"Seek the Lord While He Might Be Found."

A Sermon for Lent 3, Year C: Isaiah 55:1-9, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 and Luke 13:1-9

Sometimes writing for this Substack comes after some of my other writing obligations, like being asked to preach. Because it is Lent and I have the training, churches feel a little more free to impose themselves and ask if it is ok to assign me a text, or, in this case, texts. Writing for sermons is different that my usual writing here as I don’t read them and they are for a general audience. The point of writing is to work out the language, the flow, the transitions and allows you to be more careful in what you say that simply speaking off the cuff. But what will be heard Sunday morning will vary a fair bit from what is on the page. Substack is telling me it will take 15 minutes to read. But I can almost guarantee you that the sermon will last 20-25 minutes. Those extra 10 minutes are all extemporaneous. Even so, I thought my readers might appreciate reading the text. What follows is what I will take up to the pulpit with me. What the congregation hears might be something altogether different. If you are interested, let me know, and I might try to record it as if I were preaching. That may or not go well. Before you continue, read the following texts. They are the readings for the third Sunday in Lent, Year C.

Isaiah 55:1-9

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

Luke 13:1-9

Most of us today really don’t believe in the judgement of God. We say we do and many of us who call ourselves Christians intellectually acknowledge that Christ is going to return and God is going to judge the world, but when push comes to shove, we don’t live like we believe this. This is one of the great lies of the evil one, that God’s judgement isn’t going to happen. It is also one of the great lies of our society, of our culture.

In my recent messages, one of the themes that keeps coming up is the subtle ways that we as Christians are influenced by the world. The society around us is defined by a belief in human progress. This idea is woven into almost everything. There are the obvious forms, that of technological progress and the so-called capitalist free market.

The idea is basically that if we apply ourselves as human beings, we can, little by little, make the world a better place. We can harness the power of science and technology, the power of the market and we will be able to cure disease, solve the societal problems we face and bring about a material abundance that will end scarcity and ensure that everyone has enough and more.

Much of the idea of human progress is built on the idea that we as human beings are at the centre of history. It seems like a strange thing to say. Of course, human beings are at the centre of history. We are the ones doing stuff, right?

But it wasn’t always this way. At one time, history belonged to God. All human events happened under God’s watch and under his care. There was sin in the world, but we as human beings were called to trust and believe that God had a plan to save us as human beings and also save his creation.

Throughout time people have chipped away this belief. If God is good, why do bad things happen? And so, we as human beings began to walk away from God. We decided to take things into our own hands. Sometimes we did it, using the language of faith. We are building the kingdom of God. There is, unfortunately a short distance from trying to reveal the kingdom of God in the world and us building a worldly kingdom, but in God’s name.

And as we talked about a few months ago, the biblical understanding of the way time works is different from the way that we as moderns think about time under the influence of the ideas of progress and human history. If you remember, the modern world looks at events through the lens of cause and effect. I do something and it has an effect. It’s a pretty straight forward idea. We look at the spiritual life in much the same way. Getting close to God involves making good decisions that lead to good effects and little by little our life improves.

But as we discussed, this may work well for science and technology, but when it comes to spiritual realities it is all backwards. When you make a choice today, you are not just choosing an immediate effect. When something goes wrong in our lives, and we will see this with our gospel text, we ask ourselves, what did I do? Is God punishing me for something I did? We think in terms of cause and effect.

It is possible that what is happening in your life is related to something you did. But, in spiritual realities, when you make a choice, you are choosing not just the immediate effect, but the end result of that choice. Basically, there is one choice, do you choose to obey God or not. One leads to life and the other leads to death, eternal death. Once that choice is made, that end begins to reveal itself in our lives. Unfortunately, once that choice is made, there is nothing you can do about it; death, destruction, and chaos all begin to reveal themselves in your life.

Here is the real kicker. The problem for humanity is that this choice was already made for us. We as human beings only got one shot at it. It seems unfair. But we don’t make the rules. This is where it comes back to the question of who is in charge of things? We as human beings like to put ourselves at the centre of human events, making ourselves the heroes. And we want to judge God.

But God said to Adam and Eve that they were forbidden from eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The consequence of that would be that death would enter the world. What this means is that the end of man is now death. And this end now begins to reveal itself everywhere in the world.

