Sin, Death and Repentance

Luke 13:1-9

March 14, 2004

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them 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.”

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

Byline: New York Newsday, February 11, 2004, Iskandariyah, Iraq.  Hundreds of Iraqi men aspiring to become police officers to earn a decent wage and help stabilize their country were lined up outside the Iskandariyah police station yesterday morning waiting for application forms.

When a truck packed with explosives erupted in their midst, it killed at least 50 and injured up to 100…The sand-colored police station, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, lay in ruins.

Suicide bombers had struck again.

"What did they do to deserve this?" asked Lt. Gen. Abdul Rahim Saleh, director of the police station, taking out a brown handkerchief to wipe his eyes. "What did their families do to deserve this?" [1]

What did they do to deserve this?  These words are usually spoken rhetorically.  Nobody expects a real answer when they whisper it under their breath or scream it out loud in response to a tragedy they might have witnessed. 

One time however, the question was sincere and the person asking it expected an answer.

Jesus was standing before huge crowds of people, someone shouted out to him from the crowd.  “Hey Jesus, did you hear what happened the other day in Jerusalem?  A few of your fellow Galileans were down there sacrificing to God and Herod punished them.  He killed them and their blood was mixed with the blood of the sacrifices they were making.  What did they do to deserve it?  Where they especially sinful folks that got what was coming to them?”

Perhaps because the person doing the asking understood Jesus’ status as God incarnate or maybe because he was a Galilean and the inquirer thought maybe Jesus had the inside scoop on his neighbors, this person asks this question looking for real answers.

But Jesus doesn’t answer him directly.  He doesn’t want to indulge this person’s rumor-seeking inquiring mind.  Perhaps he didn’t appreciate the assumption that this inquirer seems to hold that those who died must have been awful, sinful people to die so tragically at the hands of such a vicious person as Herod.

Jesus responds not by telling the inquirer some particularly juicy detail about the poor victims, but with a word of warning. 

“Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?  No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

In other words, don’t worry about those guy’s sin, worry about your own! 

He continues, “[What about] those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them 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.”

The first group died at the hands of the tyrant Herod, if you think they provoked or deserved the attack Herod laid on them think again, he says.  The second eighteen as well, had no more guilt than the first group, or than YOU, in insists.  Everybody must repent, everybody is sinful, everybody will someday die, some tragically, some mercifully and quietly after a long, joyful and fruitful life.  All must prepare for the eventuality.

The difference between the two folks who ask this question however is significant.  The Iraqi Lieutenant General, witnessing the carnage of the tragedy in front of his police station, asks the question, “What did they do to deserve this?” as a rhetorical way of saying, “They couldn’t have done anything to deserve this, nobody deserves what these guys got!”

The one who questions Jesus is probably more interested in the tawdry details of the poor sufferers lives, like a modern day reality show watcher, or a tabloid reader, or a church social hall gossiper.

Jesus’ answer to both of them is, all are sinners.  All who are born mortal and imperfect are subject to sin, are somehow flawed and in need of repentance.

What about us?

Do we worry about the sins of others?  Do we worry about our own sin?  Or do we not worry about sin at all?

I think there are at least three ways folks worry about sin.

The first way to worry is in the manner of the two inquirers we just considered, speculating on the sin or the lives or the lifestyle of others, wondering either out of shock or just plain inappropriate nosiness what someone else is doing or did or could have done.

A second way we think about sin is to worry about it as it relates.  Many churches throughout Christendom have counted on this worry to slap people into shape.

Many folks are scared witless by sin.  They obsess and worry and become alarmed by sin, or what they believe to be sin, and to hate it with a passion.  They live with the fear of sin as the primary motivation in their lives.  Its an attitude toward sin that had its glory days during the dark ages in medieval Europe, when it was thought that the Black Plague was a scourge on humanity that God sent to punish all people. This concept of sin has not enjoyed as much popularity among folks as it did in that era, but it is still around and many churches and ministers and preachers like to take advantage of it to control and manipulate their people.

I knew an evangelist who every time he spoke to groups, especially to young people he would tell them about a young man he knew named Tony.

“Tony,” he said, “wasn’t a Christian.”  This evangelist apparently had been trying to convince Tony for a long time that he should become a Christian.  Tony would listen to the evangelist again and again, he would meet with him and tell him how much he respected him but he would insist that he wasn’t ready to become a Christian yet.  Tony insisted that he was too young to become a Christian and that he was too busy partying and too busy doing exactly what he wanted in his life and he didn’t want to become a Christian, because all that crazy, carefree, fun would have to come to an end. 

Then the evangelist would say that one day Tony’s 23^rd birthday came.  Once more he and Tony spoke about Tony coming to Christ and becoming a Christian.  And once more Tony said, “I’m too young, I’ve got too much I still want to do before I become a Christian.”  This evangelist would always finish his story about Tony by saying that his 23^rd birthday was the last time the evangelist saw Tony alive.  He walked out of the party they were at together, got onto his motorbike and drove straight into a eighteen wheeler truck on the highway and died.

