One More Year

I preached this sermon at Dulin United Methodist Church today. The texts for the sermon came from the Revised Common Lectionary, and can be found here.

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"One More Year"
March 24, 2019
The Third Sunday in Lent

Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. 

I was prepared to preach a very different sermon this morning.

I had just gotten back from General Conference when I was looking to see what the lectionary passages were for today, and I don’t know about you, but I was in a mood, and there was this beautiful passage from Luke staring right at me that told a story of a landowner giving a barren fig tree one last chance to bear fruit. The gardener was given one more year to dig around the tree and cultivate it and fertilize it, and let me just tell you, that imagery was really calling out to me.

For forty-seven years, we have cultivated the fig tree that is the UMC, and for forty-seven years, it failed to produce fruits of justice and repentance for our LGBTQ siblings. We were even given the chance to heap…manure onto the roots of the tree in the form of a Commission on a Way Forward and a Special Called Session of the General Conference that cost us an estimated four-and-a-half million dollars. And what did we get?

None of the plans that were put forth were really repentant.

None of the plans that were put forth gave real justice to LGBTQ United Methodists.

We did our waiting, and the fig tree still failed to bear the necessary fruits to save itself.

We did our waiting, and so the time for the axe to fall had come.

I was prepared to preach a very different sermon this morning. A sermon that was going to be full of the full force of the prophetic witness that called out the sins of our denomination. The kind of sermon that would get passed around on social media like wildfire. The kind of sermon that would get me a book deal and a national speaking tour.

It was going to be a very different sermon.

And then right as I was going to bed the Thursday before last, I was reminded that there’s a world that exists beyond the United Methodist Denomination.

An AP news alert came across my phone saying that a white nationalist had shot up Christchurch Mosque in New Zealand during Friday Jummah prayers.

As the reports came in and the number of casualties climbed—fifty worshippers dead and fifty more who were injured—I was suddenly drawn to the first part of the story from Luke.

Jesus had spent the past fifty-nine verses preaching and teaching about the impending arrival of the reign of God when all of a sudden, someone brought to his attention Pilate’s slaughter of Galileans who were worshipping at the temple; their blood mingling with that of their sacrifices.

Truth be told, we don’t really know why it was brought up at that moment. The text certainly doesn’t give us any clues anyways. Maybe it was breaking news and was offered up as a point of information—hey, this thing just happened and you should probably know about it. Or maybe it was offered up as a foil to Jesus’ message—sure, sure I hear what you’re saying Jesus, but what about those Galileans that Pilate killed? Where do they fit into all of this?

One of the hardest parts of living through or witnessing a traumatic event is the recovery. It’s the picking up of the pieces. It’s the long, dark sleepless nights praying, perhaps in vain, for the return of some semblance of normalcy. It’s the searching for answers that will make sense of it all.

And to Jesus’ credit, he doesn’t offer up any answers. Always be wary of those who, in the wake of tragedy, show up with easy answers or empty platitudes. You know the ones. Everything happens for a reason. God doesn’t give you more than you can handle. This is just a test. This is all a part of God’s plan.

What humans meant for evil God meant for good.

No. Put that scripture back where it came from, or so help me.

Jesus, no matter how much we might want him to, doesn’t take this opportunity to give us a drawn-out treatise on theodicy, or an attempt to make sense of the nature of God’s justice in light of the reality of suffering that exists in our world. On the contrary, he quickly dismisses one of the prevailing understandings of theodicy of that day: the idea that bad things only happen to those who do bad things.

It’s really easy to fall in to that trap. It’s really easy to blame the victims. Why didn’t he wear a seatbelt? She had a lot to drink and did you see what she was wearing? Well, he did smoke a pack a day for years. Their “lifestyle” brought God’s judgment on them. If only there had been a good guy with a gun. 

Jesus takes all of those questions—those questions that, at their core, betray a belief that the tragedy wouldn’t have occurred if only the victims lived their lives according to my superior sense of morality—and flips them on their head.

Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?

Of course not, Jesus says. You’re not any better than they were.

Of course not, Jesus says, and that’s the end of his explanation. Sometimes, bad things just happen, and deep down, deep in the core of our very beings, we know that there is no answer that can ever erase the pain completely; no answer that will ever make complete sense of it all.

Perhaps, some of us are there this morning.

One of the sad realities of life is that we can never know what a day will bring.

But the good news is that’s not the end of the story. While it might have been the end of Jesus’ explanation, it’s not the end of Jesus’ response. Jesus offers us another way.

The Gospel of Luke frames the life and ministry of Jesus as being centered on liberation. Our liberation from our ways and our thoughts to freedom found only through God’s perfect love for us and our love for our each other. In his very first public act in this Gospel, Jesus proclaims The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor and to proclaim freedom for the prisoners. Jesus is here to show us that the kingdom of God is at hand, but its arrival is predicated on the liberation of our bondage, and in our lesson this morning, we learn that if we want to break those chains, repentance is the first order of business. 

Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

Ok, I can see your faces, and in my defense, I said this was good news, not easy news.

We don’t really like to talk about repentance; it makes us feel bad. Perhaps that’s because often times, we hear about repentance the loudest from street so-called preachers—you know the ones I’m talking about; the ones with the bull-horns and the tracts. Or maybe it’s coming from the mouth of someone like Jerry Falwell, Jr., or Pat Robertson. Repent or perish! It just fits so neatly and cleanly on a sign. 

But no matter how much all those folks might protest otherwise, they are missing the point of the gospel. We are not to wield the gospel as a weapon to strike terror into the hearts of those who pass us by. Fear has no place in evangelism. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. The common understanding of repentance won’t make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. The common understanding of repentance won’t bring about the reign of God. The common understanding of repentance is not what Jesus is calling us to do.

We often equate repentance, as one of my seminary professors used to say, with moral guilt. That feeling in the pit of your stomach that says I did something bad, so therefore I must be a bad person. But that’s not the case at all. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We’re all in this mess together. Repentance isn’t about self-loathing. We are not called to linger on our past mistakes so that we feel bad about ourselves, but rather to tirelessly work on correcting them for generations to come. Repentance requires a complete and total transformation and reorientation of our outlook on life. It’s forsaking our ways, for God’s way and it’s forsaking our thoughts for God’s thoughts. It’s looking out not for our own interests, but rather for the interests of others.

And so we’re left asking ourselves some hard questions.

In what ways have we fallen short? In what ways have we, as individuals or collectively as a church, national, or even global community messed up and inflicted harm on someone else?

It’s our obligation, our gospel-mandate, to not only name our shortcomings, but also to then do something about them to ease the pain and stop the bleeding, not because we feel guilty, but because it’s the right thing to do. Our individual and collective liberation depends on it.

If that sounds like a daunting amount of work, you’re absolutely right. It is. It takes intentional cultivation and care and digging and fertilizing. But the good news is that we know how the story ends. As we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of our Lenten journey, we know that Easter is coming. We know that the hard work repentance requires of us is not done in vain. And we don’t have to garden alone. Sometimes, we’ll mess up. That’s bound to happen. And sometimes, bad things will happen. That’s also bound to happen. And when they do, we can rest confident in the knowledge that we are surrounded by a community of gardeners all trying to care for this supposedly barren fig tree together, and we can use our collective strength to get back up and carry on the work for just a little bit longer; because, we know the fruits of our labor are ready to burst forth.