Pour Some Manure on Me, Church

March 23, 2025 - The Third Sunday in Lent

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. It’s good to be back with you in our nave again today. A huge thank you to Ellen for coordinating this renovation, to all of you who came out yesterday to help get us set up again, and to everyone really, for being so flexible these last two weeks. It looks good in here, doesn’t it? As some of you know, my Lent this year got off to a lousy start, stuck in bed (and in the bathroom) for a week with a brutal intestinal illness. There’s something appropriate about being a frail shell of your usual self on Ash Wednesday, when we are reminded of our own mortality, but I’d rather not experience that again next year. Thank you to Father Jeff for filling in for me while I was down for the count, and thank you to Karen for bringing the good news last week, with your determination to do what God was calling you to do. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Today’s lectionary readings struck me as odd when I first came to them in my return to sermon writing after a few weeks away, and I began to regret not asking Karen to preach this week instead. (Ha.) In a flip of what we usually have in our readings, this morning’s Old Testament passage is a familiar one with God encouraging the previously unknown Moses from a miraculous burning bush while answering the prayers of his people. The New Testament passage is far less familiar, and it has Jesus at his most confounding and confusing. Usually, we find the Old Testament less well-known and the Gospel with a clearer message of good news for us today, but not this week. Paul doesn’t make it easy for us this morning either in 1 Corinthians, with a perplexing description of their Jewish ancestors following a spiritual rock that was Christ, and then God striking people down anyway, including 23,000 people thanks to their sexual immorality, a reference to an even less well-known story in the book of Numbers. We won’t get into Paul this morning... maybe in three years when the lectionary cycles through this text again.

I have, however, been to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the mountains of Egypt, the oldest continuously habited Christian monastery, with a history dating back over 1700 years. St. Catherine’s is the long-assumed home of this particular burning bush in Exodus, which has now grown to be quite large since it has been cared for and protected for centuries. Christian and Jewish traditions both revere this place/this plant where God came into the world in a unique way, so they have turned its location into holy ground... but for me, when I visited as a 21-year-old college student, the visit was not particularly holy. It felt oddly consumeristic, with tourists lining up for photos in front of the bush and a robust gift shop nearby. Something was off. I was stuck on that off feeling as I read that text this week, so preaching about the burning bush did not feel right for me today either.

So, what message do I think that God has for us today in the middle of Lent, on our return to our nave, and just a few weeks before Holy Week? Well, I landed in an odd place, I think led by the Holy Spirit, but you can be the judge of that. I landed on manure.

Jesus mentions manure in our gospel story today, and I told my oldest daughter to listen up, because you will rarely hear a story, let alone a sermon, about animal poop in church. This is it, Lily. You’re welcome. The mention of manure here in Luke 13 brought to my mind, as a child of the suburbs, the image of Biff Tannen, a memorable character from the 1985 movie Back to the Future. Biff crashes his car into a truck of manure while chasing Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly in multiple Back to the Future movies; manure is kind of his thing. But if you are a gardener or a farmer, or if you have taken care of your lawn better than I have, and especially if you were living in the first century, you likely have a very different relationship with manure. More on manure in a minute.

Let’s rewind a bit. This gospel story, this pericope from Luke, it is one of a few found only in this one gospel. It’s not a story we see from different angles; this is all we have. Jesus is speaking to crowds “gathering by the thousands,” according to Luke 12, and here we find some Jews coming to him complaining about Pilate, their brutal Roman governor. Pilate has a well-known role in Jesus’s Crucifixion – that’s a teaser for Holy Week, so please do come back – but here, we find out that he was killing Jews in their own temple, while they were making sacrifices to God, mixing their blood with that of the animals they were offering as acts of repentance. The brutality and evil of that act may put our current difficulties with rulers in some perspective; the Jews were angry about injustice and oppression and they came to Jesus likely expecting an angry response.

But Jesus, of course, does a Jesusy thing. He does not tell them to fight fire with fire. And he does not confirm to them that they must have done something wrong to incur God’s displeasure or wrath, a popular notion in first-century Judaism. He does not tell them that because God does not work that way. Instead, he has something new to teach them.

