Fruit worthy of repentance, fruit of the Spirit: Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent (March 23, 2025
Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent (March 23, 2025) at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, NY. View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day.
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Transcript
It occurred to me, listening to this parable of Jesus, that on every good team there's a person who sees the potential and a person who is impatient. So Christopher can count on me regular to be like these pieces of wood in the garage. Do we still need them? Can I throw them away? And Christopher will say, give me just a little more time. Because perhaps there is a project in which they may bear fruit.
It's not just like I'm thinking about Val and Patty in the Sunday school, and Val is notorious for being able to take what looks like scraps and bits and bobs. Dear De May said garbage. I mean, so you can tell who she is in the relationship and create a magical wonderland, a jungle for the Hyde Park Community Day booth. So there's always a person kind of impatient, ready to move on, and there's someone who says, no, no, there's still a blessing here. There's potential here. There's something good here. And I think Jesus is kind of inviting us to know deep down in our hearts that God, God is the one who sees the potential and says, give it a little more time. Give it a little more time. He tells this parable about a fig tree growing in a vineyard, and the owner of the vineyard comes along and says, well, what about this one?
It's been here for three years. It's not bearing any fruit. It's basically dead. Why don't we cut it down? We can plant a new one. Let's get rid of this. But the gardener comes along behind and says, takes a look at it. The gardener is the one who has the relationship with the tree and the gardener says, look, I hear your frustration and your impatience, but I really don't think that we've attended to this. So give me just a little more time. Let me get in there and aerate the soil. Let me get in there and kind of stir things up, loosen things up. Make some room for this tree to spread its roots and let me feed it. Let me give it some fertilizer. Let me nourish it and we'll see what it might be able to do.
And then the parable stops. So we're all kind of in suspense like, well, what happens to the tree? Did the vineyard owner say yes? Did the gardener get a little more time? And were the gardener's efforts worthwhile? But the story kind of cuts us off, maybe because Jesus is telling this story in a response to a discussion that he's just been having with his disciples about how sudden and short our lives can be. The disciples are coming to him. Someone comes to Jesus, someone has read the proverbial Judean newspaper and they're like, oh my God, here's this horrible story about the governor executing these Galileans and apparently taking their blood and mingling it with the blood of the animals. They had been sacrificing this sort of brutal and atrocious execution, and they come to Jesus and they're like, why did this happen?
In what world is this permissible? Why would God let this happen just like we might feel when we open the news app on our phones or pick up a newspaper or watch the news, they're coming to Jesus, their teacher, in this deep distress about this brutal and sudden death that these people experienced. And Jesus says to them, look, there's nothing that these people did that could have caused them to deserve this. He says, do you think that this happened to them because they were worse than all other Galileans? No. He says, bad things happen all the time. We live in this brutal world, this dangerous world. He says, look, I mean, think about that. The other day when that tower fell on those people, do you think that because the tower fell and crushed all those people, that somehow they deserved it, that they'd done something? He says, no, no. It has nothing to do with that. Bad things happen. They just happen. The question is, how are we going to live our lives?
These news stories that the disciples are bringing, Jesus are reminding them, and all of us that life is startlingly short sometimes. When death or grief or loss comes, we are not always ready for it, not always prepared. Like the great litany in our own prayer book says, God, we beseech you that you would deliver us from dying suddenly and unprepared, but we know that life is short, that this next moment is not guaranteed to us. So what are we supposed to do about it? Jesus says, look, given that you're mortal, given that something like what happened to these Galileans or these folks who were crushed by the tower of Stallone, given that that could happen to any of us at any time, how are we going to live? He says, unless you repent, unless you repent, change your mind, change your way of thinking, you're going to die just like these people did. That is, suddenly and unprepared.
