3rd Sunday in Lent
March 23, 2025
Luke 13:1 – 9
In 2016 and 2017, I was part of a program called The Living School, which was begun by the Franciscan monk and Priest Fr. Richard Rohr around 2013. The Living School was intended to move lay people and faith community leaders to cultivate a life of what’s often called contemplative prayer, and to help others do the same. Students at the Living School were from all over the world. We were mostly Christian but some were from non-Christian traditions. Most were lay people; some of us were Pastors. But all of us shared an interest in prayer and spiritual practice. And all of us believed, as I still do, that prayer and the practice of outer and inner silence are not only central to Christian life, but may well be central to God’s work of redeeming the world.
At the end of this two-year curriculum, there was a meeting of all the students who were completing the program – so a few hundred of us. And anyone there was welcome to ask questions of the faculty, the teachers who had led us over the past two years. A young woman stood up. She was probably in her late 20s, early 30s. She said, “I love what I’ve learned here. But I notice that almost everyone is quite a bit older than I am. And I think part of the reason is that it’s very hard to fit the kind of spiritual practice and reading and silent prayer we do here into my life every day. I have to work. My husband works. Somehow, we have to balance housework and getting the bills paid and calling the plumber when a pipe breaks. I’m home at night and the baby is crying. My older girl needs help with her homework. And I think, ‘Someday I’d like to be a prayerful mystic. When I retire.’” She said, “How can I lead a contemplative life when I don’t have time to do anything but the most urgent and necessary things?”
I guess that moment in 2017 was kind of where I got the idea for this sermon series I’m preaching now.
We’re in the season of Lent, this forty-day period of preparation to celebrate the resurrection on Easter Sunday. Traditionally, Lent has been a time of deepened commitment to prayer and self-denial; it’s where we get this Christian practice of giving up things that might keep us from focusing deeply on God. But the world we live in does not help us do this. Like the young woman who asked the question, many of us are impossibly busy. And even for those who are not, the world is a distressing and imperfect place that refuses to conform to our plans or our convenience and offers any number of distractions, from political outrage to social media to streaming TV.
I’m calling this sermon series “in the flesh,” because I want to focus on how we might find God in our distracting and anxiety prone lives. I want to look at what it means to follow a God who lives with us, a God who is committed to this human life in our physical, material, exasperatingly imperfect and sometimes sad world that can feel like it’s purpose built to distract us from spiritual life.
The scripture passage we heard this morning comes from the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. It’s often pointed to as one of two places in the Gospels where Jesus rejects the idea that when bad things happen to us, God is punishing us for sin. You might not realize this, but even today, nearly two thousand years after the Gospels were written, that’s a surprisingly common notion.
Fairly often, people I don’t know will spontaneously stop by my office, or call me on the phone. They want to talk to a Pastor because they’ve had some terrible experience. Someone they love has died. They lost their job. They’re on the verge of losing their home. Their marriage is breaking up. They have a terminal illness. They’re about to have a risky surgery that could be their last hope. Whatever it is, in those moments, like I said, it’s oddly normal for people to ask if God is angry with them, if they’re being punished for some sin or wrongdoing.
When people ask me that question, I often point them to a couple of stories about Jesus. One is from the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus and his disciples see a man who was born blind. His disciples ask what at the time would have been an entirely reasonable theological question, because in first century Judaism it was commonly believed that physical disability was God’s punishment for sin. So the disciples ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus says, “neither this man nor his parents sinned.” It doesn’t work that way. And then he says, “He was born blind so God’s works might be revealed in him.” And then he heals the man’s blindness. Now, there’s a lot more to say about that story, but that’s a sermon for another day.
The second place this question comes up is in the passage we heard this morning from the 13th chapter of Luke.
A huge crowd is gathered around Jesus, and some of them tell him about a horrible thing that’s just happened: A group of Jewish people worshiping in the temple were slaughtered, cut down where they stood, by soldiers of the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate. When Jesus hears this, he says, “do you think this happened because they were worse sinners than everybody else? No!” Then he gives another example, where 18 people died because a stone tower collapsed on them. And again, he asks: “Do you think that happened to them because they were worse sinners than everybody else? No, I tell you.” He’s saying, that’s not how it works. That’s now how God works.
But then he says something that at first might be even harder to hear than the idea of God’s punishment. He says, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
I don’t think Jesus is saying that unless his listeners give up their sinful ways they’ll all be murdered or be victims of natural disasters. That would kind of contradict what he’s just said.
