Sermon – Bear Fruit or Else . . . Rev. Sandy Lacey March 23, 2025
Talk about your difficult questions! In the midst of Jesus’ conversation with the religious leaders about judgment, they say something like, “speaking of judgment, what do you think about those worshippers who were killed in the Temple while they were making a sacrifice to God?” Their inference is something like, “wow, they must have really ticked God off, look what happened to them!” Were they hoping to get a certain response from him? Were they hoping to catch him saying something anti-Rome that might land him in jail? Or were they wanting Jesus’ confirmation that the people slain somehow deserved it? Or maybe the people were simply asking the “why” question to Jesus: “Why did this happen?” or “why would a loving God allow this to happen?” When something bad happens, most of us start looking for a reason. We feel we must explain it in some way so that maybe we can avoid it happening to us. We search and search for a logical reason because the alternative would mean our carefully constructed lives are out of our control. (Or worse, maybe it would mean there is no grand plan and no God after all.) We cannot have that. We like the world to be ordered, predictable, and understandable. We cannot imagine the scenario that anything could happen to anyone of us at any time. It is so much easier and better on us, we think, if we can find a reason why things happen: Susan died of cancer because she smoked a lot, or Jane was brutalized because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or Frieda was wearing something that provoked him. Predictable patterns take some of the guesswork and fear out of tragedies. Tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes that devastate entire communities, however, are harder to explain. Some have given their best effort at finding reasons even for them, though. I remember that when Haiti was devastated by a powerful earthquake in 2010, a particular religious leader, Pat Robertson, claimed the devastation was in response to Haiti’s pact with the devil because of their indigenous voodoo practices, or his explanation for the hurricane hitting Homestead was because of homosexuality in our culture. In other words, the people brought it upon themselves, and God was punishing them for it. And there have been many other times that it was easier to blame the victims than reconsider our understanding of who God is and how God works in the world. The truth is that things do not always make sense and there are rarely easy answers to hard questions about why there is suffering in the world. Why anyone ever thinks it is okay to blame the victim is beyond me. I am sure there are those in our world today, however, who blame the victims in any war-torn country (like Ukraine, for example.) Spinning false narratives makes it easy to blame the victims and hide behind the smoke screen of the problems in our world. It is preposterous to blame the Galilean victims in the Temple for being slain, Jesus said. You may remember that it was a common understanding in the Hebrew culture that bad things happen to bad people (as if they somehow deserve it.) What was reported to Jesus was horrific – Pilate had his soldiers enter the worship space of the Temple and kill the worshippers so that their blood and the blood of the animals they brought to sacrifice to God were mingled together. Jesus refuted the cultural suspicion that they were somehow culpable for their own deaths because of their sin. And then he tells the crowd to repent or run the risk of the same kind of treatment. What? Well, that is a head scratcher. . . He shifts the whole conversation from those “others” and what happened to them . . . to the people listening and what they are going to do and how they are going to live. It is as if he is saying, “quit worrying about what they did and what happened to them; instead, worry about yourself and repent.” (The NT way of understanding the word, “repentance” meant to change your way of thinking so that it results in a different way of living. To repent is to literally “turn yourself around.”)
