First Presbyterian Church of Winchester

Serving Christ and Neighbor in Winchester and Beyond since 1800

  • Home
  • Contact Us
  • Sign-Up to Usher or Greet
  • Service Times
  • Are You New?
    • Directions & Parking
    • Accessibility
    • Child Care
    • Sunday School
    • Membership
  • About Us
    • Beliefs
    • History
      • Boyd Memorial Chapel
    • Affiliations
    • Baptism
    • Communion
    • Weddings
    • Request to Use the Facilities
    • Church Leadership
    • Staff
    • Employment
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
  • Ministries
    • Children’s Ministry
      • CM News
      • Kids Sunday School
      • Child Care
      • Safe Sanctuaries
      • Sign up for the Weekly CM Email Blast
      • Vacation Bible School
    • Youth Ministry
    • Adult Christian Education
    • Weekday Preschool
    • Mission and Outreach
    • WATTS 2022
    • Care and Compassion
    • Prayer
    • Music
      • Children’s Choirs
    • Worship
      • Watch Worship Online
      • Worship and Discipleship Council Collaboration
      • New Stone Gathering
    • Stewardship
      • Make a Pledge!
      • Questions and Answers About Pledging
      • Planned Gifting
      • Automatic Withdrawal
        • Printable Form
      • Frequently Asked Questions About Donating Online
      • Donate
  • News & Events
    • View Online Worship Services
    • eNotice
    • Calendar
    • Subscribe to Weekly eNotices
    • Member Directory
  • Sermons
    • Dan McCoig
    • Amanda Thomas
  • WATCH WORSHIP
You are here: Home / Uncategorized / Change of Hearts and Minds

Change of Hearts and Minds

March 4, 2013 by Todd Bowman

March 3, 2013

“Change of Hearts and Minds”

The Rev. Maren Sonstegard-Spray

Luke 13:1-9

13 At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

2 He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?

3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?

5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

6 Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.

7 So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’

8 He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.

9 If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

Let me say right off the bat that this is a difficult passage (Dan says he thinks this is one of the most difficult in the New Testament).  Jesus seems to be giving with one hand and taking with the other.    Terrible things have happened – we can relate to that – all we have to do is turn on the news.  Jesus tells the people who bring him this news that this was not God’s punishment – those who died were not more sinful than other people and therefore more deserving of a violent and sudden death.  But there’s a disconcerting “but” that follows, “But unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

Sometimes it takes us aback to hear this kind of talk come out of Jesus’ mouth – I am taken aback by these words.  Where is the Jesus of love and grace?  Jesus is first and foremost always about bringing us back to God – sometimes that involves reminding us of God’s love, sometimes that involves reminding us how poorly we have loved God.  Here Jesus is seizing the teachable moment.

 

One of the blessings and challenges that comes with the work of a pastor is being present with someone dealing with some of the most difficult things we encounter in life: watching a parent die, learning of a cancer diagnosis, losing a job, desperate struggles with a spouse or a child, a terrible accident.  In the midst of these scary events come the questions that cut to heart of our faith:  why do these things happen, or perhaps, why does God let these things happen?  How do we understand who God is in the midst of our heartbreaking reality?

 

Barbara Brown Taylor, one of my favorite preachers, writes about when she was a hospital chaplain, the calls she dreaded most did not come from the emergency room, the psychiatric ward or even the morgue. They came from the pediatric floor.  She writes, “One day I received a call to come sit with a mother while her five-year-old daughter was in surgery. Earlier in the week, the girl had been playing with a friend when her head began to hurt. By the time she found her mother, she could no longer see. At the hospital, a CAT scan confirmed that a large tumor was pressing on the girl’s optic nerve, and she was scheduled for surgery as soon as possible. On the day of the operation, I found her mother sitting under the fluorescent lights in the waiting room beside an ashtray full of cigarette butts. She smelled as if she had puffed every one of them . . . She was staring at a patch of carpet in front of her, with her eyebrows raised in that half-hypnotized look that warned me to move slowly. I sat down beside her. She came to, and after some small talk she told me just how awful it was. She even told me why it had happened. ‘It’s my punishment,’ she said, ‘for smoking these damned cigarettes. God couldn’t get my attention any other way, so he made my baby sick.’ Then she started crying so hard that what she said next came out like a siren: ‘Now I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop. I’m going to kill my own child!’ This was hard for me to hear. I decided to forego reflective listening and concentrate on remedial theology instead.  ‘I don’t believe in a God like that,’ I said. ‘The God I know wouldn’t do something like that.’ . . . However miserable it made her, she preferred a punishing God to an absent one . . . If there was something wrong with her daughter, then there had to be a reason. She was even willing to be the reason. At least that way she could get a grip on the catastrophe. Even those of us who claim to know better react the same way. Calamity strikes and we wonder what we did wrong.”

