Luke 13:8-9 “‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.’”          

Leave it alone for one more year. The vineyard worker pleads for the fig tree to be spared. This is what Jesus does for us. He pleads for the Father not to treat us as our sins deserve. His pleas are always successful. They never fail, because they are based on his own work, and his own shed blood. The past is forgiven, all of it, always. But it is forgiven with an end in sight. Our Lord wants to enrich our future.

That starts with nurturing our faith. “I’ll dig around it and fertilize it,” the vineyard worker promises. First there is digging to do. The ground has to be prepared. Hard ground won’t let food and water in, and neither will hard hearts. So God goes to work softening them. And softening is almost always something of a violent process. Sharp blades cut into the ground and chop the soil apart.

The Lord softens hard hearts with a message that cuts, and beats, and rubs. I don’t like to be told I’m wrong any more than you do. I don’t like to have my selfishness and lovelessness exposed. But I need it.

A number of years ago my dentist noticed I was developing gum disease. He said I might need a procedure in which he would peel back the gums from my teeth, clean and polish below the gum line, and then sew it all back together again. I had always been faithful about brushing, but I was lackadaisical about flossing. My dentist had to confront me about my habits, and threaten me with a nasty procedure, to spare me from deeper pain. Six months of regular flossing later, everything was in order again, and the dentist didn’t have to cut my mouth up.

In a similar way we need God’s law to tell us what we don’t want to hear, and to confront what we don’t want to change. So God’s law tells me that I am not being good. It warns me that my sinful habits can make life uncomfortable now, and plunge me into eternal pain in the life to come. It digs. It cuts. It beats. It rubs. But it is making my heart ready to receive something good.

In the parable, that good thing was fertilizer. In the Greek, it is literally manure. It may smell a little, but it brings the tree food and life. The gospel is a little like that. The “smelly” part of the gospel is getting past the idea that I can’t save myself. I need Jesus. And the message of the cross is foolishness in the eyes of the world. The idea that one man’s death thousands of years ago sets everything right between me and God doesn’t smell quite right to human reason. But that’s what the gospel says.

The nourishing part of the gospel is like finding a feast unlike anything we have ever known. God doesn’t love the good people, the people who make him happy, the people who get everything right. He loves me, just the way I am. He loves the world, just the way they are. I bring him the sins of the past week, the past day, the past hour, and he doesn’t roll his eyes at me and say, “Again? Really?” He grabs them from my hands. He buries them in the deepest pit he can find. He scrubs every last trace of them from my soul. He looks at me again and says, “Sins? What sins? I don’t see any sins. I see only one of my dear children. Run along, and be the person I have declared you to be.”

I don’t deny that other people love us, too. But no one else loves us this way, this much–not our parents, our spouses, our children, or our dearest friends. God has spared us to enrich our lives with the love of the gospel. And it will sustain us to survive another year.

This is what produces the love God seeks. Even these are not so much a product the Lord seeks to collect for himself. It is a way to enrich our lives. Our acts of love, our own sacrifices, are a better way to live. They replace the boredom of trying to keep ourselves entertained with the excitement of having a mission and purpose. They make our lives meaningful. They make it possible to go from wondering, “Why does God leave me here?” to anticipating, “What can I do to make a difference in the year to come?”

So here we are, with another chance today. The Lord has left us here, spared for at least some part of the year ahead. Make it rich in God’s word. Make it fruitful in your life.

Galatians 4:4 “When the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.”

Some might be tempted to question Paul’s intelligence when he asserts, “When the time had fully come, God sent his Son…” This was good timing: God chooses the ninth month of Mary’s pregnancy to coincide with a government mandated journey of over 100 miles, quite possibly made by this young couple on foot?

I remember our family going camping just 25 miles from home when my mother was 8 months pregnant, and that was with all the modern amenities of travel by car. It may have been the low point of our camping experience. Jesus is born when the inns of Bethlehem are filled to overflowing because of the census. Joseph, who as a carpenter could otherwise provide for his family reasonably well, is forced to take his wife to a stinking shelter for animals for labor and delivery. There is no doctor or mid-wife to assist. What does a carpenter know about these things? Perhaps we could forgive Mary and Joseph if God’s timing seemed a little less than “full” to them.

