*Isaiah 55.1-9
Psalm 63.1-8
I Corinthians 10.1-13
*Luke 13.1-9
Between Grace and Repentance
Rev. Matt Samson
A few weeks ago, I stood before you with the call of the prophet Isaiah in sight. The
prophet’s call was affirmed in the temple when on of the seraphim touched his lips with a
burning coal. The prophet’s task was to deliver a bleak message–a message of the
consequences of not returning to God’s ways, a bleak message for a people on the eve of
exile.
Today, at near the midpoint of our Lenten meditations, we encounter in Isaiah a text
from another era–a proclamation from perhaps a century and a half laterto a people now in
exile in Babylon. The consensus today is that chapters 40-55 are a block that some have even
called “The Book of Comfort” because the Persian king Cyrus is about to overrun the
Babylonians, and thos in exile will be able to return home. Chapter 40 begins with these
words:
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins. (Isaiah 40.1-2, NRSVUE)1
The larger point for Isaiah is the call for a return to the mountain that represents the
stronghold of God. This should not be confused with Zionism today, a topic for another
time, but it is a call for those in exile to return – to begin again. And this is the call is a call to
return, to begin again, much as the Hebrew people did when they left Egypt.2we should hear
echoes of the exodus of old and even of the spiritual in our hears if not our minds. “Go
down Moses, and tell ole pharaoh, ‘Let my people go.’” In Isaiah the words are more like an
1The notion of book of comfort is from John McKenzie, 1967, Second Isaiah, The Anchor Bible, New
York: Doubleday and Co. McKenzie sees the focus of second Isaiah on the mission of Israel and the role of
the servant, and less on the issue of salvation. Most of my general interpretive frame here is reflective of some
of the insights of Richard J. Clifford, 1992, Isaiah, Book of (Second Isaiah), in The Anchor Bible Dictoionary, v.
3, ed. David Noel Freedman, 490-501, Doubleday.
2For larger discussion, see Clifford, 491-492.
page 2 invitation to a homecoming, a banquet even, ”to witness to Yahweh’s victory that brought
them there.”3
Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price. (Isaiah 55.1, NRSV)
I might have the two words backwards in the sermon title, which was never my forte
to begin with. But if Jerusalem has served her time, and paid her penance, when we move
to the Gospel, we are confronted with tragedy–a seeming massacre of some Galileans by
Pilate and a building collapse, and Jesus doesn’t begin to adjudicate why as it were, “bad
things happen to good people.” He simply holds out the idea that repentance is the way
perhaps to fulfillment in life when circumstances surpass our ability to reason or to make
sense of the world around us. And Lord knows there is more than enough pain and
heartbreak to go around in our own lives and the lives of those who walk with us on the
roads that we travel.
There is a lot at stake in these passages in the middle of Lent when we reflect on
sacrifice and what it means to walk on the way to a passion, a crucifixion, and ultimately to a
resurrection. We can’t do them justice on a single Sunday morning. And you know the old
refrain in preaching (and teaching) that our proclamation (acts?) are designed “comfort the
afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” So the words do hold up: repentance and grace.
The call to repentance is ever with us, but grace is perhaps the first word, and both
the invitation to a banquet and the parable of the fig tree is an image of grace that grows out
of God’s mercy. A fig tree doesn’t bear fruit, and the owner, God in the parable, is simply
about to be rid of it but for the intervention of the caretaker. “Give it another year, and let
me see what I can do for it.” Our text ends there, but in the Gospel the journey to the
passion in Jerusalem continues. In our Lenten journey, the pregnant pause is the space for
reflection–as we await what the future brings.
There are other voices out there, but at least in the Presbyterian world, no one is
about to argue against an emphasis on grace as the last word, the ultimate word that God
speaks to humanity in sending Jesus to share our sufferings and our joys. Our hope is that in
our own times of exile–the longest night or the worst of days–that God somehow, in some
way holds us in God’s hands, and comforts us and in time sends us out again into the world
to live lives of courage and compassion. Even Paul in the passage from Corinthians for today
deigns to tell us that no test will be greater than God’s faithfulness in giving us strength to
overcome our times of testing (I Corinthians 10.13).
This is grace, a gift that comes to us from outside of ourselves with the possibility of
“mak[ing] the wounded whole,” of enabling us to move from one place to another in our
personal and spiritual lives with all confidence that God’s love is deeper and more profound
than human hatred, for some of us, even hatred of ourselves. This grace is the sign of God’s
“steadfast love and mercy” for all God’s children. So, in our tradition, we baptize our young,
putting the sign and seal of grace upon them even before they are able to know what we do.
