to secure them from danger. We hear a sterner word for those who only point fingers and believe that others are responsible for things in which we too have roles. But for the repentant chicks, for those who are troubled by their own participation in the complex fault at work in the world, there are gracious and wide-spread wings protecting, securing and empowering us
We are graced today, we who mourn and admit our most grievous faults. We are assured and empowered that life, no matter our failures, is filled with new beginning and blessed outcomes.
It is our tree of life that has been regularly nurtured by the good news of God’s love for us in Christ.
It is our tree of life that will produce good fruit—today and for new days to come.