After the Water

Prayer: God, be with our thoughts, be with our heart, be with our spirit today. May we be guided by your holy word in the way you require us for the moment of now. Amen.

As we come into today, our first day with masks optional, it does feel like, fingers crossed, we are beginning a new phase. Really, in every sense. As we embark on this phase and whatever it brings, I hope we enter it remembering the things we learned along the way and the ways we have changed, perhaps for the better.

One thing I gained in the pandemic was a new to me spiritual practice of quiet reflection, a form of meditation. I remember those beginning months, being isolated in my apartment by myself, watching the streets around me close up, and losing my job. I had gone from working a lot of days and traveling every week to stillness quite abruptly. And that emptiness became overwhelming.

At the beginning, it was very hard for me, mentally and emotionally, to find any kind of balance. I was stuck in my little apartment with no one but my own brain, which was the internal form of doom scrolling. I couldn’t stop scurrying thoughts in my brain from going over all the details of the daily news, nor I could stop worrying about: when I would see my family again, is our entire society on the brink of collapse, is the tiniest sniffle I have a symptom of COVID?

My mind began to turn on itself. It was then that a friend of mine suggested meditation. To which my response was, “rude.” I am a pastor, of course I had tried meditating before but, in full admission, I am not good at it at all. I’ve never thought I was good at it. I have tried so many times to get into mindfulness and meditation and each time I could only ruminate on how bad at meditating I was. So, this felt like a rude act against me.

But I had a lot of time on my hands and little to do about it, so I gave it another go. And that time instead of trying the meditation apps or guided words, I found a piece of paper and started writing out my prayers in quiet reflection. I read Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s piece on mediation where she shared her own struggles with mindfulness, saying, “what I learned from the teachers I listened to is that, the gift of meditation isn’t in being able to maintain a still mind (although that’s great), the gift of meditation is in the messing it up—it’s in being carried away in thinking and then realizing you are thinking and then returning to the meditation. Meditation’s magic is in the returning. Not in never having left.” Meditation is about offering yourself space to open and release your worries, to enter that overwhelming emptiness, and be changed in your mind. Live life, which has worries. And return to the open space.

“Theologically speaking, there’s a word for that. It’s repentance…”^[1]

I know that the word repentance, in our tradition, can have a bad reputation. Maybe you, like me, have feelings when you hear the word “repent.” I hear “repent” and conjure images of the street pastor that stood on the corner of Main Street when I was in college with a sign that read “Repent, repent now!” or you will face the fiery pit. I think of Michael Corleone in the Godfather saying, “I swear on the life of my children, give me one last chance and I will sin no more.” Repent, as a word, carries this sort of catastrophic doomsday peril.

Repent is a very loaded term, a term that my seminary colleagues would call “Christianese,” which is a language full of terms we say a lot in the church, but don’t often unpack. Repent is a “Christianese” word. It comes up a lot, and because it has taken on so many meanings, when it comes up, it’s good to revisit what the term means for us.

Repent is actually far more than doomsday peril or even just cleaning up our act. Repentance means changing your mind and changing your direction and changing your heart. The Greek word, metanoia, means to "think differently after," "after a change of mind"; to repent literally means "think differently afterwards.”. In Greek it implies a continual action, not something that happens just once and then we’re good. It’s something we return to.

In today’s passage from Luke, the word repent comes up. It begins as a crowd gathered seeks Jesus’ opinion on a current event. They are eager to tell Jesus about the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mixed with animal sacrifices. Pilate not only killed the Galileans, but he killed them in the temple, offering them up as sacrifices. A truly shocking and abhorrent thing to do. And the crowd didn’t have anything bad to say against the Galileans. Jesus himself was a Galilean. So, Jesus intuits that the crowd wants to know what they must have done that was so incredibly bad and sinful to lead to such a horrible death and dishonor?

When violence, death, and unthinkable events occur, it’s natural to want to ask, why did this happen? What Pilate did is just absolutely horrendous. Committing a sacrilegious act in the place of their worship. This transgression is an act of violence not only to the Galilean victims, but against the temple they hold dear. The crowd is going to expect Jesus to take their side and be anxious with them as they get inside their head and comfort them by encouraging them that they are not as doomed as the Galileans.

You can hear the crowd asking Jesus, “What do you have to say about this!” They need Jesus’s response to answer this important question and he’s placed in a dilemma, because he has gotten a reputation for himself by now and he knows he will be defined by his response. He could condemn this horrendous act, and then appear subversive, a threat to the establishment and Pilate, possibly accused of inciting a rebellion, - or he could downplay this event, and seem calloused, insensitive to this horrendous act that happened to his fellow people, to the religious place of high importance. Christ is being called to respond to an unthinkable event.