Then we remember that when God sent us his own Son, he sent him on a mission, with a purpose. Over the centuries the Lord had made dozens of prophecies in anticipation of this birth. As the years rolled along, he quietly drove the course of history so that one by one these prophecies could be fulfilled. In fact, this little excursion to Bethlehem neatly fulfilled one of the promises God had made about location of his Son’s birth. “But you Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times” (Micah 5:2).

When we look beyond this little family, what about the timing for the nation of Israel, or for the greater world around it? Politically and spiritually, Israel was at another low ebb in its history. The nation had lost its independence to the Empire of Rome, and for all practical purposes the throne of David had disappeared. There was still a little remnant of true believers in God’s promises of a Savior from sin, but in the hearts of most there was a full scale rebellion going on. It showed itself in a religious formalism: going through the motions of their faith in an outward way for traditional reasons. They looked pious on the outside, but there was no love and no sense of need for God within. In others it showed itself in a general disinterest in the faith and slide into immorality. Does this seem like a strange place for God to send his Son? Does one send a baby to quell a rebellion?

But then we remember that God sent us his own Son on a mission, not to save the state of Israel from the shame of political insignificance and foreign control, but to save the people of Israel, and the people of all the world, from the shame of sin and unbelief. Roman roads and Roman law and order provided superior conditions for taking Jesus’ message of faith to the world. Then don’t forget that the work of a Savior is not to congratulate the spiritually strong, but to heal the spiritually wounded, strengthen the spiritually weak, and to raise the spiritually dead. What better time for the doctor to arrive than when the waiting room is full? When God sent us his Son, the time had fully come.

Does God’s sense of timing at Christmas offer us any comfort today? This past year has seen its share of troubles: wars and mass shootings, celebrity scandals, political unrest, and the countless daily irritations with which we have to contend. Is anyone running this show? Why this? Why now?

Then we remember that the one who sent us his own Son has a plan and a purpose for each of us. Ultimately that plan has less to do with making us comfortable here than it has to do with getting us out of here. From where we stand, we cannot see God’s perspective, his long range view. That makes his timing is difficult to understand. We get the pieces of the puzzle that makes up our lives one at a time. We cannot see the completed picture on the box our Lord is looking at.

Then among the many other promises of Christmas we find this one: God doesn’t sit in heaven waiting for things to fall into place, hoping he will find just the right situation to carry out his plans. He drove the course of history for thousands of years. He directed the rise and fall of entire empires. He did so to make sure the setting into which he sent his Son to save us was just right.

He who so loves us, who worked so hard and labored so long to save us from our sins, continues to direct the times and events that work toward our salvation today.

Luke 1:35-37 “‘How will this be,’ Mary asked the angel, ‘since I am a virgin?’ The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.’”

Sometime early in the fall of 1980 I was introduced to the woman I married. Except at that time she was dating one of my classmates. Each year of high school she dated one of my best friends, until my senior year. Then she dated me. I didn’t know it when we first met three years earlier, but that introduction would change my life.

Sometime in the year 5 or 6 B.C. the angel Gabriel introduced himself to a teenager named Mary. He had been sent by God to introduce her to the son to whom she would give birth nine months later. These words conclude that introduction. The Son God introduces through Gabriel changed her life like no one else ever had. He changed the whole world.

Here, the angel introduces to Mary the agency, the power or means, by which she could conceive this child and give him birth. It is just one of the places in the Bible that tell us Jesus was born of a woman who remained a virgin until the day of his birth.

The skeptics, of course, find this ridiculous. They propose one of two explanations. Either this is an example of ancient ignorance about where babies come from, or this is an example of out and out myth-making, a fictionalized story intended to surround the person of Jesus with additional honor or mystery, because maybe that would help to promote the Christian brand.

But Mary’s own question shows that she understood this was not the way women were supposed to become pregnant and give birth. And if there really is a God, then the one who created all life out of non-living material is not even slightly challenged to enable a woman to conceive without involving a man.

For those who still aren’t satisfied, we might ask the question, “If you were God, and you intended to become a part of your own creation in order to save it, how would you do it?” The answer in any case is going to have to involve something supernatural, isn’t it? It may as well be this way as any other.

And by choosing this way, this agency, for becoming a part of our world, God is introducing us to another facet of his love. We are so dear to him, so precious, that he would not refuse to join himself to our broken and miserable little family, if it means that he could reconcile our relationship and make us his own once again.

Today we celebrate this birth, this Son, to whom God has introduced us. Now that we have met him, he will change our lives.