 

We do that, and people in Jesus’ day did that.  That is apparent in the conversation that we find Jesus in, in this passage.  Terrible things have happened and people are talking.  The first story is that Pilate has killed people from Jesus’ home province, Galilee, who were at worship and in the violence, their blood was mingled with the sacrifices on the altar.  This is the only account we have of this event.  But from what we know of Pilate’s actions towards the Jews, it is very probable.

 

It would have been horrific.  Holy, sacred things had been violated.  In a single stroke Pilate humiliated the nation and its culture, and the very presence of God.  And we don’t know what the reporting of this event sounded like, but we can tell from Jesus’ response that it must have sounded something like, “Did you hear about what happened?  Those Galileans must have brought that upon themselves.  God was punishing them for their sins.”

 

One commentator writes, “I think most people at one time or another will run headlong into the question, “God, how could you let that happen?” Usually it is in the context of something like your worst nightmare coming true.  Whether it’s the loss of a child, or the loss of a marriage, or some tragedy on a broader scale than the individual, I think at one time or another we will all face that troubling question. It is a natural thing to ask when you’re in the depths of despair.  After all, if God is truly infinite, truly beyond all that we can comprehend, it would only seem reasonable to assume that God has the ability to prevent tragedies from happening. For some, this becomes proof positive that there must not be a God, since the world is full of tragedies both individual and widespread, from Holocaust gas chambers to genocide in Rwanda, from the tsunami in Myanmar to the earthquake in Haiti. This seems to be what was on the minds those who approached Jesus to ask him about a tragedy that apparently affected them deeply. Although our Gospel lesson doesn’t spell it out, I think we have to assume that they were troubled by this tragedy—the Roman Governor Pilate had not only executed some of their friends and neighbors, but also had desecrated their sacrifices. It would seem that what troubled them were questions about God’s character. ‘Couldn’t God have prevented this from happening?’ ‘If so, why didn’t God prevent it?’”

 

And Jesus replies strongly, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you . . .”  Jesus declares that their sinfulness had nothing to do with it.  And he adds another example of his own, another terrible event, a tower in the wall in Jerusalem, near Siloam, fell and killed eighteen people.  And he asks again, “do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?” And he answers his own question, “No, I tell you . .”

So we have a purposeful act of violence on the one hand, and a random accident on the other – one human-caused, one nature-caused.  Both saw innocent people killed with little warning and for no apparent reason.

Jesus is given the chance to defend God against charges of being cruel or unjust – but he doesn’t take it. We simply cannot equate tragedy with God’s punishment.  As hard as it is to hear, sometimes terrible things just happen.

But we want to know, don’t we, why these things happen.  We want to know what we can do.  We want control of our chaos and the unexpected.   We want protect ourselves and our loved ones from every danger.  Jesus doesn’t offer us a simple answer; he only makes sure that we understand that this is not God’s punishment.  But events like this should stand as graphic reminders that life is fragile, and any of us may stand before God without a moment’s notice.

Jesus doesn’t stop there – there is a “but” that follows.  Twice he says, “but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

 

That word in the Greek for “perishing” can be translated two different ways: as physical death, as when the disciples think that they are going to die on the boat in the storm, or as spiritually or relationally dead or lost, as in when Jesus says, “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose themselves.”

 

So that’s probably how we should hear this passage: not, those who are unrepentant will meet an untimely death, but, that what is lost or destroyed is the relationship between God and people – he is talking about the perishing of the soul.

 

Jesus has seized the moment – his listeners are more aware than ever that life is fragile, their existence is precarious – and Jesus reminds them that now is the time for repentance – the need is urgent.  We don’t have the luxury of knowing how much time we have to get right with God.

 

One commentator writes, “If life’s fragility demands urgency, that urgency shows that life itself has carved out opportunity for us to seize God’s graciousness.”

 

So what Jesus does here for his listeners is what happens to us on Ash Wednesday.  We come at the start of the season of Lent and hear these words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return,” and we receive a mark that reminds us that we are mortal, that life is fragile, that we don’t have time to waste on things that don’t matter, our need for repentance is great and urgent.

