Mulberry Heaven
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22 Year C RCL)
2 October 2022 --8:00 a.m. & 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
With Blessing of the Animals
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Readings: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Psalm 37:1-10; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
When I worked at the Department of State in Washington DC, I often would go running on my lunch breaks. I would run from State to the Lincoln Memorial to the Key Bridge and cross the Potomac into Virginia, then run past the Marine Corps Monument, then onto a footpath along the George Washington Parkway and then at the entrance to Arlington Cemetery run up the hill to Memorial Highway to cross Memorial Bridge and run back to where I started. At the top of that hill by Memorial Bridge, just down the hill from the Custis-Lee Mansion (Arlington House) and overlooking the graves of the cemetery, there stood an immense mulberry tree. Almost at the end of my five-kilometer run, I would often stand beneath its cool shade, reach up, and gorge myself on the black, ripe berries, re-boosting my blood sugar levels and rehydrating before I ran the kilometer or so back to State. Once, I sheltered beneath it in a sudden summer rainstorm. I loved that tree. Later, when I lived in China, I learned that all silkworms feed on mulberry leaves only, and that you can tell in China if there is a silk factory nearby if you see an orchard of mulberries. All the more reason to love mulberries.
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Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial. The mulberry tree is the large one forming a "halo" on head of the equestrian statue on the right.
Today’s Gospel uses a mulberry tree as an image for big, immovable nature, and says that even a little bit of trust in God is greater than anything in nature or our lives.
Jesus has just told the disciples that they need to forgive people who harm or hurt them even “seven times a day.” The disciples respond with today’s line: “Increase our faith!” “Yikes! To forgive someone who does us wrong over and over again we’re going to need a whole lot more trust in God than we have now!”
Jesus answers, “If you had even just a little tiny bit of faith, say the size of a little seed, then you could do impossible things!” In Matthew, it is “you can move mountains just by telling them to move.” Faith removes obstacles. Here in Luke, it is “you could tell that huge mulberry tree over there to plant itself in the middle of the ocean and it would thrive there!” For Luke, the miracle of faith is not so much the removal of obstacles, but the thriving of the sweet good parts of our life in the face of a hostile environment: what gives us food, shade and shelter, and, in China at least, clothing, can endure and thrive even in that most desert of places, the salt sea.
We often think of faith as working up a psychological state where we can affirm our assent to any number of things, be they the creed, a claim that “God” exists, or the content of some religious leader’s moral teaching. But if that is what the word means, all we’re talking about is self-delusion, denial, and ability to mouth partisan slogans. This is not faith. Faith is trust, giving your heart to God.
Such trust will NOT make the world conform to your will. But it will change you, and with you, your world.
Beloved: we all face hard things in our life, and often we try to tame and manage them by projecting our fear or our pain onto others, sometimes onto people we think, rightly or wrongly, caused the pain. That’s why forgiving sometimes seems so hard. But in the degree that we cannot forgive, but persist in projecting our pain and fear onto others—people who face hard things as well—we are constrained, limited, and trapped. A little trust, a little forgiveness changes the world. When we open our heart and set aside a desire to make those others pay for what they did, we open ourselves to the same grace from others: that’s why the Lord’s prayer—that great prayer for the poor in need of bread each day, the poor who yearn for earth to be like heaven—is so clear: forgive us the debts we owe, as we forgive others the debts they owe us.
Jesus makes the point clear in his parable comparing us to slaves whose masters consider them “worthless” or “unprofitable.” In this broken world, household staff who expect fair and equitable treatment will often be bitterly disappointed. While working for a better world is good, accepting the reality of things as they are is key to being happy even in this broken world.
The parable says faith or trust is all about expectations: “Does the household staff get to rest and have dinner just because they’ve worked hard in the field all day? No. They must first feed the Householder in proper style and only then can they take their meal and rest. Don’t expect any better. Do what’s expected of you, and then some, and don’t worry about getting nice thank-you’s or attaboy’s or attagirl’s. Once you’ve done what was expected, and that without resentment, can you have some hope for refreshment and rest.”
As most of Jesus’ edgier parables, this parable in its original setting may be a criticism of the economy and society of exploitation around him, one that remains with us today, whether or not we have the institution of slavery. Jesus is saying that we cannot rise above where we are unless we are honest about how broken things are. “Lower your expectations, give up your demands. You might find it in your heart to forgive endlessly because you aren’t striving to have things your own way all the time.”
He is telling us to trust—even a little bit—in a loving God, a God of grace, a God like that loving father of two wayward boys, the dissipate and the prig. If you want faith, you have to have faith. You need to trust God. And God destroys our petty expectations by exceeding them.
Jesus grew up reading and quoting from the Book of Sirach, which says, “My child, if you want to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for an ordeal” (Ecclesiasticus 2:1). Ordeal—dealing with the messes, the drama, and the scary stuff—is part of the job description of serving God. It is part of the job description of being a disciple of Jesus.
But faith in God—faith in the living, expectation-overturning Abba taught by Jesus—faith even in tiny tiny amounts makes it better. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. It’s about whether it’s real trust in that real loving God.
When we trust, when we are deeply thankful and grateful, well, we stop keeping score. Many things that once were intolerably hard become easy. We seem to know the right thing to say at the right time. And we no longer have a grudge against God or anyone else. True faith—even in tiny amounts—is like that.
If we help the homeless because we expect them to be grateful and thank us, we are bound to be disappointed. If we hold grudges and keep scores, we will always be playing at a losing game. If we do what’s right with an expectation that somehow that will earn us a place in heaven, heaven will always be beyond reach.
Thomas Merton wrote, “[Concern about] means and ends... is not the way to build a life of prayer. In prayer we discover what we already have. You start where you are, and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there. We already have everything, but we don't know it and we don't experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess. The trouble is, we aren't taking the time to do so.”
May we strengthen our life of prayer, and exert trust and faith—even just a little—in that living, loving God.
Amen.
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