The gardener's voice
Thumbnail Image by Aritha from Pixabay
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
March 23, 2025—Lent 3C
Exodus 3:1-15; Luke 13:1-9
One of the most powerful things you could do to change your life, is to start listening more to what God says about you, than to all the other voices that play in your head. You know the voices I mean: the ones pointing out what you did wrong. Comparing you (unfavorably) to that person over there. Reminding you of all the ways you’ve embarrassed yourself this week (not to mention that time in Elementary school) and how you’ve fallen short.
You’re not alone in this. So many of us give those voices so much power that I would argue we’ve actually started identifying them as God’s voice. We project them upwards. Take today’s parable, for instance. We hear this parable about the fig tree, and have to fight the assumption that “Cut it down” is the voice of God.
Partly this happens because we hear “owner” and our Capitalist brains think that must be the most important person in the story, and therefore that person must be the God-figure. The same thing happens when we hear parables about kings and judges.
But so many of Jesus’ stories are actually about corruption in leadership: in judges, in land-owners, in religious leaders and rulers of kingdoms who have lost sight of God’s desire to protect the vulnerable, to prevent exploitation of workers and customers, to pay attention to the common good. Which means that we should always avoid the temptation to see God only in the person who seems most powerful, by worldly standards.
Also, to return to my starting point, our tendency to identify that voice of the vineyard owner as God might well say more about our own fears and insecurities than anything else. Because it signals how much power we assign to the voice that says, “Cut it down.”
Because if we’re the fig tree … and we know that we are not producing fruit … at least, not enough fruit … not good enough fruit … nowhere near enough good fruit to satisfy God in our estimation … then the voice that says “cut it down” is clearly the one that knows what it’s talking about.
Surely, if God looks at me. Looks at my sins, my faults, my shortcomings, which I have been confessing and promising to work on for so many yea—well, all of my life, if I’m honest—with only the barest improvement to speak of. If God looks at the fruit that I bear, the good that I do in this world, the kindness, the bravery, the sacrifices I make for the sake of others … well, there is some, but it seems so paltry in the face of so much need, so much injustice, so much evil at work in the world.
So surely, the owner of all this, the one who does my yearly review, will look at me and say, “You know, this isn’t working out. Cut it down.” And that is BY FAR the loudest voice in the story (Cut. her. down) and so, surely, that voice, the voice of the owner in this story, is the voice of God.
But what if we’re wrong about that? What if we’ve projected our deepest fears onto God? What if we’ve projected our own tendency to put far more weight on negative assessments of us than we are ever able to do with the positive, remembering them long after their effect on the world, onto God?
And what if that tendency makes us ignore what we learn about the nature of God from scripture?
For God to be the owner, we have to ignore the long arc of the Hebrew scriptures, in which the people of God stray over and over, turning away from their God to worship money and possessions, to chase after other gods who promise them more things, easier things than living according to God’s covenant. Have to ignore the way God longs for them when they are gone, despairs of the ways in which they choose selfishness and self-indulgence, the ways in which they choose to care only for themselves. And we have to forget the way in which God takes them back, over and over and over.
We also have to ignore the way Jesus invites people to follow him: to turn away from the same selfish ways that the people of God have always strayed into, and simply come with him. Honestly, not many more questions asked. Just, turn away from those behaviors, which aren’t life-giving for you or for the world around you, and discover a life shaped by service to others. Filled with God’s power. Formed by God’s love.
And most immediately: to make “Cut it down” a divine command, we have to ignore the voice of the gardener. The voice that acknowledges that we are a long-term project.
Not only can we not fix ourselves, which is the basic message of the gospel: freeing us from the myth that if we only tried harder, we could perfect and save ourselves. Not only that, but apparently Jesus can’t just wave a magic wand and perfect us either!
Maybe perfection isn’t even the point. Maybe we need to allow ourselves to be a not very impressive fig tree. Maybe that’s faith: to trust Jesus enough to let him see our shortcomings and failings: the patch of rot here, the rather sad crop of undersized fruit there. Trust Jesus to see it, and rather than give up on us, to place himself between us and the owners who declare that we are not enough, that we have shown ourselves to be a bad investment. He places himself there, then turns towards us, insisting that he’s still working on us. Still tending us. Because we are worth the effort, no matter what.
The voice of the owner can be SO. LOUD. And again I don’t know about you, but I listen to it way too much. I don’t tend to think of it as the voice of God (that’s not an image of God that was ever drilled into me), but I still allow it to act as a god in my life. Giving it my time, my attention, my allegiance, as though it can save me somehow, even as it pronounces condemnation.
It is dangerous to mistake the voices that threaten doom and destruction for the thing that can actually save you.
So, what if we could listen to the voice of the gardener instead? He is clearly Jesus, which means HE is the voice of God in this story! What if we could place our trust, place ourselves, in the hands of the gardener? And what if that’s what faith is: a willingness to be slowly tended, over a lifetime. A willingness to have years when we bear no fruit, and Jesus KNOWS we aren’t bearing any fruit, But we allow him to keep working on us anyway.
He doesn’t give up. So we don’t give up.
May it be so, my friends, Amen.