Penelope Bridges
Third Sunday in Lent
Penelope Bridges
You’ve probably noticed that we start our service a little differently during Lent. For one thing, we do the confession up front – putting us in the right, repentant frame of mind for the solemnity of the Lenten worship. And we also hear Jesus’s words summarizing the law he lived by:
Jesus said, “The first commandment is this: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” If you grew up with the old Prayer Book you might remember that last sentence as “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets”. That’s because the old prayer book quoted from Matthew, whereas this prayer book goes for Mark’s version. But the Matthew version actually makes an important point. These two commandments sum up all the law and the prophets.
It’s all too easy to skip over these introductory words as we make our confession and then immerse ourselves in the readings of the day. So I want to take a moment to think about that summary, and about the law that it reflects and that Matthew refers to explicitly.
We hear a lot in the Gospels about the Law of Moses. The gift of the Law was regarded as a unique blessing for God’s chosen people. It set them apart from the tribes around them. It provided sensible boundaries for living in community. And it said that God loved them enough to want them to live their best life.
As Christians we don’t subscribe to all 600 and some laws of Moses – what would we do without mixed fabrics or shellfish? – but we do honor or at least give lip service to the ten commandments. We may chafe sometimes at rules, but we know that rules are in general a good thing. Children flourish when they know their boundaries and the rules are clear. Our mental health suffers when the goal posts move, when we don’t know what is allowed and what is not, when there is inconsistency. When parents don’t present a united front, children learn to manipulate for their own advantage: “Mommy won’t let me do this, but Daddy might …”
One of the most powerful arguments for celebrating same sex marriage in the church is that the church is the standard bearer for healthy rules. We have a responsibility to provide a set of expectations for life together. The marriage service clearly sets out three purposes for marriage and requires certain promises of fidelity and mutuality regardless of future circumstances, witnessed by the faith community, family and friends, and God. This is a good structure for raising a family, and we are blessed to be able to offer it and to support those who make the commitment.
Living within a law tells us what is permitted and prohibited. It creates stability for a city, a state, a nation, a world. That is the bottom line, the lowest common denominator.
But our faith takes us further than that. While secular law gives us lines within which to live without prosecution, it rarely moves into proactive instructions for doing the right thing, and this is where, as the baptismal covenant reminds us, we need God’s help. The Ten Commandments include both prohibition and prescription, both “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots”. You will worship the Lord as the only Lord; you will not commit murder. You will honor times of rest; you will not lie. Both are necessary.
For a community of mutual benefit and compassion to flourish, we need to continually ask ourselves, what is the right thing to do in this moment? When you find a bundle of cash on the sidewalk, there is nothing in law to stop you putting it in your pocket and walking away, but maybe the right thing to do is to ask the people around you if they have dropped it, or to hand it in to the police station. When you hear of people starving in South Sudan or of babies dying in Gaza, the law doesn’t require you to send a donation to help, but maybe the right thing to do is to put off the new outfit you were planning to buy and send that money to save a life. When you have a choice between spreading rumors that incite distrust and fear, or restricting yourself to only sharing what is good and lifegiving, the law has nothing to say about it, but it’s pretty clear what the right course of action is.
When we lose sight of the right thing, we lose our moral grounding. When the only consideration is, can I get away with this, rather than is it right, the social contract that binds us together starts to disintegrate. I believe that is what we are seeing now in this country. People with enormous wealth and power are only interested in what they can get away with that will benefit them, regardless of the damage it will do and the lives it will cost. And this social cancer is spreading, so that we are losing the ability to think the best of each other, to trust others to behave with kindness, mercy, and compassion.
I’ve been looking for faithful people who are sincerely supportive of conservative positions on social issues. I want to organize open conversations in which we hear differing points of view while honoring the dignity of each participant. A friend who has conservative connections has been asking around her circle, but everyone so far has turned down the invitation because, she said, “They don’t want to go somewhere and be attacked.” They do not trust a Christian community to treat them with respect. I want to believe we would do the right thing; we are even practicing it in our Lent forum series about civil discourse. But the social climate around us means we are not trusted to do the right thing, to have mercy, to practice compassion.
God has given us guidelines for life, through the Ten Commandments and through the teaching and example of Jesus. And we get infinite opportunities to get it right, to turn our lives around, because God wants us to flourish, to be righteous, to live up to God’s expectations. Let’s look at Luke’s parable of the fig tree. The tree isn’t living up to its potential. A short-term market sensibility might say cut it down and replace it with something that will bear fruit. That’s the attitude of the absentee landlord, the investor who sees the tree only as a way to make money. But the gardener, who has a long-term relationship with the tree, wants to give it a second chance.
Here’s a wrinkle you might not be aware of: the gardener is actually proceeding in accordance with the law of Moses. Leviticus prohibited gathering any fruit from a tree in its first three years of life. Any fruit produced in the fourth year was to be “set apart for rejoicing in the Lord” (Lev 19:23). Only in the fifth year was it permitted to harvest and profit from the crop. This tree is entering its fourth year, so the owner, if he is obedient to the Law and respects the relationship between humanity and horticulture laid out in the Creation story, should not expect any return on his investment for another full year.
Now there’s reason to believe that the landowner in the parable represents God, who would expect to rejoice with the people over the fourth year’s harvest. There is plenty of material in the Hebrew Scriptures about God being angry over the faithlessness of God’s people and wanting to destroy them; but once we get past the great Flood, every time God threatens to destroy all humanity, someone manages to convince God to relent. Moses, Abraham, the prophets, all experienced this dynamic, and now Jesus, the good gardener, follows suit. Wait, the gardener pleads, let’s see if one last effort can turn things around and restore the relationship. Then we can rejoice indeed.
This is a parable of hope: the gardener doesn’t know if the treatment will be effective, but he is willing to work at it and risk the outcome. He is open to a future possibility. Manure isn’t the loveliest image in Scripture, but in a pre-industrial world it is the best fertilizer available. And consider this: when we go through hardship, when we are living with grief or fear, the everyday burden of that emotion can be as unpleasant as a pile of manure. But if we keep working it, bringing it to God in prayer, putting our trust in God to bring us through, reflecting on it through the lens of Scripture and community, that manure might eventually turn into spiritual fertilizer that gives new growth, bears spiritual fruit, enables us to deepen empathy and compassion. The divine gardener is deeply invested in our wellbeing and will be there with us and for us through every challenge.
Echoing through this parable is the larger story of Scripture. Over and over, God reaches out in mercy to people who don’t deserve it. Moses was a murderer. Sarah laughed at God. Jacob was a swindler. Rahab ran a brothel. David committed adultery and conspiracy to murder. Peter tried to pretend he didn’t even know Jesus. The gardener keeps working, keeps turning over the soil, pruning back dead roots, adding fertilizer, giving us chance after chance to turn our lives around, because the gardener loves each one of us and longs for us to return that love, longs for us to do the right thing.
The story of the fig tree doesn’t have an ending. How would you finish it? What might happen after that additional year of nurturing? If the tree starts to bear fruit, well and good, but what if it is still barren? Will the gardener give up on it, or will he argue with the landowner again, maybe bargaining for yet another chance. Might he even offer to give his own life and nourish the tree with his blood?
We don’t know what the future holds, for each of us, for our church, for our country. But that should not stop us from working for the future we believe God wants for us, the best future possible. So we will keep on, doing the right thing, practicing mercy, offering everything we can to nurture and strengthen the world around us, trusting in the good gardener to bring about the growth and fruitfulness that lies within each of us.
