Remembering to Remember

 

Once upon a time during Holy Week, I was sitting in a meeting with our parish leaders, trying to figure out how to solve pressing church problems like fixing the broken lights in the sanctuary ceiling and convincing somebody to serve lemonade on Easter, when a bunch of kids from the Preschool rushed into the office, all talking at once. “Rev. Anne, Rev. Anne,” they cried, “the ‘Alleluia Box’ blew up and all of the Alleluia’s are gone!”

          “What?” I exclaimed, with a bit of impatience, as Vestry members all looked down at their watches. I knew that I am in control of that Alleluia box game; I am the one who locks up the word “alleluia” during Lent and frees it on Easter. It is a fun game, but I knew that the box wouldn’t really blow up. Goodness, kids’ imaginations!  But the kids were all in an uproar, so excited, all talking at once.

“It’s true, we saw it, we saw it!” they cried, when I didn’t react. “It’s just like you told us,” offered one little girl patiently, the way you have to talk to clueless grownups. “You said last week in chapel that the box would open and that all the alleluias would come out. Well, they must have come out and then flown away, because they’re all gone!”

          “OK,” I said, trying to humor the kids. “You better go back to your classroom. Your teacher is probably worried about you. We have to finish this meeting, but I’ll check on it later. You see, it’s not Easter yet. Jesus isn’t alive yet. So the alleluias must still be in the box. It’s OK.”

          The kids trooped away dutifully, with only a faint trace of disappointment on their still glowing faces. They knew what they had seen. They remembered the Easter story that I told them in chapel. The Vestry and I turned back to our meeting. Only one vestry member got up from the table. “I’m just going to go see what the kids are talking about,” he said, and dashed off.

          That’s how Luke tells the story of the Resurrection in today’s Gospel, isn’t it? A group of women, with the business of preparing a body for burial, are surprised to find an empty tomb and are told by angelic witnesses that Christ is risen. They run to the rest of the disciples, full of wonder and excitement, and their testimony is dismissed as a gullible flight of fancy. After all, in the first century, women had about as much credibility as witnesses as preschoolers do today.

          Just like Jesus’ disciples, we have the Story. We read it in Scripture; we recite it every week in the Creed: Christ is risen. God is victorious. Death is vanquished. Sin is forgiven. From that first Easter on, we live in a new creation. We are a new creation. We might say that we believe this story. We might try to believe it. But then we mostly go on about our lives as if none of it were true. We spend our days in meetings worrying about broken lights and lemonade. We spend our nights worrying about death or loss or failure. We live as if gathering enough security and enough possessions is going to make everything all right. Even at Easter, we get caught up in brunch menus and reservations, in decorating the church, in getting the kids or grandkids cleaned up for the photo ops. “Christ is risen!” we proclaim, yet it often feels like a game that we are playing, a game like locking up and freeing the alleluias. All of our preparation is for death, like the women taking spices to the tomb to anoint Jesus for burial. We don’t really expect an explosion of life, do we? We don’t expect that alleluia box to blow up. We don’t expect to see Christ. We don’t expect the world to change overnight. We’re pretty good at showing up at the tomb, but, like the women, even though we know what Jesus has told us, we forget to remember; we come expecting not life, but death. I was struck just this week by two examples in my own life.

          There was a video floating around Facebook that charmed me during Lent. It was an ad, actually, for the work of the Anti-Defamation League. Called, “Imagine a World Without Hate,” it portrays people picking up newspapers dated into the future. The camera zooms in on the front page headlines of those papers, which say things like: “Martin Luther King, Jr. Champions Immigration Reform,” accompanied by a photo of the Civil Rights leader with grey hair. “Anne Frank Wins Nobel Prize for Twelfth Novel,” reads another headline. “Matthew Shepard Leads Anti-Bullying Coalition,” reads another. “Yitzhak Rabin Brings Two Decades of Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” After showing what could have been, if all of the hope and promise present in these leaders had not been wiped out by violence, the video ends with the phrase, “If we all stood up to bigotry, we could change history.”[1]