Jesus does not answer the why question at all. He does not tell his listeners why those bad things happened. He just clarifies that their sin was no greater than anyone else’s sin. There is no explanation given for this horrible act and the tower’s collapse on innocent, unsuspecting passersby. This kind of unexpected calamity could happen to anyone in the blink of an eye. Like the book of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures, the why question is not answered at all, as if it ever could be thoroughly and completely answered. Lynn Japinga says the why question is never fully answered by God. “Some tragedies are random. Others could be prevented. In the ways that we systemically contribute to the brokenness and pain of the world, we probably do deserve judgment.”[1] Regarding the anxious look for blame, Rodney Clapp says this, “we live in a day – not so unlike that of the atrocity-rumoring Galileans – when everyone wants to blame everyone else for the ills of the world. Christians blame Muslims and Muslims blame Christians. Fundamentalists blame Hollywood, the ACLU, homosexuals,” (and these days the CDC and just about anyone who works for the Federal government.) “Liberals blame fundamentalists, militarists, pharmaceutical companies,” (and white supremacists. And I would add that Republicans blame Democrats and Democrats blame Republicans for our country’s woes.) “Amid the din, Jesus says something that sounds odd: “Hold on. Think about a homely old fig tree – one that has not borne fruit for a long time.”[2] In his telling a story about a fig tree that does not bear fruit, Jesus cleverly shifts the focus from questions of “what happened?, why did it happen?, and who is to blame?” to “what are you doing these days and are you bearing fruit?” He turns their judgment question back on them. Talk about a momentum killer, just let Jesus interrupt your big point with a phrase like, “repent, or something similar will happen to you.” Whatever point you were hoping to make, whatever agenda you had, gets upended as Jesus changes the focus from everyone else . . . to you and what you are doing right now. He does not answer the why question, does not fall into whatever political trap being set for him; but instead, shifts the spotlight to the ones who are asking the question. He was good at that. It is as if he said, “You are not going to distract me from the message I came to bring – which is a message of the need for repentance so that you might bear fruit.” In this momentum shift, Jesus tells a story about a landowner, a gardener, and a fig tree. The fig tree is not bearing fruit as it should and the landowner wants it cut down, but the gardener has hope that it can once again produce fruit. So, he bargains with the landowner to let him tend it for another year to see if it will produce fruit before cutting it down. By implication, the people Jesus is telling the story to represent the non-fruit-bearing fig tree and he is the gardener trying to fertilize them and help them to bear fruit before God cuts them down. Change your focus and bear fruit. Are you just taking up space in the good soil? Don’t be so concerned about the atrocities and political maneuverings that are going on around you that you forget the real purpose you are here: to bear fruit. I wonder what he would say to Rockledge Presbyterian Church today? There are all kinds of distractions that might prevent us from doing what we know we should be doing. Sure, there are crazy things going on and a great deal of political maneuverings around us. But in the middle of all our righteous indignation, it is as if Jesus is dragging a scruffy tree in here to remind us to refocus our energy and lives, so that we do not miss the point. In this season of Lent, we are asked to examine ourselves, to reorient ourselves to the One who has been slowly cultivating us toward bearing fruit, the kind of fruit in which we actively demonstrate love for God and love for our neighbors. That is the good news of the Gospel. The challenging news is that our time for repentance and reorientation is limited. Things changed radically for those who were in the Temple the day the Romans came in with their swords, and things changed radically the day the tower collapsed. They had no time to repent; so, take a lesson, now is the time for repentance and reorientation. Given that there are no clear answers to the problem of suffering in our world, Japinga relates, perhaps the best we can do is to “stop talking. Stop trying to answer or explain. Instead, listen. Be quiet. Be present. Sit in silence. Listen. Bring casseroles. Care for the children. Scrub out the mud and the mold. Help rebuild. Weep. Embrace. Listen.”[3] And then there is this. Luke reminds us, “are you merely taking up space?” Are you wasting the good soil that Jesus is cultivating? Or are you turning your heart and life around so that you may live out your purpose and calling? What are the distractions that are keeping us from bearing fruit? As we consider our distractions, the Prophet Isaiah’s words haunt us individually and corporately, “why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? . . . Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let us return to the Lord so that He may have mercy on us.” Repent: turn around, change your direction, your heart, and your life. After all, you were made to bear fruit. And the interesting thing is we never really know what tomorrow will bring. AMEN.
[1] Lynn Japinga, “Theological Perspective” in Feasting on the Gospels: Luke, Volume 2. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.) p. 30. 2 Rodney Clapp, “Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Volume 2. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.) P. 96. 3 Japinga, ibid.
