Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

last week we talked a little about how

the story of Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem,

and that image of God as grieving over us,

is probably not on most of our "top ten lists"

of best-known stories about Jesus,

or even, favorite stories about Jesus.

Well, I suspect that this morning’s reading

is even less so!

"Unless you repent, you will all perish,

just like those people that the tower fell down on"?

"Cut down this tree!

Why should it be wasting the soil?"

Anybody want to claim this fig tree thing

as your favorite parable?

If you were choosing a Bible story to read

to one of your grandchildren, let’s say,

is this one that you would choose?

On the one hand,

I imagine that most of us do find it easier to imagine

Jesus judging us for our sins and failures

than grieving over them.

But we don’t really want to read about it, do we?!

Nevertheless, there are some important gleanings

that we can take from this uncomfortable set of verses.

They aren’t necessarily cheerful and upbeat …

we are in Lent, after all …

but they are important.

So let’s unpack them:

first, the first half about people perishing in awful ways,

and then, the parable about the fig tree.

In the first half, verses 1 through 5,

we learn that people two thousand years ago

are amazingly like people of today

in terms of thought patterns, and seeking explanations.

A terrible episode where Pilate

has apparently slaughtered quite a few Galileans.

An equally terrible episode where a tower falls

and kills eighteen people in Jerusalem.

And what, apparently, are the rest of people speculating about?

"These must have been really wicked people

for God to cause something like that to happen to them."

Or even, "for God to permit something like that to happen to them."

We’re always more comfortable if we can see a clear cause and effect, aren’t we?

If A, then B.

Conversely, if we look out and see B,

then we know A must have happened before.

If something bad has happened to you,

it must be because God is or was upset with you for some reason.

Jesus is having none of that.

Were those murdered Galileans worse sinners than other Galileans?

No, Jesus says, they were not.

Were the eighteen who happened to be under the tower when it fell

"worse offenders" than everyone else in Jerusalem?

No, says Jesus, they were not.

But then he goes on with the scary part:

"Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did."

Well, that’s hardly comforting, is it?

All he’s saying is that every one of us is a terrible sinner,

it’s just that some have been luckier than others so far.

Unless we repent,

we will all perish as they did.

What seems important to me here is that,

Jesus is making clear that there is no such thing as

one person being "a worse sinner" than another person.

At least, not from God’s point of view.

Humanly speaking, of course we make distinctions.

If I rise up and smite you dead,

that’s obviously a great deal worse for you

than if I just spread a nasty rumor about you.

And you’re likely to send me to prison for one,

and not the other.

But from God’s broader point of view,

there’s not all that much difference between the two.

Both are demonstrations that I am separated from God.

Both indicate that I’m trying to shape the world my way

instead of living in the world as God created it

and intends for it to be.

Both suggest that I think I can run the world

better than God can, or will.

Whether I assault you physically, or verbally,

it suggests that I think that judgment belong to me,

and I can’t wait until God gets around to it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But hear carefully also

what this passage is not saying.

It does not say that there is no such thing as sin.

It doesn’t say that because I’m a sinner,

I have no right to protect myself against some other sinner

who has a bad temper and a large knife.

It doesn’t say that God will not judge us at some point.

Only, that we cannot presume that bad things happen

only to bad people.

We are all sinners.

And we all stand in need of repentance.

Now, the second half of our reading, verses 6 through 9,

gives us a sense of what it is that God thinks about

when God makes the claim that we are sinners.

Here, we have a fig tree.

That’s us.

The fig tree is in a man’s vineyard – that’s God –

and for three years he has been waiting for it to bear fruit,

but there has not been any.

So he’s ready to cut it down and start over again,

maybe with another fig tree,

or maybe with a date palm this time, who knows.

But the gardener stops him …

and we have to understand the gardener here as Jesus.

The gardener says, wait,

let’s give it one more year;

I’ll put special effort into it, and pamper it,

and if it doesn’t have fruit next year,

then you can cut it down.

In a sense, then, sin is our failure to bear fruit.

Sin is what happens when we fail to be who we were created to be,

fail to do what we were created to do.

It doesn’t mean that we’re not doing anything at all …

that fig tree may have been providing lovely shade

for the workers in that vineyard.

But it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do:

give figs.

It’s important that we understand this correctly, though.

It is not that bearing fruit is what gets us saved, rescued, whatever.

That’s God’s work, and God will do it.

Rather, bearing fruit is a sign that we know and understand

what God has created us to be,

and what God has done for us.

