Sinners

1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

I don’t really want to think of myself as a sinner. Do you?

Some of us have been fortunate enough to encounter the kind of church tradition where calling ourselves sinners is a way to really deeply appreciate the gifts and love and mercy of God. Others of us have been injured by church traditions that have used the term as a weapon: a label to divide, reject or isolate people. Many of us are simply uncomfortable around the term, not sure what’s actually a sin, or a sinner. Or steeped in the culture of tolerance and self-esteem that makes it seem wrong – either mean or offensive, and certainly “judgmental” – to call anyone a sinner, even ourselves.

But whatever your background; whatever your comfort level with your understanding of sin and the label of sinner, we’re going to have to wrestle with it today, because both Jesus and Paul are calling us – all of us – sinners.

Paul and Jesus are both challenging the first-century equivalents of the modern notion that you and I – most people – are basically good people, who make some bad decisions, and can fix them.

Paul is trying to show the Corinthian community that being pretty sure of your own righteousness – pretty sure you’ve protected yourself from sin – is close to a guarantee that you’re actually riding for a fall. That, in fact, you’re in the middle of both sin and denial.

Jesus challenges the local gossip and news network that is repeating the common idea that the victims of disaster and massacres brought it on themselves. These days, we tend to overtly or unconsciously blame poor preparation or poor choices for accidental deaths, or death from disease, while first century Israel looked to see how the dead had offended God, but the impulse is the same.

“The Galileans killed by Pilate in the middle of their worship? The folks who died in the tower collapse?” Jesus says, “They were no worse sinners than you. In fact, you – all of you listening right now – are going to experience the same bad death unless you repent in a hurry.”

Jesus sounds remarkably, well, “judgmental” here. Like a fire and brimstone preacher. This isn’t the merciful, tolerant, comforting Jesus we’d like to hear.

Except it is.

Judgement – God’s judgment, which Jesus is preaching today – is actually an act of mercy. Because judgment – God’s judgment – measures us against God’s standard of righteousness and shows us accurately how we’re doing. God’s judgment shows us what we’re doing right, even if the world around us doesn’t recognize it. And God’s judgment shows us how and where we fall short of God’s righteousness, which is measured in selfless love and generosity; unbiased, generous justice; and faithfulness to God and to God’s will and work.

God’s judgment is the honest mirror that means we don’t have to try to lie to ourselves to look better. In that honest mirror, we can see all of what is wrong in us not as punishment for our failures, but as the pain God is longing to heal. We can see all of what is right in us not as fragile success, but as enduring gifts of God’s love. And we can see that what’s right and wrong in us is not always what we think it is.

I want to be a good person. I expect you do, too. I hate to admit that I’m personally responsible for any small or serious wrong in the world, because guilt is a nasty, slimy, painful feeling, and I want to protect myself from it. Maybe some of you feel the same.

So I don’t want to hear Jesus call me a sinner.

Except maybe I do.

Because when Jesus calls us sinners, warns us that we are worse off than a lot of the people we are tempted to judge (and yes, we’re all tempted that way, whether you notice or not), and warns us that our sin is enough to kill us…. Well, Jesus is the only person I trust to say that looking out entirely for my interest, and not his own.

I’ve often heard it said that Jesus tells his fig tree parable today to remind us that Jesus wants and works to save us from God’s righteous wrath.

But I suspect there’s something else that Jesus meant.

I think Jesus would like us to be the gardeners in this story. To recognize that our souls are meant to bear God’s fruit, and that God can’t wait forever for us to start growing.
(Well, God has forever, but we don’t.) To recognize the urgency, and make a special effort to tend our souls, to dig the soil we’re rooted in to bring fresh air and nourishment. To spread a little manure – let honest reflection and repentance bring nourishment out of the discards and waste in our lives. To accept God’s love not as a blank check, but as an invitation to grow and give and share now, and to accept God’s judgment whether we do or don’t.

Lent is a good time for this. A time of “self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting and self-denial” (to quote the Ash Wednesday service) which is what brings the nourishment, the fertilizer, out of our lives’ manure.
From time to time, in Lent, I turn back to the Ash Wednesday service in the prayer book and pray over the Litany of Penitence (p 267-69), reflecting on how I, in my own life, do these things we confess together, on who is hurt by them, and how I might accept God’s help to change.

The Litany of Penitence reminds me that certainly there are things I do wrong and must change in myself. But also that we all live lives that are too broken, and in a world that is too broken, for us to fix it by ourselves. And seeing that brokenness clearly lets us see what healing and help we must ask God to give.

Lent is also a good time for reading scripture: reading the testament of both God’s judgment and God’s love through many generations, so we can recognize it in our own.

Jesus wants us to know ourselves as sinners not so that we feel terrible, but because if we cannot see for ourselves what is wrong we will never be able to see the healing God is offering.

If we cannot see ourselves as sinners, we cannot see ourselves as saved.

And though seeing my flaws and faults in the honest mirror of God’s judgment is enough to make me cry, refusing to see that truth is enough to make God weep.

But when we do see – when the voice of Jesus calling us sinners rings lovingly true in our ears and hearts – then we can accept the radical gift of healing and salvation that actually transforms our hearts and lives.

I’m not going to tell you it’s easy.

Sometimes that healing is a lot of work: changing our habits and lives, seeking forgiveness, working to heal what we’ve broken.
Sometimes it’s challenging just because of how hard it is to truly believe in our own helplessness in the face of subtle, everyday evil.
Sometimes salvation is hard because of how difficult it is to be vulnerable enough to accept the help God offers, in our hearts, or through the hands and words of others.

But Jesus wants us to know that hard as that honesty and helplessness is, it is full of joy. Paul wants us to know the same thing.

Both of them call us to see ourselves in God’s honest mirror so that we can see how much God’s healing grace and gift of life can carry us beyond our own power or imagination.

And to open ourselves to God’s joy – and our own – when we know and accept that all the brokenness, shame, and failure within us can be healed, that we can be – in fact, we have been – saved.

So we can rejoice in being known to God, to ourselves, and even to others as sinners, accepting from God the gift of that identity that shows us all our brokenness filled up by love.