Sunday, March 23, 2025, Third Sunday in Lent
“Just Don’t Fall!”
Ps. 118:1-4; Ezekiel 33:7-11; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
Order of Holy Matins
Hymns: #663 “Rise, My Soul, to Watch and Pray”; #543 “What Wondrous Love Is This”; #425 “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”; #422 “On My Heart Imprint Your Image”; #664 “Fight the Good Fight”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
Have you seen the ads on TV for the Acorn Stairlift? The tagline in that ad is, “Just don’t fall!” Falling is a subject of great concern to many of us, whether we’re getting up there in years ourselves, or have loved ones and dear ones that are. We all know that nothing good happens when you fall. If you fall down, you’ll hurt yourself, you’ll break things. You could find yourself in a hospital bed, or in a nursing home. You can’t stay in your home if you’re falling all the time. So “just don’t fall!” Easier said than done, isn’t it? A moment of inattention, a crack in the sidewalk, a wrinkle in a rug, and down you go. Please be careful! Watch where you’re putting your feet.
It’s much the same when it comes to our faith. Take care where you’re putting your spiritual feet. Don’t let yourself get complacent about your faith. St. Paul says in our reading from 1st Corinthians, “If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall!” If you think your faith is settled and secure; if you think because you’re a good baptized and confirmed Lutheran, you can put your faith life on auto pilot - neglect your prayers, put down your Bible, not give your salvation the time and attention it deserves – the truth is that anyone can fall; so be careful!
St. Paul, to illustrate his point, uses the children of Israel as an example for us; or better said, as a warning to us. “For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact,” he says, “that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea.” He’s talking about the many blessings God gave to the Israelites, and how much He loved and cared for them. The cloud was that “pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night” that led them through the wilderness. That sea they passed through was the Red Sea, the one the Lord parted for them to save them from the Egyptian army. (The sea we get to pass through from life to death is our own precious Baptism!)
“They all ate the same spiritual food,” Paul says. That was the manna from heaven that God fed them with all the years they were in the wilderness. (Our manna is the Bread the good Lord puts on the altar for us every Communion Sunday). And their spiritual drink was the water from the rock that God gave them when they were thirsty - which was a metaphor for Christ, the Rock of Ages, who never left them or stopped loving and providing for them, in spite of their many sins.
God chose the nation of Israel to be blessed above all the other nations on earth, and He kept His promise, sinful though they were. Through the incident with the golden calf, through all their crying and complaining, through their disobedience and even open rebellion, still He loved them. He promised, from the beginning, that the Savior of the world would come from their line, that the Savior would be “one of their own brothers.” And that promise was kept when Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary, Son of David, and also Son of God, was born into the world, and gave His life for them and for all of us on a cross.
“Nevertheless,” says Paul, “God was not pleased with most of them, and their bodies were scattered in the desert.” That first generation who came out of Egypt in the Exodus finally tried the patience of God to the point where they fell and fell hard. They were so blessed, and there were so many more blessings they could have had, if they’d only been obedient to God and allowed Him to lead them.
Moses, angry with those stubborn people, struck that rock God gave them water from with his staff, instead of just speaking God’s Word over it; and for that, the Lord wouldn’t allow him to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land; he was buried in Moab instead. And the whole nation of Israel was sentenced to wander in the wilderness for forty years, until that entire first generation had died (with the exception of Caleb and Joshua). It was left to their children to be the ones to cross over. It’s not that God’s promise wasn’t kept; it’s that their fall into sin caused them to take the long, hard way around. What should have been a forty-day walk to the Promised Land turned into a miserable, forty-year roundabout. It didn’t have to be that way. Sometimes we do it to ourselves.
Now these things, says Paul, occurred as examples for us, to keep us from falling like they did: To keep us from setting our hearts on evil things, like they did, instead of on the good things God wants to give us. To keep us from being “idolaters”, like they were - that is, from putting our desire for money and creature comforts and our own brand of happiness over love for God and obedience to Him. “Covetousness,” God calls that.
And once we’ve put aside that very first “no other gods before me” commandment, it becomes so easy to put the other commandments aside as well - the ones about immorality and grumbling and complaining and slander, and the ones about loving one another and loving our neighbors as we should; all those things we do or fail to do that test the patience of the God who loves us.
