Gardening with God
By Griff Martin
On
Luke 13:1-9 and 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist
community of faith
On the Third Sunday of Lent
March 24, 2019
Incarnate
and Resurrected God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it
into a living and breathing new reality we can all together experience. Make us
aware of your presence here in this space and in these words, God. For if we
are present to you then nothing else will matter, but if we are not present to
you then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and
the Comforter. Amen.
Last week we started the ski trip with these words:
"Dad, are we having to do the hula hoop thing again?” If you have not been
skiing in a while, you might not know that you no longer put kids in those
harnesses or reins in which they ski out in front of you; this does not help
them to lean the right way into the mountain. The newest way to help a kid
learn to ski is to put them inside a hula hoop with you, and just start skiing.
It gives them something to hold and it puts them close enough to your skis that
naturally they move the same direction you move. It also makes for spectacular
wipeouts.
It’s also spectacularly painful on your back because
you have to lean over the entire time so that the hula hoop is at their waist
level, not yours. So, it makes an already painful sport even more painful.
So, Jude asks, “Dad are we going to have to do that
hula hoop thing again?”
“Not this year, I think you skied well enough you
don’t need it.”
He looked at me a bit confused and then stated with
great authority, “Good. I was really tired of having to hold you up while you
skied.”
It’s really all just a matter of perception and
perspective. The parable we just read is like that – a matter of perception.
And this parable is a story that I think we have gotten wrong for a long time
and deserves a new fresh perspective.
Listen to it again with new ears:
One day a man went out walking his land and to see all
he had that was growing and producing. His apple tree was producing apples, his
lemon tree was producing lemons, there were bushels of blackberries and the
strawberry plants were doing quite well. The lettuce was coming in and it
looked like there would be tomatoes and okra and squash for days. But this day,
he was in the mood for figs, so out to the fig tree he went with thoughts of
canning figs and making fig jam and figs wrapped in bacon and fig and pear
sweets filling his head.
And there, to his dismay, he discovered that the fig
tree was not doing so well – a puny little fig tree if there ever was one. It
was not doing well and, to be more direct, it was not doing well once again for
the third year in a row. In fact, this fig tree was not growing a single fig.
There would be no canned figs or fig jam or even fig wrapped in bacon for a
little snack. Once again, third year in a row and there would be no figs.
Surely, he had given it enough time. If after three years the fig tree could
not grow figs, then enough was enough. The land was too valuable; he could
plant something else in this rich soil – maybe another fig tree or a lime tree,
or maybe this was the perfect spot for carrots.
He saw the gardener out of the corner of his eye and
called her over: “Wendy, for three years we have had this fig tree and we can’t
get anything out of it. This is valuable land here. Let’s get a new fig tree
and try again or let’s try carrots here. Cut this one down, let it be firewood,
and let’s start again with something new. We’ve wasted enough time here on this
tree.”
The gardener though was particularly fond of this
little fig tree and she begged for grace. One more year, let her spend this
season and go buy Dillo dirt and Miracle Grow and make sure it’s getting enough
water at the roots each day and install a drip line. Give the tree one more
season. And then, she adds for good measure, “Next year if we find that even
after all that it still won’t grow – well, then let’s chop it down.”
Now this is traditionally how the parable has been
explained: the tree is, of course, you and me, the landowner is God and the
gardener is Jesus. And the parable is explained that God was really angry
because we human beings were once again not producing the fruits we were meant
to produce. God came walking though the fields one day and said, “Cut this one
down, it’s not good.” And then Jesus showed up and begged for one more year to
help the tree produce what it was meant to produce.
That works if you are a person who sees the New
Testament as Plan B when the Old Testament, Plan A, failed. That works if you
are a person who believes that Jesus is the answer to God’s bad P.R. problem.
That works if you think Jesus is just the less wrathful version of God. Which
is to say it does not work, that is bad theology, that is a God we can’t
believe in.
The New Testament is not Plan B. Jesus is not God’s
answer to a P.R. crisis. Jesus is not the less wrathful version of God.
Maybe the problem is us. Maybe we are looking at
this parable wrong.
What if we aren’t the tree? What if we are the
landowners and God is the gardener and life is the tree?
Think of it like this: This is a parable about you
and me looking at all the things that we think are dead in our lives. Maybe
it’s a relationship or a child or a career or our faith or our finances
or the very world around us, and we are thinking to ourselves, “It’s time
to burn it down and start over, there is no hope here.” And God is the gardener
that comes and says, “Give me a year… you see, resurrection is my business,
it’s what I do. I bring dead things back to life, so give me one year to show
you what I can do.”
What if the parable
is about hope and how often you and I are ready to call something dead and cut
it down… and God is there begging us for one more year to make it work, to
bring it back to life, to bring about resurrection once again?
