Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,

given by Rev. Eliza Linley/March 11, 2007

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This morning I’d like to talk about a very special kind of recycling, and the springboard for this reflection is in this morning’s gospel text: “Let the barren fig tree alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good, but if not, cut it down.” 

Manure is great stuff. Outside our front door hang two ferns in baskets. One is perpetually lush, green and healthy, and the other barely survives. But they’re right next to each other. What’s the difference? Every spring, a dove returns to the one fern, lays her eggs, and sits on them for weeks. Then, after the eggs hatch, mother and dove babies live there until the little birds fledge, which happens when they just can’t fit into the nest anymore. This is the third year of this cycle, and I’m not sure, but I think it must be the second or third generation of doves. No wonder the fern is so healthy! It has an annual massive infusion of dove guano. In Peru the Inca used to send collectors all the way down from the Andes to the coast to gather sea bird droppings to put on the terraced fields at 10,000 feet. EBMUD’s wastewater treatment facility used to sell bags of well-processed fertilizer that was, as they said, made by all of us, and it made the garden grow like nobody’s business. The gardener in Jesus’ parable was no stranger to the wonders of manure, and since no detail of a parable is unimportant, I wonder what message is hidden here. Like the child looking at a large pile of horse droppings, “I’m sure there must be a pony in here somewhere!” 

Jesus’ hearers wondered if the Galileans Pilate murdered in a hideous and sacriligious way were terrible sinners, and so deserved their fate. Or maybe those people who were killed in the construction accident had done something awful to cause the tower of Siloam to fall on them. Jesus’ answer does not satisfy their need to have retributive justice make sense of the world. God’s justice does not mean that bad things don’t happen to people, independent of their moral character. When he says, “Unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did”, what does he mean? We who are steeped in the Christian tradition can interpret it to mean that, having begun a new life in Christ, you may have a tower fall on you, but death is not the worst thing that can happen. We know that it is not the end, and so we have the option not to die as they did. 

But how do we get to that enviable point of confidence and trust in the goodness of the Lord? What if we find ourselves more in the position of the fig tree: not dead, but not a single fig on the branch, either? Take Moses, for example. He’d beat a murder rap in Egypt and made a nice life for himself in Midian, Married, tending his father-in-law’s sheep and staying out of trouble. Which was where God found him and placed before him a burning bush – hard to ignore. But Moses has no desire to be the savior of Israel, to head back to his arrest warrant in Egypt and tell Pharaoh to “let my people go”. He does not say “yes” to God. At first. 

Indeed, salvation history is littered with the excuses of the called and the chosen: “I am just a boy”, “I am but a pruner of sycamore trees”, “a man of unclean lips”, “how can this be, since I am a virgin?” Sarah just laughed. And what are these excuses, if not the waste, the manure, of our fears, our lack of faith, our false beliefs, our sinful past and the effort to sweep it all out of the way? God uses these to work miracles. It is the negotiation, the dialog with God, that gets us from Point A to Point B. Moses tried everything in the book to avoid bearing the figs God is calling him to bear. All his faults come back to haunt him. No doubt with the murder charge in the back of his mind, he

Says, “who am I to do this?” as in, “Lord, I am not worthy”, which most of us use most of the time. God says, “I will be with you”. Moses says, “who shall I say sent me?” and God replies “I am who I am.” and, lest there be any question, “the God of your father, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. “What if they won’t listen to me?”. God says, “here are the signs”. And finally Moses says, “Well, I’m not much of a public speaker”, and God says, “your brother Aaron will do the talking”. God pushes Moses, and us, to work through and look beyond the seemingly impossible, in other words, our own shortcomings and the awful things we’ve done, to lean on God, to use our heads as well as our hearts, to seek community, and to have faith. 

God knows we can’t do this without digging a little around the root of the tree and fertilizing with the manure we’ve created as part of the human condition. St. Paul tells us that God never tests us beyond what we can bear, which is a truly terrible thought to anyone who has been tested and collapsed, which is to say, most of us. But this passage from First Corinthians is often quoted out of context. The whole text is this: “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but will also provide a way out, so you will be able to endure it.” God is faithful. Community exists. We never have to do it alone.

On the other hand, being chosen by God, even in our era of self-affirmation, does not mean that we are doing a screamingly wonderful job. God will use any means at hand. Another way of saying this is that God is not created in our image, does not share our prejudices, does not buy into our self-righteous judgmentalism, will not endorse our divisiveness, our inability to forgive those whose spirituality or politics are different from our own. 

Oh, dear. And things were going so well, in our church, in our nation, in the world. As the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, put it to the bickering bishops in Tanzania a couple of weeks ago, “the only thing any of us has any right to say is that I am a very great sinner, and Jesus a very great savior”. Our own bad behavior is not simply something to be ashamed of but to be learned from. The thought that God can use our worst and most embarrassing failures to help bring about God’s reign of justice, mercy, and love is a marvel and a blessing. That should be good news enough to forgive others and ourselves. The fig tree is a story of being worthy of love and care even, or especially, when our lives appear to be barren of grace. May we live in hope of bearing fruit worthy of repentance.