Making Our Days Count

[This message was shared with the people of Friendship Lutheran Church during worship on March 11, 2007.]

Luke 13:1-9
Once there was a couple who won a prize, a two week trip to Ireland. They had a whole year to claim their trip. “Well,” said the wife, “let’s not do it this summer, because we don’t want to interfere with our summer at the lake. And we can’t go in September because that’s when the kids go back to school.” Then, before they knew it, it was late October and the husband said, “We can’t go over the holidays.” “That’s right,” his wife agreed. “Let’s wait till after the first of the year.” But somebody told them that the days were terribly short in Ireland in January and February and besides, the weather wasn’t very good. So they said, “Let’s wait till spring, when we know there’ll be good weather and we don’t have to worry about the snow closing airports in this country.” So finally they made reservations for the first week in May. The weather was supposed to be good and the days were long and it was the best time of the year to go. They admitted that they were cutting it close because their prize ran out on June 1. But they were sure nothing would go wrong. Then the husband had a gallbladder attack and required surgery. The doctors said he would be able to travel by...the middle of June.

That little story by Andrew Greeley points out how unpredictable life can be. Gall bladder attacks aren’t the only things that can interrupt our agendas. Sometimes death itself interferes. All of which leads me to a very serious question: What would you do if you knew for sure that one year from today, your life would come to an end?

My guess is that most of us anyway, faced with that certainty, would have a thought or three about how we would live differently from the way we live right now.

The question is suggested by today’s Bible lesson. In the first part of it, Jesus talks about two terrible incidents that the crowd surrounding Him was talking about. One was a massacre of Galileans who were worshiping that had been ordered by the Roman governor, Pilate, the very same person who would soon order Jesus’ execution. The other incident is one Jesus Himself brings up: The collapse of a tower at the famous pool at Siloam. There, eighteen people died.

Many people, when they confront such inexplicable tragedies so need to make sense of them or feel a need to feel morally superior, that they accept explanations which really defame God. They convice themselves and others that God is punishing people for their sins. Jesus will have none of such explanations for life’s tragedies.

Nor should we. Back in the 1980s, a new disease of which none of us had heard before began killing off, at first, only gay men. AIDS took thousands of lives and consigned thousands more to certain death. One Sunday, I told the people of my former parish that, contrary to what some were telling us, I did not believe that God was punishing gay men for their homosexuality. If God killed people because of their sins, we all would be dying horrible, premature deaths. The Bible teaches that none of us is sinless and that God sent Christ to die and rise so that sinners like us who repent and trust in Him will live with God forever, no matter how long our lives on earth may be.

After the service, a woman approached me. “Pastor,” she asked, “do you mean to say you don’t think that God is punishing these men?” “No, I don’t,” I said. Her reaction surprised me: “I’m relieved to hear you say that. I was beginning to think that maybe I’d misunderstood God all these years. These preachers who say that God was punishing these men seemed so certain of themselves. But the God they talked about didn’t sound like the God I know in Jesus.”

That doesn’t sound like the God I know through Jesus either. I don’t believe that when troubles, suffering, or challenges come into our lives that God is punishing us. That’s not the God any of us see when we consider the God of the Bible!

But how do we explain tragedy? When Jesus cites the two tragedies in our Bible lesson--one perpetrated by a tyrant, the other an accident, He doesn’t try to explain them. And He specifically rejects any attempt to paint the victims of the tragedies as being worse sinners than anyone else. As Jesus puts it elsewhere, in this imperfect world, it rains on the evil and the good. More important than trying to figure out why bad things happen to good and bad people, is learning to let God love us every day and to live each day as a gift from God!

Jesus says that unless we repent, we will die. The death He’s talking about, I think, is the death of eternal separation from God, eternal separation from human fellowship, an eternity of regret that we chose to go it alone, rather than relying on Christ for life.

To repent, as we’ve said before, is to repudiate sin and to walk toward Christ. No one can do that perfectly. But God isn’t looking for perfection in us. As the Old Testament tells us, God remembers that we’re dust.

