Today's scripture reading is from Luke 13 verses 1-9. Now there were some present at that time who Jesus told about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, do you think that these Galileans were worse centers than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you no, but unless you repent you too will all perish.
Or those 18 who died when the tower and salom fell on them, do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you no, but unless you repent you too will all perish. Then he told this parable, a man had a fig tree growing and has vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, for three years now I've been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven't found any.
Cut it down. Why should it use up the soil? Sir, the man replied, leave it alone for one more year, and I'll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, then fine.
If not, then I'll cut it down. It's the word of God for the people of God. Thanks, Alan. When I was 12 years old, I had been begging my mother for a guitar for months.
And like Suzy Brooks did, she went and found the cheapest one she could, and then she put on a layaway. My mother was the master of layaway. And when I got it for my birthday, I got the guitar and then they also bought me, my parents bought me the book because back then before YouTube, if you want to learn how to play an instrument, you had to go get a book. And my mom bought me the book for the Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 1, the Blue One, and then for Tom Petty and Heartbreaker's Greatest Hits.
And I wore those books out that summer and when I had gotten done wearing the books out, I decided I was naturally a dude what happens when you kind of get to the point of not having more books than your guitar is I decided to 12 years old and I was going to be a singer-songwriter when I grew up. And so with all of the emotion I could muster up as a 12-year-old, I decided to start writing songs, like deep, important philosophical songs. The first one I wrote was about why bad things happen to good people, simple things. You know, things that a 12-year-old absolutely has experienced artistic authority over.
Not really. But the story today, it kind of talks about that idea of song. Jesus confronted with, hey, some bad things have happened to people. Why?
But also we see Jesus turn it and begin getting into the idea of consequence and what consequences are. Folks are doing one of those usual things they do in Scripture is they're trying to back Jesus into a corner to try to trip him up, to try to see what he says with things like let's get complicated, more complicated, and more complicated. And let's see what the guy does. But how he does this is different.
We've been talking for the last several weeks about why Jesus is different and how he does this in his conversations, in his miracles, and all these other things and how Jesus paints a picture of a different world. He doesn't just talk about it, but he does it and he speaks it into his existence, through his words, and through his actions, and through the way that he loves people. And he shows spiritual authority in these scenarios. And so Jesus in this section right here, the whole story starts off in chapter 12 and the scripture tells us that there are so many people, there are thousands of folks, they are trampling one another.
And think of that feeling when you're in a big, huge crowd and you feel like you have no control over where you're going, you're just kind of having to hold on. So in this moment, Jesus begins speaking directly to his disciples. It's an interesting thing we find at these times when there are thousands of folks around Jesus, he starts speaking just to that handful of people that he calls his closest followers. But the crowd keeps on interjecting and interrupting and making requests all throughout this.
And this passage today is the last time they do this in this scenario. They've been talking about judgment. They've been talking about uncomfortable things. Jesus finally decides, okay, you want to talk about uncomfortable things?
Let's talk about uncomfortable things. Let's talk about what judgment looks like, what happens when we ourselves try to be judges. And just like normal, in the middle of an uncomfortable conversation, someone interrupts in a way that's attempting to get the awkwardness off of them and to cast it on someone else. Hey, what about Pilate?
And those people that he did that thing to, that's what we find ourselves in this story. And the first story about Pilate mingling the blood of these Jews from Galilee as they are doing their sacrifices. It's like a crazy noteworthy story, right? This sounds like the kind of thing that would absolutely be written down in perpetuity.
I hate to tell you, but Pilate was so bad, this kind of thing was normal. Where Pilate made his reputation known as right when he became governor, the Roman governor of Judea, it was during the Passover and Pilate decides, hey, I'm going to march an entire legion into Jerusalem in the middle of the Passover sacrifices. And they're going to hang up their legion shields on the walls of the temple. And these shields were saying that Caesar is God.
So when we think about this Passover, we talked about Easter the whole thing a lot the last couple of weeks. We've also all seen gladiator, right? Remember that opening scene in the woods, the Germans, all the crazy stuff? Like a Roman legion is a killing machine.
He marches him in there, makes this huge declarative statement. So people get upset, right? So a bunch of Jews go across to the Mediterranean coast to a town called Caesarea where Pilate had his palace and they protest for five days outside of the palace. And Pilate finds out to take care of this problem.
Since a bunch of legionaries outside and amongst the Jews in a predetermined moment, they pull the swords out saying we're going to get violence, get this thing stopped. And then all of the Jews bear their necks from their tunics and invite the swords to become martyrs. This is Herod's nasty habit of just like my sister would call it, hatcheting, of just aggravating the Jews during their times of worship. So this story about Herod killing some folks as they were making their sacrifices, that's just like this is a normal thing.
This is a standard thing that they see. And Jesus also then countered this story with a recent story about when a tower fell in Jerusalem and killed some people when it fell. If these aren't big huge monumental things, what Jesus is doing is Jesus is talking about the news cycle of his time. These things that people are just obsessed with for these moments.