 

A quick word about repentance.  One Commentator I came across said some helpful things about repentance.  He writes. “Repentance becomes less interesting when people mistake it to mean moral uprightness, expressions of regret, or a “180-degree turnaround.” Rather, here and many other places in the Bible, it refers to a changed mind, to a new way of seeing things, to being persuaded to adopt a different perspective.”

Repentance is a change of heart and mind that allows us to see ourselves and our world differently.  And the word Jesus uses for repent is in the present tense subjunctive, which is to say, that it means continual action, as in “be a repentant person,” “continue to repent,” or “keep on repenting.”  Repentance is not meant to be a one-shot at being saved, but a lifestyle.

 

The first part of what we read today reminds us that our need for repentance is urgent, and the parable that Jesus tells indicates that the time for repentance is short.  According to Levitcal law, a fig tree had to produce fruit for three years before the fruit became ritually clean and could be harvested, so in the story that Jesus tells, the owner of the vineyard has waited six years for fruit.  The fig tree takes up valuable space and wastes resources.  But the gardener proposes to do something out of the ordinary, even extreme, to save the life of the tree.  But time is running out.

 

We discover during Lent, and especially on Ash Wednesday, that is not a bad thing for us to feel the fragility of our lives.  As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, it is not a bad thing for us to count our breaths in the dark — not if it makes us turn toward the light. She writes, “Depending on what you want from God, this may not sound like good news. But for those of us who have discovered that we cannot make life safe nor God tame, it is gospel enough. What we can do is turn our faces to the light. That way, whatever befalls us, we will fall the right way.”

 

Amen.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Serving Christ and Neighbor in the Heart of Winchester and Beyond

View Online Worship Services

Facebook Feed

Instagram Feed

firstpresbyterianwinchester

A Thoughtful, Compassionate, and Engaged Faith-Based Community.
🌿 All Welcome 🌿
♡ 🌈 ♡
#oldtownwinchester

First Presbyterian Winchester
We are overjoyed to highlight the mention of FPC a We are overjoyed to highlight the mention of FPC and our very own Carolyn Thalman in the most recent issue of Mosaic 2021, Year in Review. 

Thank you to those who have helped make our new neighbors feel welcomed and at home in our community. 

Please check out the full issue at the link in our bio. 

#fpcwinc #fpc #oldtownwinchester #matthew25 #thankyou
“What if we shifted our model of church membersh “What if we shifted our model of church membership to church partnership? I could no longer say I am a member of First Presbyterian Church. I would have to say that in Christ I am a partner with others in Christ at First Presbyterian Church who together do God’s justice and love God’s mercy and walk humbly with God.”

The Jesus Following Movement |May 22, 2022 | Dan McCoig
#firstpreswinc #fpcwinc #sermon #sunday #oldtownwinchester
Pictured here are donations from just this week! I Pictured here are donations from just this week! Isn't that awesome?

There's still time to donate!
Sunday or throughout the following week between the hours of 9AM - 2PM. 

#FPC #firstpreswinc #fpcwinc #thankyou
To read the full statement, please visit PC(USA)’s website. It can be found under the “News” Heading. 
May 17, 2022 
#pcusa #matthew25 #fpcwinc
“I’m not sure what it’s going to take for us “I’m not sure what it’s going to take for us to see all of our neighbors as people who were created by God, redeemed by God, and sustained by God — who bear God’s image.  But it’s the place we will need to get to if there is to be hope for us.”

A Living God | 15 May 2022 |  Dan McCoig

#fpcwinc #oldtownwinchester #sermon #msv #lovethyneighbor
The wagon will be at service - this Sunday! Thank The wagon will be at service - this Sunday!

Thank you to all who support this longstanding tradition of giving with CCAP. 

#winchesterva #fpcwinc #fpcwinchester
eNotice- eNotice-
Instagram post 17956345597681536 Instagram post 17956345597681536
Join us for Worship Outside! Sun MAY 29 | 10 AM On Join us for Worship Outside!
Sun MAY 29 | 10 AM
Only one service | Old Town Cidery
326 N. Cameron St
Galatians 6:2: "Carry each other’s burdens and s Galatians 6:2:
"Carry each other’s burdens and so you will fulfill the law of Christ."
We hope to see you there tonight! We hope to see you there tonight!
"We know this epic love story but we cannot stop a "We know this epic love story but we cannot stop at its familiarity. We open ourselves up to the unexpected as we arrive at the tomb and realize we have to lay our own spices down, letting go of what we know how to do to step toward whatever is next. … Do not be daunted by the symbols and signs of death. Do not be overwhelmed by what is, or what you hope will be."

