In the early 1970s, I
did campus ministry at Somerset Community College, down on Lake Cumberland.
During those years, I used to take students on month-long backpacking trips all
around Europe. I took five of those trips in all. Every year, we always spent
one of those weeks on retreat in Taize, France. We were always in a camp ground
with several hundred students from all around the world.
I have stayed in
contact with a few of the friends I met during those years, including a couple
of students from Belgium, who later got married. He became a forestry engineer
for NATO which required that they live in several countries around the world,
surveying forests.
On one of their
trips to visit me here in the US, I was living near the intersection of Norris
and Eastern Parkway. I had planted a small birch tree in the front yard, but
like the fig tree in Jesus' parable today, it was not doing well. It was
stunted from disease and the lack of something - I knew not what! Being a
forestry expert, my Belgian friend noticed my pathetic little tree, right
away. When I told him that I was
thinking about digging it up and throwing it away because I was tired of
messing with it! Using almost the same words as the gardener in today's
parable, my tree-expert friend said to me, "Before you do that, let me go
out and prune out the diseased parts, dig around it a bit and fertilize it. If
it doesn't turn around in the next few months, then you should get rid of
it." I have since moved from that
house, but that scrawny diseased bush of a tree has since grown into a
beautiful tree that shades the whole front of the house!
What Jesus wants
us to know today is that we are that little fig tree and God is the gardener.
Many of us, at some point in our lives, are like that poor unproductive fig
tree. We may even feel that others have given up on us, and we even feel
sometimes that we have given up on ourselves. Even though we may feel that way
and feel treated that way, we need to know that God never gives up on us! With God, as long as we are alive, there is
always hope for the growth and change that leads to a productive life, no
matter how hopeless we feel or how poorly we are viewed. Jesus is the gardener sent by God to call us
all to a full and abundant life.
This parable
resonates with me! During most of my
childhood, I felt like that scrawny little fig tree. I was told growing up that
I would never amount to anything. My own pastor told me that I would never make
it when I left for the seminary at age 14. Even during my second year of
seminary, at age 15, the rector of the seminary, like the owner of the fig tree
in today's parable, called me "a hopeless case," saying that he
intended to send me home. Like the gardener in the parable, I pleaded with him
for a second chance. If it were not for my own resolve and the encouragement of
a hand full of other people - people who worked with me to cultivate my gifts
and talents - I probably would have given up on myself. I may have not known
how powerful God's grace can be! I tremble to think where I might be today if I
had not asked for that second chance and there had not been a few people around
to believe in me!
Friends! No matter how you feel about yourselves at
this point in your life, no matter how low others perspectives are of you, it
does not have to be that way - unless of course you accept their low opinion of you! As far as other people go, Eleanor
Roosevelt was right, when she said, "No one can make you feel inferior
without your consent." What people
say to you and about you mean nothing unless, of course, you start believing
them! Decide today to be one of those people George Bernard Shaw called "a
force of nature." "Be a force of nature," he said, "not a
selfish, feverish little clod of grievances and ailment, complaining that the
world will not get together and make you happy." If you show up, God will show up to help you!
Every time I drive
past my old house and see that big beautiful tree that used to be a stunted bush,
the one I almost dug up and threw away, I think of my own progress. I thank God
every day that I did not believe those who did not believe in me.
Friends! My prayer
today is that you be your own gardener - that you would take responsibility for
your own lives by standing up to your own cowardice and addictions and do hard
things for your own good. God wants you
to have the fullest life possible and he awaits your cooperation!
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