God of the Second Chance

Rev Dr Mark Porizky

3/11/07

Luke 13:1-9

There were some present at that very time who told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.  And he answered them, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus?  I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.  Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Silo'am fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?  I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish."

And he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came seeking fruit on it and found none.  And he said to the vinedresser, `Lo, these three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down; why should it use up the ground?'  And he answered him, `Let it alone, sir, this year also, till I dig about it and put on manure.  And if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'"

In his spiritual autobiography, William Barclay, the venerable Scottish scholar, tells the tragedy of losing his 21-year-old daughter and her fiancé who were drowned in a boating accident. He writes, "God did not stop that accident at sea, but he did still the storm in my own heart so that somehow my wife and I came through that terrible time still on our own two feet."

Barclay also tells of receiving an anonymous letter about his daughter's death. It said, "I know why God killed your daughter. It was to save her from corruption by your heresies." Barclay says, "If I had known the writer's address, I would have written back in pity, not anger, saying, as John Wesley once said, 'Your God is my devil.'"

In this story are two different interpretations of God's involvement in the event that took the life of Barclay's daughter. Both interpretations see God involved in the loss. Barclay implies that God could have stopped that accident at sea but chose not to. The letter-writer expressed the belief that it was God's breath that caused the winds that night and God's hand that tipped the boat over thereby killing the young couple. 

What can we say about this difficult, dangerous world and God’s place in it?   This will not be a sermon about why bad things happen to good people?  Nor will it be a sermon about God’s will and human freedom.  Mostly I avoid those subjects because Jesus didn’t tackle them in this morning’s Scripture.  Instead, Jesus was refreshingly blunt in speaking about life’s hardships.  I think Jesus has three points to make on the subject of life and death from today’s Scripture.

The first point is this.  Life is uncertain.  There are no guarantees in this life, only a sentiment that we can’t quite make sense of this uncertain world without God’s help.  

Tom Long was my preaching professor at Princeton Theological Seminary.  He tells a story about the little Georgia country church of his childhood, a story the older folks loved to tell again and again, laughing over it and savoring it as time went on.

The tale involved a certain Sunday night in October 1938. Evening prayer services were in full swing when a man named Sam, a member of the congregation who lived down the road from the church, charged into the prayer meeting trembling with fear and excitement. Finally gaining the breath to speak, he shouted, "Martians are attacking the earth in spaceships! Some of ‘em have already landed in New Jersey !" The preacher halted in mid-sentence; the congregation stared at Sam blankly. "I s-s-swear," he stammered, now a little unsure of his footing. "I h-h-heard it on the radio."

What Sam had heard, of course, was Orson Welles’ now infamous Mercury Theater radio production of War of the Worlds, but no one in the congregation was aware of that at the moment. For all they knew, the world outside was coming to a flaming end. The little flock looked apprehensively at the preacher, but he was mute and indecisive, never having had a sermon disrupted by interplanetary invasion.

Finally one of the oldest members of the congregation, a red-clay farmer of modest education, stood up, gripped the pew in front of him with his large, callused hands, and said, "I ‘speck what Sam says ain’t completely true, but if it is true, we’re in the right place here in church. Let’s go on with the meetin’." And so they did.

Spaceships landing in New Jersey ? Signs of the end of the world? The old farmer sized it all up, measured it against his rough-hewn view of providence, and decided it was better to be in church praising God than running around the cow pasture shooting buckshot into the night sky.  

According to Jesus, most of us are not nearly as astute as this farmer at reading the signs of the times, at distinguishing what matters and what doesn’t, at discerning what is truly happening in God’s world.  We are asking the wrong question when we ask if people deserved, or didn’t deserve, the bad things that happened to them.  Good and bad things happen to us all.  That’s the nature of living in a truly free world. 

What’s more important, according to Jesus, is not that good and bad happen, but that some people refuse to look at life’s tragedies and learn from them.  Evil wins some battles, not the war, but an occasional skirmish.  Rulers like Pilate will have their day.  Towers sometimes fall.  Bridges collapse and roads freeze over.  If your trust is only in the promise that this life will be easy, fair and pain-free, your trust is misplaced.  Repent.  Make a U-turn and look to God as a more certain place for your trust.  For we have never been promised an easy, pain-free, even accident-free life.  We have only been promised that God will be with us in the midst of it all.  (Pause)   

The second truth Jesus speaks to is that death is capricious.  Unpredictable.  There is often no way of knowing why one person get cancer and another doesn’t, why a tower falls at one moment killing some but sparing others who passed by minutes earlier.

What is certainly true is that we do not spend enough time thinking about our deaths, and thus, if the truth be told, thinking about our lives.  Since working with Hospice and Hospice patients I spend a great deal of time talking about death.  Ironically, I also feel that I am becoming much more sensitive to life in the process of spending more time with death.

