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We were created for good. All of us were. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, liberal and conservative, gay and straight. This whole wide world, as we confess when we tell the first creation story, was created by God whose word declaimed it all ‘very good.’
I don’t know what exactly our problem is, but we call it sin. Call it ‘the Fall,’ call it discrimination, call it insecurity, oppression, social sickness, isolation, rugged individualism… somehow we have gotten so infected by it, so broken down, we don’t even know what ‘good’ really is any more. We fill our bodies with sugars and transport foods out of season across long distances, turning the earth inside out by shooting fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere, we center our appetites on getting more stuff over building relationships, we ignore and cover up our pain out of shame and misplaced pride. We destroy ourselves and one another either actively or by negligence and apathy. And the prophet Isaiah cries to us with God’s tears: Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Life on this side is hard. It can be terribly confusing. It’s often complicated, demanding, stressful, painful. It is also beautiful, heartbreakingly so. And deep, and rich, and wild, and amazing. I love reading stories of immigrant communities in New York City at the turn of the century, and how colorful they were, how they cobbled together new lives in a strange environment for the sake of providing safety for their children, how they passed on culture and tradition, even while they were so tightly packed from one neighborhood to the next in such poverty. I hate how our different cultures get erased out of shame and assimilation until we no longer feel safe celebrating our diverse heritages. Tomorrow is the last day of Black History Month, and there is still so much we need to learn, so many stories left untold, unheard, undervalued.
There is a theme of repentance in today’s lessons that just begs to be addressed, and repentance is a huge part of our stories of redemption. The word used here for ‘repent,’ means something more like ‘convert,’ or a ’turning,’ like when you reach a turning point in your life and something has got to change. I often push my turning points to the back of my memory in favor of simply living the best I can in the moment, and forget how difficult some of those moments were. It’s more comfortable now to see them through rose colored glasses because of how far I’ve come in another direction than where I was headed. But these stories of our conversion experiences, these times when we knew we were spending our lives on junk and turned again toward the life that really is life, are so important. Even when we fall off the bandwagon these stories need to be told, for they speak to possibility, to hope, to small resurrections growing out of each death we experience. Because conversion requires a death, either of dreams or of habits or of expectations or of fears and anxieties, resurrection follows hard on the heels of conversion. And resurrection means new life. And new life is why we are here.
When that fig tree stopped living into its full nature as a fruit-bearing tree, the landowner saw it as a waste of the land itself, gathering into its branches the nutrients from the soil without offering anything to give in return. But that gardener worked on it, stirred it up, fed it some good decomposed plant and animal byproduct, probably talked to it, might have played music to it. People who work the soil tend to get to know it well, by texture, by smell, even by taste, if you’ve ever gotten to know a vineyard owner. In the world as we’ve created it, living up to how we are created to be is not an overnight change of direction. It takes love and attention and stirring and no small amount of *ahem* manure and time to bring us back to life again as we were created to be.
Fantastically, the image for us, the image of us, in this parable, as I read it, is a tree. Trees don’t often get much choice in the matter of producing fruit or not producing. Trees don’t throw tantrums, as far as I know. Then again, I’m not very skilled at tending to plants, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those who are would say their trees or flowers or garden plots have personality. We are part of creation, after all, meant to be in relationship with the whole of this fragile planet. But for a tree to turn from barren to fruitful depends a lot on the soil and the air and the water and the gardener.
It depends on the rest of the garden, too. Are there other plants growing too close and sucking the life out of the ground, other vines or parasites choking the life out of this fig tree? The ending verse of our Epistle reading today, that portion from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, drives me up a wall when we use it out of context and individually: “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” It sounds to me like a “save yourself” verse, or one of those trite “I can do all things!” Hallmark cards. As though being evicted is a test and you’ve got to get yourself back on your feet without any help. As though when your childhood cat gets run over by a car you’re not supposed to cry because you’ve gotta trust in a higher plan and forever be happy. As though life were a cosmic game and God is testing us to see if we are ‘good enough’ for Heaven. But what if the ‘way out’ is food stamps or section eight housing? Or the ‘way out’ is a friend who will let you cry and grieve and look at cat pictures with you all night long for the next two weeks? Do we still ‘pass the test’ if we need help getting through? Does repentance, or conversion, mean that we will reach that great ideal level of comfort where Joel Osteen says we should be?