But he's also talking a little bit about just first century pop cultural belief about consequence. Because remember this is coming as part of Jesus's teaching on judgment and how judgment works in his time 2000 years ago, but also in our time now, we have a belief that if something bad happens to someone, they must have done something to deserve it, right? Isn't this how we operate? Karma begins to creep in.
If you don't believe me, that we have some really just bad ideas of human belief about consequences, just go look on Facebook anytime like an arrest report is made. See what people say. Oh, they got what's coming to them. They're not that bad.
They just made a bad mistake. They're in the wrong place. You want to see how humans deal with consequences? Just go look on those comment threads.
But we have this belief that we either choose to accept or we intentionally fight against is that we get what we deserve. Think about it. What was the last time we thought about that? We get what we deserve.
That person, it's never what we deserve. It's always what that person got what they deserved, right? Or when something good happens to someone and we feel like it hasn't happened to us, we begin thinking unfairly about that as well, right? We've got this belief that for thousands of years, I think as long as we're being humans on the earth, we've been dealing with this idea of comparison and good things and bad things and how this happens.
And we see Jesus coming in and hitting this at this level, but speaking about how does consequence work in God's kingdom? And he comes in with this critical statement and really the statement is the hinge point to the whole story. He's repeated two times inside this, but Jesus says this. Unless you repent, you too will all perish.
He says it after the person tells him the story about the Galileans and the sacrifice. He says it again after he brings up this tower falling. Unless you repent. You too will all perish.
Death is coming for all of us. So don't judge what's happened to others and reward yourself for bad things not happening to you too. You will die too one day unless you understand what repentance means. And Jesus does a pretty good job building this out with his parable.
Anybody else feel uncomfortable and kind of awkward when Allen was reading the parable? We can't read that parable. We're here that parable without feeling a little bit nervous. It doesn't leave too much of the imagination.
It doesn't. One commentator said that anyone who tries to get too allegorical with interpreting this parable is trying to hide something. We hear this. We know Jesus is speaking of.
And deep down in our hearts we all can find a way where this applies a little bit too much to it. But Jesus is telling the story and he's telling it as though he's saying you want to talk about consequences? Okay. Let's talk about consequences.
But Jesus is also saying that our fruitfulness matters. Jesus talked about being different here. If you're feeling like this, a little bit of a buzzkill this Sunday. We're at the bottom of the V right now.
Let's start making our way back up. We live in a world where we assume that bad things are going to happen to you if you do things wrong. Depending on how old you are, this might be a governing belief in your life. If something bad happens, this means that you are never going to recover from it.
We've all seen the meme from Tiger King. I'm never going to financially recover from this. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind, the writers talk about what they call the great untruth of fragility. What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
And they talk about how that affects our culture now and the way that we deal with bad things tells a story about how much we are capable of understanding goodness. If we're always assuming bad things and living in spaces of fear, what that really does is say, hey, this is how much I understand goodness or this is actually how little I understand goodness, especially if we're following Jesus. And then when we live in a system of retribution and fear, we really don't leave room for good things to be present in our life. We live in, we allow danger and we allow this necessity for protection to run things.
I learned this when I was running a middle school youth group in Central Kentucky. And I had the descendants of the Hatfield McCoy feud in the youth group. I tell you what, generational fear of an idea of retribution can last a long, long time. If we let fear and retribution live in our lives, we will stop.
We will start creating walls where goodness cannot come in. We'll also use these bad things as a broken system of judgment. We'll start saying, well, at least I'm not like them. I might have done this, but at least I'm not like them.
So we start creating this caste system of goodness and of consequences. And we then begin to get jealous and frustrated that people that we perceive to be above us or better than us or have more than us. We live in a space where bad things and judgment creates our world. So how many times we internalize that?
The basement side of living like this and living with this approach to consequences will always leave us broken. In some ways, the best we can ever hope to be for is realizing what happens when we get what we want, when we realize that what we want, it isn't enough. That's what living the basement side of this happens. And Jesus, oddly enough, begins to send us on an upward trajectory to a conversation with us when he starts talking about repentance.
Now, we don't talk about repentance that much, do we? We kind of think of repentance or repent as a bad word. When we heard Jesus say this two times, I mean, if you don't repent, you're going to die. We don't think of that being a transition point that leads to a better life.
But we think repentance is some church way of saying, I'm sorry, I'll take my punishment. But the idea in both John the Baptist and Jesus is preaching in the gospels, they say repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. What they're saying is repentance is an invitation into something new. We handle repentance vaguely.
We just think it's kind of like this thing that we kind of have to do or have to happen. The only thing that's going to come on the other side of it is we might feel a little bit sorry or have to go through some bad things to do it. What Jesus tells us to do is I'm going to take this misery on. But we often don't think about what repentance invites and what does repentance create in our life.
To repent literally just means to turn, to see one thing and to make an intentional decision saying, I'm not going to face this anymore. Instead, I'm going to face this instead. I'm going to choose to live with a different form of consequences as a result of my things. Instead of consequences being these bad things that happen to me, the consequences instead are going to be the fruit that I see in my life because of the change that Jesus has made in me.
