Repentance is a complete turning around of your whole being, a turning to God who longs to freely fill you with nourishment and life.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday in Lent, year C
Texts: Luke 13:1-9; Isaiah 55:1-9

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?”

Isaiah’s question is powerful. It can’t be ignored. Because if Isaiah’s right, we’re spending our mental, spiritual, and physical energy and time on things that won’t replenish us, feed us. If Isaiah’s right, we’re in danger of starving to death inside, not from lack of physical food or drink, but because we are filling ourselves with emptiness.

Instead, Isaiah says, know this: God offers you all the spiritual food and drink you need or want, endless mercy and love, at no cost. God wants to freely fill up your heart and soul with life and love.

So seek God, Isaiah says. Stop wasting your time and energy on whatever it is you think fills you. Turn to God for mercy and pardon, for steadfast, sure love.

And, strange as it might seem, today Jesus sounds a lot like Isaiah.

Unless you repent, Jesus says, you will perish.

If that sounds terrifyingly harsh, you’re missing Jesus’ point.

Jesus isn’t saying repent or God will have a wicked ruler kill you, because he says the Galileans Pilate murdered weren’t punished by God, either, and they weren’t any worse than you. Jesus isn’t saying repent or God will kill you in a construction accident, like the workers at Siloam, because he says those who died weren’t punished by God, either, and they weren’t any worse than you.

Jesus utterly rejects the idea that people suffer because God targets them for their sins. So, there must be another thing he means by “you will perish as they did.” And there is. Jesus is talking exactly like Isaiah. If you were sitting at a table in a restaurant eating sand and drinking lye, I hope someone would come up and say, “you’re going to die if you keep feeding yourself with that!” They’re not threatening punishment. They’re stating fact. So is Isaiah. So is Jesus.

Jesus says, if you keep going in the direction you’re going, if you keep living and thinking and doing as you do, you’ll dry up and die. Just like Isaiah says. We know this is what Jesus means thanks to Luke.

Only Luke tells of these tragic deaths, and only Luke tells Jesus’ parable about the fig tree. And he puts them together.

That’s significant. It’s how we know what “repent or perish” means. Luke follows Jesus’ frightening words with an absolutely clear parable. There’s a fruitless tree, and the owner wants to clear the land for something more profitable. The current way the tree is living won’t end well. But the gardener talks him out of it. He says, “The problem is, it needs nourishment. Let me see what I can do, feed it for a year, see if I can encourage it to bear fruit.”

That’s the powerful gift of Isaiah and Jesus. In warning that your path won’t lead to nourishment, and will ultimately kill you, they’re giving you hope: God’s life awaits you in the other direction.

We miss this because we’ve made repentance into a puny, weak shadow of what Jesus actually calls for.

When we hear “repent,” we think of individual sins we do, individual thoughts we think, then say, “Yes, I suppose I need to repent of them.” But that’s more like confession: name your sins and ask forgiveness.

Repentance is far deeper. The individual things we think or do that harm others, harm the creation, and cause God grief aren’t the problem. They’re the symptom of the problem. The things I think I need to repent of are the sign that there’s a deeper illness in me. A sign you’re going in a direction away from God’s life, toward death.

As long as we focus on the symptoms rather than the underlying disease, we’re still going in a way that misses God’s nourishment. Thankfully, Jesus means a whole lot more when he says, “repent.”

Jesus’ word is “metanoia.” It means a complete change of mind.

Repentance is a 180-degree shift in how you think, how you reason, in how you live your life. A full stop and reversal. Which makes sense if you’re going away from food and life and hope.

Isaiah and Jesus invite you to ask: What am I wasting my life on? Does my current way of thinking and being actually satisfy me, fill me, heal me, lead me to God’s nourishment?

For example: does dwelling on grudges against some people really feed me? Does having my own list of people I wish God would punish really satisfy me? Does trying to get my way all the time really make me happy? Does distracting myself with entertainment and noise instead of hearing God’s voice really give me purpose? Does getting whatever I want while others suffer and struggle really make me feel good?

You might have many more, but these are the kind of questions to ask. Jesus is asking us to consider exactly how we face the world, how honest we are with our motives, our actions, our behaviors, and then to ask ourselves: is this a direction toward life?

I can’t answer for you, but what I know, what millions of believers have come to know, is the more you turn toward God the more you find life and hope and healing. It’s hard to face the ugly truths of how you think or imagine or live and see whether they’re healthy for you or for others. But wasting time and energy on things that can’t fill you up inside is death. And it’s unnecessary. Because you could seek God, and live.

The Triune God is offering all you need for life now and forever.

It might mean a complete turn-around from how you currently think and live. But it’s a turning into the only path that will give you true life, a turning toward the undying mercy and love of God that fills you up.

There’s one more truth to hear, and it’s about that fig tree. Fruit trees don’t bear fruit to help themselves. If their fruit is eaten, others are nourished. If it falls to the ground, it grows a new tree, it doesn’t nourish the original tree.

That’s how God’s plan works, too. When you turn your whole life and intellect and being toward God you are fed, nourished, manured, satisfied, and you bear fruit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. The fruit of the Spirit.

And that fruit fills others up with God’s nourishment. So they turn from death to life. Then they bear fruit for others. And on and on until God in Christ heals all things.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

God will draw all creation under wings of death-defeating love. There’s no point in fighting it or rejecting others from it. So live in God’s embrace!

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday in Lent, year C
Texts: Luke 13:31-35; Philippians 3:17 – 4:1

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Something doesn’t add up here.