I have to name that, because I know it’s especially hard to be Christian in America when everything is self-help, and pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and contribute to society, and if you need help in this country it’s taken as an insult and a shameful thing. We have even infected our faith practices with this awful lie that we can get ourselves good enough for heaven if we just give enough or make enough or smile enough or save enough. God knows that sort of talk is nonsense. Jesus nails it when he asks about the Galileans who had been slaughtered by Pilate while they were offering sacrifices. Did they get what they deserved? Were they worse sinners than all the rest? Of course not! Then again, Jesus says, you are on the same path to destruction as they were on, and you’ve got advanced warning to turn around.
So here we are, trees in a garden, struggling to produce the fruit we were created to bear, and the crazy thing is, this gardener just keeps working on us. Three years so far, in this parable today, three entire years of fruitless labor! How many of us would give up after a single season, and this gardener has given three years for nothing, and is asking the landowner for another year, a fourth chance at coaxing the tree into acting according to its nature. Not only that, but when he gives the landowner the option of cutting the tree down if nothing works by next year, he uses this word that one would use for the work a surgeon does, ‘ekkoptO.’ Surgeons don’t make cuts in a body to kill it, they make cuts in a body to save it. So even then, the gardener is asking the landowner to work with him on saving this fig tree, cutting away the sickness that impedes fruitfulness.
When we talk about conversion, about salvation, about atonement, we try and make sense of who Jesus is and why Jesus is important, and there are many conversations around this that make God the Creator the bad guy and Jesus the one who saves us from wrath… this image does not sit right with me, nor does it actually take the First Testament into full consideration. And yet, in this story of the gardener and the fig tree I imagine the end of that fourth year, the ‘failed’ second or third chance where the fruit still doesn't grow and the landowner returns to cut down the tree, and the Jesus character says “cut me down instead.” If God is to be seen as the landowner, it doesn’t sit well with me, because it doesn’t get at the character of God, but it does sit right with me if God is seen as the gardener. I don’t know who else the ‘landowner’ would be, then, if not simply a world that demands return on investment, but the world doesn’t own the land. We do not, in fact, belong only to ourselves. So we see again that parables and metaphors always fall a bit short, but that’s why we tell them, since they act as icons. Like icons, they invite us into using our imaginations, playing out a scene, taking part in the story of our relationship with God. It would be in the character of the world to destroy that which does not give what it demands, and in the character of God, who we see most clearly in Jesus, to say ‘cut me down instead.’
That is, in fact, what Jesus does. He presents us a life lived to its fullest, a life of love and service and freedom and right relationship with God and neighbor, and we cut him down instead. He shows us how the branches live connected to the vine, and we do all we can to uproot him. He brings us good soil, sun, water, tending, and we offer thorns in reply, to him and to each other… and he still tends to us. Jesus the good gardener goes to work pruning and husbanding, protecting and providing, and some of the branches that had been choked off come to life, while others grow sharper thorns, but we are all the same tree under the care of the same gardener, in the end. We break his heart, we are frustrated and frustrating, and yet his love for us will not let go until he waters our roots with his very own blood, down to the last drop, to bring us fully alive.
So come to the waters, come eat and drink without money, without price. Receive the free gift of God's love and grace and forgiveness, given and shed for you on that tree which gave us the fruit of eternal life. Know that what God wants for you, more than what God wants from you, is abundant life, deeply rooted, connected, thriving. Know that God will stop at nothing to make you flower as you were made to.
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