Third Sunday in Lent – Bill Harkins
The Collect
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Gospel: Luke 13:1-9
At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them–do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it 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, you can cut it down.'”
In the Name of the God of Creation, who loves us all, Amen. Good morning, and welcome to Holy Family on this Third Sunday of Lent. Today’s Gospel reading includes the parable of the barren fig tree, an evocative illustration of being stuck in a pattern of unfruitfulness—or what Henry David Thoreau called a state of “quiet desperation.” I imagine that for each of us the conditions that might lead to depleted and unproductive soil are uniquely ours, yet with common features to our stories. Perhaps it is the soil of unhealthy family dynamics, or unresolved grief, or anger, which leads at times to bitterness. Perhaps we have deep questions about why God allows bad things to happen. It is quite human to ask, as did those in our Gospel reading for today, if these events are somehow punishment for something we have done or left undone. Jesus responds to their question with a parable, and the metaphor from today’s Gospel, with its evocative image of a withering and unproductive fig tree, suggests a person disconnected from his or her own soul and from the wholeness that the Light of Christ can restore. It is a Lenten text, appropriate to this season of discernment. I don’t believe ours is a vindictive God, and I do believe that because we have free will sometimes our choices cut us off from life-giving and generative possibilities. Perhaps Lent is a season for digging around our roots, asking for forgiveness when that is what is needed, and hoping we can bear fruit in the coming season. I believe this is true. And God waits for us in that new season.
In this lovely parable, it is not until the vineyard owner expresses his discontent with the situation that the gardener is motivated to change. The owner desired that the tree flourish and grow, but the gardener seemed content to let this state of horticultural lassitude go on for another year. Understood theologically, there are times when our confession—saying out loud what has remained unsaid—can be the occasion for grace, reminding us that we are to care for and nurture the soil of our souls, and that our lives are to be lived as fully as possible. God fully glorified, Irenaeus said, is a human being fully alive. The season of Lent calls us to self-examination and repentance. Indeed, the word “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning “to lengthen,” or, put differently, to “spring forth,” as in that season when the light of day gradually grows longer.
Today’s Gospel brings this home to us in an urgent way. I wonder if you have a memory of a time or event in your life that demonstrates this parable for you…a time perhaps when you were rooted in unyielding soil, cut off from the rich ground of your own soul and from the life giving light of Christ… a memory perhaps of a lost and squandered opportunity, or a season of living in darkness. One example that comes to mind in my own life takes me back all the way to high school, a time of life when for most, if not all of us, life is marked by the intensity of every kind of emotion and experience, a memory I shared at our Men’s Retreat last fall.
In the mid-summer before my senior year in high school a new student arrived in our neighborhood. He was from Southern California, and he fit the stereotype perfectly. With blond surfer good looks and an easy manner, he quickly stole the hearts of the girls at school and was the envy of all the guys—though we would not admit it. In the Sandy Springs community of the early 70’s, in many ways a small town really, he was rather exotic. Along with my football teammates, I simply chose to ignore him. Until, that is, he decided to go out for football. When the coach, in a moment of grace, granted him permission to join the team, we were filled with righteous indignation. After all, he had not suffered through years of two-a-day practices in the August Georgia heat or cut his teeth on Gray-Y football on the dirt fields of Chastain Park as had most of us. He was a stranger among us, in this our senior year, and my little band of brothers would not let him in. We considered it unfair for the coach to let this latecomer onto the team, not this team, and not this year. This was our year. And we were a good team. And so, the cadre closed its ranks. He seemed to take this with the same good-natured equanimity with which, outwardly, he took everything else. He quickly made friends with others at school who, according to the proscribed rules of our football fiefdom, were also social outcasts. He seemed to get along with every strata of our stratified universe at a time and place when this was very hard to do. In my own way I was testing these boundaries as well, writing for the school paper and joining the drama club—things football players did not do. But he was transcending boundaries as if he lived in a different universe altogether. Secretly, I admired him.
Truth be told, however, I was also jealous of him, and when the coach let him join the team my envy only increased, because we happened to play the same position. And he was very good; lightning fast with good hands, he was ideal for the position of slot-back and flanker in our power-I option offense (I am dating myself here, to be sure). Thankfully, this scheme also called for multiple substitutions and combinations, so we both got a lot of playing time over the course of a very good season. Yes, I secretly admired him, and I learned from him. But I would not let him in. When track season began, he replaced a dear friend on the sprint medley relay team, of which I was also a member, and largely due to his contributions, we finished third in the state, setting a new school record in the process. In practice I refused to let him beat me on the track, harboring a secret fear that he was faster than me. And perhaps that was true.