You can read our 1 Corinthians passage today very wrongly, as many Christians today do, and say that Paul tells us that “God will not give us more than we can handle.” There are many in this room who know that platitude to be false, or at least misguided. The thought of God giving us, his beloved image bearers, anything bad or testing or traumatic comes straight out of Jewish tradition, made most clear in the book and story of Job. Likewise, in today’s gospel, Jesus is tired of the Jews thinking for generation after generation that “God blesses those who do good and curses those who do evil,” that karma is real, that somehow our right and wrong actions decide our fate, or that they at least persuade God to treat us differently. So, Jesus does not engage in their entirely reasonable frustration with Pilate here. Instead, he uses this chance to remind them that the world is indeed unjust, that the Jews who were killed by Pilate did not deserve death, just as those who died when a tower fell on them did not deserve death. Instead, they must do what they can do right now, which, of course, he says is to repent. Jesus asks them to repent in the face of injustice. Jesus tells them to repent while facing death.

Now I know that repentance is a loaded word in twenty-first-century Christianity. I know it comes with some bad “Churchy” baggage, the baggage of judgment, the baggage of purity culture, the baggage of not being seen as good enough or worthy of love. But Lent is the season of repentance, and so we need to talk about it. Jesus here is calling the Jews, calling all of us to repent, to turn away from the ways that have kept us in darkness and to start following his ways, to start following God in the way of life and light and love. It is through this repentance, this turning toward God, that the world will be changed. If we do not know what to pray specifically for, we begin by repenting, by praying for more God.

To describe this repentance he calls us to, Jesus tells a parable, one about fig trees and yes, Lily, about manure. I’ve already established that I’m a suburban/city boy and know very little about taking care of plants, so I identify with this man in this parable who has a fruitless fig tree planted in his vineyard and is ready to cut it down. That makes sense to me, it has not been producing fruit. The gardener though, he knows better. The gardener isn’t giving up. He has hope for the fig tree. What the fig tree needs is proper care. He offers to dig around it, to tend to it, to put manure on it, to give it what it needs to grow. Now he admits, that even with this new direction, with this care, the tree may not produce fruit in the next year, and maybe then he will cut it down. But he has hope that it will.

This fig tree in Jesus’s often-forgotten parable about repentance, it cannot change on its own. It cannot miraculously start growing fruit and somehow save itself. It cannot try harder. It has been without fruit for three years and the owner is ready to give up. But the gardener knows that with the proper care, with a change in direction, with a little outside help, the fig tree has a good chance to grow good fruit. With some digging and a little manure, the fig tree that was hurting, that was lost, that was broken, it can thrive.

Friends, there is grace, there is patience, there is hope, there is good news in this story about repentance and a little digging and a little manure. Jesus knows that there is plenty of injustice in the world of the first-century Jews, and also in ours. People are dying, life feels unfair and out of control. His message in such difficult and unprecedented times, then and now is simply this: repent. Turn toward God.

Our continuous turning away from the things of darkness will shine a much-needed light into the tumultuous world, and that light will change the world. And we cannot do it on our own. We need the digging, we need the manure, we need others to come around us and care for us, to build us up, so that we can indeed produce good fruit.

Here at Epiphany, by being a part of this church community, we have plenty of people willing to pour manure on us every single day we show up. (Ha.) Our very act of being here this morning is a recognition that the ways of the world, the ways of Pilate, the ways of consumerism, the ways of fighting evil with evil and fire with fire... they do not work. Instead, we repent, we turn toward God together, praying for more God in our lives and in our world. And we do it here through the manure of worship, of brunch, of formation, of coffee hour, of book studies, of prayer, of our healing service. It’s all good manure.

We do this repentance thing together, you see, shovels in hand and manure nearby, tending to each other as best we can, and always with God’s grace and patience and help, with the promise of producing the good fruit that will change our lives and our world.

Our recessional hymn today echoes Exodus, asking Pharoah to let God’s people go. The final verse stands true for us today, as much in bondage to the ways of the world around us as Moses’s people were enslaved by Pharoah. It reads: “Let us all from bondage flee and let us all in Christ be free.” Friends, I pray that we continue to commit ourselves to acts of turning toward the light and love of God, that we commit to repentance, to digging and caring and tending to each other.

Only then, in Christ, will we all be free.

Amen.