Unwatered

Lent 3(C) – Luke 13:1-9
Preached at Christ Lutheran Church, West Boylston

My father was an expert gardener. In addition to an orchard of fifteen fruit trees, cherries and apples, chestnuts and pears, my father cultivated a large, beautiful vegetable garden. Every year, we would have fresh broccoli, carrots, potatoes, rhubarb, beans, onions grown in our own backyard, more than we could eat. Raspberry bushes that grew over my head as a child, blueberries tiny and sweet. When Mom mentioned that she loved asparagus, my father worked that unforgiving soil until we had so much asparagus that it went to seed before we could harvest it, the long, thin, flowering stalks reaching for the heavens. I remember as a little child, my father taking me out back to plant pumpkin seeds, and watching in the fall as my VERY OWN PUMPKIN grew along its curled vine. Twenty-two years after my father passed away, we still find clusters of garlic growing wild on the property. And all this while working as a traveling insurance salesman, seldom home but pouring his heart and soul into those plants when he was, and producing the earth’s bounty therefrom.

So when in ninth grade Biology class, our teacher, Mr. Snyder, told us we’d be growing plants over Christmas break, I thought this would be an easy A. Surely I must have inherited my father’s gift of gardening. The project was simple. We’d take a cutting from a rather robust, easy-to-grow houseplant, pack it with some soil into a styrofoam cup, and care for it for about two months until we had a full, lush plant of our own. Dozens upon dozens of cups lined the windowsill in our classroom, plants of all kinds reaching for the sun that shone in through the glass early in the morning. And mine stood out from all the rest. It was the one that was brown, and withered. I blamed the plant.

Try again, Mr. Snyder said. So I went back, took another clipping from the spider plant that hung in his office. I tried a different mixture of soil and fertilizer this time, kept accurate records of watering. When I watered it. Which wasn’t that often, to be fair. Anyway, the thing seemed to spite me. It shriveled up and died within a week. For my third try, I got help. Mr. Snyder chose the plant himself, a wandering Jew, beautiful purple and green leaves, impossible to kill, he said. He mixed the earth himself, and I pushed the clipping down into it with his eyes watching over me. He practically did the project for me this time. Somehow, this time, the plant leapt from the cup and threw itself on the ground. I think it knew what was in store for it, under my watchful care. It wanted to get the inevitable over and done with quickly. I couldn’t blame the plant this time; it was me. I wasn’t attentive enough, and deprived it of water. And as the withered plants in my office in Holden can attest, I am still a certified brown thumb.

Jesus talks about a fig tree that doesn’t bear fruit. But if it were up to me, the sapling would have died before it grew into a tree.

I think that most of us believe pretty sincerely that there’s something wrong with us when we don’t bear fruit. It’s a common understanding of the world and how it works. When we do good things, it produces good things in us. When we do bad, though, we are punished, we fail to produce. Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. And so, when bad things happen to us, we must be bad, right?

Of course, we know, at least on the surface, that things don’t quite work out that way in real life. Sometimes our behavior and our rewards don’t exactly match up. That’s the way that life goes sometimes. Still, we expect that overall, goodness should produce more goodness, and evil should produce more evil. Whether because there’s some heavenly force out there keeping track of karma points, or we just have experience that things tend to feed back into themselves, we want the world to operate this way.

And so when things don’t go well, we are quick to look for someone to blame. I’ve mentioned before the challenges experienced in the faith community I served during my internship year in Omaha. It was a congregation that erupted into conflict about six months into my year there. As I went from person to person, visiting people and providing care in their hurting, I got to hear a lot of candidates for who was to blame. It was the pastor’s fault, some said. Others pointed to the property committee chair. Someone aimed an accusation at one particular couple who always seemed to have something to complain about. There were others, too, who received the blame. As I stood outside the system, there to serve and observe for just one year, I could see the situation in a way nobody else could. And I could see that the situation was far more complex, and that none of those accusations, not a single one, was accurate.

The congregation experienced tragedy, and searched desperately for the reason. But instead of giving the problem some water, they blamed the plant.

The same is true with the beginning of today’s Gospel reading. As Jesus is teaching, he is confronted with a community tragedy. Certain Jews from Galilee were killed by Pilate, the representative of the Roman government. Not just killed, either, but desecrated, their blood mixed in with sacrifices to false, Roman gods. The assumption is that, to experience such a terrible death, these Galileans must have committed some very grave sin. Jesus is asked to identify the blame.

And He says there isn’t any. Even while calling his listeners to repentance, to turn back toward God, Jesus insists that evil does not automatically stem from evil.

To make his point even stronger, he cites the recent collapse of a tower in Siloam, which in its fall killed eighteen people. This was not caused by sin, Jesus insists. God does not punish evil in this way. That isn’t in God’s nature. Karma isn’t what God is all about.

So Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree that doesn’t produce fruit. It’s a confusing little parable, because something is missing, something that we want to be there, something that we expect. Jesus describes a tree that is barren. But he doesn’t say why it is barren. It could be that the tree has an infestation, or is planted in poor soil, or is just not mature enough to bear fruit yet. We have no idea. We want to know, we want to blame, we want to point the finger at the problem, but we can’t.

And so we are like the owners of the field, quick to diagnose the problem, come up with someone to blame. For lack of a better culprit, we blame the tree itself for not putting forth fruit. We insist that the evil of the tree be punished, that the tree be cut down, thrown into the fire, that the ground be used for something better.

But God is not like this. God is like the gardener, patient, tending to the tree digging around it, fertilizing it, watering it, giving it another chance to grow, another year, and another.

Our community here is like that. This is a great little congregation here in West Boylston, filled with resources to do wonderful, exciting work in God’s world. In the month that I’ve been here, I’ve gotten to know you–us–as a people who care very deeply about one another and about the church that we serve. You know as well as I that things have not always gone so well in this community, and I wonder if we–myself included–have been too quick to look for blame. Sometimes rightly, because we have to know what the problems are before we can solve them.

It’s clear to me, too, though, what God is up to here. God continues to nourish and feed each one of us in this community as we struggle together to produce fruit. We are planted in the rich soil of the Word, our stories woven together into the story of God’s saving acts told in scripture. We are fertilized, fed with the Lord’s Supper, week after week, growing in faith even when it seems there is no fruit to give. And perhaps most significantly, we are watered in our Baptism, renewed day after day, our very foundation placed in that claim God made upon us so long ago, nourished by God’s presence in our lives.

Sisters and Brothers, are you feeling dried up, withered, unable to produce fruit? Are you worried about your home, or your community, or your congregation? God’s promise is that He will continue to tend to you, continue working with you until you do. He will keep nourishing, keep watering you so that sprouts burst forth from your heart. God bids everyone who is thirsty to come to the water, to come without money and without price. Amen.