Just a little
biblical insight to support a reading like that: First, we are in Luke’s Gospel
and we are two chapters away from my favorite parables, those of the Lost Coin,
the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son (next week’s text). Three parables that
give us the clearest picture of God we can get: God as a woman tearing her
house up to find her missing coin, God as a shepherd putting an entire flock at
risk to find one lost sheep, God as a father sitting on his front porch and looking
out day after day for his lost son. That God can’t be the same God who just a
few stories earlier is the one demanding that we be cut down and destroyed.
They are not the same, and I know which one I am sticking with – the one Jesus
stuck with. The God on the front porch, the woman tearing up her house, the
shepherd risking it all for one sheep.
Second, this
parable has something to do with the verses right in front of it when the
people are trying to figure out why bad things are going on all around them…friends
being killed in the temple by Pilate and towers near the pool of Siloam falling
and killing 18 people…trying to make sense of why bad things happen and why
life could be like that. And Jesus, instead of giving them a real clear answer,
tells them to repent (key word) and then tells them this parable.
And third, because
that word Jesus gives them, “repent” does not mean what we think it means.
Repent has very little to do with moral uprightness and an expression of regret
and guilt; if only it were that easy. Our false understanding of repent comes
from the 4th century when St. Jerome translated the word into “do penance” and
created a version of repentance that has moralistic implications, leading to
our understanding of repentance as regret or guilt over something bad we have
done: repentance as the Tide detergent to all that is unclean in our life.
But that is not a
proper understanding of repentance. It’s a process. A better translation of
repentance is to change your mind or go beyond your mind. Repent has to do with
changing our minds, finding a new way of doing things and learning to live a
new and better life. Repent is hard work. Repent is the work of Jesus, perhaps
the theme of Jesus. It’s the first word out of his mouth in his public ministry
and it’s the bulk of everything he does, helping us to change the way we think,
which in turn changes the way we live.
So, what if this is
a parable about changing our mind, learning to see more so that we can live
more like Jesus, which is living with a holy imagination where the impossible
is possible?
What if this is a
parable to remind us that when things get hard and it looks like there is no
hope, to remember that we are not the Master Gardener and that we never get to
decide what is alive and dead? That power belongs to God and God alone. What if
this is a parable to remind us that sometimes we just need to let God be God?
What if this is a parable to call us to be co-gardeners with God, that our
calling is to be in the business of bringing things back to life?
Because how we love
to be in the business of declaring that things are dead. How many times do we
have to listen to lectures on the dying church? Because I for one have heard
that prediction too many times. The fear of the dying church says way more
about us than it does about God.
How many times have
you looked at your partner and thought, this time is really it? How many times
have you checked up on your child and found a text message or a Snapchat and
immediately thought ‘I have failed as a parent and they are going to end up in
prison?’ How many times have you driven home from work with that feeling of
dread because your career is meaningless and going nowhere? How many times do
you look in the mirror with that same feeling? It’s that awful phrase, better
off dead.
This tendency to
declare things dead is not new to Jesus. Just remember the story in Mark where
the father brings his son to Jesus – it’s my favorite miracle story. This
father, alone (we are never told if he is a widower, if his wife has left him
or if she is done with religious healers), brings his boy to Jesus. His son is
having horrible seizures, thrown to the ground and unable to speak, seizures
that are potentially deadly. The son begins to seize right there in front of
Jesus. The father is now yelling for Jesus to heal his son, and then he offers
what I think is the most profound and honest prayer in all of Scripture: Lord I believe, help my unbelief. And
with that prayer, the boy goes still.
And the text reads:
The boy looked so much like a corpse, that the crowd said, “he’s dead.”
Note the words like a corpse and the crowd said… because it’s not what Jesus said. And when it comes
to matters of life and death, Jesus has the final word. In fact, following that
line in the text, Jesus pulls the boy up by the hand and he walks away – healed
and whole and resurrected.
It’s not up to us
to be out looking for things that are dead and need to be cut down; it’s up to
us to be out there looking for things that look like they might be dead, and
then seeing what our God can do in terms of bringing them to life again. As the
Epistle reading stated this morning, “Our God is faithful.”
And maybe it’s a
world where it looks like racism and sexism and homophobia are winning, a world
where it looks like violence is the only way. And maybe it’s a home that is
coming apart and it looks like all is lost. And maybe it’s a career that seems
to be dead end after dead end. And maybe it’s one more poor medical diagnosis.
Or maybe it’s depression. It’s whatever is the thing in your life you are
looking at right now and saying, “despite all my hopes and dreams, it’s over.”
And here comes the
Master Gardner, “Give me some time, let’s see what I can do. It might not look
like your happily-ever-after, but things don’t die on my watch. They grow and
become more. They change….”
It’s the prayer
that has been attributed to Bishop Oscar Romero that says everything about our
role in life:
It
helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond
our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime
only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of
saying that the Kingdom always
lies beyond us.
No statement says all that
could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our
faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No set of goals and objectives
includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day
will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will
need further development.
We provide yeast that produces
far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and
there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do
something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is
a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord's
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end
results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders;
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not
our own.
First
Austin, take hope because the Master Gardener is inviting us to create
alongside her, to bring life and to help the Kingdom grow. Amen and Amen.
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