Luke 1:31-33 “You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”

Mary’s son, God’s Son, was going to be “great.” I think that my sons are great. They have been successful students. They are nice guys. They are good citizens. But God doesn’t generally send angels to parents to tell them that about their children. By “great” the angel meant something more.

Over the whole course of recorded history, “The great” is a title that has been given to only 130 people or so. Usually it is reserved for conquerors and emperors of unusual power and influence. Greece gave us Alexander the Great. A few popes have been members of the club, beginning with Leo the Great. The great French king Charlemagne literally translates to “Charles the Great.” Russia has had three such rulers: Ivan, Peter, and Katherine the Great.

None of them has influenced our world like Jesus has. Today 2.2 billion people, almost one third of the world’s population, claim to follow him. Yet he never wore a gold crown. He never raised an army or led a military campaign. He lived his entire life on a postage-stamp sized piece of land no more than 150 miles long and 70 miles wide–about the size of Vermont.

Still, he was destined to rule. He still does. The throne of David and the house of Jacob are not limited to a single piece of geography or a particular nationality or race of people. It started with the Jews, it is true. Abraham was the father of this people. But in his letter to the Romans, chapter 4, Paul explains that those who share Abraham’s faith in Jesus are also his descendants and share in the promises given to him. And those who do not share the faith of Abraham are not really his descendants, no matter what their nationality or race. The promises of salvation God gave to Abraham’s family, and that passed down through his grandson Jacob and later King David, now also belong to you and me.

So we are living under Jesus’ rule and belong to his kingdom that will never end. This all fits with the way Jesus later explained his kingdom to Governor Pilate at his trial: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.” Jesus’ kingdom operates on love, not force. It conquers hearts and souls, not mere body counts or real estate. Its people are citizens by faith, not by their address or family heritage. In this way Jesus’ kingdom transcends all boundaries of space and time. It will never end. And the Lord has graciously made us a part of that kingdom today.

Luke 1:26-27 “In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.”

There are number of things we can collect from these words about the kind of family into which Jesus was born. It was a humble family. There were no celebrities here, no attention seekers, no news-makers. Nazareth was the kind of small town where just about everyone was poor. If a person had a lot of ambition, big dreams, and the ability to make a good living for themselves, they probably moved to Jerusalem, or Caesarea, or one of the other leading cities of the area.

That’s not to criticize Mary or Joseph. They were honest, hard-working people. You probably would have liked to have them as neighbors. But they weren’t prominent citizens. They weren’t influential. They were ordinary, working-class people, not so different from you or me, who never expected their names would be written in a book, or their story told in a movie.

Isn’t that an interesting family for God’s Son to grow up in? You and I didn’t get to choose the families we were born into. For us it was potluck, like winning the lottery (or losing it, as the case may be).

This was like an adoption in reverse. The child chose his parents. Jesus chose Mary and Joseph to raise him. He chose a home without extra privileges, where people had to work hard just to eat, where you didn’t care about whether your clothes were in style, you just wanted something to cover you and keep you warm. There is no vice, no shame, in being poor and struggling, no matter what some politician or pundit might have to say about it. Jesus dignified it by choosing this kind of family for himself, and then more or less living this way his whole life.

You see, these are the kind of people he came to save–not from poverty, but from sin and death. Yes, he came to save the rich people, too, though he knew it was harder to squeeze a camel through a needle’s eye than to squeeze a rich man into heaven. But because he came to be the Savior for everybody, he passed on power and privilege, where people might think salvation is for the elite. He plopped himself down squarely in the middle of a common, ordinary family, perhaps not extraordinarily poor by the standards of his day, but certainly poor by ours. As your Savior, he wants not so much to impress you as he does to draw you, to attract you, to convince you that he is safe and approachable, and you can come to him. That’s the kind of family God chose when he came to save our world.

There is a second thing to note about Jesus’ family. It was a pious one. Luke mentions twice that Mary was a virgin. She was also engaged. She and her fiancé Joseph were faithfully practicing an old-fashioned virtue known as self-control until the day of their wedding. In fact, because of the child she would be carrying, Matthew’s gospel tells us that Joseph even abstained from any union with her until after the baby was born.

This couple is such a refreshing alternative to the lurid scandals of sexual harassment, abuse, or unfaithfulness that dominate our news. Alongside the scandals come the debates about what constitutes “consent,” questions like, “Does yes sometimes really mean no?” These are examples of how the moral rebellion popularly known as the sexual revolution has created havoc for the world in which we live.

