Mar. 7 Sermon: Lent 3
Sermon, Third Sunday in Lent
Holy Covenant UMC
March 7, 2010
Rev. Kate Hurst Floyd
Luke 13:1-9
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Repent or Perish. Repent or perish.
Are there more shocking words in our Christian vocabulary?
This phrase brings to mind street preachers on the corner, wearing a hand-written sandwich board proclaiming “Jesus died for us”, handing out tracts, and shouting into a bullhorn: Repent or Perish! Damning us all to hell. These words conjure up the tagline of a book series, like Left Behind, scaring people into believing in Jesus, with the threat of chaos and danger if we don’t.
We hear these words—repent or perish–and we want to turn and run in the other direction. We get the same urge we had as a child, when we knew we were in trouble, and now caught, and we heard our parents voice; or when that annoying neighbor is calling after us, and we know if we talk to her we won’t be free for an hour; we hear these words, this voice, and our instinct is to run in the other direction.
Perhaps it brings to mind images of church communities you were part of in the past, or negative images from TV or friends or family who use this language to send you to hell and proclaim a negative, hate-filled message about Christianity. Repent or perish also gets translated as: Change or Die-we see that on t-shirts. Change or die sounds more like the title of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie than a motivating, life-changing command from Jesus.
What if that had been our Lenten theme? Instead of Search Me, Know Me: Change or Die! Would you be here this morning? Or would you have gone running in the other direction? You probably would have found a church where the words weren’t so shocking.
What’s going on here, in our text from Luke, is Jesus really condemning us to death? What are his disciples asking him that evokes this kind of shocking vocabulary?
Well, Jesus’ disciples are much like us: They are asking the age-old theological question about evil. Why do bad things happen? They’ve just heard about some friends, fellow Jews, a group of Galileans who were sacrificing at the Temple, practicing their religion, minding their own business, when Pilate, the cruel and evil dictator, ordered that these innocents be slaughtered while they were practicing their faith.
Jesus’ followers can’t understand—they are in shock and they are looking for answers. They’re trying to make meaning out of an unimaginable situation. So they assume that the Galileans must have died because they are sinners, and God is punishing them. They must have deserved their fate. The people still alive, following Jesus, must be better people in the eyes of God—how else could God let such a tragedy occur? Surely they perished because they didn’t repent—this must be some kind of divine punishment.
Why do bad things happen, Jesus, they ask?
Wouldn’t you be asking that question, if you had Jesus in your midst, God incarnate, wouldn’t you be eager to ask: Why evil? Why tragedies? Where is God? Give us some kind of explanation! I know that I would.
As a pastor, I get asked that question all the time—why do bad things happen? And where is a good God when evil infiltrates the world. I wonder the same thing myself. We, like the disciples, are eager to find answers and to make meaning out of the meaningless.
So we stand with the disciples, anxiously awaiting Jesus’ answer, and how does he explain evil in the midst of a good God? He doesn’t.
He doesn’t. As someone who gets asked this question on a very regular basis, I take comfort in the fact that even Jesus, even Jesus, didn’t explain evil. What does he say? He does make very clear that bad things don’t happen as a result of divine punishment. He makes clear that God wills life, but in a broken world, tragic events happen that we can’t understand or explain. He brings up the people who were killed while standing under a tower in Siloam—some innocent bystanders who were minding their own business when faulty construction caused the tower to collapse. He makes clear the people didn’t die because they were sinners or God thought they deserved it. No, all of us are subject to the evils of a broken world.
He tells us that people who die from tragedies or at the hands of violence or natural disasters aren’t any worse sinners than the rest of us who are still living. The earthquake in Haiti wasn’t a result of past sins, those who died in 9/11 weren’t getting what they deserved as a result of feminism or glbt rights; cancer patients didn’t bring it on themselves; hurricane Katrina wasn’t divine punishment; all of these are tragedies that make God weep right alongside us.
But he doesn’t stop there. Next Jesus says to them, says to us: Repent or perish. Repent or perish. Those dreaded words that make us want to turn the other way, run in the opposite direction. Why does he use these shocking words in this moment?
He’s calling us to focus on our own lives, what we can control, who we can control—and the only people we can control are ourselves. He’s telling us that in light of knowing the world is a broken and chaotic place, we can either keep looking in vain for answers and blaming others or God, OR, we can examine our own lives and do what we can to better follow Jesus.
Repent, he tells us, turn around your lives. Turn from blaming everyone else to examining your own spiritual life. Turn from calling others sinners to focusing on what you can change within. Turn from trying to manage everything and everyone to loving yourself and others.
Repent. Because if you don’t, you will be caught up in a vicious cycle of always trying to be in control, which lead to our own perishing.
