Colossians 2:1-7, 20-23 Worth 26 August 2012 :12-25 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham Ordinary 21 J. Shannon Webster

I remember the first time I ever really heard this story of cursing the fig tree, really paid attention to it, and felt confusion and anger that Jesus did something so unfair – cursing the fig tree for having no fruit when it wasn’t even the season for figs. I also felt a little guilty about being mad at Jesus and wondered if you go to hell for that. I was probably in high school then. Even today it gives me pause when I come across this passage in Mark. Maybe it does the same to you as well.

If it does, we are in good company. One of my favorite writers, John Bell of the Iona Community, penned a guided meditation with his readers as the fig tree. He writes, “The man turns his back on you. His friends look at him in astonishment. They are silent. It seems they don’t know what to say. They look at you, almost in sympathy…then they walk away… occasionally turn their heads and look back. But not the man with the jet- black hair. He doesn’t look back. He’s got other things on his mind. He is hungry.” i

Long before that, the great theologian John Calvin wondered why Jesus was so fiercely enraged against a harmless tree.ii Long before that, Saint Augustine himself mused, “Unless this action be regarded as a figure, there is no good meaning in it.”iii And Augustine is right of course – it is a “figure”, or we might say a metaphor. So before we get overly sentimental about the vegetation, let us ask what Mark’s is telling us.

First, it is no accident that the tree in question is a fig tree. They were hugely symbolic for the Jewish people, indeed for all people in Middle Easter traditions. In Jewish tradition, the famous tree in the Garden of Eden was a fig tree. When Israel inherited the Promised Land, the idea of sitting and eating under one’s own fig tree was the promise, the symbol, of God fulfilling the Covenant (see Isaiah 36:16, and parts of II Kings). When the figs withered, it was a form of God’s punishment. (See Micah 7:1-2, and Jeremiah 8:13.) Figs were important symbols. Which is why there is some irony in Israel and Palestine today, when Israeli bulldozers destroy orchards of figs on Palestinian farms that have been in those families’ hands hundreds of years. We westerners cannot grasp the religious symbolism of that. But I’ll leave you to think on it, and just point out that John Bell’s fanciful disciples in his meditation may have been astonished, but first century hearers of Mark’s gospel would have immediately thought of these Old Testament texts. They would have seen in this an acted-out parable, with Jesus in the role of God, dispensing divine judgment.

And judgment on what – the fig tree? No. It is, as Augustine said, a “figure.” The judgment is upon the Temple worship in Jerusalem. The useless fig tree withers and dies just as the useless Temple will wither and die. The action against the fig tree is tucked into the story of Jesus entering the Temple and driving out the moneychangers. All of Jesus’ actions in the Temple took place in the Court of the Gentiles. Here is the point – the Temple symbolized the nation’s self-understanding. But in acting on their religion they left out the teaching of the prophets to be a “light to the Gentiles.” It had become a self-serving religious practice, faith being replaced by empty ritual. The Essenes of the Qumran community had already abandoned the Temple as a useless relic.

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Jesus seems to have followed suit. scholar Walter Wink describes Jesus action in clearing the Temple as a “collective exorcism,”iv that was not a call to reform the place so much as a declaration that, for God, the Temple was used up and done. Faith no longer required it. No edifice, building or sacred site can guarantee the presence of God. No institution, no investment of spiritual meaning into a hierarchical structure that seeks only to perpetuate itself can hold a monopoly on the presence of God.

The post-modern philosopher Derrida writes of the “figure” of the Temple, when the Roman army captured it, and the first Roman general broke into the Holy of Holies – that inner sanctum of the Temple where only the highest priests had admittance. Derrida writes that the general must have been surprised at finding no valuables, no gold or silver. He says, “Hence the ingenuous surprise of a non-Jew when he…violates the tabernacle, when he enters the dwelling or the temple, and after so many ritual detours to gain access to the secret center, he discovers nothing – only nothingness. No center, no heart, an empty space, nothing.”v

Yet in every generation God is everywhere in the world around us, calling to new young hearts. Arizona poet Trina Zelle writes a poem of what I take to be God as storyteller, and us living into our baptism: Children, children / I’ll weave hunger / through your bones and haunt your ears / with minor chords / from almost absent tunes that you might one day leave/ my side fevered by your own bright dreams, and wild trees / will beckon you, airy songs lure you on, until you find / a rich salt place of distant sky and wheeling forms, a place / that draws you in and on until you drown / and are reborn.vi

Paul wrote to the Colossian church surrounded by a Gnostic mysticism as empty and bankrupt as that of the Jerusalem temple gang. Gnostics over-spiritualized everything, saw reality as a war waged between powerful universal spirits on a different elemental plane. For Gnostics the physical world was bad, the spiritual was good, they imagined evil influence in the stars, powers in the air, and above all craved the power of knowledge that was secret and unavailable to the average man or woman. Some in Colossae granted to themselves the right to disqualify from the church those who didn’t share their view.