Mary and Joseph had the issue of “consent” sorted out. Consent came when God consented to their union after they were married. What Mary or Joseph wanted didn’t matter so much, unless they wanted what God wanted. Our Lord chose such a pious family in which to be raised.

And we shouldn’t be surprised, then, when Jesus doesn’t jump to approve every exception to the “one man and one woman committed in marriage for life” rule established in Scripture. People in a free society may be legally free to deviate from it. They are also free to suffer the consequences for thinking they have a better idea than their God and Maker.

Piety, however, didn’t mean perfection. These were no moral crusaders full of their own self-righteousness. They remained ever humble, ever aware of their own need for God’s forgiveness and grace. Jesus remained their Savior, too. Let’s welcome him as ours, in the spirit of his godly family.

1 Thessalonians 5:19-22 “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil.”

Do you remember the two disciples who walked with Jesus on the road to Emmaus the first Easter evening? They were convinced that all was lost when Jesus died. They were faithless and hopeless in their grief. Then Jesus came and explained to them why it all had to happen this way. He went back to the Old Testament Scriptures and showed them it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and die to save them. When they finally recognized Jesus as dinner began, and he disappeared, they asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

Do you remember the debate Jesus had with some of his skeptics after he fed the five thousand? They questioned his claim to be the Bread of Life from heaven and resisted his demand that they put their faith in him. “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” Jesus didn’t back off. He made even bigger claims for his word. “The Spirit gives life. The flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and they are life.”

When Jesus talks, the Spirit is giving life. When Jesus talks, hearts begin to burn with faith. The way to put out the Spirit’s fire is to throw cold water on the words and message of Jesus. Criticize it. Contradict it. Reject it. The fire of faith cannot long survive without the fuel of Jesus’ words to feed it.

So Paul also warns, “Do not treat prophecies with contempt.” We tend to think of prophecies as predictions of the future. Sometimes they are. But the more general way Scripture speaks of prophecy is simply a message given to man by God. Jesus’ words were prophecy. Paul’s words were prophecy. For those who know the voice of the Good Shepherd when they hear it, the whole Bible is prophecy in this sense.

And I don’t have to tell you about the contempt our world heaps on the Bible. Much of it is moral contempt. If some word of Scripture gets in the way of their happiness, by all means, they conclude, cut it out and throw it away. We can’t have a word from God stand in the way of people finding their bliss. Of course, much less is said about the happiness that is lost by not following the divine wisdom from the deep past.

Some of the contempt is so-called historical or scientific contempt. Far be it from our world to accept a revelation from God over the speculations of some human with a high IQ. But you know, Paul isn’t writing to our world, is he. He is writing to you and me. Something in the Bible gets under your skin, just like it gets under mine. It challenges our intellect. It denies our wishes. It confronts our pride.

When we come to that place, what will we do? Will we treat the prophecy with contempt? Or will we follow Doctor Luther, and when we come to things we don’t like or can’t understand, will we grant that the Holy Spirit is more learned than you or I are? Faith depends on God’s word. Cultivating a positive view of that word is necessary if we are going to avoid evil and hold on to the good things God wants to give us.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

A dear friend of our family graduates from college with a degree in nursing…at the age of sixty! My wife receives a big promotion at work. My daughter and her husband close on the purchase of their first house. These are all examples of happy times. It’s not hard to be joyful, prayerful, and thankful when things are going right.

But look again at Paul’s commands. “Be joyful always.” “Pray continually.” “Give thanks in all circumstances.” Paul doesn’t suggest that joy, prayer, and thankfulness are responses to good things. For the believer in Jesus, they are a way of life, a more or less constant inner attitude, an unwavering positive spirit no matter what is happening to us or around us on any given day.

I don’t have to tell you that such an idea is counter-cultural. Some might say it is counter to reality. If Paul had said, “Be angry and resentful always. Worry continually. Complain in all circumstances,” at least that feels more like a reasonable response to life as we experience it.

Outrage seems to have become the fashionable way for people to react to things they don’t like. They follow with pinning the blame on the people who don’t share their values or immediately jump to address their unhappiness. Many let loose with a long line of obscenities and insults to express their displeasure. Temper tantrums have become an acceptable way to behave in public. What used to be called “acting like a grown-up” somehow has fallen out of style.

