Isaiah 55:^1-9
Psalm 63:^1-8
1 Cor. 1:^1-13
Luke 13: ^1-9

The readings from Luke seem somewhat of a misfit. The readings in Hebrew Scripture clearly talking about God’s abundance and our response of thirsting for this abundance, “like a dry, worn, waterless land. ” Paul clearly warns us to repent.  Then we seem to stumble into half a conversation between Jesus and fellow Jewish worshipers.  We are not sure what they are talking about.  It doesn’t seem to make sense.  So much so that Jim called me wondering if perhaps there was a mistake. Perhaps this was the wrong passage from Luke.

But no, there was no mistake in the passage that we read.  The mistake rests in the focus of the people in the scripture. They are out of focus, and their confusion pulls us off focus.   Somehow, the people in Jesus’ time had interpreted disaster as a punishment for sin. Just maybe the Galileans whom Pilot had killed and mingled their blood with the blood of the Hebrew sacrifice deserved to be killed. Perhaps the 18 Galileans who had accidentally been killed when a tower fell on them deserved to die.

We would like to think that this connection between disaster and sin is a primitive notion that we have outgrown.  But really, it is little more that what we customarily refer to today as “blaming the victim.”  And if we are at all discerning, we know that this happens more often than we care to admit.  Jesus, for his part, doesn’t dispute or affirm the connection between sin and disaster.  Instead, he declares that those who died were no more sinful than other Galileans or other Jerusalemites.  He then warns, “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”  These are not comforting words.  They are not words we really want to hear ? but perhaps they have a ring of truth.   Did Jesus mean that if they didn’t repent, towers would fall on their heads?  I don’t think so. I think he meant something a little deeper.
 

On the one hand, we thank God for the abundance in our lives, and then on the other hand we minimalise God’s abundance by taking it for granted, or giving ourselves the credit.  We lose our focus, and instead end up focusing on what is negative.   Why?  Do we become complacent about the goodness that has been given to us, or assume that it is for us alone?  Do we forget to look at the sin in our own lives, or fail to remember our thankfulness for moments of God’s compassion in our own lives?   Perhaps we are so used to holding on to grudges and anger, or disappointment, that it seems only natural for these to be the focus of our attention.  Perhaps, we never really allow for new grace to bubble up.

The focus of our attention can indeed close our hearts and minds to how God is working in our lives and in this world to bring about new beginnings and new life.

Children have the wonderful capacity to be honest about their feelings.  I came across a beautiful story on repentance by Kathleen Norris this past week.  At one point, while being an artist in residence at a school, she spoke to the children about the passions of the psalms, and then she asked them to write poems about their own lives.

 “Once a little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.”   He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him: his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town.  The poem concludes:  “then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.”’

“My messy house “ says it all.  With more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human.  If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?”

Author Graham Greene wrote, “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”

The appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.  And so here, this morning, we have in front of us these symbols of repentance, abundance and forgiveness.  The withered tree, the cross, the baptismal font and the communion table.  Jesus invites us to repentance; to live lives of repentance.  He teaches us that repentance needs to be an ongoing attitude toward life, rather than an occasional act.

If any room in your house is messy with gossip, lack of forgiveness, anger, bitterness, nagging, selfishness, or regret, why not clean it up and make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?  To those of us who wonder whether our repentance is adequate, the role of the gardener in Luke’s gospel offers courage.  The tree must bear fruit, but it does not labour alone.  The gardener promises to tend it and to watch over it, reminding us that repentance and reformation do not occur apart from the watchful care of God.