A Green-Thumbed God: A Sermon for 3 Lent

The Rev’d Richard Gillespie Proctor

CtK Episcopal Church

3 Lent, Year C; 3.20.22

As we draw near to the mid-way point through our Lenten journey, we are given scripture lessons that invite us to wrestle with the age-old question about connection between sin and suffering. Beginning in ancient times, and continuing to the present day, many people have often attributed illness and calamity to punishment for one’s behavior. And on the other side, people have been wont to attribute good health and prosperity as reward to for their good behavior.

Well I have some good news and some bad news for us today. Since it is Lent, I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is that no matter how good we are – or how good we think we are – we will always fall short of being good enough to merit the love, mercy, and grace that God gives us. The good news is that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are all made worthy of God’s love, mercy, and grace.

The message that Jesus has for us in our Gospel lesson is this – “Get over yourselves, and quit trying to play like you are God. Quit trying to convince yourselves that you are in control of everyone’s salvation” Or in Jesus’ own words, “Unless you repent, you too will perish.”

Jesus says this to the people who approached him with the news of some Galileans who had been executed by Pilate’s regime. Jesus goes on to refer to the 18 Jews who had died the tower of Siloam collapsed. At that time, a number of Jews attributed the death of those 18 to God’s punishment – since they were working for the Roman government to build the tower, which was being paid for by money from the Temple.

Whether it was these 18 people or the others who were executed by Pilate’s regime, the people in this passage are coming to Jesus looking for answers to the tragic deaths of their brethren. And as is oftentimes the case with anxious people in anxious systems, they start with blame. Whose fault is it? Who can we blame? What behavior can we blame? How can we make sense of this tragedy in a simple, cause-and-effect way?

We saw this sort of behavior early on with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when the disease was blamed on the behavior of those who contracted it. We saw it with Hurricane Katrina, where we heard things like, “Sin city had it coming sooner or later.” More recently, we saw it with the covid-19 pandemic, when folks blamed it on China.

Whether it is those who were looking for answers in their conversation with Jesus, or those of us today trying to make sense of tragedies that befall us, Jesus’ response is for us to quit pointing fingers, quit blaming others, and for all of us to take a long, hard look at ourselves. Regarding the tragedy at the Tower of Siloam, Jesus’ response was, “do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."

We are given this passage during the season of Lent because this is the time of year when we are invited to examine ourselves, and to repent – to turn back around towards God. And this is hard work. It can make us uncomfortable. Not many people look forward to spending 40 days prayerfully examining where they might have gone astray; or what idols have crept into our lives; or how we have may neglected to love God and our neighbor.

But as I have said before, the gift of this season is that we don’t spend this time of self-examination in a vacuum or silo. We do it together in our church community. There is comfort in the fact that the person to my right and the person to my left aren’t worried about me and the ways I might have fallen short because they are too busy examining themselves.

But please, don’t fall into the trap of believing that our repenting – our turning around back to God – is an inoculation or vaccination against illness, tragedy, or death. Jesus makes this clear in our lesson today. Jim Rice reminds us that “the tragedy that befell the workers at the Tower of Siloam was in no way related to their moral state. And despite the temptation to believe otherwise, the same is true for us today.”

Today’s Gospel lesson ends with Jesus framing the call to repentance with hope. Jesus tells a quick parable about a man and his fig tree. He is annoyed that after three years, the tree hasn’t produced any fruit. So, he asks his gardener to cut it down. But the gardener convinces the man to give the tree one more year. The gardener knows that tree much better than the man who owns it. The gardener sees it and waters it every day. And though it hasn’t yet born any fruit, he believes that it will. He’s not ready to give up.

When I think of this parable, it is difficult for me to not equate the landowner – the person who owns the vineyard – with God. After all, the vineyard owner is the boss; he is the one to whom the gardener reports. So why wouldn’t we think of God as the landowner - the “boss” - in this story? But in my sanctified imagination, it is the gardener in this parable who most resembles God to me. The gardener knows the fig tree; he waters and fertilizes it; he trims it; he knows every branch. And day in and day out he sees that it is not bearing fruit as it should. But rather than being impatient and irritated with it like the vineyard owner is, he has an abiding hope in this fig tree. He asks the landowner for more time, because he believes that the fig tree, with more time to be nurtured with water and fertilizer, will finally grow into the tree that it was created to be. The reason he has more patience for the tree than the landowner is that he has a relationship with it. He sees it and tends to it every day. Dare I say that he loves the tree, and hopes against all evidence that it will in due time flourish.

This gardener is how I imagine God. God knows us because God created us in God’s very own image. And God – against all evidence to the contrary – hopes and believes that we too will one day bear fruit in the way that God intends us to do. But we need more time. We need the season of Lent to reorient ourselves back towards God. We need to be watered and fertilized with God’s Word and sacraments.

The disciplines we take on during the season of Lent – prayer, fasting, spiritual reading, almsgiving, and repentance – aren’t for their own sake. Their purpose isn’t to make us so pious that God will love us more. God already loves us more! And they certainly won’t earn us salvation. And as I mentioned earlier, they won’t protect us from illness, disease, or disaster. So, what is the purpose of repentance? I think one purpose is so that our relationships with God and our neighbors will begin to bear fruit. As such, we are living into our baptismal calling to be co-creators…participants with God in ushering in God’s reign here on earth. Such a life is one that bears fruit – that embodies and shares the Good News that, as our psalmist says today, “God’s loving-kindness is better than life itself.”