March 23, 2025

Lent 3, Year C

Luke 13:1-10

Epiphany, Winnipeg

I heard an interview a few years ago with Steve Earle, an American musician who may or may not be familiar to a few of you. For forty years he’s been writing country-folky-rockish music and selling lots of records and winning multiple Grammy awards. He’s a revered songwriter and his music has been recorded by other musicians all across the musical spectrum.

Steve Earle is also kind of famously aloof, some even say arrogant, and crusty. He hasn’t followed an easy road, and for a decade or so in the early days of his career he was lost in a fog of addiction to heroin and crack, and it likely would have killed him if he didn’t end up in jail for awhile and then in a treatment centre. He’s been sober for years now, but like most people who have lived with addiction he still considers himself to be in recovery; He’s not an ex-addict, he’s a recovering addict. It’s a lifetime thing.

One of the other things he’s known for is his outspoken stance against the death penalty. He’s concerned about innocent people being convicted and executed, and he wonders aloud how capital punishment affects the people who work in that system. More than anything, though, he just sees it as an inhumane way for people to treat people, whether they are innocent or guilty. It’s part of a system that is more concerned about punishment than it is about rehabilitation or healing.

I heard him interviewed on CBC a few years ago and when the interviewer pressed him and wondered whether there aren’t some people who simply cannot be rehabilitated, he just said, “Every day I work at staying sober. I’m a recovering addict. I can’t afford to believe that there’s any such thing as a lost cause.”

“I can’t afford to believe that there’s any such thing as a lost cause.”

In this season of Lent, as we talk about repentance or dying and rising, we might learn something from that. We might not all be recovering addicts; maybe some of us are and we probably all know someone who is. But we keep coming back here and one of the things we just come clean about week after week, just to keep ourselves honest, is our own sin. We don’t come to make excuses about it, or to say that it was all really someone else’s fault. We don’t say “the devil made me do it.” We just offer our confession, no longer hiding the harm we do to ourselves, our neighbour, and our world.

Then we ask for God’s help. Like we did this morning as we said, “Transform our lives and guide us again in the way of the cross,” or as we said in an older form, “Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways.”

We speak our confession, and we hear that good news that we are forgiven and that life begins again. Because God doesn’t seem to believe that there’s any such thing as a lost cause. Not you, not me, not our best friends or worst enemies, not society, not creation.

And maybe we might even say, “We’re sinners. We can’t afford to believe that there’s any such thing as a lost cause.” We’ve heard a word of forgiveness. We’ve been washed in baptismal waters of forgiveness, and on any communion Sunday we taste a word of forgiveness. We’ve experienced firsthand that there’s no such thing as a lost cause.

Jesus tells a story: “Someone had a fig tree planted in their vineyard; and they came looking for fruit on it and they found none. So they said to the gardener, “Look at this – for three years I’ve been looking for this tree to produce some fruit, and for three years nothing’s come of it. It’s a lost cause. Cut it down. Why should it be wasting the soil?”

Did you hear that? Why should it be wasting the soil? An older translation says, “Why should it be using up the soil?” and an even older one says, “Why should it be making the soil barren?” Why should it be wasting the soil?

At Bible study on Monday night someone pointed out that that sounds an awful lot like the way that we hear some people talked about from day to day, doesn’t it? They’re just taking up space; they’re not doing anything useful or productive here. Like a barren fig tree. How many times have any of us thought that or said that about another person? Someone we know or someone we’ve heard about, maybe someone on the news. They’re taking up space, using up the soil, they’re a lost cause.

Or maybe the thought comes closer to home sometimes. Have your ever felt, or maybe do you feel today, that you’re the one just taking up space? Maybe we hear it from someone else, or maybe we say it about ourselves: I’m taking up space. I’m a lost cause.

The owner of the vineyard comes along and says, “Look - for three years nothing’s come of this tree. Cut it down. Why should it be wasting the soil?”

But the gardener will have none of that. “Ahh, leave it for another year. I’ll dig around, stir up the soil, throw in some – ahem – fertilizer. And if the tree grows fruit next year, great!” You see, the gardener just won’t believe that the tree is a waste of space. The gardener will not believe that there’s any such thing as a lost cause. So again and again, the gardener digs at the soil and feeds the roots and says “Let’s give it another year.” Or maybe for us that word often sounds more like “You’re forgiven,” and the gardener says, “Let’s give it another week.” And the gardener never runs out of “another week.” Or each new day is like that. If yesterday was a good day or if yesterday was a train wreck, you wake up to the news that nothing’s a lost cause, and today’s another new day. Or if yesterday was a good day for the world or if yesterday was a disaster, a new day begins and the gardener is still messing around with the soil, keeping the whole creation fed and watered because the gardener has never ever settled with the idea that there’s any such thing as a lost cause.

So the vineyard owner says, “This tree’s producing nothing. Cut it down.” The gardener says, “Give it one more year, and I’ll look after it, and if it produces fruit, great. And if it doesn’t?” Did you hear what the gardener said? “Well sir, if it doesn’t produce any fruit then, you can cut it down.”

This is really the parable of the gardener who doesn’t follow orders. The boss says, “Cut it down,” and the gardener says, “I’m going to keep trying to get it to grow. If that’s not good enough I guess you can cut it down. But I’m not cutting it down.”

That’s the thing: The gardener never answers the call to cut the tree down, because the gardener knows there’s no such thing as a lost cause. No person is a lost cause, you’re not a lost cause, I’m not a lost cause. No nation is a lost cause, no country is a lost cause, no crisis is a lost cause. A world heating up or a world melting down is not a lost cause. “They” are not a lost cause, whoever “they” are, and we are not a lost cause. The gardener just won’t believe that there’s any such thing as a lost cause.

Back up to the beginning of this whole reading for a minute now. Some people come to Jesus and they tell him about a political disaster, when Pilate - the same one who will sentence Jesus to death – ordered the troops to kill a crowd of people who are worshiping their God on a pilgrimage to the temple. Then they tell Jesus about an engineering disaster, when a tower collapses and kills eighteen people. And maybe they’re waiting for Jesus to say that those people deserved what happened to them, because they hadn’t been good enough or they’d done something wrong. Maybe those people are just a lost cause.

Jesus isn’t interested in that game, though; he knows that life doesn’t work that way, where people who do good things have only good things happen, and people who do bad things have really bad things happen. He knows, and we’ve all learned well enough, that stuff just happens. And whatever the stuff is, a disaster or a slow fade, we will all die. It kind of makes us equal.

But Jesus calls us to repent anyway. Turn around. Not to save our lives – none of us can finally save our own lives – but to live as though everything we say we believe about loving God and loving our neighbour is true…. to turn away from cutting down the tree, and turn instead to tending the soil and caring for the tree…in our life with each other and in our life in the world. Because a world that God loves, and a world that we’re called to love, could never be a lost cause. A neighbour we love is no kind of lost cause. The God we love and who loves us just doesn’t see any lost cause.

So we turn around again and are met by this God who won’t cut us down, but just keeps on feeding the soil. Feeding the soil of the world. Feeding our soil. Feeding the soil and bringing life even to Jesus, to one who is laid in a tomb on Good Friday. It’s true, you know: you, me, the world, the whole blessed creation: There’s just no such thing as a lost cause.