Jesus’ grief that God’s people have rejected him is heartbreaking. But Jesus doesn’t say that the people rejected his teachings. Or his miracles. Or who he said he was. He says: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing!” Jesus mourns that Jerusalem – standing for all of Israel – has rejected Jesus’ maternal love, and therefore rejected God’s maternal love.

And that doesn’t make any sense. Who doesn’t want to be gathered under God’s wings, safe, beloved?

If we start by asking that of Jesus’ time, we see that it was for reasons he doesn’t mention here.

Jesus attracted lots of those he longed to draw under his wings. The crowds that followed him loved him. He had less success with the leaders of his people.

And they did reject his teachings. Like teaching that living in God’s love was more important than keeping one of God’s laws, if the two were in conflict. Or teaching that God was more interested in sinners who repented than folks who thought they were good enough they didn’t need repentance.

They rejected his behavior, especially his spending time with “sinful” people. Prostitutes. Tax collectors. Poor, uneducated people. Lepers. He even spoke with women publicly. These weren’t the “right” people.

They rejected his embrace because they rejected everything he stood for. If people followed his teachings, lived as he lived, believed what he believed, all their authority and power would be gone.

So even when they saw miracles right before their eyes, they opposed Jesus. He was too much of a threat for them to see clearly.

Now, this is becoming a nice little morality tale, and that’s exceedingly dangerous.

We comfortably talk about how bad the authorities were in Jesus’ time. Thinking, “what’s wrong with them,” happy that we’re different. End of story, end of sermon. Be wary of that conclusion.

Today, Paul cuts far too close to this line, too. There are “those people” whom Paul confidently says live as enemies of the cross, whose “god is the belly,” whose minds are set on earthly things. As we just did with the authorities, Paul has fallen into “we” and “they” language. He would have done better to include himself and the Philippians amongst those who sometimes get focused on earthly things over heavenly. So would we.

Such “we” and “they” language overpowers honesty about yourself and your life with lies. It keeps the truth at arm’s length, applied only to others, which might feel safe, but it’s a false security. Because we miss the truth about our own path, our own prejudice, our own reality. We miss the probability that we might be among those who reject the wings of Jesus’ embrace. And if we miss that, we miss everything.

Our problem is the same as these religious leaders. Notice the pattern in what they rejected:

It was the people Jesus embraced, more than anything else, that turned them away. Jesus’ proclamation of God’s love was unabashedly for all. Sinners. Broken people. People who didn’t darken the door of a synagogue. People who were unacceptable from birth: women; non-Jews; even the hated Romans. Jesus welcomed and embraced them all.

Jesus’ actions, his teachings, and most deeply, his death and resurrection, were his embrace, his enfolding of God’s wings around God’s people. And it’s pretty clear that some couldn’t handle just how broad the category “God’s people” really was.

Jesus would say to Paul here, “I know you think these others are wrong, that they’re focused on worldly things, that they even seem to be my enemies. But know this: I love them enough to die for them, too.”

And this exposes a sensitive nerve in us: how very anxious we are about who else is invited into the enfolding wings of God’s love, the embrace God the mother hen so longs to place around the world. We don’t want to share space under the wings with certain people any more than these authorities did.

Christians have always struggled with this.

The history of Jesus’ followers is littered with the bodies and lives of people Christians have deemed “those people,” people who don’t belong in God’s embrace. From the Crusades to the Inquistion, to Christian support of racism and slavery that still exists, Christians regularly oppose Christ and put people into groups, labelling them.

And once you do that, as Hitler taught us well, you can reject without much effort. If you think God hates Muslims, you can easily conclude that you don’t have to worry much about how they’re treated. If you think God can’t welcome people who do or think certain things that offend you, you can easily believe that you don’t have to have any compassion for them.

If Jesus were doing public ministry here in person, as he did 2,000 years ago, he’d welcome folks that some of us would be very uncomfortable with, maybe even people we know well. But when you close your heart to anyone, you close your heart to God. When you reject anyone God loves, you reject God.

Here’s an interesting truth about chickens.

Someone whose family had a farm once told me about how they’d use brood hens to nurture and care for baby chicks that arrived from the hatchery. But sometimes the hens wouldn’t accept the unknown chicks. They’d ignore them. Her father then would take the handle end of a hammer, and gently tap the hens on the head, stunning them. When they woke up, they’d see the same baby chicks and think they were their own. They’d bring them under their wings.

This flips the image from Jesus as hen to us as hen, but there’s an important truth here. Maybe the love and grace of Jesus is your tap on the head. Paul says people often have their minds on earthly things, worldly issues. Rejecting certain people because of who they are or what they do is certainly an earthly thing. The heavenly thing is to realize God’s love is so astonishingly broad it covers all creatures in an embrace. But something has to wake you up to see differently.

We often deny God’s love for others when we have difficulty believing we ourselves can be loved by God.

If you’ve faced the darkness of fear that you aren’t loved, if you don’t feel certain God really loves you, it’s hard to extend a love you don’t feel you have to people you don’t like or trust.

Well, God loves you infinitely. With a love that destroys death. A love that looks at all your failure and pain, all your sin and bad thoughts, all your things you wish no one knew about, and sees a beloved child of God who needs to be brought into God’s embrace.

Now, isn’t that a tap on the head? Does it change what you see in others?

Enjoy your place under God’s wings. They’re there to surround you and strengthen you for this hard world, and prepare you for the joy of the next. They’re a shelter in your storms, a comfort in your pain, a warmth when you’re cold.

But look around: sure enough, there are others under those wings you don’t like. Maybe they don’t like you, either. But the wings are for them as well as you. Can you see that? It’s part of the deal with God’s love.

And for that you can give eternal thanks.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen