“Gardening”

Matt Sloan 20/03/2022

Readings - Isaiah 55: 1-9; Psalm 63: 1-8; Luke 13: 1-9

This is based on a sermon given by Nathan Nettleton that is on the ‘Laughing Bird’ website (https://laughingbird.net). This site contains liturgical resources with an Australian Voice.

It is so easy to believe that God is good when everything is going well, isn’t it? But what about when things go bad? The suffering that we experience or that we see others experiencing can make it much harder to believe that God is good, that life is beautiful, and that all will be well. Being exposed to innocent suffering can fill us with doubt, fear and uncertainty. It raises many complex questions, questions we find hard to face and even harder to answer. Simple cliched answers seem both appealing and hollow, and as H L Mencken, the American literary critic once said, to every complex question there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.

When something goes wrong, we often throw our arms up in the air and ask ourselves, “What have I done to deserve this?” I asked this just this morning,when our printer didn’t work. On a more serious level, it might be an accident, an illness or something that goes wrong at work – “What have I done to deserve this?”; it could be something bad that happens to a loved one, or we might lose a job, lose a relationship, or it could be the result of a natural event – “What have I done to deserve this?”. There is always something - recently there have been the floods on the east coast, the volcano and tsunami that affected Tonga, and of course the war in the Ukraine, where thousands of innocent people have had their lives turned upside down.

Why can we get into this way of thinking? Possibly because we have soaked up the Old Testament view that “If you obey God’s commands, then you will prosper and God will bless you, but if you disobey and refuse to listen then there will be consequences.” And we turn it around, telling ourselves, “I am not prospering, terrible things are happening to me or to those I love, therefore I must have done something to make God unhappy.”

There is another way to look at this, though.

Jesus was approached by people telling him of the murder of Galilean worshippers. In order to make sense of this event, they assumed that the victims were evil people who deserved God’s punishment. They were seeking an assurance that the world is an orderly, safe place so long as you do the right thing, and an assurance that because they weren’t victims then God must have been pleased with them.

But Jesus refutes the suggestion that God causes human misery to punish us. He turns the question back on to those asking the question, saying, “Unless you repent, the same will happen to you.” This wasn’t what they expected to hear! He’s saying, stop looking at others and have a good look at yourself. He’s saying that if you’re looking for what’s wrong with the world, take a look at yourself first. If we don’t face up to and deal with our own stuff, we’ll have trouble dealing with the evil in the rest of the world. Look within first.

So often we are busy looking at others. Can you believe what he did? Did you hear what she said? We ask: How could someone be so heartless … insensitive … selfish …

When we look within, we start to see our own flaws and our own faults. And we start to see that we are no better, just different, than those whose character we find questionable. Sometimes it is a case of, “There but for the grace of God go I”.

This idea is built upon by the poet, Thich Nhat Hanh, in his poem ‘Please Call Me by My True Names’. I have slightly modified one verse.

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat
attacked by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

No-one is all good or all evil. The recent Spiderman movie is fascinating in the way it deals with evil. There are a number of villains in the movie, intending to wreak havoc on the world. A traditional movie would have the baddies killed off at the hands of the superhero. Evil is defeated and good reigns supreme. Not that this is replicated in real life. This movie, however, centres around the idea of redemption. Instead of the villains dying at the hands of the superhero, compassion takes over and Spiderman is reminded by his mother in the movie to ‘do the right thing’. So, he is moved to help the villains to understand why they are so troubled and to try to resolve their inner turmoil and conflict. Instead of seeing them as villains, Spiderman sees them as troubled souls in need of saving. Restorative justice in action.

In the second part of our Luke reading, Jesus tells a parable about the fig tree. While at first we see this as a parable about judgement, importantly it is also about God’s mercy. The imagery of the parable would have been well known to his listeners, Nathan Nettleton points out. “There were many vineyard parables in the Hebrew Bible, the vineyard standing for the people of Israel, and a fig tree in the vineyard representing the leadership of the people of Israel. So when Jesus says the fig tree in the vineyard is not bearing any fruit, everybody would have known what he meant, especially when it is in response to questions about other people’s sin.” He’s saying, “Before talking about who needs to repent, take a look at your own role in the community and ask yourself, ‘What sort of fruit are you bearing?”

But Jesus doesn’t just write off the unfruitful leadership. He says that judgment would certainly call for the tree to be chopped down, but that mercy pleads for it to have another chance. God’s mercy asks for a reprieve and promises to redouble the efforts at nurturing the tree, giving it every opportunity of producing fruit.

Nettleton states that Jesus is doing two very interesting things here. “Firstly he is emphasizing the priority of God’s mercy over judgment. He doesn’t deny the possibility of judgment, of the tree being eventually chopped down, but he does say that it will be given every opportunity to avoid it, including the best of nurture and care.”

And secondly Jesus is redefining repentance. Repentance means turning around. We usually focus on the life we turn away from. The New Testament word translated as repentance is metanoia which is the root of our word metamorphosis which means something like transformation. It was mentioned in the poem we just heard, and it is what happens to a caterpillar when it becomes a butterfly, and just like a butterfly, the emphasis is on what it turns into, not what it turned from. So when Jesus says “Repent,” the focus is not what you turn from but what you turn to. He is not so much saying, “Turn from sin,” he’s saying, “Turn to God.”

We are called to be co-creators with God. Repentance is a decision to join God in producing love and peace and justice, in actively bringing about the reign of God in the world.

The tower of Siloam fell down and killed eighteen people. A bus full of children drives off a bridge in Papua New Guinea, killing one person and injuring 21. Floods in the eastern states kill 22 and render 20 000 homes unliveable. Over 5 000 people have died of COVID in Australia in the past two years. We often can’t make any sense out of these things. Horrible things happen, but we can’t explain them. There is no reason why things happened to one person and not another. Suffice to say, Bad things happen. Our focus needs to be, ‘Where to now?’

Jesus’s response is ‘Turn to God’.

God can make something out of tragedy and suffering. God can turn any death into the basis of a resurrection. It requires us to turn ourselves around and follow Jesus on the path that leads through suffering to new life. The path that Jesus leads us on is not one that avoids suffering, but it is one that comes out on the other side of it.

Tragedies occur, innocent people suffer. God doesn’t cause it, but God’s goodness is not eclipsed by it, Nettleton reminds us. “God is not going to let it prevent us from experiencing the love and goodness of God. However, God does understand when we are barren and unproductive because of what has been going on in our lives. God’s mercy won’t allow the fig tree to be cut down just because it hasn’t provided any fruit lately. God’s mercy says, “Maybe this tree needs a bit more love and care before we can expect much of it.” If you’re just getting over a death in the family, or a relationship breakdown, or a mental illness or something, God doesn’t expect you to be busting your gut changing the world. There are going to be times in anyone’s life when they have very little to give and they need a lot of care and nurture. And at those times the economic rationalists of this world will often call for the axe because there are no figs on the tree, and productivity is the only measure of worth that they can see. But God is not an economic rationalist.” Thank goodness.

To use the fig tree analogy, our church is like a fig tree. From the church in its heyday, it certainly has been pruned considerably. How productive have we been over the past few years? Are people worried that the axe is being sharpened?

We know that God doesn’t give up on us. Our church doesn’t need an axe, it needs some digging and some manure. It needs some nurture and encouragement. Some gardeners have done their job and others are needed to take over on the tools. Our church may need to reinvent itself to a certain extent, and everyone who is part of our community needs to consider how they can contribute to building a productive church. Our current process of looking at our structure and our approach to the future is so important. It’s up to us to turn around and follow Jesus into the future.

The reading from Isaiah shows that God is a merciful God who wants the best for people. We read in the passage from Isaiah the call to hear and respond to God’s generosity. To hear God saying “Do you hunger, then come and eat. Do you thirst, come and drink. Come and enjoy the best of food and wine, of milk and honey. It will cost you nothing. Come to me and you will have life. Life, overflowing, abundant, extravagant life. Come.” The invitation is there. Let us follow! Amen

I invite you to reflect as we listen to a song based on the poem we heard, ‘Call Me By My True Names’.