1 Cor 10:1-13

Luke 13:1-9

The call of Moses and the parable of the fig tree

Moses experienced an encounter with God through voice, presence, and abnormal occurrences in nature. A bush was burning but not consumed. It creates an image that is not only unlikely but unnatural. We are so accustomed to being able to scientifically explain all natural phenomenon, even those destructive hurricanes that when scripture speaks of the abnormal and unnatural we are likely to just shrug it off with some comment about the ancient peoples lack of scientific information. How do we explain God – our encounter with God – our sense of call and vocation?

Moses may have been one of the most unlikely of candidates for a ministry vocation and yet it is Moses that God calls to lead the children of Israel out of slavery into the Promised Land. We know that many times during the pilgrimage Moses wanted to quit the mission as the people grumbled and complained about everything. Many wanted to go back to slavery rather than continue the journey in the wilderness. Moses needed help and so commissioned 70 more willing to work with the people to keep them on target to keep them moving and to be faithful to the call of God. Moses argued with God about this commission but God was not willing to let Moses quit. Our traditional understanding of Moses is one that presents a hero of the sacred law – the recipient and transmitter of the big 10 commandments, the faithful disciple of God in liberation. We omit or forget that Moses found the job extremely difficult, tiresome, and wearing. We omit the sin of Moses in killing the Egyptian overlord. We omit the difficulty of keeping this crowd focused for forty years and the fact that Moses himself would not enjoy the ultimate reward of entering the Promised Land.

The call of God to live according to the promise, to liberate the captive is not an easy task, nor is it evident in the day-to-day journey that the effort will succeed. The faithful pilgrim trusts God to produce fruit worthy of the mission. It is in this context that the parable of the fig tree provides an important teaching.

Jeremais offered the following interpretation of the parable of the fig tree: “The first three years of a fig-tree’s growth were allowed to elapse before its fruit became clean (Lev 19:23), hence six years had already passed since it was planted. It was hopelessly barren. A fig-tree absorbs a large amount of nourishment and hence deprives the surrounding vines or vegetation of needed sustenance. Nowhere in the Old Testament do we find reference to fertilizing a vineyard (often the vineyard is a metaphor for Israel). The gardener offered to do something unusual, to take the last possible measures --- like God’s mercy that goes so far as to grant a reprieve from the sentence already pronounced…When the limit granted by God for repentance has run out, no human power can prolong it (Luke 13;9). The stay of execution for the tree in order to give it a second chance to bear fruit is another way to understand God’s mercy. If you had only another year to live, would you see life differently, act differently, schedule time differently?

Last Monday I spent some time with a staff member from Hood who has recently been diagnosed with a life threatening cancer. She wanted to discuss the scientific aspects of her disease and the spiritual values in her life. It was clearly a two-theme conversation. When she had enough science, she shifted the conversation to the spiritual. Raised Roman Catholic, long since distanced from the practice of her childhood faith, she is deeply spiritual. She feels marginalized in a faith tradition that treats women as second class citizens, unfit for ordination, and so she had wandered far from the original flock but somehow she has retained a trust in God that surpasses the oppressive practice of her tradition. Working 10 months/year instead of 12 at the college allows her freedom to travel to Africa and work as a volunteer for an NGO the remaining 2 months. One of her larger concerns about the cancer is that she will not be physically able to return to Africa this summer. She is saddened by this thought because so much remains to be done to liberate the poor and oppressed in the region of Uganda where she has worked for over a decade. This gentle lady told me that ever since her diagnosis, all the things that occupied her time and energy before had vanished and she did not know yet which things would remain other than her passion for the mission in Africa.

So often when I visit with persons who are suddenly aware of the fragility of life, the question arises, why me. My colleague never asked this question – rather her concern was how to live into dying. In Luke 13, we have this collection of sayings that address two questions: “Why bad things happen to good people and, how shall we live?”

The first example is the observance of the untimely deaths of the Galileans and the second is the untimely death of the Jerusalemites. One disaster was by human corruption, the second by natural disaster. In both, innocent people suffer. Jesus warns that it is not a matter of cause and effect but a reminder that life is transient and short. The time for repentance is now, not in the end, because you may not know when the end is coming. Life can be extinguished in a flash and there is no opportunity to put things right, therefore the time for repentance is now. Then Jesus redirects their thought process away from why bad things happen to the root of the problem – how to live.

Repentance and forgiveness is a consistent theme for Luke. The concluding commissioning words of Jesus to the disciples after his resurrection are: “thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (24:46-47). Several times in the gospel, Jesus talks about the importance of repentance:

5;32 “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.

15;7 “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous person who need no repentance.

17: 3-4 “Be on your guard. If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender and if there is repentance, you must forgive. If the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, “I repent”, you must forgive.”

It seems that Jesus’ message is a call to repentance and that we bear fruit worthy of repentance. Jesus rejects the explanation that cause and effect can explain the suffering of persons. In John 9, the disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind.” Jesus taught them that neither his parents nor the man sinned but that the man was born blind that the glory of God might be revealed.

Sin may cause suffering! If we drive drunk, or too aggressively, or become angry enough to hurt another person, we may cause harm, even suffering. But it is also the case that those who suffer may be entirely innocent. All suffer is the reality of a transient life. The great contemporary theologian Paul Tillich defines suffering as the anxiety we experience when we realize that life is transient and the life we now know is not eternal or permanent. When we face the reality that all sin and all die, we realize that it is possible to realign our priorities in such a way as to live with others and anticipate a face to face encounter with God.

What should those priorities be? Luke encourages us to pay close attention to bearing fruit as faithful disciples. In Luke 12:1-13:9 several examples are given: consider yourself valuable, acknowledge Christ before others, be on guard against greed, be rich towards God, don’t worry about your life, strive for the kingdom, give alms, etc. In short the “fruit” of faithful discipleship points to our relationship with God and others as the summary of the law instructs.

The fig tree reminds us that God expects faithfulness and fruitfulness. The basic problem in the lack of fruitfulness is failure to be rooted in God. Carter Heyward called it being “enGoded”. Alice Jellema told the vestry at their retreat in February that the way we conduct ourselves as a group, how we work together, how we listen to each other, is a way of embodying Christ for each other. The mystery of God exceeds scientific or human reason to explain the why of every situation. God does not promise to remove temptation or suffering but to be present with us.

The lesson we learn from Jesus is that there is no connection between suffering and sin – we are all sinners and we will all suffer. Jesus was tempted but did not sin – and suffered the finitude associated with human life but three days later showed us the marks of the nails and spear that we might believe. We cannot make life safe nor God tame. We can only turn to God, trust in God’s mercy, confess where we have sinned, repent and turn to God, and make use of the time given us. It is not a bad thing to feel the full fragility of our lives.

To bear fruit is to bear God’s being and love into the world. If we are not doing this, we need to invite the gardener to go to work. Our tree is planted in good soil. We are grounded in God, the hidden ground of love. But we may not be paying enough attention to the grounding or opening ourselves to being nurtured. The art of the gardener, Jesus the Christ, is to see the great loss of wasted soil and fruitless trees and tend the roots that the tree will live and bear much fruit.