And there is an invitation to change because life is short. So we're invited to change our lives now, but we need to dig in to what that means. Okay? So Jesus tells this story about the fig tree. The fig tree, it's been around for a while. It's not bearing fruit. And the owner of the vineyard says, let's cut it down. And the gardener says, no, let's nurture it. Let's tend to it. Let's see if that will change. And this parable of the fig tree for us reading Luke's gospel, it might resonate with us because in Luke's gospel, in the third chapter, we hear this similar thing, John the Baptist, out in the wilderness, what does he say? He says, even now the ax is lying at the root of the tree and every tree, therefore that does not bear good fruit will be cut down. And we're like, and the people say, well, what then should we do? And John says, what he says, if you have two coats, you should share one. He says, bear fruit worthy of repentance. So us as the readers of Luke's gospel, when we hear Jesus talking about this fig tree that won't bear fruit, it rings in our ear, right? John's exhortation, bear fruit worthy of repentance.
So what is the fruit? When I hear fruit, I think of St. Paul. St. Paul says, there are fruits of the spirit, fruits that show up in our lives when our lives are nourished by the Holy Spirit of God. So think about that gardener tending that tree, right? Look at the psalm. There are so many psalms that talk about being a tree planted by a stream of water that never stops flowing. The roots go deep, and we are nourished. St. Paul says the fruits of the spirit, the fruits of one who is nourished by God, nourished, tended to cared for by God are these: love, patience, kindness, generosity, joy, peace, self-control.
That is the fruit that is worthy of repentance, that is the fruit that shows up in our lives when our lives are nourished by the tender care of the Holy Spirit, love, patience, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, self-control. And so we get to look at our lives and we say, are they showing up in my life? Is my life bearing this fruit? Do I experience love and kindness, generosity, joy, peace, self-control, patience. And we look at our communities, we look at this church community. Do we find here, do we see welling up here? These fruits of the spirit and at our community, all around us here in Hyde Park and Dutchess County, do we see love and peace, patience and joy, kindness, and generosity? And we look at our nation and we say, do we see these fruits, love and peace, joy and kindness, patience, generosity and self-control in the life of our country and in the life of the world?
Chances are we do and we don't, right? We look around, we look within. We look at our lives, we look at our communities, we look at our nation, we look at the world, and we see these fruits. And we also see the absence of these fruits, the opposites of these fruits. We see hatred, war, selfishness, cruelty, impatience, unbridled, unbridled ambition. The invitation is to know that God wants to nourish the fruits at every level in our lives, in the life of our community, and in the life of our nation and our world. That God comes in where we might say, you know what? There's not enough of this fruit. I give up. I throw up my hands, and God says, let me come in there. Let me pour some love and attention into this. Fruit worthy of repentance, is fruit that comes from the love of God that is being poured into our hearts.
Jesus told us, love the Lord your God. Love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. And he said to us, love one another as I have loved you. The change of mind, the change of heart that we're called to make is the change to show forth that love in everything we do and to receive it from God. And the thing is, is that it's God tending to us, to our lives. Sometimes God has to get in there with our lives and stir things up a little, dig around and make a mess.
And sometimes God has to feed us and nourish us and be tender to us. And God is doing that with our lives, with our communities, with the life of our nation and the world. And God is getting you involved in this too. So every time in the gospels we hear about repentance we're not just talking about a personal change of heart. We always all need to do this work together. So God has brought us together here so that we can be for one another, the tenders of the fruits of the Spirit, right? Sometimes it's for us. We don't like what we see in our community, in our nation, in the world. We don't see the fruits of love and peace and joy and kindness and generosity being born. Maybe it's for us to get in there and stir things up a little, mix things up, and we always need to be in there with love, with nourishment.
We get in there with our prayer for ourselves, for our community, for the nation, with our love, for ourselves, for this community, for the nation. God sees the fruit that still yet might be born. It is God who does this loving in this nurturing. It is God who invites us to join in and to help. The fruits of the spirit are love, peace, joy, patience, kindness, and self-control. These are the fruits worthy of repentance and the fruit that we still might bear with God's help here and in the whole world with our love, our tenderness, and our willingness to mix it up just a little bit. Amen.