          I was moved by this video, really moved. It made me think. What if all of these people had lived, rather than being assassinated or murdered? How would the world be changed for the better? What wonderful things would they have done for the world? But then, as Easter approached, I started thinking about Jesus. Wait, I thought, Jesus wanted to end oppression and injustice. Jesus healed the sick and confronted the powers and principalities. But we of course don’t ask, “What if Jesus had not been crucified? What amazing good would he have done if he had not died on the Cross?”

          I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me awhile to figure out the difference. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had forgotten what the Resurrection really means. There is a difference in trying to live lives that imitate Jesus and follow his teaching and in trying to live in a creation that has already been made new. It’s not “Jesus stood up to bigotry, so we should, too.” It’s not wishing for what wonders “could have been, if only we had behaved.” It’s not girding up our loins and facing death with courage. Living as an Easter Christian involves trusting that the real victory at the end of Jesus’ story colors all of existence, that the glimpse of abundant life seen in the teaching of Martin Luther King, Jr. is an unveiling of a corner of the new creation that already exists in the risen Christ, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of the hatred that killed Anne Frank and Matthew Shepard have already been defeated, if only we would quit reaching down into the old darkness and pulling them out of the pit. Sure, we need to stand up to bigotry, but not with the illusion that we can defeat it by ourselves. We love like Jesus loved because love has already won the fight.  

A seminary classmate of mine who is now rector of Calvary Church in Memphis alerted his congregation on Friday to a KKK rally that was going to happen across the street from their downtown parish right before their Holy Saturday Easter Vigil service. His advice was to meet the “death” across the street with “holy, intentional silence.” “Let Saturday's rally be the last breath of a group who[se] influence has vanished, gasped in the silence of an empty street,” he wrote.[2] Christ is risen. Bigotry can no longer win. Christ’s victory shines backwards into a KKK rally that is doomed to failure, bound only for extinction, no matter how loud the Klan shouts, no matter how many gather there. The tomb is empty. The only life is in the Light of Christ across the street at Calvary. The alleluia box is empty, and I am not in control.

          Later this week I went to visit the dying family member of a parishioner. I went into the hospice care unit with my prayer book and my holy oil, looking for death. I found an elderly lady whose body had just about almost shut down. It was riddled with cancer, almost visibly decomposing. I was there to prepare the family for death, to prepare the suffering grandmother for dying. I knew that in a few days it would be Easter. I knew that Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life, and the one who believes in me will never die.” I knew the Good News. But I was still preparing for death. What I found, however, was life. This dying woman was wrapped in a cloak of peace. “I’m not in pain,” she said, smiling the same patient, kind smile as the preschoolers in my office. “I’m not afraid.” But it was when I looked into her eyes that I understood. This grandmother’s pale blue eyes twinkled with life, with joyful life. You could light a thousand Easter fires from the strong life in those eyes. It was as if there were little angels in her eyes glittering and saying to me, “There is no death here. Christ is risen. Go and tell the others. It doesn’t matter what this looks like. It doesn’t matter if you are ready for life or not. It doesn’t matter if my body will soon be buried. The alleluia box has blown wide open and the alleluias are flying around out in the world. Go and find them! Don’t forget to remember the story! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed. Alleluia!

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[1] http://www.upworthy.com/i-never-thought-a-1-minute-video-could-punch-me-in-the-heart-yet-here-we-are-3?g=3

[2] Chris Girata, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=5472ab64f8f0fa71714dbebcb&id=056828bc4e&e=c55cac835b.

 

 

A Suffering God

Years ago, a parishioner confessed to me what many of us feel but hesitate to admit: “I won’t be in church on Good Friday. I just can’t take all the sadness. I have enough sadness and suffering in my life without wallowing in it on Good Friday. I’ll come to church on Easter, when everything is happy again.”