Talk about your difficult questions! In the midst of Jesus’ conversation with the religious leaders about judgment, they say something like, “speaking of judgment, what do you think about those worshippers who were killed in the Temple while they were making a sacrifice to God?” Their inference is something like, “wow, they must have really ticked God off, look what happened to them!” Were they hoping to get a certain response from him? Were they hoping to catch him saying something anti-Rome that might land him in jail? Or were they wanting Jesus’ confirmation that the people slain somehow deserved it? Or maybe the people were simply asking the “why” question to Jesus: “Why did this happen?” or “why would a loving God allow this to happen?” When something bad happens, most of us start looking for a reason. We feel we must explain it in some way so that maybe we can avoid it happening to us. We search and search for a logical reason because the alternative would mean our carefully constructed lives are out of our control. (Or worse, maybe it would mean there is no grand plan and no God after all.) We cannot have that. We like the world to be ordered, predictable, and understandable. We cannot imagine the scenario that anything could happen to anyone of us at any time. It is so much easier and better on us, we think, if we can find a reason why things happen: Susan died of cancer because she smoked a lot, or Jane was brutalized because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or Frieda was wearing something that provoked him. Predictable patterns take some of the guesswork and fear out of tragedies. Tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes that devastate entire communities, however, are harder to explain. Some have given their best effort at finding reasons even for them, though. I remember that when Haiti was devastated by a powerful earthquake in 2010, a particular religious leader, Pat Robertson, claimed the devastation was in response to Haiti’s pact with the devil because of their indigenous voodoo practices, or his explanation for the hurricane hitting Homestead was because of homosexuality in our culture. In other words, the people brought it upon themselves, and God was punishing them for it. And there have been many other times that it was easier to blame the victims than reconsider our understanding of who God is and how God works in the world. The truth is that things do not always make sense and there are rarely easy answers to hard questions about why there is suffering in the world. Why anyone ever thinks it is okay to blame the victim is beyond me. I am sure there are those in our world today, however, who blame the victims in any war-torn country (like Ukraine, for example.) Spinning false narratives makes it easy to blame the victims and hide behind the smoke screen of the problems in our world. It is preposterous to blame the Galilean victims in the Temple for being slain, Jesus said. You may remember that it was a common understanding in the Hebrew culture that bad things happen to bad people (as if they somehow deserve it.) What was reported to Jesus was horrific – Pilate had his soldiers enter the worship space of the Temple and kill the worshippers so that their blood and the blood of the animals they brought to sacrifice to God were mingled together. Jesus refuted the cultural suspicion that they were somehow culpable for their own deaths because of their sin. And then he tells the crowd to repent or run the risk of the same kind of treatment. What? Well, that is a head scratcher. . . He shifts the whole conversation from those “others” and what happened to them . . . to the people listening and what they are going to do and how they are going to live. It is as if he is saying, “quit worrying about what they did and what happened to them; instead, worry about yourself and repent.” (The NT way of understanding the word, “repentance” meant to change your way of thinking so that it results in a different way of living. To repent is to literally “turn yourself around.”)
