This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 3/23/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Luke 13:1-9. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
I remember being in the fourth grade at Washington Elementary School in Wichita, Kansas, singing in the choir. We used to practice regularly in the school gym, getting ready to perform for our parents at a school concert. I remember one song in particular that we learned, called “So We Can Live.” This song was about how we needed to respect and care for the Earth so that it would be a place where we could live 100 years in the future.
The implications were pretty dark, honestly, for a song being sung by little 9 and 10 year olds, but this was before the climate crisis and environmental catastrophe became a culture war issue. Even little kids at a public school in Wichita, Kansas, could sing to their parents about the climate apocalypse.
Do you remember those days?
Even back in the early ’90s, we were singing about how we’ve got a chance to make things right, but we’ve got to make good choices. Otherwise, there are going to be stark consequences. The clear message from the song was that we could make the right decisions and come together as a society to save our Earth – or we might not. And in that case, Earth might not be a place where we could live 100 years from now.
In July of 2020, Time Magazine released a double issue entitled ONE LAST CHANCE, with articles by people like Greta Thunberg, the Dalai Lama, and Angelina Jolie, explaining that “2020 is our last, best chance to save the planet.” Well, that was almost five years ago. How are we doing?
I’ve been thinking about all the times over the course of the last three decades – since those days singing in my 4th grade choir – that I’ve heard people say something to the effect of, “Things are going to get really bad, but we have one last chance to avert catastrophe.” You know, in the 2000s and 2010s, it felt like every year there was an announcement from some scientific body or climate change advocacy group saying, “This is our last chance to…” whatever the target was. “We can still keep the climate from heating more than 1.5°C,” for example.
So this was the mantra for a very long time – essentially: “This is our last chance.” Things are headed in a bad direction, but if we turn around now, if we change our attitudes and our actions, we can avoid the worst consequences.
And for me, for a while, that was a really powerful message. It was motivating because I thought, you know, if I could change my behavior and encourage other people to change theirs – if we could change society – we could improve our world and avoid catastrophe. But as time went on, and as we got into the 2010s, I increasingly felt more and more discouraged by these calls to embrace our “one last chance” and change society. Because we had already gotten so many “one last chances,” right?
We had already been told so many times that we were on the edge of disaster but that if we could just turn things around, we’d have a chance. After you’re told that enough times, it’s hard to keep believing that we really do have more last chances – that, in fact, we haven’t already gone past the point of no return.
Our scripture reading this morning from the Gospel of Luke is a place where Jesus talks about this. It’s a place where Jesus points out that, in fact, we do have a chance to turn things around. We do have a chance to repent, to change our minds, our attitudes, and our way of acting in the world. But also, that there does come a time when the chances run out, and it’s time for consequences.
We know this is true, because we’ve got some consequences playing out right now: Not only in the realm of climate change, but also in the way we treat our neighbors.
On March 15th, President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act against alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang in the United States. This is the same Alien Enemies act that paved the way for mass internment of Japanese-American US citizens during World War II.
But what followed was even more disturbing. The next day, on March 16th, the US government flew 238 Venezuelan men and another 23 Salvadoran men to El Salvador. They were incarcerated in an enormous supermax prison with a capacity of 40,000 people under dehumanizing and dangerous conditions.
You might be thinking: “What did these men do to deserve this?” Well, we don’t know much. There was no due process, no trial, just an arbitrary decision based on their alleged ties to gangs. And yet, in the nation America is becoming, these cruel and illegal actions are a consequence. This is what comes when we refuse to act with justice, mercy, and respect for human dignity.
Make no mistake about it: consequences are coming for us all. President Trump would love to send American citizens to be imprisoned in El Salvador. He recently posted on his Truth Social account that he’d like to see people who vandalize Teslas receive 20-year jail sentences. And he said, “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
Exile to a Salvadoran supermax prison is not just something for alleged gang members from Venezuela. It is something that President Trump and his henchmen would like to unleash on U.S. citizens who get out of line.
We’re just seeing a first taste of consequences right now. We’re seeing the president send hundreds of human beings in U.S. custody, without any due process, to a third-party country, where they are imprisoned under despicable conditions indefinitely. We’re seeing the beginnings of this right now, and we’re seeing it happen to other people, people we don’t know.
