March 20, 2022 ~ Third Sunday in Lent ~ Sermon & Zoom Worship Video Link

Zoom Video Link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/lOtELkg_asrE5DttDq7CH5gqumoj4rKfyhC7szGMMSZj6pBmEHxDGX9D0_ixKw.UGp-yLTbgZe2fswk

3^rd Lent                                                                                   03/20/22—Highland—Meute

“Fruit, Glorious Fruit”

Isaiah 55: 1-9; Psalm 63: 1-8; Luke 13: 1-9

Pearl: Each day is a new chance to be fruitful (colorful, life-giving).

Function: To encourage a spirit of always wanting and always believing that there is hope for fruit/life when it seems so very unlikely.

The barren fig tree which bore no fruit represents “hopeless” causes. The vineyard owner had enough of this “fruitless tree” so was ready to cut it down.

1. Yet one came forth, the gardener, and begged to have some more time with it. He begged for one more year’s opportunity to help it bear fruit.
   1. He did not want to give up on it. He believed. He hoped that it could renew and bear fruit again. He begged for more time. He would go to work helping it.
2. We can identify and we can think of various things that seem like this unfruitful fig tree. We can think of various hopeless causes, seeming dead ends.
   1. But can we, like the gardener, think of things yet to do and yet to try?
   1. What are our limits of patience and hopefulness? Or are there no limits?

Look for and hope for life and fruit in even the most hopeless situations because of your faith in Jesus Christ and the heaven that he revealed that God wills to be on earth.

This is the time of year when our surroundings are thankfully greening up and coming back to life again in spring. The dead of winter is giving way to life. Spring always comes!

1. Should we ever give up hoping for and looking for new life, the fruit of spring?
   1. George Orwell, who wrote the classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, was born in British India in 1903. He reached adolescence during the First World War. The Russian Revolution and the Irish War of Independence occurred in his early adulthood. Approaching the Second World War Orwell joined the Spanish Civil War in 1937 to fight fascism and support democracy. Before his death in 1945, he witnessed the rise of the Cold War and the threat of growing nuclear arsenals.
   1. While Orwell’s life was always familiar with war, living in Wallington, England in 1936, he planted a garden of roses. In his mind these roses were gifts to posterity—plants that, if they took root, would outlive the visible effect of any of our actions, for good or evil (Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit).
   1. Picture in your mind those beautiful roses in the midst of ugliness.
      1. Perhaps some are planting roses in Ukraine and in Russia.
2. While we live in a world of suffering and sadness, war and rumors of war, spring continually comes.
   1. Each spring reminds us of the opportunity for growth and for the hope of fruit again.
      1. And we will do whatever we have to do to accompany this fruitfulness, like the gardener in Jesus’ parable.
3. In the realm of God revealed by Jesus, we are prompted to seek more time, and further opportunity for a new or renewed spark of life.

Jesus’ followers always want to try again to find life and fruit. We are not defeated or dismayed permanently, because we believe things can change for the better.

1. We follow a God who is often counter-intuitive.
   1. The Prophet Isaiah wrote about buying food and drink without money.
   1. Our Lord is the God who makes a stream of water flow from a rock.
   1. Ours is the God, and this is one of my go-to passages in the bible,  whose “thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways his ways…as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are God’s ways higher than your ways, and God’s thoughts than your thoughts” (55:8, 9).
2. So we do not give up trying, hoping, or believing.
   1. One of my seminary Profs wrote about how pastoral theologian Seward Hiltner used to tell about a state-run mental hospital where hopeless cases were relegated to a back ward. The professional staff avoided this ward, making the bare minimum of visits and writing off the patients there as unsalvageable.
   1. A women’s group from a local church began, out of compassion, to visit patients in this hospital. No one told them that the patients in the back ward were abandoned cases, so they visited them regularly, bringing flowers, fresh baked cookies, prayer, cheerfulness, and mercy.
   1. Before long, some of the patients began to respond, a few of them even becoming healthy enough to move to other wards (“CC,” 3/7/’01).
      1. Followers of Jesus compassionately care and keep on believing that fruit can spring forth into life from death.

Continually look for and hope for the bloom to spring and for fruit to come in your own life, in your relationships, in churches, in nations, and even on the world stage.

Every day is a new opportunity for living life in full, fruitful color.

A high school classmate wrote about when he turned 54 and his daughter mentioned that he was getting up there. He said she wasn’t being snarky or mean because it was not her nature.

1. It was more a reflection on mortality and that his years ahead were fewer than the ones behind. He thought about her comment and brought it up to her the next day when he was driving her to school.
2. He said, “You were right about 54 being old, but you are mistaken about one crucial point. I’m not 54. I’m 100.”
   1. Then he observed that years are convenient, but poor ways to gauge life. I’m 54 years old, but I’ve lived so much more.
   1. He told his wife on their 20^th anniversary that it felt more like 40 years. He didn’t mean it as a slam. Their situations have given them a lot of time together. They share common interests and enjoy being together. For many years they had lunch together every day and dinner most nights.
   1. He wrote “time is elastic and measuring your life in brute years is pure folly. Fear not death. Fear instead the death-bed realization that you never really lived.
   1. Insinuate yourself into enough hearts and you won’t just live to be 100. You’ll live forever. (Use All the Crayons: The Colorful Guide to Simple Human Happiness, Chris Rodell, 2018.)

Every day is a new opportunity for living life in full, fruitful color. Never give up seeking the blooming fruit. Do everything you can to make it happen.