“Keep Trying”
Luke 13:1-9; I Corinthians 10:1-13; Isaiah 55:1-9
Third Sunday in Lent
Isaiah 55:1-3a; 6-9
{1} Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. {2} Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. {3} Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live...
{6} Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; {7} let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
{8} For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. {9} For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
I Corinthians 10:1-13
1 I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. 5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.
6 Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. 7 Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.”
8 We must not indulge in immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. 9 We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. 10 And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. 11 These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come.
12 So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. 13 No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.
Luke 13:1-9
{1} At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. {2} He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? {3} No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.
{4} 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? {5} No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
{6} 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. {7} 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?’ {8} He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put [fertilizer] on it. {9} If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
The Sermon
You may certainly pray with me, or simply listen, as I read the first part of Ted Loder’s extraordinary prayer for Lent.
Catch me in my anxious scurrying, Lord,
and hold me in this Lenten season:
hold my feet to the fire of your grace
and make me attentive to my mortality
that I may begin to die now
to those things that keep me
from living with you
and with my neighbors on this earth;
to grudges and indifference,
to certainties that smother possibilities,
to my fascination with false securities,
to my addiction to sweatless dreams,
to my arrogant insistence on how it has to be;
to my corrosive fear of dying someday
which eats away the wonder of living this day,
and the adventure of losing my life
in order to find it in you.
Catch me in my aimless scurrying, Lord,
and hold me in this Lenten season:
hold my heart to the beat of your grace
and create in me a resting place,
a kneeling place,
a tip-toe place
where I can recover from the dis-ease of my grandiosities
which fill my mind and calendar with busy self-importance,
that I may become vulnerable enough
to dare intimacy with the familiar,
to listen cup-eared for your summons,
and to watch squint-eyed for your crooked finger
in the crying of a child,
in the hunger of the street people,
in the fear of [calamity] in all people,
in the rage of those oppressed because of sex or race,
in the smoldering resentments of exploited [peoples],
in the sullen apathy of the poor and ghetto-strangled people,
in my lonely doubt and limping ambivalence;
and somehow,
during this season of sacrifice,
enable me to sacrifice time
and possessions
and securities,
to do something…
something about what I see,
something to turn the water of my words
into a wine of will and risk,
into the bread of blood and blisters,
into the blessedness of deed,
of a cross picked up,
a savior followed. [i]
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, ‘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?’
The last time our Wednesday evening Bible study went all the way through Luke’s gospel, we noticed that Jesus’ demeanor was not always peace and tranquility and “there, there; whatever you may have done or not done, you’re really OK with me.”
He had some tough, tough messages. And this was one of them, which left everyone—his listeners, his detractors, even his disciples; even us who dare to call ourselves disciples today—with the nagging question:
If the One who put me here—the One who planted this fig tree in the garden—came looking to see how much fruit I have borne in all the time that Jesus has been ministering to me (tending the fig tree), what would there be to show for all this time?
I suspect that many of you who think of yourselves as disastrous failures would be surprised at the fruit that the gardener would celebrate: the ways great and small that you have brought a little more light to the world around you, a little more peace to lives in turmoil, a little more hope to some who receive from you more than you may know.
And I also suspect that there are many in this world who may not admit it out loud, but kind of think that they are probably the noblest tree in the garden, and would be surprised and disappointed to find out that the Gardener is not impressed with how tall and mighty you have grown if it still doesn’t mean you’ve produced any fruit.
A few summers ago when I first started gardening, I found out about this wonderful additive you could put in the soil, and your tomato plants would grow exponentially larger. I believe it was Bettie Slusser who told me, yeah, that stuff is great, if you want an eight-foot tall tomato plant and no tomatoes.
God’s expectations of us are uncompromising. We are supposed to live lives of justice and peacemaking and generosity and forgiveness, unrelenting hope and extravagant, wasteful loving of those who repeatedly refuse to accept or return love.
It sounds like a life of truth and beauty and some challenge. What we tend to want is the beauty; what we tend to hear in the call is the challenge. And so we tend to be inclined to go around the challenges.
And then the truth and beauty we find for ourselves are fleeting. And they lead us to produce very little fruit.
But this is not a parable about judgment; this is a parable about hope.
The gardener could have just seen how little we have to show for all his sacrifices for us, and said, forget it, it’s hopeless. But instead, the gardener says to the landowner, “Let’s give it one more year. Let me try one more year to dig around it, fertilize it, water it, care for it, do everything in my power to encourage it to bear fruit.”
He’s on your side. He wants this to work. He is still working on you, working within you, working for you.
You remember that Buechner has presented us with questions for Lent such as, “ When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?” And he said, “To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are, but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become.” [ii]
So if you have continued to see things in the mirror that you deplore, and you continue to fail to become that which you were created to be, there’s only one thing for you to do, only one direction worth going, and that is to keep trying.
Because someone has bought that chance for you at enormous cost.
Because someone is praying for you. Because someone is working on your behalf.
When you deliberately went after the one thing that you know gets you into trouble every time but you did it anyway, the Gardener came to your defense and said, “Just let me work with this fig tree one more year.”
When you had every opportunity to grow in faith; every opportunity to come closer to God; every opportunity to reflect in your life everything that God means to you, and all you could think to do was stand there uselessly and say, “Well, I know, but I really think I’ll pass this time,” the Gardener said on your behalf, “Just give me one more year to encourage this fig tree to bear fruit.”
When you were confronted with injustice, deprivation, poverty, evil, and you had the power to do something, and you did nothing, when the universe saw you at your worst, Jesus said, “Don’t give up on this one just yet. Just let me try for one more year.”
He goes to the cross for us every day.
As long as he keeps trying, you keep trying. Stop saying, “I ought to do better,” and for God’s sake, do better.
Luci Shaw’s poem called “Judas, Peter” goes:
because we are all
betrayers, taking
silver and eating
body and blood and asking
(guilty) is it I and hearing
him say yes
it would be simple for us all
to rush out and [do as Judas did]
but if we find grace
to cry and wait
after the voice of morning
has crowed in our ears
clearly enough
to break our hearts
he will be there
to ask us each again
do you love me? [iii]
Catch me in my mindless scurrying, Lord,
and hold me in this Lenten season:
hold my spirit to the beacon of your grace
and grant me light enough to walk boldly,
to feel passionately,
to love aggressively;
grant me peace enough to want more,
to work for more
and to submit to nothing less,
and to fear only you…
only you!
Bequeath me not [calm] seas,
slack sails and premature benedictions,
but breathe into me a torment,
storm enough to make within myself
and from myself,
something…
something new,
something saving,
something true,
a gladness of heart,
a pitch for a song in the storm,
a word of praise lived,
a gratitude shared,
a cross dared,
a joy received. [iv]
Keith Grogg
Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church
Carolina Beach , NC
March 7, 2010
[i] Ted Loder, “Catch Me in My Anxious Scurrying,” in Guerillas of Grace. LuraMedia, 1984.
[ii] Frederick Buechner, “Lent,” in Wishful Thinking. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979.
[iii] Luci Shaw, “Judas, Peter” in Polishing the Petoskey Stone. Vancouver: Regent College, 1990.
[iv] Ted Loder, “Catch Me in My Anxious Scurrying,” in Guerillas of Grace. LuraMedia, 1984.
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