Mulberry Heaven
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22 Year C RCL)
6 October 2019 --8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22 Year C RCL)
6 October 2019 --8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
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.
Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial, with Arlington House in the background.
My Mulberry friend is the large tree just above and to the right 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
be bitterly disappointed. Only those who
set aside such demands will be able to prosper and grow, regardless of their
condition.
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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