Sermon # 5

And I promise I will stop numbering my sermons shortly....


Today's Sermon, I used as an opportunity to step a little away from my manuscript and to work more with notes. Where you see the Luke Scripture quoted, I improvised, with the help of the Spirit, to contextualize the Scripture and otherwise make the Word do what it will, which is to come to life!

Was Jesus a ‘Tree-Hugger’?: Sermon on Luke 13 & Isaiah 55

You know, us Christians… us human beings… We often like progress, movement forward, achievement, mmm! In some ways, we’d rather talk about speed than steadiness, theory than praxis, quantity than quality, and being cured rather than the sometimes slow, labor- filled process that is real healing.

And Jesus… Jesus is amazing. His parables address these visceral, in our heart and in our mind concerns—and they come out of the stuff of life, center upon the very things that the people he was in ministry with would regularly encounter.

In today’s Gospel, our everyday object is the fig tree—but rather than being cursed, it is salvaged for a year--- with the call to spread more fertilizer – or manure-- which prompts the question from my sermon title:

Was Jesus a Tree-Hugger?

A slightly bizarre question, you might say, and I would agree with you. It’s not everyday that we hear words like tree-hugger as we sit in these pews; it’s a word more often heard in cultural conversations… and even at times, (at least in the part of the country where I’m from), the word has a slightly negative feel to it; hence, a tree hugger is someone who supports environmental concerns but might, just maybe, has his or her head in the clouds—

Unfortunately, in our present cultural climate, values of universal importance find themselves connected to specific political agendas… leading one to wonder how caring for the earth could become confined to the interest of only a few people? Don’t we desire our young people to have opportunities to explore and preserve Creation and hence we support organizations like the Girl Scouts & Boy Scouts—amazing breakfast!; shouldn’t we all do our part to make sure Mother Earth survives into the future.

It is words like tree-hugger that remind us to question the influence of our cultural rhetoric, unless we find ourselves mistakenly politicizing or quarreling about the very thing that Jesus would have us do!

Ultimately, in Jesus’ telling of the fig tree parable, we receive an important message about tree hugging and it is nothing to do with our mere cultural concept. What this message is may not immediately meet the eye, yet it is remarkably meaningful!

Trouble in the Text
Today’s Gospel lesson feels almost just right for Lent. We are met with several images and depictions that appear, at first, weird, and then full of foreboding. First, there is the discussion of the dreadful fate of the Galileans: Pilate and the Roman forces exact upon them a particular awful form of suffering. Pilate slaughtered a group of these Galileans with the result that their blood mingled with that of their sacrifices. The fact that the suffering of Galileans is mentioned is not particularly shocking: Biblical commentaries suggest that Josephus, an early historian, records Pilate’s bloody confrontations with various peoples—his troops killed a group climbing Mt. Gerizim or there was the time when Pilate seized Temple treasury funds to build an aqueduct.

The mention of these particular Galileans, however, comes up suddenly, seemingly from a member of the crowd, and we don’t know much in the way of any back-story. Yet a powerful, emotional question exists underneath: Were these Galileans somehow worse sinners than other Galileans that they suffered these things?

And then the turning tide continues. More suffering is mentioned: Apparently the tower of Siloam fell, killing 18 people. Were these folks someone worse sinners too?

Jesus’ answer is quick and to the point: It has a grace and an uncomfortable challenge: No—Jus because they suffered this way does not mean that they were worse sinners! Do you hear that?!?! But unless you repent, Jesus says: we all will perish as they did.

Trouble in the World
When it comes to the question of suffering, we cannot help but jump out of 1st century Palestine and consider too the suffering going on right before our eyes! There was the earthquake in Haiti, for instance, and what some of the youth group found out the other week when we were fasting together for the Thirty Hour Famine, it is not just countries like Ethiopia or Haiti that are suffering but also Chile, with their recent earthquake, and even suffering among the poor in our own country… those suffering on this island and just across the bridge.

Beyond economic/physical suffering, there is the emotional suffering
Own despair over the things that keep us from being productive as we’d like
Our over-fatigue, our commitment to so many things that we feel committed to none of them.. We consider what we wrote on our Lent cards as things we’re hoping to take out of our lives during lent—addictions, frustrations, hostilities.

Isaiah passage speaks to this circumstance—Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

Grace in the Text
But then, just when we think at all is lost, our text hits us square in the eye with grace when Jesus tells the parable of the “tree-hugger.” What does Jesus tell us it means to be a Tree Hugger?

Then he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree, planted in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it, but did not find any.

So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, 'For three years now I've been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven't found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?'
" 'Sir,' the man replied, 'leave it alone for one more year, and I'll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.'

Our days are precious—We have some responsibility to act, on God’s initiative.

Manure with the growth --- things fail---
Christ the Gardener does not say and so as you garden your lives you should not say: Why waste the soil? -- Even when you are not being productive, it does not mean you’re wasting the soil.


Grace in the World


All the community groups on our campus. The AA group is finishing just as the youth group arrive.


Frederick Buechner:
“It is simply a group of human beings coming together with the common problem of alcohol, . . . saying we simply cannot live full human lives without each other and without [a] Higher Power. Miracles happen. I've seen them happen. In little ways, I think I have experienced them happen in myself. I just can't help wondering to what degree this is perhaps what the church originally was, that is to say, if you went back to the earliest days of the Christian community . . . I suspect you would have found something like this. A little group of people coming together wherever they could and simply helping each other and helping each other find a God who [found them first and] would help them became human beings.


Well, ladies and gentlemen, Jesus as tree-hugger is our gardener.

STRONG ROOTS

Garden for others…
Give Thanks!


Communion: "Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.

Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live.
7 Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts.
Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
8 "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.
9 "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Amen.