Not for the follower of Jesus Christ. Christians may engage in the same negativity, the same don’t-mess-with-me-I’ve-been-short-changed-and-I’m-furious attitude. But today the Apostle Paul is calling us to repent of the negativity. It is incompatible with faith.

Can we sincerely sing God’s praises while bitterness keeps fueling grudges against his other children? Can we trust God’s care and wisdom while essentially living in a constant state of criticism against the way he runs the world? If we are waiting to become joyful, prayerful, and thankful when the people around us change, or the situations and circumstances that make us unhappy change, we are going to die waiting. The change doesn’t have to start out there. The change has to start with me.

It’s not that the Lord asks us to pretend things are better than they are. It’s that we have been the beneficiaries of some incredible blessings. They accompany us every moment of our lives. They overshadow all the garbage if we honestly consider their value.

I exist, I am alive, only because God knit me together in my mother’s womb. He continues to support me, though he doesn’t owe me anything. In spite of my rather constant rebelling, questioning his decisions, defying his commands, he has never stopped loving me, not even for a minute.

No, he left heaven, adopted a human body and soul, endured the same painful life I suffer, only worse, to save me. He served the sentence for my crimes against him on the cross. Love drove him to seek me, pursue me, find me, and claim me with the sweet words of the gospel.

He poured salvation into my heart by faith. He didn’t expect or ask me to earn it. He promises, he promises, that joys and pleasures without end are going to be my eternal fate when he returns. And I think I have something to complain about?

“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances.” That’s the only reasonable response to the goodness God shows me every day.

2 Peter 3:10-12 “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.”

Most people associate Judgment Day with a day of epic destruction. Even the unbelieving world tells stories of worldwide cataclysm. Mankind destroys itself in a nuclear holocaust. Volcanoes or asteroids blow the planet up. Aliens invade and wipe the world bare.

The Bible tells us the Lord will destroy the world and the universe in which it exists with fire. Peter describes it briefly here. The Old Testament prophets announced God’s final plans the same way. Jesus and the Apostles Paul, James, John, and Jude give a consistent description. Life on this planet, and in this universe, will not go on forever.

But note the application Peter makes: “The earth and everything in it will be laid bare.” We often use the phrase “laid bare” to describe total destruction. A fire might do it to a forest. A hurricane might do it to an island. An army might do it to a city. But Peter’s Greek uses “laid bare” in the sense of “exposed.” There is nowhere left to hide. He is describing a flat and barren landscape where God and man stand face to face.

He wants us to understand that there is no plan B when the last day comes. Unlike the movies, you can’t get into a spaceship and fly away to another world where you can start civilization all over again. You can’t hide underground or move to another continent where the devastation isn’t so severe. We and all our works and all our companions here on earth will stand before God uncovered, exposed. There is no way to escape it.

But that won’t be us. In the meantime, then, we want to live for the day by being the kind of people who can look forward to it. “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.”

Ishmael Shelton had a rapsheet with 34 crimes on it. In 2009 he was paroled from a Colorado prison. He was essentially a free man. That being the case, what was the reasonable path for Mr. Shelton going forward? Should he have concluded, “I am a free man now. I don’t have to serve the rest of my sentence. I should find some more mischief to get into.”

Or should he have concluded, “I have been released from paying the full debt I owed for my crimes. I have been given a second chance. Now is the time for me to turn over a new leaf. I can make a contribution to society instead of being a burden to it.”

You know the right answer. And you can probably guess where this is going. Eight months after Mr. Shelton walked out of prison on parole, he murdered his girlfriend and found himself behind bars once again.

In God’s system of justice, Jesus has won us much more than parole. We don’t serve a day, a minute, for our crimes. The Judge has let us go with no time served, no fines to pay, because Jesus paid it all in our place.

In God’s system of justice, Jesus continues to get us acquitted when we offend again. We don’t have to be afraid to stand before the Judge. We can look forward to our day in court because of God’s grace in Christ.

Is there anything reasonable about using our freedom to pile up more crimes and add to our sins? You know the right answer. Peter concludes, “You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” “Holy” suggests something more than “pure” and “sinless.” These are lives that stand apart from the godless crowd around us. Such lives distinguish themselves, not in a better-than-thou sort of way. They demonstrate unusual kindness and patience, while maintaining a firm commitment to biblical moral standards.

That’s what it means to be the people who look forward to the day of the Lord. May our life and witness speed its coming.