March 3, 2013 – Luke 13:1-9
Luke 13:1-9
Signs of the Times
Third Sunday in Lent – March 3, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
In the fine film Lincoln from last year,
Abe Lincoln tells stories at almost every opportunity.
Some of them are instructive, and some of them just entertaining,
or at least they seem so to him.
Upon greeting some visitors from Jefferson City, he is reminded of a story he knows.
He says, I heard tell once of a Jefferson City lawyer who had a parrot that would wake him each morning crying out ‘today’s the day the world shall end as scripture has foretold’. And one day, the lawyer shot him for the sake of peace and quiet I presume – thus fulfilling, for the bird at least, his prophecy.
The parrot seemed to read the signs of the times rightly!
The question in the film is: what will the president do for the sake of peace and quiet,
in the midst of the bloodiest war the world had yet known?
The civil war divided a nation over the question of slavery,
and as the war went on it crippled that nation from accomplishing anything of purpose,
from fulfilling its intention and its huge promise.
This is the great frustration of Lincoln’s presidency,
and in one of his most impassioned moments he laments it to his cabinet:
I can’t accomplish a goddamn thing of any worth until we cure ourselves of slavery and end this pestilential war! I wonder if any of you or anyone else knows it. I know! I need this! This amendment [for the abolition of slavery] is that cure! We’ve stepped out upon the world stage now. Now! With the fate of human dignity in our hands. Blood’s been spilled to afford us this moment now! Now! Now!
I’m sure to many the war seemed like the end of the world was at hand.
I’m sure for many the signs of the times were written in blood and punctuated by bayonets.
But not for Lincoln.
For the parrot maybe the end was death.
But for the president, the end is the abolition of slavery and
freedom for countless African-Americans.
The signs of the times – the signs of God’s work in the world – were not to be found in
war and rumours of war, but rather in the end of war and the freedom of many.
Many did not read the signs of the times rightly, but the president did.
Today in the Gospel,
Jesus also laments the people’s inability to read the signs of the times rightly.
The question is: what really is happening in God’s world? What is God really up to?
Just before our reading today, Jesus has been talking with people following him about just this.
He asks them, “Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
You can tell the weather well enough by looking at the sky:
You see a cloud and you know it’s going to rain.
You feel a south wind and you know it’s going to get hot.
God’s reign is breaking into this world and you can’t see it? Watch for it!”
So then the people think for a mo and say:
“um, okay: how about when those Galileans were killed by Pilate:
Is that a sign of God’s punishing them for their sins?
Is that a sign of God’s reign breaking into this world?”
And Jesus, I think, just looks at them: like, How dumb can you be?
No, Jesus says, that’s not what I’m talking about. You don’t really have a clue, do you?
And don’t even think about bringing up that terrible thing that happened in Jerusalem
where the tower of Siloam fell and killed 18 poor people.
That was not punishment for their sin either.
That is so not what I’m talking about!
It was natural for those people following Jesus – and it is natural for us – to think that
God is mostly at work in the world punishing the sinful and rewarding the good.
But apparently that’s not what Jesus thinks.
When we’re confronted by bad news, it is always tempting to wonder
“why is God doing this to me” or “why is God doing this to a person I love.”
It’s what the people following Jesus were thinking that day, and it’s often what we think.
But Jesus firmly rejects this way of thinking.
He never really answers why tragic things seem to happen for no reason –
either he doesn’t know or he isn’t telling.
People come to him today and basically tell him,
Hey, preacher: we seem to be living in pretty lousy times:
We’re ruled by a nasty evil tyrant while natural disasters are killing our own people.
Aren’t these the signs of the times? Isn’t this what God is up to in the world?
Are these tragedies the true signs of the times?
And, hey: we have our own questions for Jesus, right?
What about all those cancer diagnoses?
What about the freak accidents to those we love?
What about global warming? The rise of terrorism? Economic meltdown? A planet in crisis?
Aren’t those the true signs of the times?
What about school shootings, violence in the public sphere, sexual abuse in the church,
increasing loneliness, addiction, and the rise of mental illness?
Aren’t these the true signs of the times? Isn’t God just leaving us to our own sinful devices?
Isn’t God just so fed up with us that God is just letting us destroy ourselves?
Isn’t all this a sign of what God ultimately has in store for a creation gone wrong?
Aren’t these signs of “the true end of the world?”
Isn’t this what God’s inbreaking realm looks like? Destruction, death, and tragedy?
How do we interpret the present time?
What should we look for as a clue as to what God is up to in the world?
Because, let’s face it, we usually look to destruction and death and
ask why God does it – or, at the very least, we ask why God allows it.
Well: Jesus never answers that question. Never.
He just says, No: these are not the signs of God’s inbreaking reign. You don’t have a clue.
The bad news is not the whole story. The bad news is not the whole story.
Like President Lincoln, Jesus is a storyteller. So, like honest Abe, he tells a story.
He says the sign of the fullness of God’s time,
the clue as to what God is up to in the world is like this:
There was an orchard owner who became impatient with a fig tree in his orchard; it was bearing no fruit. So he ordered the gardener to cut it down. “Sir,” says the gardener, “let’s care for the tree and treat it well and give it one more year to produce some fruit.”
There, Jesus says, that’s the clue to interpreting the present time,
that is the clue to God’s inbreaking reign: that is a sign of what God is up to.
As the preacher Tom Long eloquently says: the sign is not . . .
wars and rumours of war, but instead the gracious and patient hand that reaches out to halt the ax, the merciful gesture woven into the fabric of life that stays all that would give up on the barren and the broken, the merciful voice that says, “Let’s give this hopeless case one more year.” (at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2165)
We are graciously given time by a gracious God to become what we were created to be:
lovers of God, lovers of our neighbours, and caretakers of creation.