The evangelist would then go on to challenge and scare all the people present, especially the kids, with the false information that if they didn’t become a Christian soon, then like Tony, God would punish them by taking their lives and they would go to hell and not be with God.

Scared straight…  So many churches, so many Christians use sin to scare people.  Hell, damnation, God’s anger are pretty persuasive tools when used for getting people to do what you want to them to do.

Johnny was going home one day past his grandfather's house with a couple of his chums.  As they passed the house they spied the old gentleman out on his sun porch in his rocking chair with a big black book (the bible) on his lap reading rather intently.

"What's your grandfather doing", asked one of Johnny's friends.

"Oh - grandpa - he's cramming for the finals", Johnny replied. [2]

Cramming for the finals.  Omigosh, I better get it right or God is going to punish me.  Omigod, I better repent before I die or I’ll go to hell!

Another, and perhaps more prevalent attitude toward sin today is the sense that sin doesn’t matter.  “Who cares about sin?  Nobody can tell me what’s wrong or right, nobody can tell me I need to change anything or repent.”  The only things I can be truly criticized about is my job performance.  If I don’t make enough money for my company, then my boss can surely say, “You’re fired.” 

Or fashion, don’t all of us today want a half a dozen people to come into our lives and pick through our closets with a camera crew looking over our shoulder, making fun of our hair, our clothes and our lifestyle up to the point where they give us an extreme makeover and help us to look spectacular and beautiful and cool and well coifed?

Fashion police are socially acceptable today, and money police are actually called “bosses” or “supervisors” or “managers.”  But nobody, including me, wants sin police.  Sin, except for the Medieval fear mongers I mentioned a moment ago, is out of vogue.

Utter debilitating fear of sin and complete and total disregard for the true impact of sin.

But these are the two extremes we see today aren’t they? 

To those who disregard the power of sin in their own lives, like the inquiring minds who want to know the details of others’ sin but ignore their own, Jesus says, “I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish.”

To all those who are deathly afraid of what will happen if they don’t clean up their sin, Jesus tells the parable of the fig tree, within which the gardener, a symbol for Jesus himself, tells the Master, “Have patience, I’m working with this fig tree that has borne no fruit.  Don’t cut it down yet, I’m sure that in with a bit more work, you’ll be happy to see what its doing.”

Repentance.  It isn’t about fear of death, and exclusively about the wrath of God.  Its about new life, about bearing fruit, and allowing Jesus to nurture that fruit out of you, to cultivate in you a change of heart.

What is repentance?  Seventeenth-century Puritan theologian Thomas Watson argued that repentance was a spiritual medicine made up of six special ingredients. "If any one is left out, it loses its virtue."

1) Sight of sin, 2) Sorrow for sin, 3) Confession of sin, 4) Shame for sin, 5) Hatred for sin, 6) Turning from sin.[3]

This is a wonderful definition, but do you notice the emphasis?  Sorrow, shame, hatred.  Half the steps involve deep negative feelings in relation to sin.  In the 17th century, up until the last and current century, repentance was all about the weight and heaviness and horror and awfulness of the sin itself.  But in the ancient biblical Greek, the word for “Repent” that is recorded when Jesus responds to that voice in the crowd, was the word “metanoia.”  Metanoia has none of the 17^th century or medieval heaviness ascribed to repentance.  Metanoia means changing one’s mind.  It means complete and total transformation.  It is also the word used to describe what happens to a caterpillar when it becomes a butterfly.

A traveler once asked a young man for directions to a place where he wanted to go.  “How far is it,” he asked pointing down the road. He got the answer, “If you go on the way you’re headed, it will be about 25,000 miles, if you turn around, it will be about three.[4]

A changing of direction, a transformation of the heart, soul, mind and spirit are necessary in the life of each human being walking the face of this earth.  And it must happen with a recognition that we’re going the wrong way.

One old theologian put it this way,

“Repentance, is thorough.  It strikes deep.  First and foremost it involves recognition of wrongdoing; not of having made a mistake of judgment, but of having gone contrary to the very laws of the universe.  For this reason repentance nearly always is a religious experience.  One feels he has gone contrary to the nature of things, to the structure of the universe, to God’s will.  And then it involves a change of heart, of mind of outlook.  It is turning around and starting again on a new set of principles.  It is a revolution of the inner person.  This is what the New Testament calls second birth.”

As significant as this sounds, its not something that happens overnight, or in a flash of time.  This changing, evolving and transformation is a process that takes lifetimes to complete, but is accomplished with the tiniest steps. 

Jesus calls for repentance.  He tells all who will listen that sin is universal and that all must turn from the broken way of a fallen world, to a new reality and a new way of being.  He also speaks of grace and patience and the companionship of the gardener in his little parable in Luke 13.  He wants to help through the process and has patience and grace and hope for what each of us can become. 

During Lent and beyond, lets listen for the steps of that gardener in our midst and understand that he comes not to cut us down and condemn our unfruitfulness, even if we deserve it, but to nurture and encourage and cultivate our transformation and our fruitfulness, if only we’ll participate and turn to him and receive him.         Amen