And this end begins to affect things today. This end is the final judgement of God. Every disaster that you see. Every tragedy that happens. Every inexplicable bad thing that happens to seemingly good people is all part of the revelation of the final judgement of God.

Events don’t make sense to us. We are wired to think in terms of cause and effect. If something bad happens to me, it must be because of something I did wrong. Or if that person over there is suffering in some way, it must be because they sinned. Or perhaps their parents sinned? We want things to make sense. Or God is being mean or unfair. We judge God to be the bad guy.

It is hard for us to grasp the idea, in a practical experiential way, that every day we are experiencing the judgement of God for a choice made by Adam and Eve long, long ago. We want to make immediate connections.

But it is also hard for us to grasp that all of these bad things that happen are a form of grace. It would have been perfectly just for God to have brought death on Adam and Eve. But he didn’t. But because of the love of God, the mercy of God, his own greatness and glory, his great patience and forbearance, God gave us time.

And he gave us a way to secure a different ending for ourselves. He gave of himself, his own Son, to live, die and be risen again for us. And for now, we have the time to repent and acknowledge that our lives are trapped. We are in sin. Our end is death, eternal death. And this death is revealing itself all around us in ugly, painful, destructive ways. Our experience is one of misery.

But the world tells us that we can take care of this ourselves. We have pills that can take care of your misery. With enough technological advances we can overcome all the problems that humanity faces, even death. We will end hunger, disease, injustice, all of it. Little by little, step by step, we can make small advancements and eventually we can overcome all our obstacles.

But the truth is we can’t. This is the fundamental realization.

And so, when we read a story like the one in Luke 13, we as moderns have two basic thoughts. What went wrong? And then, how can we fix it, so it doesn’t happen again? Sometimes we will ask spiritual questions. Why did God allow this to happen? And sometimes, like the people who were questioning Jesus, we ask what did they do to deserve this? Often, we will blame God.

But Jesus tells us that this is wrong way to understand the terrible things that happen all around us. They are the revelation of God’s judgement over mankind. They are reminders of what our true end is. It could have just as easily have happened to us. They are no more or less deserving of eternal death than we are. After the sin of Adam and Eve, there are no “good people.”

Every bad thing that happens to us is a revelation of the judgement of God. If you want to put it into modern terms, they reveal the archetype of Judgement. So, Jesus tells the people:

“Unless you repent, you too will perish.”

This is your reminder that you have been given a grace, a mercy. Time. You have been given time to get right with God.

This then frames the next story. The tree in the vineyard. It isn’t producing fruit. The obvious implication is that if you have repented, and you have put your faith in Christ, then this needs to start showing itself in your life. You need to be revealing the salvation of God in your life. You are a new creation in Christ. You have been raised from the dead in Christ. If it is genuine, it will show itself in your life. You need to bear the fruit of repentance and faith.

You have been given time. The axe is at the base of the tree. Make use of the time you have been given.

Paul makes the same point in 1 Corinthians 10. God saved his people and brought them out of Egypt and through the sea and provided for them in the desert; and, yet they were not allowed to enter the promised land because they did not bear the fruit of the salvation of God. Instead, they sinned, and God condemned them to die in the desert. And again, this is a warning to us to get right with God, stay right with God and produce fruit in our lives.

But there is a promise here. Even though we experience the judgement of God all around us in the form of temptations, another mercy of God, in addition to time, is that he always gives us a path through. No temptation will be so bad that we cannot bear it. The avenue for repentance, faith and new life is always open to us. God never closes us off. Salvation, whether in the big picture or in the day-to-day hurdles and temptations of our life, is always available to us.

These passages are meant to leave us with a sense of urgency. We don’t know the day or the hour. We don’t know when our life will be demanded of us. We don’t know when the final day is to come.

But we have been given the word that today we have time.

“Seek the Lord while he may be found;

call on him while he is near.”

Understand that you have been given something you don’t deserve. You have time to get right with God, to repent and believe and to begin revealing who you are in Christ. The fruit of repentance and faith is showing the world that you are a new creation in Christ.

It’s easy to get distracted. It’s easy to forget this. It’s easy to grow complacent. This is what Lent is about. A regular reminder of the core realities of the human condition and how we are to respond.

God himself will remind us. His judgement will reveal itself in our life or in the world around us. It may be nothing we have done, or they have done. But it is a reminder. Today is the day to seek God, because you may not have tomorrow.