Now, maybe none of us think we could be confused for foreign gang members. It might be tempting to imagine that, even if these men being sent to a Salvadoran gulag was illegal and evil, we don’t ourselves need to worry about such things happening to us.
But I’m reminded of our reading this morning, where Jesus talks about a couple of different groups of people who had really terrible things happen to them. In the first case, a group of Galileans were apparently slaughtered by Pontius Pilate, the brutal, dictatorial Roman governor of Palestine at that time. We also hear about workers who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them.
In both cases, Jesus asks the rhetorical question: “Do you think these people were worse than you?” And in both cases, he answers: “No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all perish just like they did.”
It makes me think about these hundreds of Venezuelan and Salvadoran men who have been shipped off to a foreign country, imprisoned in an Orwellian dungeon. Maybe we’re asking ourselves, “What did they do that was so terrible that they deserved this fate?” Surely, they must have done something bad for this to happen to them.
And who knows? We just don’t have a lot of information – there wasn’t due process. This was all done in great secrecy, without any apparent adherence to the rule of law. But what we do know from our scripture reading this morning is that we are not exempt from the terrible things that happen to other people. If we live in a society where there is terrible injustice, sooner or later, we will bear that injustice in our own bodies.
It’s not just these hundreds of Venezuelan and Salvadoran men who are suffering under the cruelty of the new regime in Washington. The Trump administration has rapidly cut US foreign aid across the globe, causing suffering in many places where the United States used to send aid. The World Health Organization says that eight countries – including Haiti, Kenya, and Ukraine – face imminent shortages of HIV medications, which could lead to over 10 million new cases of HIV and 3 million related deaths. The end of USAID support threatens tuberculosis treatment worldwide, endangering millions. And funding cuts to anti-malaria programs could result in an additional 15 million malaria cases annually—maybe 100,000 additional deaths every year.
Heck, even Quakers have been impacted. The Ramallah Friends School, in the West Bank, Palestine, was the recipient of a USAID grant to improve their school facilities, but now the school – and the Quaker body to which we belong, Friends United Meeting – is hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole, because the Trump administration has reneged on its commitments. The list goes on and on.
So there are modern-day Galileans being slaughtered and modern-day laborers being crushed by towers. And we ask ourselves, “Why, God? What did they do?”
And the answer from Jesus, here in the 13th chapter of Luke, is: Nothing that you didn’t do! “No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all perish just like them.”
We’ve been warned all our lives that we are heading down a bad road. We’ve been told that if we don’t change soon – whether it’s fixing the climate, reforming our healthcare system, or acting for greater justice in our foreign policy – then it will be too late.
God has given us so many chances to respond, to repent, and to bear fruit. Now, as John the Baptist put it, “The ax is laid at the root of the trees.”
Will we bear fruit worthy of repentance?
We’ve got to. Now is our time. Whether it is the season for figs or not doesn’t matter; we must bear fruit, we must repent. We have got to turn around and change our lives.
What does it look like to bear fruit in this time of deepening national disaster? On the one hand, it’s very complicated; it’s hard to know what to do. But on another level, it’s very simple; we already know what God requires of us. We already know the work that God has given us, the lives that God has put in our care, the people that we are called to love and defend.
It is time to fully embrace the mission that we have from God.
Let’s not imagine that we are exempt from God’s righteous judgment on America. Whatever happens in this country, we will be swept up with it. We will be held accountable. Will the Master find us busy at work when he comes, or will he find us huddling in a corner, trying to protect ourselves rather than doing his will?
There is work for us to do: Wrapping our arms around those who are hurting. Sitting with those who are suffering and offering them the love of Jesus. Disrupting the comfort of those who have the power to change things but refuse to.
How is God inviting us to build networks of mutual aid, support, and shelter in the storm? Think of all those times when natural disasters have drawn people together, setting aside their differences to rebuild, recover, and strengthen the community. This is one of those times. God wants to gather us together in the midst of this unnatural disaster, so that we can enact God’s shalom – wholeness, peace, and justice in our nation.
God is with us, especially in these times of darkness. God is with us. If we turn and repent, if we join God in his work, if we bear the fruit of repentance, we’ll find that Jesus walks with us every step of the way. The road is hard, but God will never leave us alone.