Sermon for All Saints-by-the-Sea, Lent 3, March 7, 2010
by the Reverend Dr. Jeffrey L Bullock

“...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.’”

Deep in the jungles of New Guinea, arguably the most primitive place left on earth, bad things happen to good people.  The local people don’t find these bad things hard to explain. If your child falls out of a tree and breaks her ankle, an evil spirit pushed her.  If the food spills from your cooking pot into the fire, a spirit made it happen, maybe a restless, angry ancestor.  If torrential rains undermine your village hut, evil forces have taken hold.  You see what’s happening here, don’t you?  In the jungle world of New Guinea, cause and effect are hard at work.  If something bad happens, malicious spirits must have caused it.

Looking on with our Western eyes, we may consider this indigenous thinking as naive and primitive.  Do evil spirits really punish people? Most of us would say, “No.”  But before we judge too quickly, let’s step back out to our world, the Western Hemisphere.  When a massive earthquake crushed Port Au Prince, there must have been a reason, right?  A couple of chauvinists gained national renown by claiming that obviously, the Haitians were sinners and they got what they deserved.  All we enlightened people scorned this thinking.  But stop, ask yourself as so many did, what happened in Haiti and Chile?  Why did these people suffer?

That question stands front and center at the beginning of this morning’s Gospel.  What’s going on with these martyred Galileans?  Why did the tower construction workers have to die?  I’ve complained so many times about the Sunday lectionary, you may a bit weary of my complaints.  But this morning’s Gospel, read out of the context from what happens before and after this Gospel story, matters very much.  Right before this Gospel story, Jesus has been cautioning again and again, that we’re not to judge others.  Beware, he tells the people, everything comes to an end.  Absolutely everything.  Jesus cautions the crowds, if you can read the signs for weather, why can’t you read the signs that everything comes to an end?  Why are you running around, spending nearly all your energy on storing up wealth when all wealth rusts some day?  Why are you so worried about tomorrow?  Tomorrow can take care of itself. 
        
There are those in the crowd however who still have “but whatabouts.”  You know “whatabouts”—that’s the expression people make when they hear something they either can’t understand or refuse to understand.  In short, it’s as if someone were answering, “I think I understand what you said.  But what if this or that were to occur—would your claim still be true?”  And so a “whatabout” shows up in this morning’s Gospel.  The crowd has heard again and again from Jesus: be prepared, the time will come when everything you know now will disappear.  What will be left to you then?  Some people in the crowd, having heard what Jesus has said, ask “But what about the pious Galileans who went to make a sacrifice at the Temple?  Pilate’s police snuck up on them and murdered them?  What did they do wrong to deserve that death?” 
        
Jesus, filled with an inspired wisdom, answers a question with questions of his own.  Were those Galileans, Jesus asked, any guiltier of sin than anyone else in Galilee?  Note carefully if you will, that when Jesus asks this question, he’s addressing Galileans!  No of course not.  God doesn’t pick out sinners and punish them proportionate to their sins.  Just in case the crowd missed the point, Jesus asks them, “And how about those stoneworkers who were crushed when their construction site collapsed?  Were they worse sinners than anyone else in Jerusalem, that often notorious city?”  No, of course they weren’t.  No, and Jesus couldn’t say this more plainly than this--these stories of sudden destruction are not about punishment or even for that matter, cause and effect.  But these stories do show us one critical point--are we prepared?  Have we given our best?  It’s not about cause and effect, crime and punishment—life is about this: have you done what you were created to do?
        
Just in case the crowd is still protesting with “whatabouts,” Jesus goes on to tell the crowd a story about a man, his garden, vines and fig trees, and the gardener he employs.  The estate owner has been watching for three years now, quite a time in the life of fruit bearing trees, and a fig tree has done nothing.  In fact, the translation we heard this morning reads as a question about whether the fig tree will bear fruit.  But the original language is more sharply etched and therefore plainer—the original language doesn’t ask if the tree will “bear fruit,” the original language questions much more directly if the tree will ever “DO” anything.
        
By the cause and effect standards of our world, where we look to lay blame and suspicion, a tree that doesn’t DO anything is a waste.  Cut it down.  But wait, the gardener says to the landowner.  Let me tend to the tree one more year (one LONG year) and if it still doesn’t DO anything, THEN let’s cut it down.  Here’s the sad attitude that’s always included in cause and effect, blame and punishment—impatience.  In a world ruled by impatience, we have no time to discover what a patient loving approach might offer.  But our rules are not God’s rules, our blame is not God’s blame, our cause and effect has no play in the Kingdom of God.  No, God has rules like the gardener’s, rules we would all be better to apply.  In the Kingdom world, God always has enough time to give us one more chance.  If you haven’t done the things you know you were meant to do, take the time now.  God will give you at least one more chance.  The trials for the Galileans and the stoneworkers were not about sin.  The trials for them were the loss of that last chance to do what needed to be done.  In truth, we don’t have to worry about their sins. Instead we ought to be sympathetic for their loss.  How many of those Galileans left home that morning, remembering to tell their spouse and children they loved them?  How many of those stoneworkers meant to go by their neighbors and apologize for their angry outburst?  Everything, absolutely everything comes to an end someday.  If you can read the signs of the time, you can see that.  So here’s the question—God’s given you one more year to get your life right.  The message can be read as plainly as storm clouds rising in the west.  So let’s get our lives right.  Now is the time to forgive and be forgiven.  Now is the time to be loved and to return that love.  Now is the time to do what God created you to do.  Listen my friends, you have one more year—let’s get going.  Amen.

The Rev. Jeffrey Bullock
All Saints by the Sea Episcopal Church
Santa Barbara, CA   93108