            We do have enough sadness and suffering in life. Why add any more? Perhaps because God refuses to avoid it. Perhaps because God chooses to heal this world that God loves so much by pouring Godself freely into all of its nooks and crannies, even into the dark and frightening ones. God chooses to bring life to the world, not from outside the world, but from within the depths of the world, from pouring the divine being into frail and suffering human flesh and blood and dwelling there in the darkness. God becomes one with us not just in Jesus’ birth, but also in Jesus’ death. Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich describes Christ’s suffering and death on the Cross as “oneing,” as a making complete the oneness or unity of God with us and with all creatures, as we suffer with the crucified Jesus, and he suffers with us.[1]

 I recently read a poem by Wendell Berry that has haunted me this Holy Week. Berry writes:

“…These times we know much evil, little good/ To steady us in faith/ And comfort when our losses press/ Hard on us, and we choose,/ In panic or despair or both,/ To keep what we will lose./ For we are fallen like the trees, our peace/ broken, and so we must/ Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And must await the wayward-coming grace/ That joins living and dead,/ Taking us where we would not go--/ Into the boundless dark./ When what was made has been unmade/ The Maker comes to His work.”[2]

Isn’t that what Isaiah is saying, too, in his poem about the Suffering Servant? We tend to make Isaiah’s poem into an allegory for Jesus—Jesus punished by God “for our iniquity.” Isaiah, however, writing to the exiled Jews in Babylon, was not specifically writing about Jesus of Nazareth. No one knows exactly “who” the Suffering Servant is, and we can’t draw neat, clean lines that match him up with any historical figure. Isaiah 53 is not a nice prophecy about Jesus that we can drag out on Good Friday, admire, and then put away again. It is not a logical explanation of the mechanics of redemption, either. It is a poem, like Berry’s, about suffering—and salvation.

The first kind of suffering that God dives into in this poem is deformity. Isaiah portrays the Servant as a hideous creature. He seems to have a facial disfigurement so horrible that we almost cannot recognize that he is human. There is nothing about his appearance to make us want him around. He is one from whom we hide our faces in disgust, cringing at the horror before our eyes. He is like all of the parts of ourselves that we hate. He is like the ugliness that war and human greed wreak upon the natural landscape. God suffers deformity with his servant. His suffering presence leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.

We reject this Servant; indeed, we despise him. We hold him of no account. He grew up in our midst, yet we didn’t notice him as he emerged like a root out of hard, drought-tormented ground: slowly, painfully, and half-withered. He is like all of the peoples who have been enslaved, like the people who crouch under freeway overpasses. He is like the foreigner, the outcast, like all those who are different. He has no place with us. God suffers rejection with his servant, and his suffering presence leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.

The Servant suffers from pain and illness. The Hebrew says that he is “a man of pain;” defined by his physical suffering. Moreover, he does not just bear his own sickness, but ours as well. He carries our sickness and bears our pain; he is wounded, afflicted, struck down by God, and crushed by our sins. Even though we can’t be bothered to look at him, he is ground down by the sickness of the world. He is like all of those suffering from illness in places where doctors fear to tread, like soldiers and civilians wounded in war, like the teenagers bloody from gang violence in no-man’s land, like people in hospital beds that no one bothers to visit. God suffers pain with his servant. His suffering presence leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.

The servant suffers unjustly. Like Job, he never does anything to merit his grief. It all happens by a perversion of justice, by life gone awry. He never even complains about his lot. He remains as silent as a baby lamb who doesn’t know enough to cry out before his throat is cut. He does violence to no one and speaks without deceit, but he is still tossed outside of the city walls for burial, dishonored and cast out with murderers, cheaters, and thieves. The world’s justice completely passes him by. He is like the children of poverty, like the casteless and the homeless, the victims of abuse, the millions who never get a chance. God suffers persecution with his servant. His suffering leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.