To understand what’s going on here, it’s helpful to know the Greek word that’s translated into English as “repent.” The word is “metanoeite,” and it comes from two separate Greek words. The first one is “meta.” It’s a word we still use today. “Meta” is the parent company of Facebook, for example. Or we might say “that joke is really meta,” which means it’s a joke but it’s also a joke about jokes. Or in academic circles you might hear the term metanarrative, which is a story about the kind of stories our culture has that help us understand the world. In Greek, meta can mean above or beyond, or changed.
The second word is “noia,” which can mean knowledge or thought or perception. So “meta/noia” is translated “repent.” And that’s fine, except that in our culture the word “repentance” often carries connotations of shame or guilt. Metanoia, or Metanoiete, is actually more like “changed perception” or “rethinking.” When we “repent,” we awaken. We see the world differently. We act differently.
I don’t think Jesus is telling his audience that God will do terrible things to them if they don’t change. I think it’s more like, “tragedies happen. People die. It’s sad and hard. But God’s not punishing you when those things happen.” But at the same time, Jesus is saying, “unless you rethink your life, change your perception, nothing will change. God will be right in front of you and you won’t know. And when you do die, you’ll go just like the people in the temple, just like the people who died in the tower collapse: unconscious, unaware, your consciousness and understanding of the world still mired in your old views.”
And then Jesus tells this weird little parable. It feels almost random, like it’s unrelated to what he just said. He says, a landowner has a fig tree. For three years, he returns to the tree looking for figs, but nothing happens. Finally, he tells the gardener to cut it down. The gardener asks him to be patient for one more year. If it doesn’t bear fruit then, fine, he says: we’ll cut it down.
I’ve sometimes heard this parable interpreted in a very straightforward, simplistic way. In this way of understanding it, we’re like the fig tree. God is like the landowner who’s mad because we’re not bearing fruit. Jesus is the gardener who will help us bear fruit; and we have to bear fruit or we’ll get cut down.
To me, that doesn’t really work. It seems to go against what he just said about God not punishing people for sin.
But like all parables, this one can be read in different ways. Instead of God being the landowner, what if God is the gardener? What if the landowner is our world, impatient for us to produce, to get busy, to stop wasting soil and time? God the gardener is trying to encouraging patience and the importance of caring for our spiritual life. I think that’s better – but it still doesn’t quite sit right with me.
I sometimes write my sermons in the library over at the Iliff School of Theology across the street. Sometimes when I’m over there I run into Cathie Kelsey, who of course works there: she’s the Dean of the Faculty and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. I saw Cathie there on Wednesday, and I was talking with her about this parable, how I hadn’t quite come to grips with it yet. Cathie said, “what if God is the fig tree? We’re all standing around, saying, ‘come on, God! Do something! If we don’t see some action, we’ll have to cut you off! We’re very busy people here! Don’t keep us waiting, God!’”
There I was, standing in the lobby at Iliff, mind blown.
What if the fig tree is its own little burning bush, and we don’t notice because our perception has not changed? We might perish just as those Galileans did: unaware of God’s presence and grace, unaware that anything out of the ordinary is going on. We just stand around yelling at the fig tree because it’s not doing what we want, or begging those more powerful than ourselves to have a little patience so they can get what they want. And the whole time, the tree just does what trees do: grows at its own pace, gives us fruit at its own pace. If we could slow down, we might see God at work.
At that gathering back in 2017, after the young woman had asked her question about whether a contemplative prayer life was even possible in her situation, one of the faculty, a man named James Finley, offered an answer. You’ve heard me quote Finley before; his work has influenced me a lot. I don’t remember all of what he said, but part of it was that contemplative prayer doesn’t have to be sitting silently, alone in a quiet room, lighting a candle, an open Bible on our lap. Contemplative prayer can take place in the moments in between, the little gaps in our busy schedule. Finley said, “perhaps your baby is the voice of God, crying out to be held and comforted.”
There I sat, mind blown.
And I thought, “what if God is crying out to be held and comforted wherever there is suffering? Maybe we could all learn from that.”
I think Finley was inviting the young woman – and all of us who were there – into the kind of repentance that Jesus was talking about. Changed perception, renewed ways of knowing the world that recognize God in the crying child as much as in the sunrise, or the quiet candlelit prayer time. That kind of renewed understanding has the power to create profound change, if we just keep at our work and cultivate the patience to let God bear fruit in God’s good time.