warning and grace

Warning and Grace 022816

Most of you know I’ve been on vacation….in warmer climes than here!  The hotel we go to has lovely tropical gardens, rich in palms and bright coloured flowers.  But 2 years ago, the gardener died, and with cost-cutting measures, has not been replaced.   So subtle signs of neglect have begun to show. It’s still lovely, but bushes are not pruned, so flowers are fewer, the back garden that once gave tomatoes and lettuce is a mess of weeds, and coconuts are not picked, so they and the dead leaves around them can be dangerous in a windstorm!

Today’s scripture readings came alive to me this week in that environment. 

Isaiah paints a picture of abundant life as God wants it, and Jesus a picture of untended life as we want it.

Isaiah shares a vision of abundant lush life, where everyone has what they need and a generous God tends to us, inviting us back into relationship,   broken by human politics and self-sufficiency.  It’s an invitation of great grace, the amazing grace of the Divine.

This may be the vision that hunkers in the back of Jesus’ mind when confronted by the eternal question: why do bad things happen to good people?  Notice he doesn’t resort to all the things we do to answer that unanswerable question…no theology that blames God, no facile explanations, no cynical turning away from God.

He points to a dying fig tree, and issues a warning.   A fig tree’s job is to produce figs, and this one has stopped, and its no use to anyone (picture of pomegranate tree at hotel).  Any fruit just drops and rots; it may seem to still have purpose, an occasional piece of fruit does grow….but it has no meaning—it feeds no one, brings no joy, is not part of the co-creation of the world…all because someone thinks the tree can do it all by itself.

Now there’s a metaphor.   It might be one that speaks to us as a congregation, or as individuals (it certainly speaks to us as a nation)…..our culture, and maybe even some of our members, may be right, like the owner of the fig tree, in asking what use is the church, why should we pour resources into it?  how well tended and pruned and cared for by the divine Gardener are we, what nurture and sustenance do we offer a hungry world?  Or are we so self dependent we grow a little fruit here and there but are not much use to the rest of creation?   Where is there something that is dying of neglect?

Jesus is pointing out what Isaiah pointed out: we don’t need self-dependence, we need self-criticism: some rational honesty about how our life is, how our relationship with the Gardener has been broken or neglected, about what needs some TLC from God…then we need to allow God to work with us.

Otherwise, the warning comes, we will wither and die in our own mess.  

In terms of the suffering question, Jesus doesn’t go there except to point out the stupidity of our facile answers….obviously people die when poor building maintenance causes accidents, and people die when evil leaders hold on hard to power in the face of faithful practice of others.

No, Jesus turns the question right back on to the disciples with this fig tree non sequitor:  what is your RESPONSE when bad stuff happens? that’s the key.

This week in a reflection on the psalm, Sr Joan Chittister comments on suffering: “what matters is what we do with it, AND what it does to us.”   That’s the warning and the grace in our texts.  What do we do with trouble, with suffering, with anything we can’t control?  And what does it do to us?   Lead us into withering fruitlessness, or hand it over to the gospel grace of the divine gardener?

As Fr Richard Rohr says, “Jesus builds on what his Jewish tradition already knew—how to hold, make use of, and transform suffering into a new kind of life instead of the old kind of death”

As gospel people, resurrection is our core.  We are in Lent but Easter is coming, and death doesn’t have the last word.  Life does.  Grace happens, that’s the promise we stand on (as we will sing later)…but we have to open ourselves to it..to new life that comes from hard pruning, careful digging, and lots of fertilizing.  I pray we may be trusting enough to let it happen.

Amen.