Dr. Bill Bartholome. He was Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Dr. Bartholome was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in June of l994. He died five years later. Two years after he got his diagnosis, he wrote this:

"It has been over two years now since I discovered that I have a fatal disease. In trying to explain to my family and my friends what having this period of time has meant to me, I have found it helpful to characterize it as a gift. It has allowed me time to prepare my family for a future in which I will not be physically present to them. It has given me the opportunity to tie up all the loose ends that everyone's life always has. I have been given the opportunity of reconnecting with those who have taught me, and those who have shared their lives with me, and those who have touched me. I have been able to reconnect with all those from whom I had become estranged over the years. It has given me time in which to apologize for past wrongs and to seek forgiveness for past mistakes.

‘But even more than all these, the gift has provided me with the opportunity to discover what it is like to live in the light of death, to live with death sitting on my shoulder. It has had a powerful effect on me. It has changed my perspectives on the world and has altered my priorities. I like the person that I am becoming much more than I ever liked myself before. There is a kind of spontaneity and joyfulness in my life now that I rarely knew before. I am free of the tyranny of all the things that ‘have to get done.' I realize more than I ever did before that I exist in a web of relationships and support that nourishes me, that clinging to each other here against the unknown beyond is what makes us human. I have come to know what it means to give and to receive love unconditionally."

And then Dr. Bartolome goes on to say: “To live in the bright light of death is to live a life in which colors and sounds are more intense, in which smiles and laughs are irresistibly infectious, in which touches and hugs are tender, almost beyond belief. … I wish that the final chapter in your stories can have a chapter, like mine has, in which you are given the gift of some time to live with your mortality."

Or as Jesus says, “Life is uncertain.  Death is capricious.  Start living now.” 

Well he doesn’t say it like that.  Instead he tells a parable about a fig tree.  The parable is a warning that in an uncertain life that includes the reality of a capricious death, we should start living now,  In light of all of life and death’s uncertainties, we each have been given a second chance, just like the fig tree.

In the parable, the barren fig tree is three years into the period when it should have been bearing fruit.  It is visited again and again by the owner.  "I come and I come", the owner says, "but no fruit".  

 Finally, in utter disappointment and exasperation the owner orders it cut down.  But the gardener intervenes, pleading for one more season in which to apply fertilizer and to see if it can be induced to bear fruit.  One more year!!  It's another chance, and in this parable, the last chance.  

I like the stark way that novelist Frederick Buechner puts it:

"We must be careful of our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.  There is always this temptation to believe that we have all the time in the world, whereas the truth of it is that we do not.  We have only a life, and the choice of how we are going to live it must be our own choice."

Another chance to make a choice:

Another chance to allow the things of Christ, to be decisive in our lives:

Another chance to be instruments not of revenge but of reconciliation:

Another chance to work not for the withering but for the widening of our circles of compassion:

Another chance not to be cynical  but to engage in the uplifting practice of hope:

Another chance to listen not for the noisy shout but for the still small voice of calm.

To whom will we listen, and how will we respond?

 At the time of the Civil War, William Scott was a young soldier from a Vermont town. He fell asleep at his post, but had great provocation for doing so--he had been without rest for forty eight hours. The army was at Chain Bridge; the neighborhood was dangerous, and discipline must be kept. A court martial sentenced the man to be shot. Then, the kind offices of Abraham Lincoln were sought.  

The day preceding the proposed execution, the greathearted President appeared at the tent of William Scott and asked him many questions about himself, his family, and his circumstances.

Finally, Lincoln said: "My boy, stand up here and look me in the face. You are not going to be shot tomorrow. I believe you when you tell me that you could not keep awake. I am going to trust you and send you back to your regiment. But I have been put to a great deal of trouble on your account. I have had to come up here from Washington when I have a great deal to do, and what I want to know is how are you going to pay my bill?"

With his heart welling up in his throat, William Scott expressed his gratitude in the best terms his embarrassment would permit. He said that he had not thought the matter out since it had come upon him so suddenly, but there was his bounty in the savings bank and some money he thought could be raised by mortgaging the farm at home. His own pay was something, and he believed the boys of his regiment would help him a little on payday. Altogether it seemed probable to him that five or six hundred dollars could be made up if that would be sufficient.

But the bill is a great deal more than that," said President Lincoln. Then the condemned man replied that though he did not quite see his way clear to do it, he would, if he lived, find some plan for paying the great debt.  

Then the President put his hands on the shoulders of William Scott, and looked into his face and said: "My boy, my bill is a very large one. Your friends cannot pay it, nor your bounty, nor the farm, nor all your comrades. There is only one in all the world who can pay it, and his name is William Scott. If from this day forward William Scott does his duty, so that if I should be present when he came to die he could look me in the face as he does now and say, 'I have kept my promise and I have done my duty,' then my debt will be paid. Will you make that promise and try to keep it?" The promise was given and it was kept nobly.

In one of the fights in the peninsula, William Scott fell, wounded to the death, and said to his comrades: "If any of you ever have the chance, I wish you would tell president Lincoln that I have never forgotten the kind words he said to me at Chain Bridge, and now that I am dying I want to thank him again because he gave me the chance to fall like a soldier in battle and not like a coward by the hand of my comrades."

Life is uncertain.  Death is capricious.  The judgment is given:

We live in the grace of the God of the Second Chance. 

What is it that you need to do?

Will you pray with me now?   

St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Groton, CT

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