3rd Sunday in Lent
Texts: Luke 13:1-9;
Isaiah 55:1-9; 1 Cor 10:1-13
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y6Yzz23_ONM
Sermon Take-Home Notes
REPENTING OUR WAY OF BEING HUMAN —
FROM VIOLENCE TO NONVIOLENCE
“No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Twice Jesus repeats these rather harsh words. Someone in the crowd wants his reaction to Pilate and his Roman soldiers killing some fellow Galileans. Do they expect righteous indignation from Jesus? Instead of showing outrage, Jesus turns it back on all of them: “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” Then, for good measure, Jesus adds his own scandalous scenario, a tower falling on 18 Galileans. It sounds like it could have been simply an accident. But we know about falling towers, too. The Trade Center towers had some help falling . . . from Osama bin Laden’s terrorists. We also know of buildings collapsing with fatal results from shoddy building practices. Whatever the cause of this tower’s killing 18 people — we simply don’t know — Jesus once again turns it back on the crowd gathered with him that day: “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
What is Jesus doing here? Here, again, we might need to first unlearn the lens we were given to read the Bible. Many of us were taught to hear repentance as being sorry for our sins so that Jesus can forgive us and take us to heaven when we die. If we read this passage with that old lens, then we will, I think, fail to understand it. When Jesus is calling for repentance, he is issuing a general call to his people to change the path they’re on in order to avoid disaster. His people had been suffering terribly under the nationalism of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, the most popular way to address this suffering was to whip up support for their own Jewish nationalism, to fight fire with fire. This has been building throughout Jesus’ life. Shortly before Jesus was born, there had been an armed rebellion in Galilee that Rome had put down with great brutality. Their nationalistic efforts had failed back then with horrific, costly results. Thousands had been killed and whole villages destroyed. Jesus had grown up in this climate of Jewish nationalism, and it wasn’t going away. This passage needs to be read and understood in that context. Another smaller version of an uprising had apparently happened recently, and people in the crowd wanted to know where Jesus stood on such things.
Wow, does he ever tell them. . . . “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” Do you see how these words make a different point when in the context of pending doom? Jesus is not there to support any Jewish nationalistic campaigns to combat Roman Nationalism. He is there to offer them a completely different way, based in an understanding of their God as completely nonviolent. His call to repentance is a call to them to radically change their way of thinking so that they might choose a different path. Because the path they are on will lead to utter and complete destruction. If they didn’t repent, if they didn’t choose to find in their faith in the covenant God Yahweh a different path than nationalism, then they would all perish as those zealous Galileans had. Tragically, about thirty years later, that’s exactly what happened. The Jews chose the nationalistic path of going to war with Rome, and they were utterly destroyed.
About a year ago, I introduced you to a book by my friend Brian McLaren which hadn’t come out yet. He had sent me an advance copy. It has an imposing title: Life after Doom. The subtitle is a tiny bit more hopeful: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart.1 It is truly a book that carries a similar message as the one that Jesus does in our Gospel Reading today. Things might even be worse for us. If we don’t repent from our own version of nationalistic ventures, we will all perish as have the many nationalistic civilizations before us. And our version of nationalism includes a couple of addictions that complicate things even more. We are addicted to fossil fuels for energy consumption and to a form of capitalism that encourages seeing ourselves as primarily “consumers.” Our current form of nationalism tries to live in complete denial of both these addictions, adding to the layers of destructive outcome. Jesus’ call to repentance still applies to us, but we are adding to the ways in which we will all perish due to climate change. Unless we repent, unless we change some of our current ways, we will all perish as the many nationalistic regimes before us.
OK, so how is any of this Good News? Obviously, it’s not unless we do repent, unless we do change our current way of being human. God is giving us more time to have manure spread on us that we might finally bear fruit. That we might finally repent and change our way from nationalism. The Good News, then, is that Jesus did come to lead us precisely into the new and better way of being human, a way that finally frees us from the age-old perils of nationalism.