One afternoon that spring, just a couple of months before graduation, I found him sitting alone in the locker room, located off to one side of the gym. He was crying. Letting the blinders of my own jealousy momentarily fall away, I sat down on the bench across from him and asked him what was wrong. He was quiet for what seemed a long time, and then, slowly, his story unfolded. His father was a prominent misogynistic physician in southern California who left his family after several affairs. My teammate moved with his mother and younger sister into a religious commune that we might refer to as a cult. His mother’s mental health deteriorated after his parents divorced, and he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Atlanta. With his mother now in a state hospital in California, and his father involved in yet another relationship, his life was in chaos. He worried about his younger sister, who was becoming involved with drugs and alcohol, and he felt he needed to stay close to her rather than go to college back in California. He wanted desperately to go home. He told me all this as we sat in the late afternoon sunlight of the gym, with motes of dust glinting and floating in vertical shafts in the sunlit air, and only the distant sounds of bouncing basketballs breaking the silence. I sat there and stewed in the juices of my own blinding self-righteous envy, and I realized that his good looks and easy-going manner had masked his pain, and that all of us who might have been his friends—had been instead the gatekeepers to his emotional prison and loneliness. I felt deeply ashamed. I tried over the last weeks of school to befriend him, but really, it was too late. Soon the forces of time and destiny swept us up in a river of change, and after graduation I never saw or heard from him again.
I often wonder what became of him, but I do not know. I heard that he did find his way back to college in California, but a note I sent to him was returned unopened. I did know that I needed to repent, and that summer I made my way to Holy Innocents’ church—I had grown up Presbyterian—and I began a series of conversations with the Rector, slowly leading me eventually to the Episcopal Church, and ultimately, to be standing here with all of you. I needed to acknowledge my envy, a form of idolatry that had kept me from the life-giving possibilities of relationship. Yes, I had been guilty of wastefulness in relationship, of envy, of detachment from the fertile and life-giving soil of the Good News.
Yet, unproductive and toxic guilt, so common in our culture of gratuitous public confession, is at times its own form of idolatry, is finally not the appropriate response to this recognition. Confession in the Episcopal tradition occurs in community, as was true in this sacred space this morning, and in the context of worship, and in response to the life-giving light of the Gospel. It is not about publicly bearing one’s soul for the sake of relieving us of toxic guilt. It is not as if God is engineering punishment for any of the things any of us leave undone or are guilty of having done knowing full well that we should have done otherwise. Would God have sent Jesus to teach, and heal, and restore unworthy souls to wholeness if this were the case? Admitting my blame and culpability in the case of my erstwhile teammate those many years ago was not going to protect me from bad things…this is not how God works. What is our operative theology of crisis and loss, of repentance, of forgiveness? People do this not to interfere with the “will of God,” but rather because it is in keeping with the example of Jesus, who healed the leper, made straight the limbs of the paralytic, gave sight to the blind, exorcised the demons. Were these ailments punishments from a God angry about misdeeds? They were not. God does not micromanage our lives such that we are the reasons for catastrophes that occur by virtue of our having displeased God. Jesus did not tell those who fell at his feet in pain to go suffer a few years longer to pay for their sins. But he does ask us to repent. In the Gospel for today we hear the clear message that if Israel does not turn from its idolatry, does not turn from seeing its vocation in terms of privilege and worldly preeminence, the idols it worships will exact a high price. So it is for us. What I learned, and am still learning, from my experience with my high school teammate is that my envy—pure old-fashioned jealousy, caused me to deny the abundance of God that might have allowed the relationship to flourish, bloom, and grow. I was like the fig tree that did not bear fruit. And, to continue the metaphor, I have often found myself wishing for just another year, just a bit more time to get to know him and to respond to his story with compassion, without being blinded by my operative theology of scarcity—my belief that there was simply not enough love to go around. But it was not to be. Rather, my repentance, and the recognition of my own fears borne of envy, and the vulnerability that it opened like a deep wound in my soul, had something to teach me. It is teaching me still. Jesus says that terrible things sometimes happen. “I am not going to focus on Herod,” he says in the Gospel last week, “and I am not going to worry about Pilate.” Bad things happen sometimes, and it is not our fault. As Kate Bowler at Duke says so well, “no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude… When they don’t know what else to say, people say “Everything happens for a reason…The only thing worse than saying this is pretending that you know the reason…I was immediately worn out,” she laments, by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.” In this parable, Jesus asks that we attend to what we are feeling when we look in the mirror and see someone whom we do not like, whose life is not bearing fruit. We are asked to be careful about our projections, especially when we make assumptions about people who do not share our views, or whose family constellations are different from ours. Regardless of the form our sin is taking, it is keeping us from flourishing and bearing fruit. Attend to that, and to the fact that we are bumping up against our own limitations and humanness. Let it be the occasion for choosing life. Let our confession be the turning over of the soil of our souls, in preparation for planting the life-giving seeds of repentance. If we name what we see, we may be afraid, but this can be life-giving. We may be afraid, but God is still the God of compassion, and our fear is not the final answer. We may be afraid, but Lent is a time for turning toward the light, connecting with the deep and rich soil of the Good News, and allowing our very souls to, well, lengthen, grow, and flourish. Let’s remember the miracles of the burning bush, and of the miracle of photosynthesis in which trees eat sunlight, and carbon dioxide, and give us in turn the very air we breathe. As Welsh poet and priest reminds us in a timely Lenten poem, these moments of deeper self-awareness may be a gift.
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.
Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
~ R.S. Thomas
We may be afraid, and we may be in a hurry to move on, but the harrowing of our souls that occurs through the recognition of our own fear and vulnerability, and when appropriate, our need to repent and apologize, can become the source of new growth, new relationships, and new life in Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.