Listen, so that you may live

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 55: 1-9 and Luke 13: 1-9 Sermon Title: “Listen, so that you may live” Preached on March 24, 2019 My family has now been glad to call Marietta home for about a year and a half. It will be two years in July, which isn’t that long, so people are still kind to ask us how we’re settling in and what we think about the place. Of course, I grew up here, but it’s still new, so Dr. Sam Matthews, newly retired pastor of First United Methodist Church, asked me about it over lunch last Monday. “What is it like? How is your family settling in?” he asked. I told him how fortunate I felt to be living in a place and serving a church like this one, and he responded, “you’ll be asked to preach the funeral of a lot of people who made it that way.” He’s right about that. I’ve already preached the funeral of some people who have made this place great, whose legacy benefits me and my family. Already, I’ve preached the funeral of some who made this community and this church what it is. When that’s the case, the funeral becomes a chance for us to celebrate the life of saints who ran their race well. Even in the midst of grief, we take time to thank God for the life of those who have gone on. We don’t think so much about why they died or take their death as some kind of warning, instead we focus on how they lived. But that’s not how people always deal with death. Someone dies, and the first question some people ask is: “was he sick?” “Was it cancer?” “Did she smoke?” This may be a natural way to be. Someone dies, and we want to know why. Human beings can’t help but ask the question, “why,” especially when trying to understand the great tragedies of life. That being the case, you can understand why it sounds like it was just accepted knowledge that those who died when the tower of Siloam fell had it coming. Many just assumed that the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices must have done something to deserve it. That’s just the way we deal with death sometimes. We hear about a tragedy and we ask, “why?” Before you think we’re not still like that, consider all the people you know who still take the paper just for the obituaries? People think a lot about death. We’d talk a lot about obituaries back in Tennessee. A woman back in Tennessee named Wanda Turner used to criticize people if their obituary was too long. She showed me one that she was disgusted with and said, “it’s an obituary, not a resume! Do these people think God’s reading these things to decide who gets into heaven?” We all knew not to die and let our obituary be too long or Wanda Turner would talk bad about us. That woman was incredible. I could tell Wanda Turner stories all day. She was in her 90’s, still coming to church every Sunday, and one morning she was standing by the coffee pot outside the Sanctuary before the service started. “Miss Wanda, how are you?” I asked. She said, “Pastor, I’m doing pretty well. At my age there’s not much sin that even tempts me, much less that I could follow through on.” Wanda Turner was something else. But she gets us to an important point. Like death, sin can become an obsession, especially other people’s sin. We want to make sense out of death, and so we blame the victims, but Jesus won’t stand for that: At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. [But] He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” Jesus responds with this question because those present who told him about the dead Galileans were thinking that their death must be a punishment for their sin. That because they died, they must have done something worse than what everyone else was doing. This is a human tendency. Sometimes we revel in the sin of the deceased to assure ourselves that we won’t be next, though death is largely out of our control. We don’t like that, so we come up with little algorithms: I don’t smoke so I won’t get cancer. I don’t eat red meat, so I won’t have a heart attack. I won’t have my kids vaccinated and they won’t get autism. The ones who died must have done something to deserve it. Only, sometimes bad things just happen. Now, no one wants to hear that. We like to hear about what we can control, so, this week The New York Times reported that doctors are wondering whether or not we should be eating eggs. I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though. We won’t be throwing out our eggs. Tomorrow it will just be something different, but some pay attention to these things because we all want to avoid death and suffering. We try to avoid sin, cigarettes, cholesterol, and a bunch of other stuff, only avoiding death and really living aren’t the same thing To help us really live, Jesus tells a 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 soil?’ [But the gardener] replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year.’” What’s the point of the parable? Well, we are the fig tree, the gardener is Jesus, and if your name wasn’t in the obituaries this morning than he’s bought you a little more time. What are you going to do with it? That’s a good question, isn’t it? And it’s the right one to ask, because we can’t fear death wondering if we might be next. No. We must wake up each morning knowing we might be, for the only thing that separates us who are alive and them who have passed on is that for some reason the Good Lord saw fit to give us a little bit more time. What will we do with it? Jane Sullivan told me that she heard about a 104-year-old woman whose friends asked her what she wanted to be sure and do before she died. The woman said, “I’ve never been arrested, and I think I’d like that.” Isn’t that incredible? Along those same lines I saw a CS Lewis quote: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” There’s more to living than not dying. And there’s more to today than the fact that you and I woke up on this side of the grave because today we have a chance to change how we’ve been living that we might live more abundantly. Back in 2016 I had the honor of officiating at the funeral of a 102-year-old woman. She didn’t want me to preach. I was the same age as her great-grandchildren, so she never really saw me as her pastor, and even though I went to visit her often she always just kind of saw me as a kid. That was OK. The man who preached was a long-time friend of hers. They met when she was 80, so that means they had more than 20 years to solidify their relationship. She gave this man instructions for what to say at her funeral, and so she told him not to make his part in the funeral a eulogy about the deceased. “Don’t talk about me,” she told him, “because if they don’t know me by now than they’ve missed their chance. Talk instead about Jesus, because they haven’t missed their chance to get to know him.” If we are all fig trees, fruitless fig trees, we have been spared by the Gardener who can change us. Who sees in us the potential to bear fruit, and desires to fertilize and work our soil so that we might do just that. Now this charge to bear fruit is also a gift. Today, we can’t go back and change the beginning of our story, but we can start where we are and change the ending. I want to say that this is a good message for our church, right now and in this moment. You might know, possibly because I’ve talked about it a lot, that three years ago our church found herself in the midst of a big conflict. The stories in the news about the United Methodist Church recently may be giving you flash backs. As a result of decisions made to keep our Presbyterian doors open wide to the children of God who love someone of the same gender, there were many who left this church to start another one. The paper got a hold of our dirty laundry, so right there in the Marietta Daily Journal were stories about us, full of discord and conflict. That’s true. That’s what happened, and we can’t go back and change it. But let me tell you something more important. This morning that same paper announced which church was voted as the Best Place to Worship in Cobb County, and we are it. They told us last Thursday, and all weekend I’ve been wishing I could tell Harris Hines about it. All weekend I’ve been wishing I could call up Bob Stephens and so many others to let them know how far we’ve come, but while they helped us get here, they aren’t here to see it. We are though. We are. And we can’t change the past, but we can change the ending. We can live today, right now, with a new focus and a new future. We can focus on the power of the Good News and the love of God rather than debate who is in and who is out. We can lift our voices in praise to the God of all creation rather the wring our hands, worried, anxious and afraid. Today: Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Today, let us do so, for we have fruit to bear. Amen.