Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

Repentance Rev. Chandler Stokes Luke 13:6-9 The Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time November 10, 2013 Scripture Introduction

We read from Luke today. And one of the defining literary structures of Luke’s gospel is a major turning point in Luke 9:51, which reads: When the days drew near for him to be taken up, [Jesus] set his face to go to Jerusalem. From that point forward until Jesus enters the city, as told in Luke 19, every passage is best considered under the shadow of the catastrophic events that take place in Jerusalem. It is as if the cross casts a shadow back across the whole of Jesus’ ten-chapter-long journey to Jerusalem. Our passage today falls directly in the line of that shadow, and it is critically informed by that ominous context.

Scripture: Luke 13:1-9

At that very time there were some present who told [Jesus] about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? 3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. 4 Or 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? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

6 Then 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. 7 So 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?’ 8 He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. 9 If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ ”1

* * *

The word “repent” carries a lot of baggage, enough so that it can even be used in cartoons. Typically, a guy with long hair, a robe, and sandals is standing on a street corner with a sign that threatens, “Repent! The end is coming!” And the joke ensues from there. For instance, a guy across the street has a sign that says, “Forget it. It’s too late.” Or some other twist. “Repent” often evokes some kook threatening the end or something very dark. Let’s say you tell your friend that you’ve got a new spiritual practice. “What is it?” If you say, “Repentance,” she’s going to think you’ve been up to sinister things.

It’s not a trivial concept, but in the New Testament, however, “repentance” is more about beginnings and new life. The classic text, which I read earlier in this service from Mark 1, says: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good

1 The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Luke 13:6–9.

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news.” Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand; good news! It’s the promise of a new world, a new life, a new way of being that’s offered in the command to repent.

In Scripture, sometimes the focus in repentance is on what we’re turning away from, but more often, as in Mark, the focus is on what we’re turning toward. In either case, repentance is about turning. And it’s like turning a corner. When someone improves in the hospital, we say, “He’s turned a corner.” When your child takes on a new sense of maturity or responsibility, you say, “She’s turned a corner.” When an institution is starting to fire on all cylinders, we say, “I think we’ve turned a corner.” Repentance is about turning and is life-giving like the expression, “We’ve turned a corner.”

It’s like moving along a street from which we can’t see the whole horizon and then turning a corner and finding, “Oh, there is a way ahead.” Or it’s like moving out of a dark cave, turning a corner, and seeing the light. “Oh, I can make it from here.”

Repentance requires movement. It does take effort, but it leads to life.

That is the nature of repentance. Years ago, in a phrase that has stuck with me, my friend, Tom Are, described repentance as “a call to the walking dead to breathe.” A call to the walking dead to breathe.

This passage we have today from Luke is pretty strange. On first hearing, it sounds like Jesus is saying that we can avoid a horrible death if we stop “sinning” or “offending God.” But, honestly, doesn’t that sound pretty stupid? That sounds like one of Job’s friends who say, “Job, if you hadn’t done something awful, you wouldn’t be suffering like this.” The emphasis here in this passage is on the “Do you think that those that died were worse sinners, worse offenders than others?” Scripture is not stuck with the shallow interpretation of suffering by Job’s friends; Scripture knows that evil sometimes befalls the kindest, the most innocent. And that truth is evident in Jesus’ own innocent suffering.

Here Jesus himself raises the question about why terrible things happen. He speaks to his disciples about an incident where Pilate, the local governor, executed people in Galilee, likely for some kind of rebellion, and then did some God-awful thing to suppress the rebellion—that’s already an allusion to Jesus’ crucifixion and his capital punishment. And then Jesus reminds them of a tragedy in Siloam where others were killed by accident. He raises these questions about why terrible things happen to decent, imperfect people—or more to the point—people like you and me. He raises the questions, but he does not answer them. He does not answer the question about why terrible, evil things occur and instead turns the conversation to: “Well, so what are you going to do?” In the midst of “Why?” and in the midst of these intractable questions, Jesus calls us to repent. He raises these questions about death and then turns us toward life.

Remember the narrative structure of Luke.

In the shadow of the cross, as the story looks forward to Jesus’ blood being spilled in Jerusalem, Jesus is anticipating the aftermath: “When I am slaughtered, you may well ask, ’Why? Why did this happen? Why to the most beautiful, gracious, loving person we ever knew… Why? Why?

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Why?’” Jesus knows that we’re going to ask, “Why?” but he turns away from the question as if…, well, as if it were a dead end. (That’s a topic I discussed in another sermon, the one given on May 15, 2011entitled Changing Time Zones.)

Here, instead of answering the question, “Why?,” Jesus tells a parable. By raising the question, he says, “Stuff happens. It’s going to happen. So, look, this is where you are. You weren’t in Siloam. You weren’t among those Galileans. You’re like this fig tree. You are living in mercy, granted a reprieve, living. You’re here. You’re alive. You will at times come to know, sometimes very clearly know, that we are all going to die; how and when and where is not likely to make a lot sense. Or at least it won’t always make sense, but now… now, while you live, turn the corner.

This is how Professor David Buttrick puts it: “Unexpectedly, Jesus interrupts the objective discussion, calling for us to repent. We are all [we might say] sinners in the sight of God, blithely living in mercy without changing our lives. …In the Bible repentance is change, a deliberate, smart redesigning of life.… The parable is an encouragement. We live in the midst of God’s absurd mercy, unbelievably patient and generous. Let us then respond with grace, grace stretched wide, and repent! God is waiting, waiting.”2

Even closer to this text is theologian Robert Capon’s insight: “Maybe what Jesus was telling them to repent of was actually their rejection of death… maybe they were supposed to stop pretending that death was something God only sent to bad guys and realize it was his chosen way of saving even people with lives as carefully lived as theirs.