— Commentary by Rev. Larissa Kwong Abazia on Luke 24:1-12
Image: “Prepared” by Hannah Garrity | sanctifiedart #fpcwinc #lent 

A Sanctified Art (sanctifiedart.org / sanctifiedart)
"One day, one day we will say, “It is finished "One day,
one day 
we will say, 
“It is finished”
and only mean the 
book we just read,
the cake we just baked,
the song that made us sing,
the meal around the table,
the familiar drive back home."

—Excerpt from “It Is Finished” by Rev. Sarah Speed
From the Full to the Brim poetry collection by sanctifiedart #fpcwinc #lent 

A Sanctified Art (sanctifiedart.org / sanctifiedart)
eNotice-Easter. Click the link in the bio to read eNotice-Easter. Click the link in the bio to read this week's eNotice.
"We live in a world that feels woefully unfair, th "We live in a world that feels woefully unfair, that is woefully unfair. It is unfair that certain people aren’t seen in their full humanity. It is unfair that not seeing this humanity leads to suffering, mistreatment, lack of care, and loss of life. And yet, when we mourn these situations and honor humanity, we show that our capacity to love has not been taken away in all this."

— Commentary by Rev. Ashley DeTar Birt on John 19:1-30
Image: “Posca” by Carmelle Beaugelin | sanctifiedart #fpcwinc #lent 

A Sanctified Art (sanctifiedart.org / sanctifiedart)
"For me, there is a liminality to standing with my "For me, there is a liminality to standing with my feet submerged, not far from dry ground. Whether a boat ride or baptism, you’re going somewhere you’ve never been when you decide to take that step. The disciples have no idea where their own journey will take them. Peter is at first reluctant to even dip his toes into the water—into the liminality. But they’re assured they’ll be with Jesus on the other side."

— from the artist statement for “Threshold” by Rev. T. Denise Anderson | sanctifiedart #fpcwinc #lent 

A Sanctified Art (sanctifiedart.org / sanctifiedart)
“For now, alongside the disciples, we are invite “For now, alongside the disciples, we are invited to surrender to the moment. Take our shoes off and feel the solid ground below. Rest our weary bodies and souls to be cleansed by the water splashing in the basin. Through these waters, we will become more deeply present to the days ahead.”

—Rev. Larissa Kwong Abazia
Commentary on John 13:1-17, 31b-35 for sanctifiedart #fpcwinc #lent 

A Sanctified Art (sanctifiedart.org / sanctifiedart)
"God of mercy, one of the last things you did for "God of mercy, one of the last things you did for your disciples was wash their feet. It was love in action. Remind us that we are worthy of that same generous love. Help us receive and trust authentic love when it is given. We too are worthy of being cared for. Amen."

—Prayer by Rev. Sarah Speed | sanctifiedart #fpcwinc #lent 

A Sanctified Art (sanctifiedart.org / sanctifiedart)
"Justice will bubble up, hope will raise its head "Justice will bubble up, 
hope will raise its head, 
love will rise to the surface. 
Hate and fear will try to 
drown them out,
but you cannot silence 
what was here first, 
which was love,
and it was good.
It was so good.
So even the stones will cry out. 
Remember that 
at your parade."

— Excerpt from "Even the Stones Will Cry Out" by Rev. Sarah Speed
Image: “Even the Stones Cry Out” by Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman | sanctifiedart #fpcwinc #lent 

A Sanctified Art (sanctifiedart.org / sanctifiedart)
“Expressing our joys, telling our truths, asking “Expressing our joys, telling our truths, asking the questions we need to ask, repenting and making amends, being our honest and authentic selves—these things are too important to be silent. We shouldn’t have to restrain ourselves because some may temporarily experience discomfort.”

—Rev. Ashley DeTar Birt
Commentary on Luke 19:28-40 for sanctifiedart #fpcwinc #lent 

A Sanctified Art (sanctifiedart.org / sanctifiedart)
Load More Follow on Instagram

Return to top

First Presbyterian Church of Winchester | 116 South Loudoun Street | Winchester, Virginia, USA, 22601

Tele. No.: 540-662-3824 | Fax: 540-662-8498