It’s a path that tends to be closer to the wisdom of indigenous peoples, who live in closer communion with each other and with the land. I believe indigenous peoples have wisdom about what we need to do to change, precisely because, like the Jews of Jesus’ time, they have lived for a long time under nationalistic oppression. So they tend to have a covenant way of life that experiences all of life as grace, as a gift from God to be cherished and cared for, not as something we somehow deserve for which we forcefully dominate it. We must learn to read our own biblical stories through the lens of the indigenous peoples who are colonized and dominated by the nationalistic empires, not through the lens of the colonizers. It’s a hard thing to do! Jesus speaks harshly because he knows so many of his fellow Jews find the way of nationalism compelling, their own Jewish nationalism to combat the Roman nationalism. Jesus is holding up for them a different way to understand their own tradition which will lead them onto a different path to peace.
This business of switching lenses is hard for us, too. We have grown up understanding the world more through the lens of the colonizers than of the colonized. We’ve found it dangerous to hear a message against our colonizing. So our lens for reading the Bible and or faith tradition makes things easier for us. That basic message about repentance as being sorry for our sins so that God will forgive us and take us to heaven. (What Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” in the face of the rising nationalism in 1930’s Germany.2) Let me be clear again: it’s not that God doesn’t grace us with the promise of life after death. It’s that this business of repentance is about so much more. It’s about changing our way of being human so that we might avert the terrible consequences of Nationalism.
In your Sermon Notes, I offer an extended quote from the book about the importance of reading the Bible through the right lens. I urge you to read it. I think you’ll see how it captures the spirit of today’s Gospel, the sense of how it is we need to repent in order to avert looming disaster for ourselves and our planet.
I’d like to end my sermon this morning on a more personal note — my own experiences with “repentance” in my lifetime. My first struggle with what repentance means came in the context of my Dad’s struggle with alcoholism. He increasingly became aware that he had a real problem with alcohol, like his father before him. He tried to deny it because his father’s problems were different than his own. But, as the oldest, I felt it was my responsibility to help him to see that his drinking was hurting our family . . . was hurting me. When he first began to address his alcoholism, including the first ten years of getting treatment and going through relapses, it seemed to me that he had a deficient sense of repentance — one that I’ve already referenced a couple times this morning. Repentance seemed to primarily mean feeling sorry for one’s sins so that Jesus would forgive them and take you to heaven when you die. Repentance did not seem to mean actually changing the path of your life. There was a resignation that ones sinfulness could not be cured until after we go to heaven. Until then, we human beings could not really expect repentance to mean drastic changes in this life. My Dad seemed to welcome this view of repentance, as he failed several times to live a life of sobriety. He was an alcoholic and couldn’t change that, so repentance meant at least feeling deeply sorry for it in the hopes of finally being free from it in heaven.
Well, I was not satisfied with that view of repentance. First of all, it flew in the face of the opportunity that millions of alcoholics actually experienced through the Twelve Steps program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Yes, they remained alcoholics. They could never drink without it causing grave problems, finally even death. But they could “repent” in meaningful ways and go on to lead lives of sobriety. They could choose a different path that leads to more fruitful lives for them and their loved ones. I’m happy to report that my Dad finally got this. A.A. saved his life. He was sober for the last 24 years of his life, and I’m very proud of his achievement.
But that deficient sense of repentance with which I struggled in the context of my Dad’s alcoholism goes beyond that personal experience, too. It can apply as weel to our collective lives in the ways we carry out our civilizations. If the nationalistic way of doing civilization lead to death and destruction, then let’s choose different ways. Focusing only on individual repentance doesn’t make sense to me, either, especially since so much of the biblical tradition is about the prophets speaking to the whole community.
My experience with my Dad carried over to how I read my Bible, as I studied to become, and then embarked on a now long career of being, a pastor. St. Paul, in particular, speaks of a life in Christ, a life in the Spirit, in terms of repentance in the sense of distinctly changed lives. As you know by now, I’ve come to read Paul in terms of a repentance that means we are able to choose, with the help of the Spirit, nothing less than a new and better way of being human. That is the repentance that Jesus urges this morning. We are called to help our fellow citizens understand that we must repent in order to avoid the deadly end of all previous forms of nationalism. We need to live into a better way of being human that leads to life. Next week, as we continue our Lenten journey of repentance, we see this true wholistic form of repentance through the incredible Parable of the Prodigal Son. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, March 23, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y6Yzz23_ONM
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Brian McLaren, Life after Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024).
2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the phrase “cheap grace” in chapter one, “Costly Grace,” of his book Discipleship (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 4, Fortress Press, 2001; originally published in German as Nachfolge in 1937.)