To see repentance as this hinge point means to move from negative consequences to expecting fruit. Jesus talks about fruit a lot. The biggest way the New Testament talks about fruit is fruit is the result of when people change. Fruit is that outward example of the change, outward example of repentance.
Fruit is the consequence of the change. Jesus himself says in Luke 3a when he's in some argument with religious leaders, he said it's bare fruit in keeping with repentance. The two are linked in the mind of Jesus. Bare fruit in keeping with repentance.
The story that we read this morning about this fig tree and the awkwardness and the kind of inter-decisions we can see, we can make ourselves, what it is instead is an invitation to leave judgment aside and to take on repentance as a way to show change. It gives us a great personal reference point. One of the conversations I have with people a lot is when something big has happened, something bad has happened, there's this moment of introspection or thought or dealing with loss in some way and they're at a point of trauma. It's a real, real place but we come to this where this is the conversation I have so many times.
It's always, it's God really with me or if I screw this up so much he's not here anymore. Friends, I have that conversation more than I talk about barbecue almost. Because we think that we can lose this thing. We think that we can come up with something new that Jesus has never heard of and didn't qualify on the cross.
It's going to rule us out of the kingdom of God. We're worried about our standing point with God. We get to that tough spot, that spot of consequences and we don't think about what outward manifestation of the Holy Spirit and how Jesus has changed us looks like. It's the story of the fig tree.
What happens when we come to the spot we realize I've been living in space of negative consequence at some point in my life. I'm realizing that there's negative consequence thinking and that judging others or judging things or jealousy or just living in that dynamic at all. It doesn't produce anything. In fact, it's choking off what creates life both in my life and in the world around me.
We don't realize often how our own negativity produces a negative environment around us. We go to S&L, skip to Debbie Downer. Sometimes when things seem to be falling apart around us, we have to ask ourselves a question. How am I, it's amazing you look at people talking about the biological, the electrical impulses that can come off of our body when we're around other people.
How we literally can change the room dynamic when we're living in that space. I'm at home sheet this week, almost all of the questions and there's action and stuff are about us learning how to discern this in our life and to see where this has changed before already. But this is the thing, repentance is not a one-time thing. But repentance is a posture that we take where we continually offer ourselves up to Jesus.
Repentance is what happens when we expect to learn hard things about ourselves. Repentance is when we willfully make decisions to turn from one thing to the other. Repentance is us living. Jesus shows up more than the other teaching of Jesus in the gospel.
He said, no, for those who become lesser, they will become greater and those who become greater will become lesser. It's willful, self-emptying before God. It's the wrestling of prayer and of scripture. But with that prayer and that scripture and that time when we come with God, that is fertilizer, that is being poured over us.
And in our grasping and our seeking and our knocking, just that turning over and over and over all of this is tilling up the ground around us and allowing the Holy Spirit to get down into our roots. And when we do that, it makes what was dead living again. And our life in that area begins springing up and showing the evidence of the fruit of this work we have done with the Spirit and with God that where we once lived in fear, we live in hope and where we once showed no love, now we shall love where we once hated, we now accept where we once condemned, we now invite. And what Jesus asked us to do is say, this is what living this life looks like.
And if we're honest with ourselves, we realize that just when we've gotten the tough stuff done on one thing, now we are able to go and to take care of the next tough thing. That is what bearing fruit and keeping with repentance looks like. Our life lived in a way that causes and shows just the unintentional death of consequence. Or do we have a relationship because of the power of Jesus Christ that shows the consequence of eternal life and our lives and those around us?
Friends, how are we showing the fruit of repentance? Let's pray. Father, we have all come to places in our life. God of brokenness where brokenness has been done to us.
God, where we have done brokenness, God, we have come to points in time in our life of consequence where there's impossible for us to live life without that. And God consequences are scary. But Jesus, you come in and you break that system. And Lord, you don't break it by saying, okay, I'm going to stop you from doing bad things.
You don't come in and say, I'm going to make you do good things. But it says you come into our lives Lord and you invite us, God, to take true control over our lives and to have true freedom or freedom that comes to the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus, you invite us to take on the suffering of your son, Jesus. Where as Paul says, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection to share in the fellowship of the suffering to become like him and his death, even death on a crossword.
You invite us to take a space of honesty before you. But God, an honesty that reveals things, God, an honesty that invites us to make these changes, to make these turns. And Lord, so what I pray for this morning is this, if we are sitting in here and living in spaces of guilt and worry, God, I pray for your spirit to overcome. I just love to show the fruit of repentance, but God, the fruit of forgiveness over us.
God, to begin tearing away those walls that are stopping us from experiencing. God, if we're here this morning and we're prideful about things, God, I'm praying for you to begin tearing apart that pride. Well, because there's freedom in your son, Jesus. Where's the freedom where we don't need self-protection?
God, if we're here this morning, we need hope, we know we find that hope inside of you. God, I'm praying for us to understand what repentance means, God, and that repentance is not a wall that keeps us from you, but instead is a doorway you invite us through. And we're a doorway to see more. God, to experience more.
God, to be more. And we know that your son, Jesus, that opens that up for us, God. God, so let us be bearing fruit, bearing fruit because we are turning to you. And God, not just one time at all at the times.