Instead, here Christ doesn’t give an answer, Christ asks a better question. For Christ knows that they are truly asking: “Why did this happen?” Jesus, getting to the heart of the matter, asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” “Do you think those who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell were worse sinners than those in Jerusalem?”

By changing the question, Jesus places the current event within a larger framework that yields a divine imperative for us. A question we, too, may ponder. Do we think anyone is a worse person because of their circumstances? Do we think anyone deserves death more than another? And rather than focus on these questions that invite examination of events that have passed and seek to change what cannot be controlled, Jesus encourages us to change what we can— our minds.^[2]

Jesus doesn’t answer their question but tells the crowd to reflect on what they think and repent —to change their mind and change their direction and change their heart. To change the way they currently engage injustice and unrighteousness, which asks questions that only concern themselves. Jesus invites them to adjust their current course and return to God. For they may meet their end in the same sudden and unprepared way as the Galileans and those in Jerusalem.

Jesus is not suggesting that repentance will prevent them from a physical, catastrophic death. He is stating that rather than focusing on the sins of others, changing their own hearts and minds will prepare them for whatever they will experience.^[3]

To emphasize this point Jesus uses the parable of the fig tree. The purpose of the fig tree is to bear figs. In this parable, when the owner finds no figs after three years, he demands it be cut down. If the tree is not producing, why should it be wasting the soil? Something fruitful can be planted in its place. He is stopped by the gardener, who says to give him another year. If it still does not bear fruit, then it can be cut down.

Jesus emphasizes his point: If our mind, heart, and direction are not bearing fruit, let us return to repentance and dig in the soil with different fertilizer. Here Jesus says, even though the tree wasn’t bearing fruit, there was time to go back and try again. Try again and see if this time, you will find the questions that will guide you to bear fruit rather than the questions that only serve ourselves. Disaster coming as a result of sin is a long-held belief, so we too have some long held beliefs that we think about ourselves that make way for questions that help defend us rather than guide us.

To that Jesus says to the crowd, you are asking the wrong questions, it’s time to change the thinking. You are so concerned with saving yourself, but not concerned with changing yourself. None of us is more worthy than another, but since for some reason we are still here, how are we going to bear fruit?

Jesus invites us to return to repentance. To the space that’s open for us to release our worries and change our mind and change our direction and change our heart. We cannot predict the day or the way that we will die, but we can decide the way we live, knowing that in God’s definition of repentance there is space for us to grow and change. And a gift is in the messing it up—it’s in being carried away in thinking and then realizing you are thinking and then returning to repentance. “There is no limit to the times we can return to God by changing our minds or changing our hearts or changing our direction.”^[4]

I invite you to find that place you can return to. Whether it’s meditation or prayer, painting, quiet reflection, whatever works for you to enter into the overwhelming emptiness and offer yourself space to think, to open and release your worries.

As Christians, we declare one place for this in our baptism, when we wash ourselves with the water of change, of new life, when we enter the family of God and commit ourselves to loving and uplifting each other in Christ through the tumultuous life of questions, called to remember the things we learned along the way, the ways we have changed, perhaps for the better.

The baptismal font stays in our sanctuary to serve as a reminder that no matter what happens when we leave this place, we can always return to this promise that calls us to change. To return to the promise that God claims us and loves us; that our God is faithful and when we repent the grace of God overflows upon us. The magic is in the returning. Not in never having left. Allow that reminder to wash over you today.

As it’s written in Isaiah, “…everyone who thirsts, come to the waters…. Incline your ear, and come to me,  listen, so that you may live.” Come all who are thirsty, come to the waters and be washed. Wash yourself of the thinking and habits that are hurting you; wash yourself of your internal doom scrolling; wash yourself of the shame that you bear for something you regret; wash yourself from the hate that you feel for someone for something; wash yourself of anything that bears questions that lead you astray.

Come, return, and repent. Let the water wash over you and be cleansed by the grace of God. Be changed.

Amen.

^[1] “Meditation and Repentance” by Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, 2021.

^[2] “Commentary on Luke 13:1-9” by Jeremy L. Williams, 2022.

^[3] “Commentary on Luke 13:1-9” by Jeremy L. Williams, 2022. 

^[4] “Meditation and Repentance” by Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, 2021.