Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Luke 13:1-13

I have a picture of Desmond Tutu in my office. At the bottom, in ink that has virtually disappeared over the years, he wrote, “Brad. Thanks for everything. God bless. Desmond. May 8, 2000.” He was a visiting professor at Emory University when I worked as the manager of the university’s chapel. My office was located at the front door, at the bottom of the stairs, across from the elevator. Everyone had to pass my office. We had been instructed by his staff not to speak to him because he needed, at least one place in the world, where he could just be himself, do his work, and have quiet time to write, think, and pray.

Every time he came into the building, he stood outside my office at the elevator, always pulling a little suitcase behind him. After months of eyeing each other, offering a nod or smile, I decided to break the rules. “What’s in your suitcase,” I asked. With a characteristic twinkle in his eye, and little giggle, he said, “My lunch.” The elevator door opened, and away he went. The next time we interacted was after he decided to attend daily chapel when I was preaching. That’s an entirely different story, but after that, we began to talk, and he, knowing that my job was to arrange the rooms for his receptions with ambassadors, church leaders, presidents, artists, started inviting me to attend.

I would watch him: slight, a bit hunched over, often in pain because of medical conditions that were being treated at the university hospital, giggling, laughing, cocking his head to listen, the gentle way he would put a hand on someone’s shoulder or arm, even speaking rather simply when he was asked to say a few words. I would describe him as cute, lovable, magnetic, hardly a visible threat to even the flies that often found their way to the wide window in the reception room.

If you didn’t know but were told that he was one of the primary figures that brought down the racist apartheid government in South Africa, eventually serving as the chair of an extraordinary Truth and Reconciliation Commission that recognized true healing could not occur unless the whole truth about the violence of apartheid was spoken and acknowledged, you might say, “That’s bull ________.”

I’ll let you fill in the blank. Just know it’s the same word that’s in the bible around that dead tree.

As I read today’s gospel text, alongside, the question in Isaiah, “Why do you spend your money on what does not satisfy?” still humming that chant, “What we need is here,” I found him looking at me from the picture. He wrote this prayer: Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death; victory is ours through God who loves us.

Those words stir me, but I couldn’t help wonder if they’re really enough. In the face of renewed bombing in Gaza, governments all over the world almost-gleefully announcing efforts to close borders to keep out those fleeing that very kind of violence, orders signed in this country that make education for all seem like a topic for debate, the centering of disdain and disgust as the regular language of politics, the real consequences of hunger, fear, and disease brushed off as fake, not to mention all the crap that faces our bodies, families, and futures, I can hear some of my non-Christian friends speaking honestly about faith-based, naïve platitudes, “That’s bull&%$#.

And Jesus in Luke’s gospel says, “Exactly, that’s the only thing that can ultimately work. We can all see that the tree is dying, or, at least, stopped producing any kind of fruit. It probably makes sense to just cut it down, but let’s put some manure around it because I have a sense it will work. Let’s not worry about it until, at least, next year.

At one level, they are good words. Mercy. Patience. A gardener’s tender heart for things that need fertilizer if they’ll have any chance at flowering. But when does it start to sound like offering “thoughts and prayers.” A few pious wishes and folded hands aren’t going to work when forests of trees, the world’s very lungs, are being cut down year after year.

Jesus doesn’t tell this little parable of mercy as some cute, platitudinous meme. He only tells it after this sharp review of the world around him and what its going to take to redeem it. I’ve rewritten the first few verses for 21^st century ears.

At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the hundreds in the East who were buried in a mudslide after record rainfall.  [Jesus] asked them, “Do you think that because they suffered in this way, they are at fault for climate change?³ No, I tell you; but unless you turn this around, the whole earth will perish as they did. ⁴ Or those eighteen in Guatemala who were killed when that substandard apartment building collapsed—do you think that they were worse offenders than the ones looking the other way, extracting their wealth. ⁵ No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all be buried alive just as they did.”

It was the book “Overstory” that taught me that the roots of trees are connected, and they communicate. [1] There is no such thing as one tree that dies without implications for all the rest. Jesus knew that. He speaks here with an urgency that calls for change right now and suggests we’ve all stepped in it.

Repent, after all, just means, turning it around. If you don’t get your act together, people, we’re all going down. The direction ahead of us is not sustainable. If there’s a burning hell, it’s because we’re boiling the planet. If politics and economics continue in this matter, we’ll get buried in the consequences for generations to come.

Now, if your heart is racing a bit faster, breathing shallower and quicker. If this sounds like doom scrolling or that first bit of news—that one voice–that forces your eyes wide awake in the morning like a gut punch, you may now understand the parable. Any reasonable, and probably honest appraisal of the world, is going to make you think it’s over. We’re done for. There’s no hope. There’s no way out. It’s all bull____.

To us, Jesus might say: Let me tell you this story, because I want you to know something I know. It’s like this. Yep, it looks like it’s all about to get chopped down, and maybe it should be. But let’s do this. Let’s not focus on the end of it all, because that’s in God’s hands. Maybe a tiny glance backward because, remember, there are also the images of shoots from Jesse’s stump, that righteous branch raised up for David, trees that have deep roots by the Jordan, a tree of life and a tree of the cross. But maybe turning to the past isn’t the best, either. Let’s focus right here, because when my hands feel the earth and the manure, there’s something going on that’s better than us. There’s a lifeforce at work. Yes, better than us, but also in us; these hands that can work life; hands that nurture, and plant, and tend even the dying; hands that wipe tears and say, “Just breathe. Just breathe. It’s okay. I’m here.”; hands that have a wisdom our brains don’t; hands that can unclench and reach and hold; hands that can bleed; hands whose wounds make us holy, hands that hold the bread that can satisfy.

There is only one way: love. It’s the manure, and it can sound like bull_____. It may lead to a cross. It may lead to the end. Yet, I’ll dare to say it one more week because I think it’s the right fertilizer, “The one cut down from the tree, after all, has become the life of the world, a tree of life with healing in its leaves, bearing fruit that money cannot buy, but is offered free of price.”

It’s appearance in the world, not in just words, thoughts, and prayers, but in hands and bodies, in choices and in dreams, in patience and joyful courage, in the painful act of truly loving; urgency, repentance, hope, and resurrection are held together as one story that is as solid as the ground in which we dig and upon which we stand. The manure of grace has a power that makes next year a big, open, and hopeful question.

Yeah, I know. It sounds like bull in the face of everything.

But it’s the only way, at least according to Jesus and Desmond Tutu.

I wanted to sing Desmond Tutu’s words this morning as the hymn of the day. Thank you to Dennis and Tim who respond to the pastor’s way-too-late-on-a-Saturday bull______ with mercy.  Instead of the hymn listed in the bulletin, we’ll sing 721, as many times as we Tim or Dennis would like. The prayers that we’ll pray following the song, are inspired by Tutu’s words in another prayer from his African Prayer Book.[2]

Victory is ours in the God who loves us.

[1] Richard Powers, Overstory: A Novel, W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019)

[2] “Goodness is stronger than evil,” and other prayers are from Desmond Tutu, An African Prayer Book, Doubleday, 2006.