I remember when our two children were learning to walk. Whenever they showed an interest in walking toward us, we held out our arms and praised them for every imperfect step they took, even when they fell on their seats. We wouldn’t have thought of criticizing them or punishing them because they didn’t do it precisely correctly.

The person living repentantly is taking baby steps toward Christ and even though we may sometimes fall or fail, as long as we keep walking toward our Savior, the cheers coming from God’s throne are so loud that if we were privileged to hear them, we’d have to cover our ears!

If I knew my life were to end one year from today, I hope that I would be walking repentantly, moving toward Jesus.

But, there’s a second thing I hope that I would be doing if I knew I had just one year left to live. Jesus talks about that in the second part of our lesson, in a parable--or a story--He tells that same crowd:

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 the soil?" He replied, "Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down."

The owners of vineyards in Jesus’ home country didn’t waste precious water on young trees. Nor did they have patience for trees that occupied space and didn’t bear fruit. They simply couldn’t afford any sentimental attachments to a barren tree. So, according to the practices of the time and the scarcity of acreage and water, the landowner was right to order that the fruitless tree be cut down.

But then, the unexpected happens: The gardener begs the landowner to give the tree one more year. It’s a gift of life. If the tree doesn’t bear fruit, he’ll cut it down.

You and I are that tree in the vineyard. Every day, God allows us to occupy space. He’s sent His Son and sent His Spirit to help us grow strong in faith, in love, in courage. He gives us spiritual gifts by which we can play our part in His Church and His mission in the world. But often we just take His gifts and then just live lives that look just like that of the spiritually disconnected person who lives next door.

Christ died and rose for you and me to do more than just exist. Even here, in this imperfect world, He’s pumping the life, love, and power of eternity into us. But, I suspect that you wouldn’t know it by looking at the lives of most Christians. A Japanese poet, a Christian, likely describes most Christians when he writes:

I read
In a book
That a man called
Christ
Went about doing good.
It is very disconcerting to me
That I am so easily
Satisfied
With just
Going about.

If I knew that I had just one year left to live, I hope not only that I’d live repentantly, but that I’d also be bearing fruit, displaying evidence that I really was saved from sin and death by Jesus, that I really relished being God’s child.

I’ve told you the story before of an important conversation that Jimmy Carter had with his sister, the evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton. It happened after Carter lost his first bid at becoming governor of Georgia to a notorious racist. His sister told him that his being governor of Georgia wasn’t as important to God as whether Carter was walking with God. By that time in his life, Jimmy Carter had already spent decades teaching Sunday School and going on mission trips in which he went door-to-door leading people to faith in Jesus Christ.

Talking cold turkey with her brother, Stapleton wondered who Jimmy Carter had done all of that for. Then she asked him, “Jimmy, if it were a crime to be a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

That question changed Jimmy Carter’s life. What his sister was really asking him was, “Are you leading a repentant life, a life in which you’re walking toward Christ? Are you bearing the fruits of that repentance? Can people see Jesus working in your life even though you’re imperfect like the rest of the human race?”

Those are good questions for all of us to be asking about ourselves, I think.

I hate to tell you that in fact, there are many days when I hang my head in shame over the answers which honesty compels me to give to those questions as I look at my own life.

But thank God, we follow a gracious God Who gives repentant people second chances, opportunities to so open ourselves to Him and His love that we walk confidently in that love and let the whole world see what a great, open-hearted God we follow!

Today, this week, I invite you to offer two simple prayers:

• Ask Jesus to help you walk toward Him.
• And, ask Jesus to let the investment He’s made in you--the investment of His life on a cross--show in something you say, you do, or you think this week.

Don’t put it off.

Pray those two things. Ask God to help you walk toward Christ and to let Christ live in you.

Whether you and I have one year or fifty years left to live, we can’t go wrong if we keep asking God to answer those two prayers each and every day.

[The question, "What would you do if you knew for sure that one year from today, your life would come to an end?," is one brought up in a commentary on this passage from The New Interpreter's Bible.]