Always there ... but hidden from view

Mike Willock writes: Every now and then a passage of Scripture springs opens in a new way – revealing something that was always there but was somehow hidden from view. That happened to me as I read the March 18 devotion from Luther Seminary, which was the text that Travis preached on this Sunday.

The passage was Luke 13:6-9 – the story of the man, the gardener, and the fig tree.

Then Jesus 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?' The gardener 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.'"

The startling insight for me was that the man blamed the tree when it failed to bear the desired fruit. He even said the tree was “wasting (his) soil”. It’s a case of Nature vs. Nurture.

The tree has God-given potential, but it needs good soil to thrive and produce. The gardener knew that, so the gardener set about to improve the soil.

Too often we can be like the man in the parable. When a person (or a neighborhood or community) fails to live up to our expectations, we blame them instead of thinking more deeply about the family (or local or educational or employment or financial or legal) environment in which they live – the soil where they are planted. We can even try to end the relationship (“Cut it down!”). It’s a convenient displacement response to blame another instead of working to build and live with them into a mutually beneficial relationship. “Other”-blaming is a big part of the arguments about structural racism in our society today.

How do we change this? We work to create healthy relationships with those around us so we can better understand their life experiences and their needs. And, we ask God to help us overcome our human tendency to blame others when they don’t thrive in the society we have built. We pray that Second Church and its members may be like the gardener, working to build a community where all can have the support they need to fulfill their God-given potential, looking to God to bring the harvest.