2022 03 20 Sermon

Sermon for March 20, 2022 Lent 3 C House of Prayer Lutheran Church

Luke 13:1-9 Rev. Karl-John N. Stone

Several years ago, when my family lived in Pennsylvania, we went down to Baltimore to visit a friend of ours, Gary Ditmann, when he was being installed as Pastor at his new church. This was an inner city church, a struggling neighborhood. Pastor Gary told us a bit of the history before he got there. Some years earlier, when drugs, crime, and social problems had done much harm to the neighborhood, the church had erected a high chain link fence, topped with barbed wire, all around the property.

Let me ask you: does a fence with barbed-wire make you want to go inside? Does it make you think of a church, or a prison? The fence and barbed-wire cut the church away from the neighborhood it was supposed to serve. It sent a clear and unmistakable message of unwelcome, of keep out.

After much soul-searching, the church decided to take down the fences, take down the barbed-wire, and open themselves up to the community. That’s when the transformation began, and they took on a new name: Amazing Grace Lutheran Church. They also had land surrounding their building—and in a neighborhood of tightly packed row houses, any patch of green was a valuable commodity. So they opened up their land to benefit the community. They planted a garden so they could share vegetables with their neighbors. They built a meditation area for prayer or relaxation in the garden. They painted a mural on one of the exterior walls of the church building to radiate beauty, peace, and healing to whoever passed by. In the summer months they pitched a big tent on the lawn sometimes and worshiped outside. They turned their parish house into a food pantry. They welcomed all and included all whether they be black or white, rich or poor, straight or gay, longtime local or new to the neighborhood, those who were established in their faith or those who were seeking God anew.

Today, Amazing Grace is no longer a church that happens to be located in a particular Baltimore neighborhood on McElderry Street yet disconnected from the people who lived around them. Instead they became a church of and for their neighborhood. Were drugs and crime still a problem in the area? Yes. Was there occasional vandalism or break-ins? Yes. Did the church still have its struggles? Yes. But the transformation of their ministry also changed the message being communicated to the people who lived nearby: the neighborhood is more than its problems. The neighborhood was fundamentally its people, many of whom struggled, and every day many of whom had to overcome obstacles than many of us here rarely think about. And the people of the neighborhood still wanted things out of life that any one of us would want—good relationships, a feeling of being included, having a nice place to live, safety, health, a good job, enough food to eat, a way to support others and be supported in times of need.

So they focused on cultivating the things that brought life and joy and healing into their lives and into the neighborhood. That’s when the “soil” they had been tending began to blossom and grow fruit. That’s how Amazing Grace truly became a church, and not just a building with a cross on the steeple. And if they hadn’t cultivated those things when they did, today there would not be a church there, just an empty building on McElderry Street covering up the soil.

This is a story of true repentance. Because in the Bible, the word “repent” literally means two things: (1) to change your mind, and (2) to turn around. Amazing Grace in Baltimore changed their mind and turned around their whole ministry. And in today’s gospel Jesus called the disciples to change their minds and turn around when they had wanted to stop trying to bring the message of hope from God’s kingdom to people who were struggling.

The context in Luke 13 is that Jesus is going to leave his home base of Galilee, and lead a party of Galilean disciples all the way to Jerusalem. This is when, in this passage, someone runs up to Jesus with the latest news from Jerusalem, where the brutal Pontius Pilate kept control on behalf of the Roman Empire. The news was that some Galileans were worshiping in Jerusalem, making sacrifices at the Temple, and Pilate had them executed—meaning that their blood got mixed in with the blood of the sacrifices they were making. Gruesome. We don’t know why, exactly, Pilate did this. But we do know that Pilate did things like this fairly often, and the cruelty was the point. You can see why the disciples might need some encouragement to follow Jesus to a place like that. You can also see one reason why Jesus felt it was necessary to go to a place like that to begin with—the people down there really needed the message of hope from the Kingdom of God, to counter the message of fear from the Kingdom of Pilate.

Jesus was reminding them that Jerusalem—even though it did have problems—was more than its problems, and the suffering and hardship the people endured had roots in larger systemic issues. Were the Galileans whom Pilate executed sinners? Yes, but not worse sinners than anybody else. Maybe they had done something to tic Pilate off, but that doesn’t mean they deserved to die. Then Jesus points out that when the tower of Siloam toppled in Jerusalem, 18 people were killed when it fell on them. Were those 18 people sinners? Sure, just like we all are, but they were not worse than anyone else. They didn’t deserve to die.

Yes, we’re all sinners and fall short of the glory of God. Even as we try to live a Christian life as best we can, sometimes we miss the mark that God has laid out for us in the Ten Commandments, and sometimes we even actively rebel against those Commandments. But that doesn’t mean every bad thing that happens to us is our own fault; or that every bad event that occurs is the result of our personal sinfulness, or of divine punishment. Sometimes bad things happen because of bigger systemic injustice, and sometimes bad things happen because of shear randomness. In this passage, Jesus is not trying to condemn us or scold us (unless, that is, you are perpetrating violence or abuse, or running roughshod over other people, and causing damage to their lives and well-being—then Jesus is trying to condemn or scold us). Instead Jesus us calling us to cultivate true repentance, meaning “to change our minds, and turn around”.

That’s why he follows up with the parable of the fig tree—it’s a parable of repentance. A man planted a fig tree, so that he could enjoy the fruit and be fed and nourished. But for three years, the tree produced no figs. It sure would be easy to just say, “cut it down and start again”. But the gardener says, “No, no, no; wait! It might need to be cut down, but not so fast. There might be new life in this tree yet if we just try tending to it and caring for it in a different way for a while.” What we see on the surface doesn’t always give the whole picture about what’s going on inside. In this parable, Jesus calls us to change our minds by looking beyond what we see on the surface, and look deeper; then turn around by considering the long-term potential for bringing life, joy, healing, hope, community, renewal.

To do that kind of repentance, begin with cultivating the soil of your own heart with the grace given to you in Jesus and his death and resurrection. The fruit you can share with others will be limited if your own soil is hardened. Then, after cultivating the soil of your heart, move out from there to see what other soil needs to be cultivated, and ask, “who else, where else, is in need of the hope and healing of Jesus?” In this way we can look for how God’s kingdom is taking shape in the world, and then we can offer ourselves to be part of what God is doing. Amen.