That is the good news.
That is the sign of God’s activity in the world: mercy, and patience, and grace:
the extension of time to us to become what God intends us to be.
The triune God gives us time to bear the fruit that the triune God intends us to bear.
Jesus calls for repentance here: he calls for a new heart and a new mind and a new life and
a new way of living: that’s what repentance means: to have a change of heart,
and it’s what Jesus calls for: the bearing of fruit for others.
He calls for a new heart and a new mind and a new life and a new way of living that is
aligned with the God who cares for all the world and who
wishes to enlist our help in ushering in the triune God’s reign for
mercy-giving and manna-sharing and justice-doing and peace-making.
He calls for a new way of looking at things.
A way that invites us not to be daunted by the bad news,
but invigorated by the good news around us.
True: Jesus does not do away with a sense of impending judgment.
The fig tree has time, yes, but it only has a year.
There is some urgency to bearing fruit,
to aligning ourselves with the God who cares for all the world.
And while this may sound like bad news to us, I’m not sure it really is:
We do confess every week as part of the good news that
“he will judge the living and dead.”
How can that possibly be good news?
Partly it’s good news because we know he will judge with mercy.
But it’s also good news because evil will be judged and ultimately does not have a place in
God’s future for this world:
both the evil that is around us – and the evil within us: that is good news.
Perhaps it means that ultimately Jesus’s way of judging evil and dealing with evil is to redeem it,
all of it, by simply not tiring of loving it until it is turned around.
I don’t know.
In Faith Study last week, we reviewed the ministry of Jesus and the question was:
can all of what Jesus said and did be summarized by saying that he
freely shared mercy with all and he freely shared manna with all?
The answer was “Yes, but. . .”
But what about those times where Jesus seems to retain a sense of impending judgment?
What about those “woes” of Jesus: woe to you who are rich now, who to you who are full now,
woe to you who are laughing now?
Even here, I would say, he is calling for a change of heart and
using some very strong language to wake people up and call for that change.
We are accountable for the gifts we are given in this life,
and we are accountable for using them in alignment with the God who cares for all.
The good news is that change is possible.
And the even better news, is that when the woe comes, when the judgment comes,
it all seems to fall on Jesus, and not on anyone one else.
And that, I would say, is judgment with extreme mercy:
when the chicken throws herself in the way of the ax for the sake of the chicks,
every single one of them, the good as well as the bad.
That maybe is the ultimate sign of the times: Jesus on the cross.
That is what God is up to in the world most of all: mercy.
God’s punishment does not fall on us: rather, our sinfulness falls on Jesus.
And what does Jesus do with it? He forgives it. He seeks to redeem it.
We are not cursed by woe; we are blessed with forgiveness.
“Forgive them, Father,” he says from the cross in Luke’s Gospel.
And what does the gardener say to the master about the fig tree?
In our translation, what he says is, “Let it alone,” which is unfortunate,
because what the gardener really says to the tree is exactly what
Jesus says from the cross: “Forgive it. And give it another year.”
And then the gardener does everything in his power to make sure that the tree produces fruit:
he nurtures it and cares for it and feeds it.
God is in the mercy business, not the retribution business. God is pretty patient.
We often think we are the ones waiting for God to do something.
Turns out, God is the one waiting for us: waiting for us to bear the fruit of caring for one another,
to bear the fruit of forgiving those who have hurt us,
to bear the fruit of feeding the hungry,
to bear the fruit of working for justice.
There is much that inhibits us from being the people Jesus calls us to be.
Addiction is a powerful inhibitor, as is apathy and self-interest.
And we are not always the parents we should be, the sons and daughters we should be,
the friends we should be, or the members of this community we should be.
But we are given a gracious gift of time in which to bear this fruit more abundantly.
The gardener looks at us and graciously says: It’s not a lost case yet: let’s give it another year.
That’s pretty good news, but there’s more: the gardener asks not just that we be forgiven,
but promises to care for us and feed us.
Nevertheless, we are confronted with the question: what will we do with the time we are given?
Anne Pereira and those who served the Community Meal this week made some
very good use of their time.
They served the most beautiful meal you can imagine to our guests this week:
pork tenderloin, baked potatoes with butter and sour cream, carrots, corn and coleslaw.
And it was delicious.
Near the end, a couple of guys came in, and they were not doing well.
One is struggling with depression and a gambling addiction, the other, his brother,
is just trying to keep him alive.
When they came in they were really just looking for toilet paper,
because they didn’t even have enough money for that.
But they had heard they might get a meal here too.
Well, they got some toilet paper, of course, but boy: did they get a meal.
As the brother told me that he hadn’t had a meal like this in months – not even at Christmas –
there were tears in his eyes.
They had several servings.
There were a lot of crappy headlines last week, there was a lot of bad news.
But the signs of the times were not in those headlines:
the signs of God’s time was in that meal.
That meal is what God’s inbreaking reign looks like.
Isaiah knew it long ago: Ho, he says, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
And you that have no money, come, buy and eat.
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
Isaiah knew what the signs of God’s times were long ago.
And the sign is about to happen again.
It happens at this table every week.
The gardener bids us come.
He has bid us be forgiven with mercy and now feeds us with his manna,
with the fruit of his own life, that we in turn might live and bear abundant fruit for
all in any need.
For that is what we were made for.
So come: the time is here. The time is now. Now is the time for mercy.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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