Jesus does not answer the why question at all. He does not tell his listeners why those bad things happened. He just clarifies that their sin was no greater than anyone else’s sin. There is no explanation given for this horrible act and the tower’s collapse on innocent, unsuspecting passersby. This kind of unexpected calamity could happen to anyone in the blink of an eye. Like the book of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures, the why question is not answered at all, as if it ever could be thoroughly and completely answered. Lynn Japinga says the why question is never fully answered by God. “Some tragedies are random. Others could be prevented. In the ways that we systemically contribute to the brokenness and pain of the world, we probably do deserve judgment.”[1] Regarding the anxious look for blame, Rodney Clapp says this, “we live in a day – not so unlike that of the atrocity-rumoring Galileans – when everyone wants to blame everyone else for the ills of the world. Christians blame Muslims and Muslims blame Christians. Fundamentalists blame Hollywood, the ACLU, homosexuals,” (and these days the CDC and just about anyone who works for the Federal government.) “Liberals blame fundamentalists, militarists, pharmaceutical companies,” (and white supremacists. And I would add that Republicans blame Democrats and Democrats blame Republicans for our country’s woes.) “Amid the din, Jesus says something that sounds odd: “Hold on. Think about a homely old fig tree – one that has not borne fruit for a long time.”[2] In his telling a story about a fig tree that does not bear fruit, Jesus cleverly shifts the focus from questions of “what happened?, why did it happen?, and who is to blame?” to “what are you doing these days and are you bearing fruit?” He turns their judgment question back on them. Talk about a momentum killer, just let Jesus interrupt your big point with a phrase like, “repent, or something similar will happen to you.” Whatever point you were hoping to make, whatever agenda you had, gets upended as Jesus changes the focus from everyone else . . . to you and what you are doing right now. He does not answer the why question, does not fall into whatever political trap being set for him; but instead, shifts the spotlight to the ones who are asking the question. He was good at that. It is as if he said, “You are not going to distract me from the message I came to bring – which is a message of the need for repentance so that you might bear fruit.” In this momentum shift, Jesus tells a story about a landowner, a gardener, and a fig tree. The fig tree is not bearing fruit as it should and the landowner wants it cut down, but the gardener has hope that it can once again produce fruit. So, he bargains with the landowner to let him tend it for another year to see if it will produce fruit before cutting it down. By implication, the people Jesus is telling the story to represent the non-fruit-bearing fig tree and he is the gardener trying to fertilize them and help them to bear fruit before God cuts them down. Change your focus and bear fruit. Are you just taking up space in the good soil? Don’t be so concerned about the atrocities and political maneuverings that are going on around you that you forget the real purpose you are here: to bear fruit. I wonder what he would say to Rockledge Presbyterian Church today? There are all kinds of distractions that might prevent us from doing what we know we should be doing. Sure, there are crazy things going on and a great deal of political maneuverings around us. But in the middle of all our righteous indignation, it is as if Jesus is dragging a scruffy tree in here to remind us to refocus our energy and lives, so that we do not miss the point. In this season of Lent, we are asked to examine ourselves, to reorient ourselves to the One who has been slowly cultivating us toward bearing fruit, the kind of fruit in which we actively demonstrate love for God and love for our neighbors. That is the good news of the Gospel. The challenging news is that our time for repentance and reorientation is limited. Things changed radically for those who were in the Temple the day the Romans came in with their swords, and things changed radically the day the tower collapsed. They had no time to repent; so, take a lesson, now is the time for repentance and reorientation. Given that there are no clear answers to the problem of suffering in our world, Japinga relates, perhaps the best we can do is to “stop talking. Stop trying to answer or explain. Instead, listen. Be quiet. Be present. Sit in silence. Listen. Bring casseroles. Care for the children. Scrub out the mud and the mold. Help rebuild. Weep. Embrace. Listen.”[3] And then there is this. Luke reminds us, “are you merely taking up space?” Are you wasting the good soil that Jesus is cultivating? Or are you turning your heart and life around so that you may live out your purpose and calling? What are the distractions that are keeping us from bearing fruit? As we consider our distractions, the Prophet Isaiah’s words haunt us individually and corporately, “why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? . . . Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let us return to the Lord so that He may have mercy on us.” Repent: turn around, change your direction, your heart, and your life. After all, you were made to bear fruit. And the interesting thing is we never really know what tomorrow will bring. AMEN.
[1] Lynn Japinga, “Theological Perspective” in Feasting on the Gospels: Luke, Volume 2. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.) p. 30. 2 Rodney Clapp, “Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Volume 2. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.) P. 96. 3 Japinga, ibid.
_____
[1] Lynn Japinga, “Theological Perspective” in Feasting on the Gospels: Luke, Volume 2. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.) p. 30. [2] Rodney Clapp, “Pastoral Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Volume 2. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.) P. 96. [3] Japinga, ibid.