"Of Being Alive Instead of Undying"  Carol Tate

Luke 13:1-9

    One minute an office manager is standing near a window in an office building on Research Boulevard, and the next minute a plane slams into the very place he was standing and kills him.  One month our young daughter-in-law is vibrantly alive and six months later she is dead, stricken by a rare form of leukemia.  One day you hug your dad goodbye and the next day you get the call that he has died.  One moment Port-au-Prince is standing, the next moment it is a pile of rubble, entombing 200,000 people.

    It is a random world we live in.  There is a sense in which the heartbreaking pain and suffering of life could be more easily borne if we really believed that God controlled every aspect of life.  But if you believe in that God, you must give up on free will and the natural processes of creation and the plain truth that stuff just happens.  I hope you don’t believe in that God.  Jesus didn’t.

    After hearing that Pilate’s men ruthlessly killed faithful Galileans who had traveled to the Temple in Jerusalem to perform their religious duties, Jesus asks:  were they worse sinners than other Galileans?  “No, I tell you…”  “What about those people who were crushed when the tower of Siloam fell on them,” he asked.  What about them—were they bad people? “No, I tell you.”  Jesus said.

    Luke knew that terrible things happen—his congregation was living through the aftermath of unutterably terrible things after Rome destroyed the Temple and decimated the city.  Jesus knew that he was on a journey to Jerusalem that was likely to crush him under the heel of Rome, too.  And we know that life brings no promises of safety and security—we are fragile creatures living in an unpredictable world.  Bad things happen, and we are not always to blame.  Jesus said the people who died from those random acts were not worse offenders than the rest of us.  Bad things happen.

    Then Jesus seems to take away with one hand what he has just given with the other:  “but unless you repent, you will all perish, just as they did.”  We thought it was a word of grace, but it has turned into a word of judgment.  His words come crashing down upon our ears—they create what one interpreter calls a moment of crisis.  Jesus confronts us, not with a full-blown emergency, but with a moment of truth in which we have to make a decision about life.[1]   We must repent—or we will perish.

    You are like a barren fig tree, he said, occupying precious soil, taking up nutrients that could nourish others, but still no figs after all this time.  Life is short.  Time is running out.  Jesus wasn’t much of a fire and brimstone preacher—he didn’t get riled up very much about hell.  But he had plenty to say about how to live this life.  Bad things may happen, but we must repent or we will be cut down in this life as surely as any hapless victim of an inexplicable tragedy.

    What a text.  No wonder San asked me to preach this Sunday.

    How our repentance may connect with the randomness of the universe may not ever be clear, and certainly not by the end of this sermon.  But I know that we resist the idea of repentance because it forces us to get honest about our own sinfulness.  Joanna Adams tells about serving on the General Assembly committee that drafted the Brief Statement of Faith, adopted by our denomination in 1991.  She says the line that gave them the most trouble was:  “We deserve God’s condemnation.”  We are the people who came up with the idea of total depravity, but we hated to have to say it again and again in a confession.  One person suggested, “Why not have that line read:  “Some people deserve God’s condemnation.”  Then there was the other suggestion.  “Why not let it read:  ‘We deserve to be evaluated by God.’?”[2]

    Jesus says God has “evaluated” us and we have not come out very well.  The owner of the vineyard comes to look this unproductive fig tree over and says, “Cut it down!”  N. T. Wright argues that the fig tree is Israel and Jesus is warning his fellow Jews against rising nationalism and the ensuing violence that absolutely resulted in their destruction by Rome.[3]  But Jesus has brought heavy judgment throughout Luke 12, words that have lost no traction for our ears.  “Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered;”  “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”  “And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, do not keep worrying…sell your possessions and give alms….For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required, and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”  “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division.”

    We deserve God’s condemnation.  Cut it down, the owner says.

    But then the gardener speaks.  “Sir, leave it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”

    Someone asked Peter Gomes, the long time chaplain of Harvard University and preacher in Harvard’s Memorial Church, to say what the gospel is.  “You do not have to remain as you are,” he said.  “That is the good news.”

    “Sir, give it a little more time,” the gardener said.  “Let me see what I can do.”

