Tradition begun by John Calvin, founder of the Reformed tradition, who believed that no unworthy person should take communion.

Took hold in Scottish Presbyterian churches when the Scots had to meet in secret to have their communion services due to persecution.

Kept going in Pennsylvanian Presbyterian churches – some up until the 1950’s

The tradition was that for the few times a year that communion was served, those who wanted to participate had to prove themselves worthy by attending religious classes and renouncing their sins.

Not unique to Presbyterians – adopted by other traditions – meant to remind us of the importance of repentance (of feeling in your heart that you have confessed fully to God)

Sacrament in Roman Catholicism

Today, repentance hardly registers as something still important to the Christian faith, much less as something we would value in our world today. You-tube and other public forums provide people the opportunity to brag about their mean or lascivious exploits, but true remorse seems unlikely to follow. Our confessions are no longer confessions of guilt even when we choose to admit the things we’ve done. Sometimes we get caught in a web of justification – that we only reacted in anger because the other person deserved it. The confession that we read together on a weekly basis may be the only form of public confession we ever make, and that is certainly limited. There are plenty of people out there who would have us do away with it in our liturgy altogether because it seems like a “downer” that could be replaced with much more upbeat prayers.

So can Jesus even get through to us on the point that he’s trying to make? Can he help us to see that repentance is life-giving and not just another guilt ploy by a religion that has lost touch with our feel-good world? Does our tradition only carry vestiges of this confessional practice, or is there something deeper here that we can discover that will bring us to a greater peace and harmony?

Some in the crowd who were listening to Jesus come to him with the age old questions about God’s judgment and retribution. Do people get punished because they deserve it? When something bad happens, is it because that person did something awful? Jesus has a rather confusing answer. He says that the people in question who had their blood mingled with sacrifices or who were killed by a falling tower were no worse offenders than anyone else. However, then he adds this, “But unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” It’s hard to make sense of this. On the one hand, he’s saying that God doesn’t just zap bad people, but on the other hand, if you don’t straighten your life out, you may just end up dead like they did.

I guess the point could be made that we all perish in one way or another, so Jesus may simply be trying to tell us that one day our time will be up too. But I do think he’s putting more emphasis on the “repent” part than that. It means something to turn away from the bad stuff that we do. It counts in the grand scheme of things to confess, to turn away from evil and turn towards God.

The way we find this out is by Jesus’ parable of the fig tree. Now that we have a fig tree in our front yard, I have a much better picture of these analogies in my head. Anyway, the owner of the tree comes by for three years and no fruit has been found on it. Nothing good has come out of it. The owner is ready to cut it down, but the gardener pleads on its behalf for one more year and a bit more care to see if it can be changed. The request is granted – but we never know if the tree gets fruitful or if the next year it becomes firewood. The good news is that Jesus loves us too much to let us stay in the “nothing” condition that we sometimes find ourselves in. He will dig around us, put manure on us, and nurture us until we do better.

That’s the interesting part about all of Jesus’ messages that carry some news about the weight of God’s judgment. It’s never quite clear exactly how divine judgment will come down – only that we’re supposed to be watching out for it. We’re supposed to let these statements perk up our own ears, not make us think about who we ought to judge, and when, and where. The message is personal, “Repent or perish.”

Back to the tokens… I think perhaps Calvin’s request to have people prove their worthiness for communion was flawed, however, he was aware in other parts of his writings that no one would ever be completely worthy of Jesus’ amazing interventions on our behalf. In this passage as well as others, Jesus is supremely kind and generous, the gardener who buys us another year, the one who will ignore the King for three days and spend time with the outcasts, the one who will ultimately die for our sins. We don’t need a token to prove our worthiness because Jesus completes that for us, but we do need time for introspection, for examination, and renewal.

If we choose to do nothing, like the fig tree, we are just wasting the soil. We allow ourselves to wallow in our own bad or worthless behaviors. Jesus was aware of the paradox of religious faithfulness – too much and we become like the hypocritical Pharisees who flaunt their religious purity, and too little and we lose ourselves to the belief that our behaviors don’t matter. Refuse to repent, and perish without knowing the grace of God. In this case, Jesus refuses to condemn the fig tree unless the fig tree refuses to get better. It’s a parable about growth, about spiritual maturity. There was a monk who once described unpardonable sin as the sin of remaining dormant, of refusing to grow in the love of God. I think that’s a pretty good definition of sin myself.

We come to this table today perhaps with some confession on our heart, but otherwise unprepared, unworthy to receive God’s grace, and yet it is precisely at this table where we are encouraged to grow. We’re given the opportunity to be dug at a little, to receive spiritual nutrients, to merit the attention of the gardener so that our owner will recognize our fruitfulness. The practice of proving oneself for communion in some outward way is not where we choose to go, but to prepare for communion in an inward way is a hope and prayer for us all. It is still a spiritual meal, a reminder that our spiritual ancestors saw as a means of receiving all the love that God has to offer. John Calvin was right to want it celebrated with a sense of awe and expectation.

Amen.