God Is Sending Us

God Is Sending Us

March 23, 2025
Third Sunday in Lent
Helen Weber-McReynolds, RWCP
Exodus 3:1-15; Ps. 103; Romans 2:1-11; Luke 13:1-9
 
           I think I have mentioned before that I used to teach Religious Ed to 6th, 7th, and 8th Graders. I really loved teaching that age because they asked a lot of questions, mostly to try to distract me from covering too much class material. But I found that if I did it right, I could get them to puzzle out how to answer their questions themselves, and learn the curriculum in the process. One concept they really grasped was the idea of repentance as a turning around, a changing of your mindset and behavior to become closer to God. They started calling it “the holy U-turn.” The Greek word metanoia, used by the gospel writers when recounting Jesus’ teachings, comes from a combination of the word meta, meaning “beyond,” or “change,” and the word noia, meaning “mind.” So to repent is to change your mind, and to change your behavior.
 
Fortunately, the students were also able to understand that repentance was not the same as penance, or self-punishment of any kind. It was about recognizing God’s love in their lives and trying to respond in loving ways to God’s people around them. They understood that God is a God of love, and does not inflict punishment. When bad things happen to people, they knew, it was not because God was punishing them.
 
I think these are the same points Jesus was trying to make in today’s gospel. He and the people he was teaching were suffering from tremendous political abuse from the Roman occupiers of their territory, many of whom were in league with the religious hierarchy. So the people were oppressed by both. When Jesus spoke of the victims of Pontius Pilate’s cruelty, or of natural disaster, he affirmed that those people were not killed in punishment for their sins. But he did emphasize that everyone needed to continually repent, or turn around, to change their mind. Everyone needed to try to love more, to try to increase justice, especially for the marginalized, so that they would not die without a close relationship to God, and without working to build God’s Beloved Community. When he told the parable of the struggling fig tree, he was explaining what continual loving repentance was like. It was like working with a patient gardener, who was willing to give the tree time, and to feed it and enrich the soil around it, so that, with time, it would bear abundant fruit.
 
Paul echoed similar ideas in the second reading, when he said that God is the only one who can judge evil and sins, not people. He went so far as to say that meditating on the depth of God’s kindness can lead us to repentance. In other words, serious consideration of the wrongs we have done, contrasted with the love God continues to have for us, can motivate us to change our mindset and behavior to love more like God loves, and to care for others with the same honor and  tenderness God has for us.
 
Here in the US in 2025, we are all, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, also suffering from political abuse, as Jesus’ compatriots were. Our first reading tells how God sent Moses to help those suffering under the cruel regime of the Egyptians. God communicated to Moses understanding of the Israelites’ suffering, saying, “I have witnessed the affliction of my people… I have heard their cry… I know well that they are suffering.” God then appointed Moses to talk to Pharoah, to secure release of the Israelites from their enslavement. It is interesting that Moses did not protest, did not give excuses why he was not up to this daunting task. He only asked God’s name, so he could tell the people who it was who loved them so much he had sent them a liberator. Perhaps Moses had repented himself to the point that he was eager to use the circumstances of his past not for the sake of princely privilege, but to help deliver the people of God from Pharoah’s oppression.
 
We can’t afford to wait around for a Moses to help us today. We need to try to band together to be liberators from those who are motivated by greed and power. We need to try to shield those who are immigrants, strangers in a strange land, as our Israelite ancestors once were. We need to try to help those who have lost their jobs arbitrarily. We need to try to defend Medicaid and the aid programs that USAID conducted, that help farmers here in Indiana in the process. Somehow we need to cultivate strength, peace, and justice for one another, to love like the patient gardener our God is. Bending our minds toward love, repenting in the holy U-turn, can take us there, if we take it seriously enough. The God of our ancestors, I AM, is sending us.