     Garrison Keillor is reported to have said:  “Sitting in church does not make you a Christian anymore than sitting in a garage makes you a Chevrolet.”  To which I might add—anymore than holding a watering can makes you a gardener.  To put it another way, I have rarely met the houseplant that I could not kill.  I am the kind of person who forgets to water for days and then overcompensates, to the great drowning distress of the plant.  But there are real gardeners in my life, people who cherish the soil and lovingly tend and nurture living things.  I am married to such a person.  Isn’t it an amazing twist in this story—the owner commands that the fig tree should be cut down.  But the gardener begs for more time.  The gardener pleads on behalf of the fig tree.

    The gardener pleads because he believes that it is possible for this fig tree to be saved.  The gardener pleads because he is willing to do everything in his power to help the fig tree to be fruitful, to bring forth the gorgeous fruit it was created to bear.  I see that gardener as Christ, loving and willing us to have abundant lives.  I see that gardener in my mind’s eye in very personal ways.  In our Nashville kitchen, we had a bamboo plant which had been growing for a couple of years.  We had cared for it fairly well, but it had gotten tall and leggy and there were some brown leaves hanging down.  Let’s throw this out, I suggested, forgetting where it had come from.  KC answered, with tears rolling down his cheeks:  “Not yet.  It is not time yet.  Let’s let it grow a little longer.”  I had forgotten that our daughter-in-law Kiki sent it to us before her ferocious battle with leukemia began.  I see KC’s grief now when I read this story. I see his loving kindness in the gardener who begged for more time for the fig tree.

     We are here.  We are breathing.  We have today.  Despite the fragility of our existence in a violent and chaotic world, we are here.  We have the gift of life.  But many of us have not lived fruitful lives.  Jesus calls us to repent, not because of judgment or hell, but because we have not found the purpose, the meaning, for our lives.  We live for ourselves alone. Or we go through the motions of living each day, but we are not present in the moment.  We bear no fruit, we do not experience the holiness or the beauty or the mystery or the love that is present in this chaotic and frightening world.  Some of us have allowed addictions to leach out the passion and purpose of our lives; some of us have honored neither our bodies nor our spirits as the dwelling place of God and the mirror of God’s image in us.  Maybe as theologian Douglas John Hall says, “when we are deprived of meaningful work, meaningful relationships, meaningful goals—when we cannot find a purpose big enough for our capabilities—we become destructive.[4]  Perhaps we distance ourselves from our feelings or from other people.  We no longer believe that new growth is possible.

    But the gardener knows there is still time.  There is a full measure of hope.  The good news is:  we do not have to remain as we are.  Maybe we can repent—maybe we can understand the breadth and depth, the purpose and meaning of life and be fruitful.

     We cannot do this by ourselves.  The fig tree could not do it without the gardener and you and I cannot do it without each other in this church.  Barbara Brown Taylor says that:

            …the church exists so that God has a community in which to save people from

            meaninglessness, by reminding them who they are and what they are for….The      church exists so that people have a place where they may repent of their fear,

            their hardness of heart, their isolation and loss of vision, and where—having

            repented—they may be restored to fullness of life.[5]

     I have never been in a congregation more welcoming, more passionate about reaching out to others, more intentional about fostering community, more fruitful than this congregation.  As I see what you do at University Presbyterian Church each week to foster new life, I can only conclude that you have heard Christ’s call to pick up your spade and mulch and follow him.  You have been gardeners even in my former congregation, before I ever knew you and before I ever knew there was any reason on earth to bring me to Austin, TX.  I was a new church development pastor and helped raise enough money for a first small building free of a mortgage.  In this new building, we needed chancel furniture.  I learned about your lovely furniture here and contacted the builder.  Now there is a font, a table, and a pulpit that were built by the same builder who created your lovely woodwork.  In Nashville, TN some of the fruits of your love of God through worship are fostering new life in a new congregation.  You are there as that wonderful congregation baptizes its babies and hears the Word proclaimed and invites everyone to Christ’s table.  It is nothing short of miraculous that I am here now with you and away from them. 

    It is a random world we live in, but that does not mean that our days cannot be filled with meaning, with purpose, with the high calling of gardening with Christ.  Maybe e.e. cummings parsed it right:  “there is great advantage in being alive (instead of undying.” [6] Maybe that is the repentance God has been hoping for all along.