Fruits of Repentance
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
March 14, 2004
Isaiah 55:1-9; Luke 13:1-9
I. INTRODUCTION
Just before I moved to Washington almost 13 years ago, I came down with a friend of mine to look for an apartment. It was a long weekend in which we drove down from New York and looked around for houses listed on the law school’s housing bulletin board. My friend and I called it “the weekend of the U-Turn” on account of the fact that we had to make something like 13 U-turns over the course of the weekend because we were constantly getting lost and going the wrong direction. Those of you who were on the Alternative Spring Break trip experienced something of this on Friday as I in my exhausted mentally dull state led our caravan of minivans in a number of U-turns as we looked for lunch and then later to my shame, as we got off the freeway at the wrong exit—twice.
Well, when you’re going the wrong direction there’s only one thing you can do, and that’s turn around and go the other way.
II. TEXT
It’s what Jesus is asking us to do in tonight’s Scripture lesson. Jesus is told about some Galileans “whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices”—that is, who had been killed in the midst of worshipping. He uses the incident to address questions of God’s justice, asking whether the crowd thinks those who died in this atrocity, or in the accident at Siloam, were more sinful than others. He answers the question ‘no’ but then goes on:
Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.
He then goes on to speak of a fig tree that bore no fruit. The owner of the vineyard comes and tells the gardener to cut it down because it has been barren for three years and the soil is too valuable to waste on an unproductive fig tree. The gardener pleads with him and says, “Let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”
Jesus uses this parable to instruct people about repentance. He reminds them, they have been given a second chance—they should take it, and bear the fruits of repentance.
III. REPENTANCE
What does it mean to repent?
A. Teshuvah
Well the Hebrew word that means repentance is “teshuvah” which literally means “turning around” or “turning back”—much like I was forced to do numerous times on the road. Turning around. It’s as though we are headed down the road the wrong way and Jesus calls to us “Turn around! Come back this way. I’m in this direction.”
We cannot repent until we first turn back.
B. Metanoia
In the Greek of the New Testament, the word most often used for repentance is “metanoia” which means “to undergo a change in frame of mind or heart.” That’s a lot packed into one word. But if we take it the two meanings together—Old Testament and New—we come to understand that repentance involves both a change of heart and a change of behavior. This is the repentance that Jesus is calling us to.
IV. COMMUNAL REPENTANCE AND THE CHEROKEE
We are in the middle of Lent. It is a time of preparation. A time of repentance. When we begin Lent on Ash Wednesday, it is customary to impose ashes on the heads of the members of the congregation and to say one of two things: “Remember, O Mortal, that you are dust and to dust you shall return” or “Repent and believe in the Good News.” And so we usually enter into Lent thinking about our individual need to repent, our individual sinfulness. I don’t want to talk about that tonight. We are usually aware of our own sins, even if we don’t like to admit it.
Rather I want to talk about our sins as a people.
A. The Sins of the Past
As you know, a number of us have just returned from our weeklong Alternative Spring Break trip to the Cherokee Nation in Cherokee, North Carolina. From this trip we have brought back a number of things: new understandings, new insight, new respect, and a little poison ivy, thrown in for good measure.
We had a chance to talk with Cherokee Indians and those who work with them. We had a chance to serve the Cherokee community by helping to clear out campsites for a camp to help kids build leadership and relationship skills. (Hence the poison ivy). And we had a lot of chances to reflect on the way the majority culture treated the American Indian. It’s a pretty shameful past.
Under Andrew Jackson, the United States government passed the Indian Removal Act compelling the Indians of the Southeast to be removed to lands across the Mississippi in Oklahoma. Those who had not left voluntarily earlier, were forcibly removed by the army. They were marched from North Carolina to Oklahoma on what is called the “Trail of Tears”—nearly 4,000 dying on the way.
Some of the Cherokee remained. They either hid in the mountains or were sheltered by friends. History speaks of a Cherokee named Tsali who gave his life that the remaining members of the tribe might be able to stay on their tribal land. Their descendants are the people who make up the Eastern Band of the Cherokee.
To add insult to injury, one of the counties in which the Qualla Cherokee Reservation resides is Jackson County, named after—you guessed it—Andrew Jackson, the same president who had the Cherokee forcibly removed in the 1830s.
B. The Sins of the Church
I wish I could add that the mistreatment of Native Americans was the work of the state alone. No, the Church has a history of mistreatment as well. The church took Indian children and put them in boarding schools, cut their hair, compelled them to speak English, and forced them to abandon their traditional tribal ways in order to embrace Christianity. Many of them did embrace Christianity, but found that they were often forced to choose between their identity as Christians and their identity as Cherokee. As we learned, there are still churches today that force the Indians to make this choice, woefully misconstruing Indian religion as pagan or heathen, completely missing the God-centeredness of Indian spirituality. Completely ignoring the deep spirituality and the many parallels that Indian religion shares with Christianity, many of those early Christian missionaries to the Indians took it upon themselves to rid the Indians of their Indianness in the name of progress and the Gospel.
It was shameful. Only in recent years has the Church even apologized, and even then, not all of them. The church we stayed at was one of four in the area to issue a formal apology for the sins of the past. Many have not.
You would expect that the situation would be hopeless.
C. The Sweat Lodge
And yet, there is still the opportunity for reconciliation. We all had the opportunity to participate in a sweat lodge, as an introduction to Native American spirituality. If you’re not sure what a sweat lodge is, let me explain…
A sweat lodge is a small circular hut,about eight feet across, made of bent-over branches, covered by blankets and tarps. In the center is a hole in the ground. Around the inside, in a circle are cushions. You enter through a small doorway and crawl around clockwise to your seat. There is a fire raging outside and in the fire are large stones, heated until glowing. The stones are brought into the lodge and placed in the hole. Sage, sweet grass, and tobacco are sprinkled on the stones, whereupon they rapidly turn into glowing embers, releasing a fragrant aroma. The door to the lodge is shut, and the guide begins to ladle water on the stones. The temperature increases. The humidity becomes oppressive. The Indians describe it as returning to the womb.
In the sweat lodge, you are cleansed physically and spiritually. You are purged. The heat and humidity are meant to be like the womb, preparing you for new life, preparing you to be, dare I say it, born again.
You leave a lot of things behind in that sweat lodge: guilt, pain, anger, fear.
V. THE FRUITS OF REPENTANCE
A. The Lesson of the Fig Tree
The parable of the fig tree tells us that God is giving us another opportunity to repent. It is the same lesson that we find in the reading from Isaiah that we read earlier:
…let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
In order to repent of these sins we are invited to consider new ways to have a change of heart and a change of behavior, to enter into a time of reflection about how we change our ways and repent for the sins of the past.
VI. CONCLUSION
There are times in our lives when we’re headed in the wrong direction. There are times in our lives, both as individuals and as a people that we have headed down the wrong path. God gives us plenty of opportunity to turn around. God is always willing to give us that one more year.
Over our history as a people there are a number of dead end roads that we have driven down. Roads we’ve gone down in the wrong direction. Sins of the past and the present we have not made amends for. God is calling us to turn around. God is giving us another chance to turn back, to repent of the sins of the past, and start down the road anew.
