3 Lent Cycle C February 28, 2016
Ex.3:1-17 Ps. 103:1-11
1 Cor. 10:1-13 Luke 13:1-9
I'd like to tell you about my wife's Meyer Lemon tree. Karen purchased this tree to be planted in our yard to provide us with the wonderful fruit. It was planted and yet it did not take off. It just remained sickly and scrawny. After a couple years, I suggested that we get rid of it. But my wife was the perpetual advocate for this failing little tree. She suggested it needed a better location, several times. I really didn't like to deal with moving it since the only fruit that it had was long thorns which would snag my hands. Karen, had a way of prevailing, and we put the little tree in a new location and redid the soil around it with lots of fertilizer and lots of that stuff which makes mushroom compost smell so stinky in the Mushroom city of California, Morgan Hill.
Well, my wife's patience paid off and we finally saw some wonderful lemons, even though many were ruined because of a very harsh freezes last year. But this year was the year for our little Meyer Lemon tree. This year it has given us several hundred lemons and there are still many to pick.
The little lemon tree needed an advocate who would not give up on it, and the little lemon tree found a patient advocate in my wife.
The punchline of the Gospel reading today is about a gardener having patience to give the fig tree another year and another chance to bear fruit.
It is interesting to note the context for this little parable about patience. It was the answer of Jesus Christ to the mystery of why things happen? Why do some accidents befall to some people? Why do some people experience unwanted cruelty in this world? Bad things, evil things are so much a deviation from and a deprivation of the normalcy of goodness, we want to have some cosmic answers about why bad things happen. If we can blame people and say that they must have done something bad to be repaid with badness, then we feel like the universe which has the random play of free events, somehow is part of a conscious plan of predetermination or karma. It gives us a sense of control if we can speculate about "karma" and fate. St. Paul noted that in the record of the people of Israel there was presented a simple connection between peoples' sins and God immediate punishment for their sins. We know that we cannot always be so precise about the immediate connection between bad deeds and specific punishment for bad deeds.
Jesus showed us that such questions about causation of accidents are more often about bargaining and denial in the grief process. Our speculation about causes can actually be victimization if we pretend to think that we know specifically about why certain bad things happened to other people.
What does Jesus imply as the answer as to why the bad things befell some people? He indicated that none of us is exempt from the range of probable events of freedom in this world.
But what is the greatest thing about freedom? Freedom implies a future. Freedom implies the endless patience of God for some future fruit to come to the lives of people. Freedom implies that there will always be the organic cycles of nature. Todays flowers and plants will be tomorrow's dead looking stuff which goes into compost but the dead looking stuff of the past is used to fertilize the context of our present lives so to provide nourishment for the fruit of the future.
Freedom is the constant creation of God and that continuous creative freedom of God means also that God is patient about what can yet be. God is patient for what can yet be for you and me.
But why did the gardener only mention about giving the tree only a year for bearing fruit?
Even though freedom implies an endless future, the changing states in life means that we need to have motivational milestones. God's creative continuous freedom needs to have our specific free choices towards excellence toward, fruitful living. We need to have deadlines for our free choices to motivate us.
Life is about the freedom of our good choices interacting with the patience of God always to give us more time in this life and the life to come.
The story of Moses is a story about the patience of God. Moses believed that he had a providential calling to help save his people. He was providentially spared from the infanticide of the Hebrew boys inflicted by the Pharaoh. He was raised in the palaces of Egypt by an Egyptian princess. Moses knew that he could not neglect his people from his place of privilege and he believed that he was ideally suited to lead the revolution of the Hebrew slaves against the Pharaoh. His attempts to begin the revolution were great failures and he fled as a fugitive into exile. He gave up his call. "What's the use God? It did not happened and even my Hebrew brothers did not accept me. I am getting far away to start a totally new and unrelated life to my past."
And it was then that the patience of God returned to speak to Moses and convince Moses that he was still called to lead the revolution of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Moses was so self-disappointed and self-disillusioned, he could not believe that God was calling him to return to the place of his former great failure.
So Moses' past life became the compost formed during a dormant phase of his escape but that compost of his past life meant that his interior life was open to a new experience of God as one who was going to be the new ability of his life. Yes, Moses had the skill and the background from his time in the palace of the Pharaoh, but he came to know that it would be God's presence which would bring fruit, success and liberation for his people.
God's freedom in always offering us a future. The compost of our lives is the dead past of our lives, even our failures. This dead past is added to our present personal freedom to respond to God's continual patience to give us more chances at success and fruitful lives.
You and I still live within the crucible of all of the features of the tests and ordeals of life. God's permissive freedom allows all of the actual occurrences of life. Some of those occurrences are happy and some are sad and we are given the choice to let the events of the past serve a better present and future. The test or the ordeal always involves the continual patience of God in giving us more chances for better lives, even while this patience of God requires our free response to take the best paths before us.
I hope that this season of Lent finds you with some hopeful excitement about being within the great test of life, including the welcoming patience of God ever to give us more chances to lure us to better choices.
Remember it is more important to ponder what to do in the present with the past events of our lives, rather than to load our selves down with morbid introspection about why we think things have happened in the way in which they have.
Let us salute the great patience of God to give us another year, another month, another week, another day, another hour, another minute, another second, in this world or the world to come. And may we honor the patience of God with some fruitful outcomes. Amen.
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