How many of you have ever seen a person standing on the side of the road with a giant sign that says, "Repent! Jesus is coming!” ?
I think most of us have seen something like this with a similar message.
I remember when I lived in San Francisco, there was a man who would stand outside the Powell Street BART station with a massive sign - maybe 9’ tall by 6’ wide - or at least that’s how big it felt - and it was covered in words, but one word was printed larger than the rest, it was in all capital, bold red letters: REPENT.
And while this is a good word for the season that we’re in - this being the second Sunday in the season of Lent - this word - repent - for so much of my life felt like a weapon.
It felt like a word that was used by some people to elevate themselves and to put other people down.
Like there was this list of sins - ranked in order from worst to not so bad - a hierarchy of sins, so to speak - and if you “had” any of those sins that ranked near the top - this message of REPENT was especially targeted at you.
For much of my life, the messages I heard from the church—whether spoken outright or implied—told me that I was condemned by my very nature.
As a young girl, I sat in pews much like these with my head on my mother’s lap - this is when Sunday School and Adult Bible Study happened before the time of worship - and I would hear the messages from the pulpit telling us that women were responsible for the fall of humankind. That women alone bore the responsibility of tearing apart the garden. That we were the weaker sex.
As a teenager, I wrestled with questions about my sexuality - I went to my high school prom with my girlfriend at the time - and when I went to church on Sundays I would hear the message that people like me were an abomination.
I watched as my mother—who had divorced my father because of his unfaithfulness among other things—was questioned about her “fitness” for membership at churches - when we moved from Des Moines, Iowa to Lafayette, Indiana - leaving the church that knew and loved us - she encountered multiple churches where she had to “prove” that her divorce was legitimate. Divorce, it seemed, had left a permanent stain on her character.
We hear Jesus tell us today that unless we repent we will all perish, just like those who don’t believe in him or God or the Holy Spirit.
And I wonder if we think about the concept of repentance like I did for so many years - one that is connected to individual, personal sin - and where sins are ranked.
And I wonder—being the good Lutherans that we are—that when we say we don’t believe this way, how often the world’s and the church’s limited views of sin and repentance have still found their way into our hearts?
We must take Jesus seriously in his warnings, his urgings for us to repent - after all, Saint Luke records him saying the phrase twice, once in v3 and again in v5 - "Repent, or you will perish"
I was reassured when I learned that Martin Luther also wrestled with this concept of repentance as we’ve imagined it.
When he read the translation of the Bible that was available to him at the time, the Latin Vulgate - the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church - he saw that John the Baptist and Jesus called people to (quote) "Do penance! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand!"
The word that we now have as “repentance” was translated as “do penance” for nearly 1200 years after Jesus and John originally said the word.
This choice in translation by the leaders of the church led to the idea that repentance required acts of penance—outward actions like public confession or payment or self-inflicted suffering—to prove sorrow for sin and in order to receive forgiveness.
This process of penance could take months or even years before a person would be allowed back into the life of the church.
The original Greek word metanoia does not mean “do penance.”
It means to “change your mind”.
See, repentance is a reorientation of the heart and the mind to the things of God. It’s an internal thing. It’s not just about avoiding sin or trying to be a better person in our own power, through our will; it’s about turning away from ourselves and what we think - and aligning our hearts with what God values - to let God’s will be done.
Repentance is a shift in our perspective—and through repentance God will call us out - to move toward those that the world has cast aside.
Instead of moving away from those people that the world calls undesirable, instead of distancing ourselves - God calls us to go to them.
When our hearts are truly turned toward God, we begin to see people the way God sees them—not as problems to be solved or people to be judged - to be yelled at that they need to repent - but we can start to see them as beloved children of God - and through loving them, through touching the untouchable, the parts of ourselves that also feel untouchable, can come into the light, feel the love of God and be healed.
While repentance often leads to external change and certainly that’s God’s dream, it can be a winding road, it’s not always straightforward.
To illustrate this, Jesus gives us a parable of a fig tree - one of several fig tree parables found throughout Scripture.
In this story, we have a vineyard owner who is frustrated. He has this tree that for three years has not borne fruit. And he, rightfully so, expects visible, tangible evidence that the tree is doing what it was created to do.
nd we have a gardener, who instead of immediate destruction pleads for patience on behalf of the tree.
Give it more time, he says. Let me tend to it. Let me nurture it, feed it, care for it. Then let’s see if it bears fruit.
And in this story, I wonder if the gardener is remembering the past days of this fruit tree. Maybe it was the tree that bore the most fruit, maybe it was the most glorious tree in all the vineyard, in its earlier years. We don’t know.
But I think what Jesus is showing us here, one of the things that I hear in this text, is that progress (if we can think of it that way), holiness, repentance - it’s not always linear.
And when we look out at the world, we can be like the vineyard owner, ready to chop everything - and everyone - down.
And in our own lives of faith, we can be like this fig tree. Perhaps once upon a time in our lives, we had fruit that everyone could see, but now, maybe we’ve plateaued, maybe our buds have withered. In our lives of faith, we can become complacent. Life happens—we get busy, we get weary, we experience disappointments. Yes, we still believe, but perhaps we’re not as sure as we once were of God’s goodness. Maybe we’ve stopped expecting God to speak, thinking we’ve already heard it all. Maybe we can’t see how God could use us now at this point in our lives, so we stop listening, we stop actively seeking.
And in this state, we stop producing fruit—not because we’ve failed or because we aren’t trying hard enough, but because we’ve stopped allowing God to work in and through us. This is the condition Jesus warns us about—it’s not only a final, eternal death, but a perishing that happens right here and now. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been a believer - repentance is for all of us - those who are new to believing and those who have believed for their whole lives. We all need the renewal that repentance offers.
And so with that, I want to take a minute for each of us to consider a question. And I want us to listen and hear what God has to say and to trust that whatever you hear is the right answer for right now, even if you don’t understand it. And if you don’t hear anything, that’s okay, too.
What mindset is God inviting me to release in order to make room for something new?
As we step out this moment of reflection, I invite you to hold this question in your heart for the days to come.
May we allow this season of Lent - 2025 - to be a season of real transformation. Where we would emerge with renewed minds from these 40 days. That God would soften what has become hardened and heal those places where we are wounded.
When our hearts turn toward God, when we allow ourselves to be gathered under God’s motherly wings - as Jesus says it in our passage today - we stand alongside Jesus not as not a judge who condemns, but as a Savior who brings us back to the One who has always been calling, and like the patient gardener continues to wait.
Amen.