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| "Lemon Citrus" by Lucy Auge, on flickr |
Isaiah 55:1-3a
Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
Luke 13:1-9
At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. [Jesus] asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Then he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’"
--
I've only been to California twice in my life. Once, when I was six weeks old (so it doesn't really count). And then not again until I was twenty.
It was February. Snowy and cold in the Midwest, sunny and soft and warm near Santa Barbara. Our host family’s back patio was lined with fruit trees: lemon, grapefruit, orange.
In the morning, as we brushed teeth and packed bags and drank coffee, our host mother ushered us outside, where she, with a keen eye and mysterious sense of purpose walked from tree to tree, looking to see if any were yet bearing fruit.
Nothing yet from the oranges, no word yet from the grapefruits. But the lemon trees were in full flourish. She seemed satisfied and a little giddy (on our behalf). She plucked two small fruits, heavy and yellow, and nestled them into our hands.
She dug a crescent into the rind of each lemon with her fingernail and told us to sniff. So there we were, two Midwestern girls, on a February morning, standing on a patio in the sunshine, smelling lemons.
It was hard not to be amazed; it was the dead of winter, and experience told us that land and tree should stand flat, brown, cold, fallow; yet here was a place hanging heavy with an abundance of lemons.
It is silly to say that the scent coming from that bumpy lemon smelled like sunshine and morning and sweetness? Perhaps. But it is no sillier than what happened next.
We hid those lemons away in our purses. And in moments when we hoped no one was watching, we pulled them out of our bags and dug new cracks in the skin and held the lemons under our noses, as if it weren’t a very strange or silly thing to be doing. We kept the lemons until they ran dry, because in the barrenness of winter, in the flatness of souls tired from traveling, we held in our hands this impossibly unlikely fruit, and it felt like a sign of grace.
The unlikely gift of a lemon in winter takes me to that flourishing feast in Isaiah: where a table is heavy with food, like the heaviness of tree branches filled with fruit; where God’s salvation overflows in beautiful sights and scents and tastes; where everything you receive comes from grace, comes from love.
The unlikely flourishing of a citrus tree in February draws me to the parable of the fig tree: in the unlikeliest of seasons, when it seemed nothing could grow, there in front of me is a tree, unlimited in its God-given potential to blossom; threatened by destruction, yet standing to see each new sunrise; a sign that God is patient and good, that God does not write us off in our barren winters, nor does God abandon us to our own devices in fruitful springtimes.
Sometimes, we want to make faith cause-and-effect: If we are good, God will give us good. If we are bad, God will give us bad. But that’s not how it works.
Jesus - the teacher, the healer, the dead, the resurrected, the giver of life - says to us: Sin does not bring tragedy. Perfection does not guard against suffering. The barren can be fruitful. The fruitful can be barren.
Here’s the thing: Someday you will be cut down. Bad things will happen. You will die. We are all ashes and dust (even if we skipped Ash Wednesday worship to avoid the topic).
Here’s the thing: Some days, you will be blessed and rich beyond belief. Good things will happen. You will feel alive. We are all stardust and light and lemonade.
In life, in death, we belong to the Lord. In trial, in joy, we belong to the Lord.
When the world says, what goes around comes around and you have no one to blame but yourself, remember this: Neither death nor blessing depend on our own striving. The grace to live another day does not depend upon our sense of self-worth, otherwise it would cease to be grace.
We do not know the end of the fig tree's story, whether it began to bud or when. And that isn't the point. It does not matter right now whether the fig tree bears fruit tomorrow, or a year from now.
What matters is that today the fig tree is given back its life. What matters is that today we are given back our lives. What matters is that the grace to live another day shows up with the resurrection dawn of each new morning.
And we need resurrection to ward off the voice of the anxious landowner writhing inside our heads - a voice that says, you are a waste of precious soil (as if your life were not itself more precious than the dirt under your feet, the air you breathe, the atoms that you jostle around with each step you take).
If you feel like you are wasting space on this earth, if you worry that you are boring, if you feel felt like you have nothing to offer, if you are a sorry excuse for a human being, if you are desperate to find your calling, if you are desperate to find yourself(!), if you stand on this rich earth and feel frustrated because you cannot muster up joy or gratitude or faith, if you think that you are too withered to ever again feel the blossoming of hope;
Know this: God created you out of the very dirt that you walk upon, made you from breath and from the very earth that will one day cradle your breathless body once again. You are not worthless. You are not a waste of soil.
You are here, and you are alive. You have been handed a bright lemon and an extra season in which to live and grow.
The poet Paul J. Willis writes (in “Evening Promise”):
When you wake
you will know that stars fade
that night does not last
that the sorrows of planets
are the joys of morning
that birds repair and lemons kindle
out your window
nature's first lesson
first hint
of grace.
So how, then, will you bear (in your sometimes-barren bones) the unexpected grace of being alive?
God has given us a rich feast of love and generosity and forgiveness. God has nourished our roots and watered us with gratitude and peace and healing for our souls and the absolute promise of eternal life.
Let us not work so hard for unsatisfying mouthfuls of anxiety and hatred and resentment. There is enough of that without our own striving.
No, instead, come to the table. Come, you who are thirsty. Come to the water, to the wine, to the bread; to the milk and to the honey; to the lemon trees and the orange trees; to the blessing of this life, which is already our second chance, which is our open-ended story, whose ending is both mysterious and simple:
Death. And then, life.
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