The Servant’s world of deformity, rejection, illness, and injustice remains in constant contrast with an ever-present “we” throughout Isaiah 53: “we who like sheep have gone astray.” The “we” of the text—that is all of us human beings—would like to take the Suffering Servant, the Suffering God, the Suffering Christ, the Suffering neighbor, the Suffering land, the Suffering self, and put them aside, where they don’t hurt our eyes and cut into our hearts. But they are all a part of us, and we cannot let any of them go. Not the deformity, not the rejection, not the illness, not the injustice, not the transgression, not the part that we play in all of these things. And so God joins us, remaking our decaying world and our decomposing souls by his constant presence with them, lifting up, exalting, loving, transforming, turning upside down. We participate in that presence on Good Friday. On the Cross, it is concentrated and revealed for all the world to see. Wendy Farley writes that Christ’s suffering is a surge of powerful divine love upon “whatever thwarts, wounds, and incarcerates the divine image” in God’s beloved creation.[3] Shall we return that love and thereby restore the divine image? Far outside of the realm of our categories and understandings, the true power of God works with a “wayward-coming grace,” a grace that can bring a broken Israel back from exile, rebuild Jerusalem out of crushed dreams, or make the Crucified One our Risen Lord and Savior. But the only way to get there is through the darkness—holding the hand of the one who created the Light.

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[1] See Diana Butler Bass’ wonderful essay on Julian’s understanding at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-butler-bass/being-with-god-holy-week_b_2949133.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share

[2] Wendell Berry, from “Sabbaths II.”

[3] Wendy Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire, 112.

Free to Leave Home

It has happened more than once. I stand in the church entry hall, vestments on, microphone ready, bulletin in hand, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I watch the parking lot fill with cars full of young families with children. The parents and children pour out of the cars, dressed up, smiling and laughing, clearly glad to be at St. Thomas and with one another. Sometimes they even speak interesting languages and wear exotic clothing, and their skin tones reflect the amazing diversity of God’s creation. I repeat: this has really happened, more than once. This is not some crazy dream or made-up story that I am telling you today… But here’s the rub: these wonderful people who are filling our parking lot at 5:30 on Saturday don’t join me in the church. They don’t even look in my direction. They skip merrily into the fellowship hall, the fellowship hall that they have rented for a birthday party or a wedding reception. And my shoulders droop as I cry out to God: “It’s not fair! We have a really great worship service going on this afternoon. Harvey has worked hard to pick out just the right songs; I have spent hours writing a sermon; parishioners have brought wine and cheese and friendship to share afterwards. We’re nice; we’re welcoming. We could all be home watching basketball or enjoying the warm sunshine. But we’re here in church! Why don’t the others want to join us? It’s not fair!” And then I grow resentful toward those smiling families. “Peggy, these renters are taking up all the parking places in the lot,” I grumble. “We need to set out cones or put up signs to save spaces for our parishioners. People are going to leave if they drive up for church and can’t find a space. Maybe we shouldn’t rent our hall on Saturday nights. These renters are just in the way.”

What if, while I was stewing over this unjust and troublesome situation, a visiting priest wandered into the church and started chatting with you guys in the pews before the service? What if he suggested, “Why don’t we go join the folks in the fellowship hall? It looks like a great party! I bet they’d be glad to have us there. There are only 10 of us in here, anyway.”

“We can’t do that!” I would no doubt protest. “What about our service?!” At this point, I would be ready to call the bishop and tattle on this rogue priest who is embarrassing me in front of my parishioners and creating havoc at my 5:30 service. In the meantime, I would likely insist in disapproving tones, “If that’s what you want to do, then you just go ahead, but I have to stay here. I have to do this Eucharist …. That’s what I’m here for, that’s my job, that’s who I am. I’ll do lots of things, but I can’t change who I am ….”

