"Wait 'till Next Year?"

Let me leave you with a final question of my own. If you had only one year of life left to live, what would you do in order to be fruitful in God's eyes? What would you do?

Life is filled with quiet temptations. And one of those temptations is to compare ourselves to other people, to notice their sins, while minimizing our own. Ever do that?

         We pick up the newspaper, turn on the TV, or scan the computer screen and there staring back is a photo of a celebrity, politician, religious leader, or famous athlete--disheveled hair, wild eyes, clothes asunder--caught doing wrong. And we’re liable to think, "Hah! Another sinner. I’m not that bad."

         Likewise, what’s the definition of a lousy driver? Answer: anybody who drives worse than I do.

         And who’s a really awful sinner? Anyone who sins more than I do, or who commits sins I don’t commit. As Jesus warned, we see the speck in our neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in our own eye.

         People were telling Jesus about some Galileans murdered by Pontius Pilate, while they were worshiping no less. Tragic. There’d also been eighteen people killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them. Dreadful. But apparently Jesus perceived what these first century action news reporters were really thinking. "Those folks who died were worse sinners than we are. So God punished them. And they got what they deserved."

         Be honest. When we hear about misfortune crushing another person, don’t we sometimes, maybe just for a fraction of a second, think that person must have done something to deserve it? And sometimes people do suffer because of their behavior. Occasionally the natural consequences of our sins are seen and felt immediately or after many years.

         But often misfortune has nothing to do with a person’s behavior. Suffering clamps its icy hands around the necks of the innocent and death sprays bullets at random. So intellectually, we know better than to assume that God goes around "zapping" people. As preacher Ernie Campbell wryly put it, "If God doesn’t destroy New York and Los Angeles, he surely owes the people of Sodom and Gomorrah an apology." (Journal for Preachers, Advent, 1993, 22.) Yet we’re still tempted to imagine our neighbor is suffering because of some wickedness, and we are doing well because of our virtue.

         But Jesus said, "Do you think those folks who died were worse sinners than you? No, but unless you repent, you’ll perish just as they did." Wow! What a troubling answer. We’re hoping for Jesus to say something comforting. "There, there. You’re upset. Let me make you feel better." But instead he throws down a challenge. He says it’s not for us to judge who is more sinful. God will sort that out, and before God we only confess our own sins, not somebody else’s.

         At the same time, Jesus does say that sin is deadly. "Unless you repent, you’ll perish just as they did." So if God in Jesus Christ is supposed to be gracious, merciful, forgiving, how are we to understand "Unless you repent, you’ll perish just as they did."?

         Well, Jesus tells a story, a parable to pester us into struggling with the answers. A man has a fig tree in his yard. After three years it still produces no fruit, and the man says to his gardener, "Cut it down. It's just wasting soil." But the gardener says, "Give it another year, while I dig around it, and fertilize it. Then if it bears fruit, great. If not, then you can cut it down."

         You know where this is going. We’re the fig tree that will either bear or not bear fruit. God is patient and provides all that’s needed for growth. But time is limited. So the question is not, Can we judge the lives of others? The question is, How will God judge the fruitfulness of your life and mine?

         While his wife lies in a hospital bed dying, a man in one of Walker Percy’s novels comes to some terrifying conclusions about his life. He thinks, "Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream." (Walker Percy, The Second Coming, 113.)

         Are we like that, never finding the quiet center of ourselves, always living either in the past or in the future, but never in the present? Are our lives passing like a dream?

         The man looks at his dying wife and thinks. "How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at each other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the halls like ghosts." (Ibid. 114.)

         Are we like that, in relationships in which we miss each other and pass each other like ghosts?

         How fruitful are our lives in God's eyes? What are we really producing with our life? What are we going to do with the fact that God will judge how we use the life we’ve been given?

         On the one hand we might move into a frenzy of activity in the hope of earning God's care. But the care of God is already present; it does not have to be earned.

         On the other hand, we might simply lie back and say, "God loves me. Nothing else matters. I don't need to do anything." But God wants us to produce something good. "Unless you repent, you will perish just as they did." Without repentance we’re spiritually dead.

         The parable leaves us with a tension. As one writer puts it, "God's mercy is still in serious conversation with God's judgment." (Fred B. Craddock, Luke, Interpretation Commentary Series, 169.)

         Life is short. Time is limited. So what does it mean to be fruitful, productive human beings before God?

         I think it means seeking balance in our life. Doing our work with integrity. As students, studying with honesty and effort. Balancing time for prayer, worship, study of Scripture, service in the church. Time for family and friends. Time for rest and play. We seek balance to be productive for God.

         Lent gives us an opportunity to reflect on our priorities in life. Here are some questions for each of us to ponder.

         What in my life is a waste of time?

         What am I doing that drains away the joy in my life?

         On the other hand, what’s painful or difficult that I'm doing which is worth the time and effort, because it’s kingdom of God work?

         Which relationships do I need to nurture, and which do I need to end?

         I once did continuing education with a man who works on parish empowerment. Here are some questions he asks laypeople to consider when they think about their fruitfulness as Christians.

         "If I offered to pay your salary for three months and you could do any kind of work for God's kingdom what would you do?"

         "If I gave you $1000.00 to give to any cause what would you give it to?"

         "When you read the newspaper what makes you tear up? What makes you passionate?"