Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne
1 Corinthians 10.1-13; Luke 13.1-9
“but unless you repent, you will all perish
If I’m being honest, I didn’t much like today’s readings when I sat down to prepare my sermon. ‘I know it’s Lent’, I thought to myself, ‘but surely we could have been set something a bit more hopeful than these.’ I’m not sure that I enjoy them any the more this morning.
Repentance, by
Nicholas Roerich (1917). Hangs in the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York City.
But real religion, which actually sheds light on the human condition, is more than uplifting spiritual Prozac. I don’t think you’re always meant to enjoy what you read in the Bible, or always to be lifted up by it. Some of the most important things for healthy and wholesome life aren’t uplifting—like going to the dentist, or eating your greens.
A Bible that only ever gave us a lift would be a Bible that only made sense in a world where everything always turned out right in the end. But the good guys don’t always win, mistakes sometimes have awful consequences, and sometimes life is just hard.
These are also an awkward pair of readings to preach 0n because they seem to disagree with each other. St Paul warns that those who stray from God’s path risk being punished by Him; Jesus, in contrast, says the victims of a building collapse were no more sinners than anyone else, and nor were the victims of persecution by the tyrannical King Herod.
Scripture isn’t a soloist, it’s a choir. If we take seriously the idea that the Bible was inspired by God, then we also need to take seriously that God caused it be written in the messy form it actually takes. If the Bible is a choir, then sometimes it sings like a Palestrina Mass, all pure intervals and authentic cadences. And sometimes the chords of Scripture’s harmonies are more challenging, like something you’d hear from Shostakovich or Benjamin Britten, or even like Schoenberg and Stockhausen. Sometimes the Bible has to speak into the dissonance that is part of real life. Sometimes the Bible has to speak into lives that have no easy answers; into our lives when there are no easy answers.
So, to understand what God is saying to us through His written Word in our own lives, in our own time and place, we need patient discernment, to listen to what God is saying through the bits that sit least comfortably with one another, and the bits that sit least comfortably with us. We need humility too, because we may not always understand what God is saying to us through the Bible. We also need to understand that what God says to us may change through our lives as we change—today’s life-giving new insight may become stale and deadening over time. God may often ask us to change direction.
And that’s where we see the harmony in this awkward pairing of readings. Both agree that the Christian life is about repentance. Repentance is a very loaded word, but it simply means to turn around, and start living as God calls us to. Repentance should be a journey that lasts throughout our lives, and it may be one where we may need to change direction repeatedly to get to where God is calling us. Sometimes following God’s call is like driving at seventy on a motorway—but usually it’s like finding our way through a maze of winding lanes that twist and turn. God never changes, but the world changes and we change—or we should change, or else we become stale.
But if we’ve genuinely been doing our best to live a Christian life, how do we know how to turn, and when? We could try, you know, praying—not necessarily in any formal way, although formal prayers can help, but simply taking the time regularly to ask God how He wants us to live for Him, and taking the time to listen for His answer.
That isn’t the only reason to be regular in prayer. Life is hard sometimes—ask for God’s help with it. More than that, there aren’t always immediate solutions to our problems. At the Lent course the other night, somebody said that the one prayer they always found was answered was for strength to endure through difficulties. Sometimes doing good for others means enduring hardship ourselves. Some problems just aren’t possible to solve – problems with our health as we age being perhaps the most common that I encounter.
Now, everybody, whatever their faith, goes through rough patches in life. As St Paul tells the Corinthians: “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone.” Mostly, the problems that affect Christians affect everyone else too.
Yet some Christians in this country today seem to want to be persecuted. They’re desperate to see every loss of influence as sign of the end times—but nobody in this country is persecuted for being a Christian.
Are you grateful for your freedom to practice your faith without fear? Have you thanked God for that freedom? Never forget how lucky we are. The strange reference in today’s Gospel reading to “the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices” remind us of the casual cruelty of the régime under which God became human in Christ. Such brutality still exists, and it is the lot of many Christians to live under such cruel tyrannies.
What we face as Christians in this country is something far less dangerous, and far less glamourous, but also more insidiously corrosive—indifference. As the famous poem goes:
When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by.
They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
It seems very up-to-date, but Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the great Anglican divine, wrote that in 1918. Little has changed.
Perhaps today’s Gospel reading makes us uncomfortable because it tells of something we actually should worry about—that despite our freedom to proclaim our faith and live Christian lives, we seem be bearing little fruit for God. The parable’s meaning seems pretty clear—those who claim to be a branch of God’s organism but bear no fruit might find they’re given a last chance before being cut down! That was true of the religion of the Great Temple at Jerusalem, which disappeared forever just decades after Jesus walked the Earth. Might it be true of our Church in our times too?
So perhaps a question we need to ask God is in which direction we need to turn to start bearing fruit? Clearly we live at a time when the Church in our own country has failed to bear fruit. It lacks vision and seems to be blown on the winds of one media obsession after another. It clearly needs to repent, to change direction. I wish I could give you a clear answer about how, but in a world that demands results today, we need to be patient in prayer, patient in reading the Bible, patient in administering and receiving the sacraments, and allow God to direct us in His good time.
In our own lives, I hope we are already bearing fruit in the humble, everyday, ways that are usually what we’re truly called to. But if we want to bear more fruit, we likewise need to be patient in prayerful discernment, and regular in reading the Bible and receiving Holy Communion.
So, pray to God to grant you strength to endure what you must, and to grant you and the whole Church vision to turn in the right direction so we can bear fruit for Him in an often indifferent world.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for evermore. Amen.
Top image: a bend in Iceland’s Highway 36 north of Selfoss. © Gerry Lynch, 16 April 2025.