It is one thing to leave home of your own free will and then return. It is another thing to have “home” taken out from under you. Yet, that is what happens to us all the time, isn’t it? Ask my children, who have grown up with one parent on each side of the Atlantic, torn between cultures and languages, never completely at home anywhere. Ask a college student who returns with joy to his parents’ house, only to realize that it isn’t really home anymore. Ask the wife who returns to her house after her husband’s funeral, and it is no longer home. Ask the divorced couple, who watch their home disintegrate before their eyes. Ask us baby boomers, even those of us who are priests, as we look at the church, also our home, so different from the churches that we remember when we were growing up. Ask, I imagine, those of you who are long-term members of St. Thomas, as you look around and wonder where you are, with staff changes, friends who have died, and even furniture that is rearranged. Home slips away so easily in all of the changes and losses in this world. Even in church. We want God to fix our homelessness, and we get pretty upset when we feel that it is God who is intensifying it. What we want are the pie-in-the-sky reassurances of the old Appalachian song, I can't feel at home in this world anymore: "This world's not my home. I'm just passing through ..." What we get, instead, is today’s parable.

Here in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus actually tells three parables about lost things being brought home: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the two sons. “Lostness” and the joy that comes with finding home again, is the common denominator in the three parables, but they are set up differently. Eugene Peterson points out that the stories are arranged in a spiral of intensification.[1] In the first story, one out of 100 sheep is lost. When that sheep is found, the shepherd is joyful and calls family and friends to rejoice with him. In the second story, one out of ten coins is lost, and when the housewife finds the coin, she rejoices and calls family and friends to join her in celebration. In the third story, one out of just two sons is lost--sons, much more important to us than sheep or coins-- and when he comes home again, the father rejoices and throws a party for the whole village. The pattern is the same (loss, homecoming, celebration) but the higher and higher stakes in these stories deepen our anticipation as we listen to them. By the time the son story comes around, we are expecting the happy ending. After all, God often favors the younger son, the underdog: just think of Jacob and Esau. Peterson imagines that even the Pharisees listening to Jesus would be cheering for the happy endings of these three parables.

But the parable of the two sons does not end when the younger son returns home and his father rejoices. It continues with the story of the elder son. The elder son does not rejoice that his brother has come home. He is angry, filled to overflowing with self-righteous indignation. He stands alone, home and possessions and sense of self destroyed by his father’s wildly forgiving actions, refusing to join the celebration. He sounds like me on Saturday nights when the fellowship hall is full. The father comes out to meet him and shows him the same grace-filled love that he had shown to the younger son. “All that is mine is yours,” the father offers, giving him everything. This part of the parable, however, has no ending. It throws the rest of the story off kilter and is meant to shake us up. Like the fig tree parable that we heard last week, this parable is left open, open to our response. We stand with the Pharisees and watch Jesus rejoicing with sinners and outcasts, and we, like the elder brother, have to decide if we will join them. And our positive response is not assured.

We usually hear today’s parable as a lesson about repentance. Repentance and grace: the Prodigal Son. But it is really a story of reconciliation. It is the story of two sons and a father. Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “It’s about the high cost of reconciliation, in which individual worth, identity and rightness all go down to the dust so that those as good as dead in their division may live together in peace.”[2] “O, how good and pleasant it is,” says the Psalmist, “when brothers dwell together in unity.”

When my children were young, one of my greatest pleasures as a mother was to go in and look at my sleeping children at night, all safe and snug in their beds, all tucked under my wings at home, no longer quarreling, or whining, but peacefully sleeping like little angels. I would go in and bless them and feel that all was right with the world, all was reconciled. When they grew up and would be away at sleepovers or summer camp, or college, I would look over at their empty beds and feel uneasy. I wanted them home, together, where I thought that I could protect them. Even now, when my grown children are home for a visit, there is something wonderful about thinking that they are safe, that home is restored as we gather under one roof at night.

