Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 23 March 2025.
James Tissot (French, 1836-1902). The Vine Dresser and the Fig Tree (Source)
• First Reading: Isaiah 55: 1-9 (Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters)
• Epistle: 1 Corinthians 10: 1-13 (He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear)
• Gospel: Luke 13: 1-9 (Parable of the fruitless fig tree)
I have never been one for playing cards and would be hopeless at bridge or poker. I have however joined a few sailing clubs.
The point is that when you join a club, you keep the rules. Card players do not cheat. Sailors sail the race courses specified for the day and may expect to offer assistance to anyone in trouble, especially if the rescue boat is not nearby.
The point is that all such clubs have their own rules and to join one is to accept them.
Now look at the Old Testament lesson. It has two aspects: come to the waters to drink and eat, even when you have no money to buy.
That is the invitation. But then there are expectations as well.
Listen to the Lord and eat as He provides. You will then delight in the richest of fare. Seek the Lord while He may be found and call on Him while He is near.
Live in His fellowship, and in this, let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let His agenda prevail in your life, and you will be enriched and enlightened far beyond anything that a corrupt and manipulative world can offer.
For God is making an incredible offer: His agenda is greater and more glorious than anything else around. It reaches further and embraces paralleled wisdom and a generosity.
Whatever worldly wisdom may have offered, God has far more to say. In this way, He says:
‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways.’
And yet for all that, He still declares: ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.’
Even as strangers to the agenda of God, we are invited into it anyway so that we may learn from Him and receive at His hand.
Yet He is not there to underwrite our own fashions and notions. He does not support the areas where we deceive ourselves and one another, and definitely not in the things of the Spirit of the Lord.
Isaiah’s message is that there is an unspeakable wealth just waiting for us, but we have to want it and to opt in. It is different from that of the winner-takes-all principles of survival-of-the-fittest.
We gain by giving and yet we receive the things that God has for us as He gives them. We are limited only by our readiness to receive.
Looking at the gospel there is a more somber message.
This is a solemn warning to turn away from self and from blind conformity to a world morality that is against God.
It does not acknowledge Him, seek Him or serve Him. It is not motivated by the dimensions of His holiness or justice. It is definitely a world of self with its own desires and appetites. If others get in the way, then too bad. If they are fool enough to be taken in by false sales or promotional pitches, then others can still profit from it.
And so Jesus warns that all should repent from self-serving agendas of life. None should assume that having escaped a disaster or misfortune in this life, they will not have to see their lives judged against the utter holiness and righteousness of Jesus’ own life.
And yes, the holiness and purity of God is not the length of a measuring rod: it is the width of the universe. In this none may assume that there are aspects of their own lives that do not demand to be assessed and amended.
And so when writing to the church in Corinth, Paul warns it from the experience of ancient Israel. These were called by God and delivered from slavery in Egypt. They had seen the signs in the wilderness and been fed with manna and quails, they had been watered from the rock.
Nevertheless they still rebelled. They still hankered after the predictable comforts of slavery in Egypt, where they were provided for even under harsh conditions.
Here in the wilderness they came face to face with their own desires and their obligations to one another. Above all they were called to a holiness of life in the presence of God and to lives of faith before Him.
It was a challenge and many, but not all, failed. But even in the life of the church there was and is always room for hope. Jesus had lived the human life and knew all about temptation. He certainly knew the frailty and fallibility of the human spirit. There were and are no illusions in this respect.
For us the matter is probably much more routine and workaday.
It is there in the little things of life, with its irritations and inconveniences. The things that distract us and divert us from what we know to be right.
The minor compromises and corruptions that we entertain, sometimes willingly.
They may be undramatic but we all have to start somewhere.
