Of Barren Fig Trees and Burning Bushes

March 14, 2004 (Third Sunday in Lent)

By The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland

- Exodus 3:1-15
- Psalm 103:1-11
- 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
- Luke 13:1-9

So Moses is just walking along, minding his own business, in this case is business being his father-in-law’s sheep, when an angel of the LORD appears. You would think that an angel of the LORD would be enough to get his attention, but on such an important occasion I suppose God didn’t want Moses to miss anything, so he provided the angel with a burning-but-not-burning-up bush. In fact, in movie versions of this story that I have seen the angel is usually deleted in favor of the more spectacular bush. Personally, if I were an angel of the LORD I would be a bit resentful that I was called on to play a role in the first intervention of God in the Exodus of the Hebrew people and then was upstaged by flaming shrubbery. Then again, angels are probably immune to resentfulness.

Once Moses’ attention has been fully captured, the bush calls out to Moses, who responds with “here I am.” God then informs Moses, once again through the incendiary topiary, that he ought to remove his shoes for the voice of the bush is none other than God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and therefore also of Joseph and the poor enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, and also thereby, of Moses. Once God has dropped all the appropriate names, God informs Moses that God has had enough of his people’s enslavement and that it is time to get them free and set them up in a nice little promised land of their own. If you were here last week you’ll remember how God promised Abram that his descendents would have a promised land, but that our lectionary skipped the part about the 400 years of enslavement in Egypt. Well, now the 400 years have passed and God is about to make good on God’s covenant with Abraham. Unfortunately for Moses, God is going to make good on said covenant using Moses.

I say unfortunately because Moses seems immediately aware that this job will kill him. As soon as God stops speaking out of the burning-but-not-burning-up bush Moses objects, saying, “who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” It’s a pretty weak objection really, because unless the DreamWorks animated movie “Prince of Egypt” lied to me, Moses was raised as the then Pharaoh’s adopted brother, so who better to go to Pharaoh demanding unreasonable things like the freeing of valuable slaves? Moses’ real objection to God’s call is that it is a threat to his life. Moses knows instinctively that getting God’s work done on earth is dangerous business, and he wants no part of it.

You and I know, and Moses probably knew too, that saying no to God isn’t that easy. The flaming voice of God doesn’t even address Moses’ concerns directly, just reasserting the divine prerogative. Moses demands a name, and God responds with the famous, “I AM WHO I AM,” which has been discussed and analyzed a thousand different ways, none of which yield results that are really much good when you have to ask the leader of the most powerful nation in the world to do something he doesn’t want to do. God is God, and that will have to be good enough for Moses who, it is clear now, doesn’t have much choice.

Meanwhile, a few thousand years later in the aforementioned promised land, an itinerant rabbi sits teaching his followers about the coming judgment of God. He tells them about a fig tree that hasn’t produced a single fig in three years. The owner of the tree orders it cut down, but the gardener intercedes. Even though three years is plenty of time for a fig tree to start producing, and even though precious farmland is too valuable to waste on unproductive trees, the gardener promises to fertilize and tend the tree, certain that in another year it will produce. If it doesn’t, he says, the owner can have it chopped down.

Parables exist to be interpreted, and the interpretation of this one has become pretty standard down through the centuries. The fig tree is Israel, the owner of the vineyard is God, the gardener is Jesus, and the three years of time is the time of Jesus’ ministry on earth. The implication seems to be that Jesus has been trying to get his message across to the people of Israel for three years and God is getting fed up with the unfruitful results. Jesus buys Israel another years grace, but it’s pretty clear that judgment is rushing down upon Israel and time is growing short. It is just a short stretch -- linguistically and parabolically -- to change Israel into all of us, which makes the whole thing more immediate to those of us here this morning.

So what do we do with these two stories as we fall further and further into Lent? What are we to learn, how are we to change our lives based on the message of the barren fig tree and the burning bush? Two things, I think, which build one on the other to give us our Lenten message.

First, if we learn nothing else from the person of Moses, we ought to learn that being called by God is life changing. Further, it is life changing in a way that we often water down in contemporary Christian dialogue. Moses is not worried because God’s call means he is going to become a priest instead of a lawyer. Moses is not concerned because he was counting on a high paying corporate job and God wants him to work for a non-profit. Moses is scared because what God wants him to do will very likely put him in a great deal of personal danger if it doesn’t outright kill him. Moses’ life will be physically and concretely different because of God’s call. This is not a matter of quiet introspection or reading self-help books. This is immediate intervention by the sudden awareness of a higher power, and God has demonstrated that God is happy to act in such drastic ways on more than one occasion.

Second, once we have learned the lesson of Moses and are prepared to deal with, or at least to try to deal with, God’s insistent demand on our lives, Jesus drives the lesson further home by making it clear that our acceptance of that demand has been placed on a very short timeline. To take the allegory literally, Jesus has bought us exactly one year. No more, no less.

So. It is now the 3rd Sunday in Lent, 2004. If you knew that on the 3rd Sunday in Lent, 2005, precisely one liturgical year from today-if you knew that on that day you would have to personally account to God for your life during that year, how would you live?