God, however, takes that motherly love one step further. God sent God’s Son away from home, away to a land where he loved so much that we killed him for it. God sent him to us not so that we will refuse to grow up or so that we won’t leave home. God sent him to us so that we can say to ourselves every day:  “I am loved so much that I am free to leave home,”[3] free to mrirror that love in the world.

Pharisees, don’t miss the party. You are loved so much that you are free to leave home.

Sinners, don’t miss the party. You are loved so much that you are free to leave home.

Repentant ones, don’t miss the party. You are loved so much that you are free to leave what has been your home.

Rev. Anne, don’t miss the party. You are loved so much that you are free to leave home.

People of St. Thomas, you who already have one foot out the door in our mission statement to “restore all people to one another and to God in Jesus Christ,” you are loved so much that you are free to leave home. Don’t miss the party.

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[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 94f.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family,” found at http://www.barbarabrowntaylor.com/newsletter374062.htm, April 17, 2006.

[3] Quote from Henri Nouwen found on a colleague’s Facebook page! J

My avocado tree

After “butter” and “green bean,” my oldest child's first words were “Not fair!” His little mathematical mind was constantly calculating, making sure that his cookie was as big as his sister’s cookie. He wanted to be sure that his little brother didn’t get extra help playing a game just because he was the youngest. He was on the alert that his own punishment fit to a “T” the specific rule that I had made (and often forgotten) six months before. In order for him to feel secure, the world had to follow an exact formula of exchange, and all consequences had to follow known and established rules. If not, I was not being “fair,” and his outcry was loud and indignant.

Later, as a teacher of gifted children, I learned that most of the disruptions caused by gifted kids in the classroom and on the playground come from an over-sensitivity in their very logical yet immature minds to the concept of fairness. They insist that bad behavior result in logical and unwavering punishments; they insist that good behavior be uniformly rewarded. And who can blame them? While we adults have learned to control our indignant responses, all of us human beings feel most secure when we think that we have fairness all figured out.

In today’s Gospel reading from Luke, Jesus rebukes the crowd for their participation in just such a rigid preoccupation with God’s justice. Jesus rejects the idea that a Roman atrocity such as the murder of righteous Jews from the Galilee be seen as a divine response to their sins. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” he asks, answering his rhetorical question with a resounding “No, I tell you.” In the same way, Jesus denies that the eighteen tragic deaths resulting from the accidental collapse of a tower in Jerusalem can be attributed to the sins of the victims. For Jesus, there is no law of exchange that connects events in the world to an exact system of rewards and punishments that we can read with the mathematical precision of computer code. Jesus doesn’t try to explain why the innocent died at the hands of Pilate or under the tower of Siloam. Our logic demands an explanation, but Jesus isn’t interested in such a logic. Jesus doesn’t want us to set up a system of rationalizations and explanations that give us a false sense of security or of superiority or of inferiority.

Let us not go too far in the other direction in our interpretation of this text, however. Jesus does not say that there is no consequence for sin or that there is no need to repent. Both chapters 12 and 13 of Luke’s Gospel emphasize the coming Judgment as well as the urgent need for repentance. “Unless you all repent,” Jesus thunders, “you will all perish just as they did.” A world without the logic of tit for tat, yet under divine judgment, is a paradox, and like all paradoxes, it is difficult to accept and to comprehend. To help us out, Jesus offers us this parable of the barren fig tree, a bewilderingly simple story that offers us a different way of thinking—and living.[1]

