You’ve read Psalm 1, "Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on God’s law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do they prosper. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish."

That’s what those who asked Jesus about the people killed by Pilate had in mind. And Jesus knows that’s what they had in mind when they thought about the people killed by a falling tower. One was an example of evil caused by a human being, the other something that was just the people’s bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - like being where a terrible earthquake happened.

Psalm one represents a stream of theology popular in Jesus’ day and still to be found today, such as when Pat Robertson suggests the people of Haiti somehow "deserved" the earthquake. It’s a neat and tidy system, whereby good people are rewarded and bad people suffer. It would be great if the world worked that way, wouldn’t it? And apparently some people believe that is the way things are. They believe if people suffer they must have done something wrong, whether we know about it or not.

But when we’re willing to look around and be honest with ourselves, we know life is not all sweetness and roses for even the most faithful and righteous. And we know life can be sweetness and roses for people who do terrible things. When we’re honest with ourselves we have to agree with Jesus and say, sometimes that’s just the way the world works. That doesn’t mean that’s the way God wants it to be, it just means that’s the way the world operates and that’s the way people operate. Psalm one is a nice thought, and maybe it is true in some ultimate sense, but in this life, things can be very different.

Jesus, though, is not so much taking issue with Psalm one as he is raising another issue. He is essentially saying, whatever comes our way, we have choices to make. Whatever happens to us, or doesn’t happen to us, if our lives are all sweetness and light or all tragedy and darkness, we have decisions to make, important, crucial decisions. We can choose, we can decide, to follow the ways of God or not. In fact, we have to make that decision. Fred Craddock says, "for Luke the gospel is the offer of repentance and forgiveness of sins." "The offer of repentance and forgiveness of sins."

Jesus says all of us fall short of the way God wants us to live. God has rather high standards. God wants us to love others, even our enemies. We are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We are to give not just our coat but our shirt, turn the other cheek, and give away our money if it interferes with living the life God calls us to live. Jesus says the one who tries to save their own life will lose it, but whoever loses their life being Jesus’ follower will save it.

So Jesus tells those who asked about the people killed by Pilate in a particularly horrible way, it’s not about how you die. It’s about how you live. It’s about whether or not you seek to repent. Repent is one of those "churchy" terms. It means to make a turn in our lives, to go in a new, different direction. I like the word "reorient." It’s like a gps that talks to you. When you start in a new direction or make a turn the gps hasn’t called for, it says, "recalculating." The gps is getting reoriented to the new direction so it can tell you what to do, where to go next.

Throughout our lives we constantly need to recalculate, reorient our lives to the ways of God. Constantly? Constantly. Because the world around us keeps changing. We are constantly facing new situations, new questions, new challenges. Take the health care reform debate for example. As Christians, do we believe some level of health care is a right everyone shares? Should some people, like smokers, pay more for insurance than others? How much profit is appropriate for an insurance company? These are not just political questions. They are questions about love of neighbor. They are questions about what God intends for human beings and being a faithful follower of Jesus. Gun control, prison reform, take your pick. Any issue worth debating, except maybe UVA versus Tech, is ultimately an issue of faith, because our faith informs and guides everything we think, do, and say - except maybe when it comes to UVA versus Tech.

And because the issues change and the world gets more complicated and more intertwined, we have to recalculate our spiritual gps every so often. We need to reorient our lives every now and then. And that’s just for the new questions. There’s always the list of old, familiar items which can steer us away from God’s path and Jesus’ ways - addictions, substance abuse, self-centeredness, greed, and so on. Sometimes we need to recalculate and reorient to steer ourselves - and others - away from destructive behaviors.

Wow, I’ve gotten this far into the sermon without asking you how you’re doing with your Lenten disciplines. Thought I’d forgotten about that, didn’t you? Easter is four weeks away, and you’ll probably be glad when it gets here just so I’ll quit reminding you that it’s Lent.

Lenten disciplines are all about repenting, reorienting, recalculating our lives, even if it’s just a small something, a starting point. Starting small is not to be disparaged. Starting small can be a great strategy. It might be tough to all of a sudden start giving away a third of our income to charity. So start with ten percent. It might be hard to all of a sudden eat nothing but healthy stuff. So start by giving up or at least limiting desserts. Or eating less red meat. Reorientation can start with just a slight turn. It doesn’t have to be a 360 or even a 180 degree turn.

Jesus follows up his call to repentance with a parable about a fig tree. It’s a bit of an odd parable, isn’t it? We don’t think much about "wasting soil" in this part of the world, but in Palestine, especially in Jesus’ day, before massive irrigation projects, fertile soil was a precious commodity. Good land needed to be productive. So when the owner of the vineyard realizes this tree is not producing fruit, he orders that it be cut down. But the gardener pleads the case of the tree. Let me fertilize it, he says, and give it another year. Then let’s see how it’s doing.

It is a story about God’s patience. Craddock notes, "God’s mercy is still in serious conversation with God’s judgment." God wants us to repent, Jesus says. Repentance is not a casual, maybe I will, maybe I won’t sort of proposition. Repentance is urgent. Why? Because we never know how much longer we have in this mortal frame. We might die at the hands of someone doing something terrible. A tower might fall on us. R. Alan Culpepper says we need to "Live each day in such a way that you will have no fear of giving an account for how you have used God’s gift." God’s gift of life each day, that is.

Repentance is urgent business. But not because God is about to strike us down any moment now. God is patient. God’s mercy and God’s judgment are still in serious conversation. The overall impression one receives from scripture is that God’s mercy is winning out. It seems that God’s patience is much more than we have a right to expect. It seems that God is willing to give us another year, and often, another, and another.

It’s called a paradox, the truth that how we live counts, but God is patient. Our faith affirms both of those truths, that repentance and reorientation are imperative and need to be ongoing, and that God’s love and mercy abide. God cares about what we do. God cares about love of neighbor and love of enemies and all that. But God is also merciful and forgiving and patient. It’s a paradox.

Maybe you ran across Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in high school physics, "The more precisely the position [of a subatomic particle] is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." In other words, the more exactly you know where an electron, say, is, the less you know about how fast it’s going, and vice versa. It sort of makes sense, but on the other hand, you would think that the more you know about something, the more you know, period. But not so, apparently, with the momentum and position of subatomic particles. We are in the process of witnessing an even simpler paradox, that bulbs we planted in the earth last fall, which seemed to be dead, are beginning to produce shoots of life. There’s something real Lenten/Easterish about that whole death to life thing.

How we live counts. Repentance, reorientation and recalculation of our lives needs to be what we do all the time. Especially during Lent we are called to engage in serious and honest examination of where we stand in our relationship with God. God is willing to wait for us to make that turn, even if it is a barely perceptible turn. God’s mercy and judgment are still in serious conversation, and that’s good news for us. How we live counts, but God is patient. Amen.