Text: Luke 13:1-9

“Dig About, and Dung It!” Luke 13:1-9

I think it’s no secret that I appreciate many things about the old King James Version of the Bible very much. If I was better with 17^th century English, it would be the only bible I’d ever use. But I’m no better with 17^th century English than the average 21^st century American, so it’s New King James for me, with one eye on the Greek text, and another on the original King…

But there are a few phrases from the old “King” that I love and our Gospel today features one of them. It’s in the next to last sentence of our reading, when the Vinedresser answers the Master who wants to cut down a fruitless tree, “Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure.” A perfectly accurate translation by the ESV. But the King says “Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it…”

“Dig about and dung it.” Now, how about that for an answer to the more thorny problems that life presents? Car won’t start? Dig about and dung it! 401k got you down? Dig about and dung it! Neighbor keep waking you up on Saturday early with the lawn mower? Dig about and dung it! Life not going the way you hoped? Dig about and dung it! Yes! Is there a problem for which the lavish and liberal application of dung is not a good answer?

Uh, well, now that you put it that way… maybe this isn’t so great? Some things don’t respond well to dung. Maybe we don’t respond well to dung in our lives? “Just put a little dung on it, and it’ll buff right out” is not a common saying now is it? In fact, put that way, you can see the difficulty with Jesus’ approach to solving our problems. Dung doesn’t strike most of us as the magical answer to the fruitless areas in our life. Windex, Kleenex, Mr. Clean all seem like more sanitary and satisfying solutions to the messes in our lives. Dung seems only to make a bad situation worse. Definitely smellier…

Which confronts us with an unpleasant fact: what if Jesus’ solution to our problems is to pile on more of what we see as problematic? Hmmm? Where we are always worrying, scurrying, and working hard to get rid of all the “dung” in our lives, what if Jesus is standing by with His shovel, ready to pile it on…

And what shall we say to this? Hmm… maybe “God’s ways are not our ways?” Something like that?

Here’s a warning to the wise: be careful about going to Jesus to talk over the old problem of evil, okay?—the whole theodicy, “why do bad things happen to good people?” thing that is like a sore tooth most of us just can’t leave alone or quit exploring. Because Jesus will answer, but you might think His answer just... stinks.

This is the mistake some people make at the outset of our Gospel today. They go to Jesus and tell Him the latest tragic news they heard on NPR driving in to work. “Did you hear about those Galileans? The ones Pilate labeled as terrorists for the sacrifices they offered, and so he cut them up (after a little waterboarding) no trial or anything, and then offered their blood right on top of the sacrifices they had offered to God? Is that terrible or what?”

And Jesus answers, “Do you think those Galileans were worse than all others?” (remember: Jesus was considered a Galilean Himself, and a terrorist to many of the authorities) “Nope!” He says, “But unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or do you think the 18 on whom the tower fell in Siloam were worse sinners than all others in Jerusalem? I tell you: Nope! But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish…”

And then He tells a parable about a man had a fig tree in his vineyard (with no fruit on it), who (sensibly) told the vinedresser to cut it down because it used up the ground. But the vinedresser answered and said: “Sir let it alone this year also till I dig about it and dung it. Then if it should bear fruit, well and good; if not then you can cut it down.”

How does that answer to the problem of evil sit with you?

Maybe it is just puzzling at first? Maybe we need to consider what kind of an answer this is exactly? Okay. It seems the gossips are hinting to Jesus they think those Galileans that Pilate slaughtered were worse sinners than all the others. That bad things happen to bad people on some carefully calibrated scale we can read. And Jesus says “Nope!” There is no such scale. He says the Galileans who died at Pilate’s hand, or the Judeans who were killed in the Siloam tower collapse were not worse sinners than anyone else around, but that unless we repent we’ll all perish likewise.

What does that mean? Well, in light of His little parable, I think the meaning is not difficult to state. If we think that God only lets bad things happen to individuals as a direct response to the level of sin in their lives, then we could control our destiny by shaping ourselves up morally and flying right. This is the “Mr. Clean” solution to sin—if you clean up your own mess by moral reform and self-improvement, the axe (or towers) won’t fall on you. But Jesus says “not the case”. Only repentance offers rescue from our sorry situation.

His story suggests that suffering and trial and cross is like dung. It smells bad, and we try our best to avoid it. We step around it when we see a pile of it, and we’d move heaven and earth to avoid having some thrown on us because we think sorrow and suffering only make life worse. Where the dung falls on someone, where calamity strikes, we are comforted to think it was probably something they did to deserve it, something we can avoid by our diligent moral efforts.

 But what if our actions have no direct connection to suffering and calamity? What if sin is in the world because of Adam’s sin that infects us all, so that there is no way around it? What if God uses our sorrow and trials not as punishment for sin, but as fertilizer for His chosen plants? What if the manure in our lives is God’s way of making good fruit appear on otherwise fruitless trees? What if the dung of this world produces a Garden of eternal and incomparable beauty?

I told you most don’t like this answer (unless they have already “re-thought” their lives by faith in Christ). But I hear Jesus saying there is nothing we can do to stop sin, death, and the devil. Evil and suffering will come to us, because sin is something that infects and affects us all. All the Windex, Kleenex, and Mr. Clean in the world won’t remove it.

But God deals with sin by putting it all on the Lord Christ. “Dig about and dung it!” doesn’t seem like a good solution to the fruitlessness of our lives. But God cleans all the mess of this world with the blood of Christ—not our cleanser of choice! He put all the dung of the world on Christ first, and on Easter Sunday shows us the growth that comes by His cross…

So when the dung hits the fan and ends up all over you, don’t try to fix it yourself; don’t think you’re better or worse than other sinners. By the blood of Christ, all sins are cleansed! By His Word and Supper here, His righteousness is made yours—along with His sufferings, His cross—the fertilizer that makes you grow into His image, grants a place in His Garden, producing the fruit that brings Peace, surpassing all understanding, guarding your heart and mind in Christ Jesus, our Master Gardner. Amen.

Pastor Kevin W. Martin