vector apple tree with fruits, over white background

Sermon, New Year’s Eve 2017

Luke 13:1-9

6 Then he told this parable: ‘A man had a fig-tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. 7 So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, “For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig-tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?”

8 ‘“Sir,” the man replied, “leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig round it and fertilise it. 9 If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.”’

Every New Year I find myself a little unsure what to do with a new year.

On the one hand I want to get organised, make some decisions and commitments and try and do better. On the hand, I know that all of this can and probably will come to naught as either I mess it all up or stuff happens to get us all off track again!

So, I find myself a little unsure of how I as a baptised and loved person of God would be best to approach another year.

On New Year’s Eve, enter the little parable of the unproductive fig tree in Luke 13.

6 …. ‘A man had a fig-tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. 7 So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, “For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig-tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?”

So, God comes looking for the good fruit in us for all his tending and gifts to us. Fair enough. He is God. He gave us everything. He has the authority to cast his eye over our productivity.

I hear too that it is possible to be alive but unfruitful. That is what this particular fig tree is – alive but not bearing fruit in its due season. We hear that this cannot go on forever. There is a limit on God’s patience.

When is the limit for me? I find myself caught between being urged to trying even harder or give up all together on any sense of progress in a new year. I find myself between trying to conjure up being even more positive, more planned, more productive to please God, and giving up on God all together in complete resignation to eventually getting the chop anyway!

I find all talk of ‘making next year better’, ‘becoming the real you’ or being a ‘better Christian’ irrelevant now.

Maybe that is Jesus’ point. He wants to totally disarm all our attempts to be good for him, to “work for God” or “be a better Christian” as if there is such a thing and such a demand from him. I suspect Jesus wants to remove any belief that we can make our 2018 better, we can make ourselves more fruitful by our own imaginations and loves and skills.

How so? Well, we need to hear what prompted this parable.

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. 2 Jesus answered, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? 3 I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. 4 Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them – do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.’

So, this little parable was spoken to a people who knew about the brutality and suffering of life. They knew of two terrible tragedies and those tragedies forced them to ask big questions of God.

Pontus Pilate apparently dealt with a group of local rebels by executing them and mixing in some of their human blood with that of the regular sacrificial animals’ blood they had offered to God at the holist place on earth – the Temple. This would make them unclean after their death, the worst possible way to treat the dead – a complete desecration of all that is sacred and Jewish. This would be worse than burning the Australian flag in the middle of the MCG on ANZAC Day.

Then there were this other group of eighteen people who had apparently been in the wrong place at the wrong time and lost their lives when a stone structure in the city fell on them (the Tower of Siloam).

The inevitable questions come: Did they cop that freak accident or suffer that unholy desecration and have their lives snuffed out because they were particularly bad people and God was finally getting them?

Jesus says to both the state sanctioned punishment for rebellion and the completely accidental death, one truth.

“But unless you repent, you too will all perish”.

In the innocent suffering and the brutality and fragility of human life., “Repent”. There is only one way to live beyond the fear of getting the chop from God, or the slavish attempt to stave off an angry God or find a way out of complete resignation in life: “Repent”, says Jesus.

“Repent” does not mean “be good” or “feel sorry” or suffer more positively! “Repent” means seeing it differently, being persuaded to take on a different understanding, a new stance, a new perspective. It is not trying harder to escape condemnation but a response to the truth that there is now no condemnation for those who are already “in Christ” (Roman 8;1)

The one speaking the parable to people who know human suffering and its many questions will suffer human brutality and condemnation to death to triumph over it so that others may by faith triumph too. So, repentance does not come from within you. To repent is only possible because the Lord creates it by his Word spoken into our heart by means of his Holy Spirit.

Whatever 2018 holds, the basic daily approach is repentance. The rest takes care of itself. The home base is always Jesus and his Word, no matter how alive or dead you fell, how well things are going or how hard the suffering.

What I hear is that there is only one means to deal with whatever happens in a new year. It is the year lived in the grace and peace only Jesus can give. All good fruit comes from that.

How so? At the end of the parable there is this other character introduced by Jesus. It is himself.

8 ‘“Sir,” the man replied, “leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig round it and fertilise it. 9 If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.”’

We have another year of reprieve! You may feel dead and very fruitless, but the garden is still tending you! He has not given up on you yet. Your year is not dependent on you bearing fruit single-handedly without water or nutrient. But only with his food – water, word, bread wine and community of peace.

What am I going to do with New Year this year? I will ask this Jesus to help me live a daily repenting, turning to him, seeking his word, hearing him and his people’s voice of the Gardner who has me and the fruit of my life in his hands.

I pray tonight you receive your Saviour who tends you, gives you living water, makes you grow in his grace for another four seasons in any kind of weather.