“These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us,” Paul says, “on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.” “God is patient with you,” the Scripture says, “because He wants all people to be saved and come to repentance and a knowledge of the truth.” But nevertheless, His patience is limited. And for you and I who are living so close to the end of all things in this world, time is short – “Nearer now than when we first believed,” Paul says. It would be easy to lay back and assume that our Lord isn’t coming for a long time yet - but what if He should come and find us sleeping? “So, if you think you are standing firm,” says Paul, “be careful that you don't fall!”
Our Gospel reading tells us about some innocent Galileans, who wicked Pilate murdered while they were doing nothing but worshiping God and offering Him their sacrifices; and then about eighteen poor souls who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a tower fell on them. And Jesus’ answer for both of those tragedies is that “bad things happen in a broken world.” And He points out that the only real safety we have in this world is to keep ourselves repentant – that is, that we confess our sins and turn to God for mercy on a daily basis, and that we cling to Jesus always and stay close to God - so we’ll always be ready for heaven, day by day, even if the worst should happen. “Unless you repent, you too will all perish,” Jesus says. To perish means not just to die in this world, but to end up in hell in the next one. God forbid that that should happen, to you or to me or to anyone. No, Lord, no! So just don’t fall.
Now strong as the devil is, and for all the trouble he causes in this world, the truth is that the devil can’t make us do anything. There’s no such thing as “the devil made me do it.” We all have our choices, and we’ll live or die by them. What Satan is, though, is an artful liar and a great opportunist. Bad things happen in this sinful and broken world. Bad things and sad things happen to us all sometimes; that’s life as it is. The Pontius Pilates of this world do the evil things they do. The towers sometimes fall. The cold rain falls upon the innocent and upon the evil, on the good and on the bad. Christians lost homes and loved ones in those storms down south last week, along with everyone else.
It’s not that devil caused your cancer or your arthritis or your cold; but his specialty is to use our troubled emotions and the situations we find ourselves in to undermine our faith in God, to try to get us to question or doubt or give up on God, or even curse Him, like those children of Israel did. “The devil loves to fish in troubled waters,” the old saying goes. The devil will be happy to destroy you by your riches if you’re rich, or by your poverty if you’re poor. Either way is fine with him, so long as he can capture your soul.
But the greatest enemy of our faith is complacency. If you’ve been an every-Sunday, church-going Christian all your life, that’s a good thing, and God bless you for it. But that means you have to be all the more careful about your faith. The devil might very well try to use some big disaster to shake your faith in God; but he’d also be just as happy to sing you a lullaby and rock you to sleep. And if we let ourselves get sleepy and complacent about our own faith, we’ll soon find ourselves becoming complacent as a Church about our obligation to love and care for the people in the world around us. The Good News isn’t going to spread all by itself; news doesn’t work that way.
Our saving grace this day is that the keeper of the vineyard in Jesus’ parable is a very patient man. The owner of the vineyard, and of the fig tree, is God our Father in Heaven, who could put an end to this whole business anytime He sees fit. But Jesus is the caretaker of the vineyard in the story. He’s the One who’s always interceding for us, always interceding for His fig tree of a Church. He’s the one who “dug around and fertilized the fig tree” with His own precious body and blood. He’s the One praying for us still, “One more year, Father, one more year.”
The fruit God is looking for from us is as simple as “lips that are willing to confess His name” in this broken, suffering, and fallen down world. The God of mercy who planted His good and saving Word in us has generously provided us with everything we need to produce “thirty or sixty or a hundred times what was sown” - if only we’re awake to see the opportunities that are all around us. Tell me we don’t have the resources, or can’t find the resources, to do something to reach out to the people around us? If we’ll put our hearts into doing something for God, and we do it in His name, how will He not bless it? He’s promised to do just that.
So who do you know who’s in danger of falling and needs a good word? Who do you know who’s fallen down and needs a hand to get back up? Who do you know who needs a little mercy? And who will I be able to help if I should fall myself, and I can’t stand up on my own two spiritual feet? Lord, may it never be!
Lord, keep us from falling! Keep us steadfast in Your Word. Keep us faithful in worship, and faithful in prayer. Keep our eyes upon You, and our eyes upon heaven, and bring us quickly to repentance whenever we sin. And if our lives should become difficult or hard times should come, help us not to complain or despair or give up, but to continue trust in You in all things. Father, help us to stand, until we all stand together in Heaven with You. In Jesus’ name; Amen.