It’s easy to condemn the street preachers and the alarmist novelists who want to control God and tell us we’re going to Hell; When they say: “repent or perish” It’s natural to run the other direction. But when we look a little more closely, I think that what they are doing, even if it’s not right, is trying to control a world that is not, ultimately, in our control. The world is a scary place: tragedies happen; good people die; economies crash; children go hungry. It feels chaotic, and we don’t know how to find answers. We think that if somehow, we can place the world’s mysteries into manageable boxes we can control, we’ll feel better, if only temporarily. So we construct worldviews that posit God is on our side, sinners go to hell, and we go to heaven. It makes us feel a little less shaky when we claim certainties about God. And it’s not just the street preachers or alarmist novelists who want to control God: we do it too. We try and put faith into a box we can manage, control, and understand.
But if Jesus can’t explain away evil with a pithy line or two, if even he doesn’t tell us why bad things happen to good people, then we certainly can’t explain it. And yet, we as humans, try. We try to explain the mysteries of life, blaming the Galileans for sins, wondering if our mother got cancer because God doesn’t favor us, or we’re unable to have a child because God is somehow punishing us…we try to explain the mysteries of life.
We may not try to blame natural disasters on the sins of the people, as Pat Robertson does, but we try to take control of what is God’s to control. We try to blame other people when things aren’t going our way, we try to control other people’s actions or behaviors, we get self-righteous about those who are different than we are, and we minimize their beliefs. We think that if we over-control our lives, scheduling every moment, we’ll be immune from tragedy.
And when we begin to think we control situations and others, when we start to assume that the Galileans died because they were sinners, Jesus breaks in and says: Stop. Stop trying to control the universe. Stop thinking you have all the answers. Stop looking for someone or something to blame. Stop focusing on everything and everyone but your own self. Your own soul. Stop.
And repent. Turn around your own life. This, my friends, my followers, my sheep, you can control. control what you can control, and let God be God. Turn around your life, stop trying to control everybody else’s. Take care of your own life, instead of blaming everyone else, and you will thrive. You will not perish.
So during Lent, 3 weeks in, our challenge this morning is to ask ourselves to take a close look at our lives, figure out what we can control and what we can’t, and start living our life accordingly. We have choices in life….we can make good choices, over and over again, and still a tower might fall on us. Or our mother gets cancer. Or our lover leaves us. Or an earthquake hits. We can’t control the universe.
But we also know that life is fragile and temporary, so while we’re here, we can make choices that make our lives and others lives better. And this is what repentance is about: turning towards God, following Jesus, and turning away from all the energy we spend trying to take control. All the energy we spend trying to be God.
The best news is, we don’t do this work during Lent, or anytime, alone. Because after Jesus tells us to repent, he tells us a parable about a tree that needs some turning around. The world has given up on the tree, the gardener is ready to chop it, and Jesus says: give that tree a chance. Even when we feel barren and lifeless and worthy of being chopped down, Jesus tells us that we have lots of potential.
He gives us countless chances to turn our lives around, and fertilizes us as we embark on this journey. Here’s the difficult truth: It’s not going to be easy or pretty, and we’re going to have to get dirty in order for the fruit to grow. Jesus makes it clear that if we want to grow, if we’re ready to repent, he’s right there; but we have to be willing to let that manure into our lives…it will be hard to touch, it doesn’t smell good, and there will be moments when we want to give it all up…but when we are afraid to wade in the muck of our live and instead always focus on other people, trying to control what we can’t control, we won’t grow—not closer to God, not closer to others, not closer to ourselves.
But if we’re bold enough to let ourselves be fertilized, to withstand the smells during Lent…we will find that by Easter, we will have grown, our limbs will stretch towards the light, and we will bear fruit. So when we take time to look at our addictions, we don’t blame others but instead call on Christ to give us strength; when we notice that the branches of our relationships are thin, we stop trying to blame and change others, and take steps to reach and out forgive, empowered by the love of Christ. We name the ways we overwork and distract ourselves from silence, and allow ourselves the shocking step of finding time just to be. We recognize we can’t change what happened in the past, and stop dwelling there, and instead move forward by making a difference in the lives of others who need a listening ear right now. We let God be God, and we work on changing our own lives.
Repent or perish. These are shocking words, indeed. But maybe they are exactly the words we need to shock us out of our complacency, our desire for control, and our temptations to be God. We need to be told to let look inward and let ourselves be fertilized…to roll around in the dirt and the muck and yes, the manure, so that we open ourselves to mystery and love and new life. We have a choice: We can run in the other direction, ignoring this call, or we can repent. May these shocking words awaken us this Lent to turn around our lives, to grow, and to thrive. So that on Easter Sunday, we will know and believe, that through Christ, the resurrection, we will never, ever perish.
Tags: Kate