“‘You’re all going to die,’ Jesus tells them in effect. ‘But since I’m going to die for you and with you, maybe you should stop trying to keep death at arm’s length.… For on the cross, in the very teeth of death, Jesus himself says, ‘Forgive.…’ The world lives, and the fig tree lives, under the rubric of forgiveness.…”3

Time is the tangible gift of mercy—of God’s waiting. In the awareness of death, we know time to be sweet and precious. The parable is an encouragement to embrace time and not miss it. We know what columnist Anna Quindlen says is true, that “It is so easy to waste our lives, because it is so easy to waste our days, our hours, and our minutes…”4 As Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”5

Is there a threat in there? A threat of death, I suppose. But the command to repent is offered as an invitation to breathe: “Hey, come on. Don’t miss it.”

2 David Buttrick, Speaking Parables (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2000) p. 191.

3 Robert Farrar Capon, Parables of Grace, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), pp. 95-98.

4 Anna Quindlen, “Lilies of the Field,” commencement address given at Vanderbilt University, 1999.

5 Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

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And the key in our spiritual practice is to understand repentance not as a once-for-all turning of our lives. Agnes Norfleet, my colleague who inspired most of today’s sermon, put it this way: “Repentance needs to be an ongoing attitude toward one’s life, rather than an occasional act.” That’s how we understand repentance as a practice; it’s something that’s at the heart of our daily lives, as it is at the heart of the gospel. As Fred Craddock said, “In fact, for Luke the gospel is the offer of repentance and forgiveness of sins.…”6 That is the gospel for him, the repeated offer to the walking dead to breathe, to turn toward the good and sweet, all the time, at any time, to recognize the precious gift of time.

There are moments of profound turning. There are times when we feel that the Spirit did seem to move: “It moved and I was free.” But it’s never the end of the process of turning. It’s a practice.

Listen to the stories of addiction. There are moments when you’re at the bottom or at the end or maybe at the back of the cave, there are times when you know that, if you don’t turn around, you will die. So, you turn around at the back of the cave and head for the entrance; but life, addicts know, is a matter of continuing to turn toward the light, of continual turning. We speak of being “in recovery” not of being “recovered.” It’s a matter of recovering, ‘til by turning, turning we come round right. The old Shaker tune, Simple Gifts, goes:

To turn, turn will be our delight

‘Til by turning, turning we come ‘round right.

I don’t know if it’s simple—as in Simple Gifts. It’s certainly hard sometimes, hard to turn away from the old habits of bitterness, or self-loathing, or over-eating, or over-drinking, or just under-caring, under-loving. It certainly is hard sometimes, but along with the implied ease of “turning a corner,” writer Martha Sterne offers this generous thought: “The scientists [say] that the primal move is turning. The universe, in the moment when all moments began, when time and space emerged from the deep heart of God, the universe, twisting in birth, exploded out—not in the form of a perfect circle or a square or a triangle or a hexagon—but the universe was birthed in turning. Spiraling really, which is a lovely and complex and grace-filled kind of turning, isn’t it…? I believe that somehow turning, turning ‘til we come ‘round right’ is the (natural) movement of the Christian faith and the movement of our life together.…”7 Natural—like turning a corner.

It’s a matter of daily turning a corner, trusting that, as sure as time keeps coming to us as a gift of mercy, God is working with us, working with our feet, working with our hearts, our wills, to get us there, turning and turning by the grace of time.

We are mortal, frail, fragile. And on his way to Jerusalem—with time clearly precious and on his mind—Jesus reminds us that death comes to us all. I suppose that is to say, “The end is coming,”

6 Fred B. Craddock, Luke: Interpretation Commentary (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), p. 167.

7 Martha Sterne, Earthly Good: Reflections on Life and God (Akron, Ohio: OSL Publications, 2003) pp. 97-98.

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but that truth, he tells us, is no reason for death to get even one more moment from us. Not one more. Jesus reminds us, “You are like this fig tree; you are alive, and God keeps pouring out mercy, mercy, mercy”—that we may turn again, again, again with each breath.

“…on the cross, in the very teeth of death, Jesus himself says, ‘Forgive.…’ The world lives, and the fig tree lives, under the rubric of [mercy]…”

Have you heard the story of Etty Hillesum? Have you heard of her diaries? They were hidden for many years until the late 1980s and were recently published in a book that calls her “a woman for our time.”8 I offer you this vision as final word on repentance.

[Etty Hillesum] claimed no religion in the institutional sense, belonging neither to synagogue nor church. She describes herself as “the girl who could not kneel” and “yet who learned to pray.” Her family ended up in a transit camp and she witnessed the worst of the Holocaust horrors. Her diaries are a remarkable struggle of horrific suffering and yet this young woman never lost a sense of the goodness and beauty of life; she refused to hate, lived with hope and integrity, and grew—beyond her lack of religion—to have a sense of God within and a passion for truth.

When her family was forced to leave their transit camp in the Netherlands on a train bound for Auschwitz [her Jerusalem], she addressed a postcard to a friend, threw it through a crack in the boarded up train, and it was picked up by farmers and remarkably mailed. It read: “Christine, opening the Bible at random, I find this: ‘The Lord is my high tower.’ I am sitting on my rucksack in the middle of a full freight car. Father, Mother, and Mischa are a few cars away. In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden orders from the Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa too. We shall be traveling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care.”9

Finding in God the “high tower” and leaving the camp singing, despite the death the surely awaits us all, is the kind of repentance to which this text calls us. Repent—it is a call to the walking dead to live.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

8 Patrick Woodhouse, Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. xii and 133.

9 Op. Cit. p. 131.