3Clifford, 492. page 3
God’s grace, in the best part of the Christian tradition, is not, ultimately, dependent
upon our acceptance of it, our acknowledgment of it, or even our desire of it. We believe
that God is love. We believe that we are all God’s children, and the children in this place
are not my or your children, they are all our children. They, and we, are all children of the
one who calls us to be in relation to Godself. And when we look beyond what my Latin
American friends refer to as the four walls of the church, and we hear misinformation or
watch the militarization of immigration law, perhaps the first word is that there are no illegal
people in the kingdom of God. And the powers that be, even in the face of making difficult
decisions, need to be informed of that, especially by those who pretend to be Christian. The
question is what kind of world we are creating, and the texts remind us that unless there is
repentance, then we may perish.
The point is that if grace is the primary datum of the Christian faith in existential
terms–both in the creation and in calling us to community, there is more. In considering
what this grace means for the living of our lives, repentance enters the picture, and it is not
first and foremost an emphasis on sin or wrongdoing as such. In Luke, repentance is more
like an invitation to change directions and an opportunity to redirect ourselves in the
direction of God’s kingdom, the kingdom of love and justice that reverses many human
expectations when those expectations neglect consideration of God’s involvement in human
affairs. In Luke, barren women have children, outsiders become insiders, the poor and the
oppressed are those who receive good news. To repent, then, means to turn in the direction
of this news and leave behind old ways of thinking and doing. In the words of Isaiah, it
means to recognize with the prophet that “my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your
ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55.9).
How is it that God’s grace becomes active? This is no passive grace of which we
speak, a grace that we experience “in the sweet by and by.” Instead, the insistence is that
grace comes to us even now, in the midst of human history and our stuggles for what is right
and just and true in our age and in all ages to come. The German theologian Dietrich
Bonhoeffer has perhaps made the most profound and reflected upon distinction between
other-worldly and this-worldly grace when he writes of cheap and costly grace. But maybe it
is Gustavo Gutiérrez, the so-called father of liberation theology who puts it best when he
writes of a spirituality as “a way of being a Christian” or as “a manner of life that gives a
profound unity to our prayer, thought, and action.”4 This is the ebb and flow of the life of
faith. We are called, set apart, for particular tasks and we respond. Our response is never
made out of guilt or fear, but in the freedom of knowing that we are children of the living
God. At the same time, we know this is the God who accepts us but who simultaneously
insists that all that we have and all that we are be offered back to God, not for God’s own
well-being, but in service to those who have been created in God’s image.
So I’m going with grace this morning–that which we cannot earn but which is freely
given in a context were we think of God’s involvement in creating, reconciling, and
sustaining us in each new day. Accepting this grace doesn’t get us out of the dilemmas we
face, however. I like Fred Craddock’s reflection on the fig tree: “God’s mercy is still in
4Gustavo Gutíerrez, 1984, We Drink from Our Own Wells, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell,
Maryknoll, New York and Melbourned, Australia: Orbis Books and Dove Communications. Longer quote part
is from p. 88. page 4
serious conversation with God’s judgment.”5 The landscape before us changes, and God’s
mercy transcends experiences in a flawed nation-state that seems to have lost its way, ideas
of a meritocracy that blinds us to circumstances of inequality among the citizenry, or simply
wealth that buys access to a political system and allows us to treat the lives of public servants
like the toys in a child’s toy chest to be picked up, examined, and discarded when interest
wanes. No, Luke is clear in the beginning of the passage that we can’t discern why human
and natural disaster fall on some people and not on others, but the logic of mercy with a
vision of God’s kingdom reveals a different logic in the universe that commands our
attention.
In the middle of Lent, as we walk the road to the passion, repentance is simply a call
to a new way of being in the world. The invitation to the banquet in Isaiah is an open
invitation, and sometimes as we gather at the communion table we might say, “These are the
gifts of God for the people of God.” At other times, we say, “Let us keep the feast that has
been prepared.” This is a mode of sharing on the road of the Jesus way. Or it is a call to a
return from exile in which we sometimes haven’t seen the face of the other contexts of our
own ways of being. This is a reminder to turn to God’s ways. The fig tree could not have
been more barren than much of the stilted discourse that we hear around us these days. Our
task is to take up the work of the caretaker of the tree and to prepare for the banquet that is
a sign of God’s mercy to us and to all creation. Sometimes the texts are cut off too soon, and
Isaiah 55 continues:
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and the trees of the field shall clap
their hands. (Isaiah 55.12)
Let us keep the feast indeed! Amen.
5Fred B. Craddock, 1990, Luke, Interpretation: A Bible commentary for preaching and teaching,
Louisville, John Knox Press, 169.