If we have a clear understanding of God’s world and our place in it,

then we will bear appropriate fruit,

not weeds, or brambles, or sticker burs,

or no fruit at all.

It’s really even more true to say that

our failure to bear fruit is a symptom of sin

than it is sin in and of itself.

But here’s another piece that is equally important,

although it really only comes into play

after we have understood the first part.

What, exactly, is the fig tree owner upset about?

Is he angry because he came looking for olives,

and there were none on his fig tree?

No …

Is he ready to cut the tree down

because he had a sudden hankering for pomegranates,

and there were none on his fig tree?

No …

He is unhappy because there are no figs on his fig tree.

It is not doing the one thing that it’s supposed to do,

that none of the other trees in his vineyard can do.

It’s not bearing figs.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Sometimes, in our enthusiasm to be good Christians,

or in our guilt over times when we haven’t been,

we start to think that God is expecting us

to bear all sorts of kinds of fruit,

a whole orchard unto ourselves.

That we not only have to give a fig,

but to give an olive, and a pomegranate,

and a bunch of grapes, and a few tomatoes as well.

This past week I was having lunch with a friend,

who was telling me about some of the reasons

he left the church where he had been going for a number of years.

He said, they were always trying to get you to do something more.

And to try to make you feel guilty if you didn’t sign up for it.

"You don’t want to do this project?

Well, okay, here’s another project.

You can sign up for that one.

Don’t want to do that, either?

What about this one over here?"

Until he finally just got tired of it.

He didn’t say it exactly this way,

but clearly, he was tired of being asked to bear fruit

that wasn’t from his kind of tree.

Now, the church he was talking about is a wonderful place;

they do an amazing amount of outreach in the community.

But my friend got tired of being told

that he had to fit himself into their programming,

instead of finding the place where he could best bear fruit

with his own skills and talents and abilities.

This is so important.

On the one hand,

God does expect us to bear fruit.

On the other hand,

God expects of us only that we bear the fruit

that we are capable of bearing.

A fig tree does not have to produce apples.

I don’t have to play the organ,

and Danny doesn’t have to preach the sermon …

though I suspect he probably could.

Wayne doesn’t have to fix the air conditioning when it acts up,

and Virgil doesn’t have to direct the choir.

Van doesn’t have to deposit the offering in the bank,

and Irmagene doesn’t have to maintain the church website.

God expects us to use the abilities we have,

not the ones we don’t have.

We have to give a fig,

not a kiwi.

I think this is also important to remember as we grow older,

and sometimes have to give up bearing the fruit we once gave.

Because it’s not so much that we become incapable of bearing fruit,

as it is that we have to discover what kinds of fruit we can bear now.

I really get a kick out of my college students,

who seem to think that anyone over about sixty

must have one foot in the grave already.

Our culture is so youth-driven that there seems to be a majority of opinion

that being a senior adult means just sitting around,

unwilling and/or unable to do anything productive.

To be sure, it can be depressing, at least initially,

to discover that there are things we used to be able to do,

that we can’t do any longer.

But that is not a sign that our days of bearing fruit are over.

Just, that God has a different kind of fruit in mind for us now.

It may take some time to figure out what that is,

but there is never a time when we can do nothing in response to God.

So, what kind of fruit are we to bear?

What kind of work are we to do, if we "give a fig"?

The writer Frederick Buechner says this:

"By and large a good rule for finding out is this:

The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work

(a) that you need most to do and

(b) that the world most needs to have done."

By way of example, he suggests that

if you really love your work,

you’ve probably met requirement (a),

but if your work is writing commercials for TV,

you may have missed out on requirement (b).

Conversely,

if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony,

you’ve got it made on requirement (b),

but if you are miserable and depressed doing it,

then not only have you missed out on (a),

but you’re probably not really helping your patients

all that much either!

And keep in mind,

whether we’re talking about work that you do for pay,

or work that you choose as a volunteer,

or the work involved in being a parent or grandparent

or caregiver for a family member,

it’s all the same when it comes to the question of bearing fruit.

Buechner concludes by suggesting that

"the place God calls you to is the place

where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."

So, should you give a fig?

Yes, if you’re a fig tree.

No, if you’re a grapevine.

Each of us needs to figure out,

together with God, and in conversation with each other,

what is the particular fruit we are called to bear

in this particular part of the world,

at our particular time of life,

with our particular talents and passions.

Not bearing fruit is not an option.

The vineyard-owner expects it.

The gardener will help us.

And we can find joy

in serving the Lord together.

Amen.

© 2007 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)