 In small vineyards on steep, rocky hillsides, any wasted space, soil, or water results in a dangerous loss of productivity for the farmer. While it would not have been strange to have a fig tree in a vineyard, it would have been expected that the fig tree do its duty and produce figs. A responsible landowner who had not had any fruit from his tree in three whole years would certainly be expected to demand that the sick tree be removed from his land. Our human logic says, “No figs, no profit? That’s easy-- get rid of the tree!” What is strange and unthinkable in this story--what shocks us into a new way of thinking--is that the gardener suggests that the tree be given another chance to bear fruit next year. Any self-respecting fig-grower would know that, even with a bit of aeration and fertilizer, the chances of getting a barren, probably half-dead fig tree to start producing again are slim to none. Only an outlook that sees possibilities rather than proofs, will lead a farmer even to think to give the fig tree another chance. The gardener in Jesus’ parable sees the world in terms of hope and extreme abundance, in terms of the kind of superabundance that we find in the heart of God. It’s the same kind of superabundance that we see in other parables:  the father who welcomes with wide-open arms his prodigal son, the shepherd who leaves his whole flock behind to search for one lost lamb, the host who throws open the doors of his elegant banquet hall to riff-raff off of the street. For God, there is no such thing as “wasting the soil,” “counting the profits” or “loving too much.”

          Our logic deems this parable annoyingly incomplete, because it does not tell us how the gardener will be rewarded for his efforts. But that is just the point. This parable has no ending, because our God will not let us ruminate over the past or fix limiting rules to divine judgment. The God who appears to Moses in our Old Testament Lesson today is a verb, an “action word,”--a verb in the Hebrew tense that refers to actions not yet complete. In Hebrew, God says to Moses, and to all of us, “I will be who I will be.” God is always “the one who comes,” the One of superabundant possibility, the One who pulls us into the future, whether we are ready or not.

          In the spirit of the openness in our parable today, I will close my sermon with story and a sign, rather than with a conclusion. Years ago, I had an avocado tree. It was the only plant in my house, mostly because plants don’t ever seem to live very long in my house. But this avocado tree was at least ten years old. I grew it as a science experiment with my young children, trying to make an avocado seed sprout in a glass of water. I didn’t think it would work. I certainly didn’t think that the plant would grow into anything that we could keep.  I thought that it would die like all of the other plants in my house. I had been waiting for that avocado tree to die for over ten years. It served no purpose. It bore no fruit. It was the ugliest, saddest-looking plant you had ever seen.

It grew to be about five feet tall, with a thin, floppy “trunk”-- really just a stem that had to be lashed to hooks in the wall with pieces of string to keep it from drooping right onto the ground. It never had more than ten leaves on it, and most of them were usually turning crinkly and brown around the edges. It reminded me of the mournful little Christmas tree that Charlie Brown brought home in the Peanuts Christmas special, the one that loses its needles and collapses under the weight of just one ornament.  My grown-up children, forgetting their tender childhood feelings for the tree, said, “Mom, why don’t you do something with that ugly old plant? Get rid of it and buy one that looks good.” But I could never quite bring myself to cast it out of the house. Somehow, all of my sins and hurts hung from its weak and spindly branches, and my mortality cried out from its dry, crusty, and deficient soil.

          I probably would have gone on torturing myself indefinitely with that sickly tree, until it did eventually give up and die. One day, though, enlightened by the writings of Paul Ricoeur on the logic of equivalence, I started to look at my old avocado tree with new eyes. The logic of equivalence in my own mind suddenly gave way to a logic of hope, a logic of possibility and superabundance that the tough little tree seemed to have known all along. As the week went on, my old avocado tree began to take on a beseeching, luminous glow. I stopped ruminating on my guilt. I closed up my seminary books; I turned off my computer; and I drove to Home Depot. I spent money and brought home a nice, big pot with good, new potting soil and fertilizer. I replanted my avocado tree, fed it and watered it.  I took action.

        Did the tree die? Did it grow into big, strong bundle of luscious avocadoes? I won’t tell you. It doesn’t matter what happened to the tree. What matters is that I set that tree, and myself, free. I turned hope into action and thereby placed my tree in the ever-loving, prolific hands of the One who comes, forever and forever.

Do you have a tree—or a relationship, or an idea, or a hope--somewhere in your soul or in your world that is waiting for the freedom to live?

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[1] This interpretation of the parable is taken from Bernard Brandon Scott in Hear Then the Parable.