Paul’s letter written to, as he says, “all who have not seen me face to face” takes on greater importance, as it may be intended not just for the Colossians and Laodiceans, but for all the Gentile churches in the same struggle.vii That would be us – because the same Gnostic bent has slipped back in today. (You know it is present whenever you hear someone talk about “spiritual warfare.”) For Paul, faith was functional, not speculative. His teaching about the work of was that Christ has an effect on the real world. The real knowledge of mystery, counter to what the Gnostics taught, is Christ himself. So, he said, “as you receive Christ, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him… encouraged and united in love.”

Gnosticism was world negating, some followers enacting harsh physical discipline on themselves as a spiritual practice to gain knowledge. Paul wrote, in our text, that the way they practiced their self denial wasn’t spiritual, but “fleshly,” a way of trying to secure one’s life by one’s own power. As Walter Wink writes, “Everything an alienated person

2 does is affected by alienation, even the quest for God.”viii Negative religion never satisfies what it claims to. Contrary to the Gnostic view of an evil physical world, Paul saw the divinely created world as good. God made it and said so. What is not good, say Borg and Crossan, “is rather the human-created world of imperial normalcy with its conventions of domination, injustice, division and violence.”ix

Jesus and Paul both contended with religious forms that had nothing at the core with which to nourish human life. That is, the fig tree is barren. The Son of God does not look back. He has other things on his mind. He is hungry.

What he is hungry for is the heavenly banquet in the Kingdom of God, where even love and justice are only the first course. He is hungry for the fruits of the beloved community, which has been delayed by institutions with no heart and no center, by a religion that has been so turned into a political playing card and a social calculation that is has no soul left.

The Presbytery meeting a little over a week ago was at First Presbyterian in Selma. When it adjourned, a few of us headed to a dinner meeting in Montgomery, and crossed the Edmund Pettis bridge on the way out of town. I was reminded that Walter Wink gave the Selma bridge as an example of a collective exorcism or racism and legalized oppression. Likewise, Jesus gave demons no concession and no power. That is what Paul was saying to the Colossians worried about spirit-powers. That imaginary and unreal world to which we are not to conform contains forces that are demonic, economically and politically. But they cannot separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. They are out there, they have no power over you; you belong to Christ, and Christ alone is all you need.

After he ran everyone out of the Temple, his disciples told Jesus: “the fig tree has withered.” He said, “Have faith in God. If you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and don’t doubt, it will happen. Pray, forgive, pray.” He wasn’t talking about any old mountain. He was talking about the Temple Mount, the seat of what was supposed to be meaning, faith and power. Tear it down, throw it out to sea. (N.T. Wright said, “Jesus constantly runs the risk of being called a traitor.”)x

We might, in some righteous anger, say the mountain is the General Assembly offices in Louisville, or the halls of Congress in D.C., or Goat Hill in Montgomery. But what we must pay most attention to is this beautiful piece of architecture at 2100 4th Ave. North – that it not be the mountain or building that needs to go. We might say, “We’re adults; we know what we are doing, we can take our lumps.” But not all of us have the means to survive those pressures (I’m thinking of people caught in the debt trap of high-interest short-term loans), and not all of us are adults. Some of us are children.

The poet Robert Hayden wrote a poem to his grandson, asking that the given name invoke divine magic to protect him as we cannot, he says…

in a world that is no place for a child – that had no shelter for the children in Guyana slain by hands

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they trusted; no succor for the Biafran child with swollen belly and empty begging-bowl; no refuge for the child of the Warsaw ghetto. What we yearned but were powerless to do for them, oh we will dare, Michael, for you, knowing our need of unearned increments of grace.xi

We make investments, and do so for the future – that what we put away today will increase in value, will grow, and will someday be of great worth. And on this “Rally Day” (Patti Winter began this week as our new Director of Christian Education) when we come out of summer, and church school begins, here is what matters – the children to whom we will hand our legacy and all our teaching. How is our fruitfulness in our time? What interior architecture of an organization, what vitality of the Spirit, can either equip faith or deaden hearts, needs either to be thrown into the sea, or will be the source where the future is nourished. We are all the uncles and aunts and grandparents of every child in this church. They are our children. The church that nourishes the future will both study the Word and storm the Temple, will meditate on the Spirit and march across a bridge in Selma, will both teach gentleness and defy powers that scorn the poor. Will our children find fruit on this tree? Will they discover their power, and the worth of their own God-formed soul. Hayden’s poem for his grandson ends this way:

May Huck and Jim attend you. May you walk with beauty before you, beauty behind you, all around you, and The Most great Beauty keep you His concern.

i Bell, John. He Was in the World, Wild Goose Publications, Glasgow, 1995, pp. 83-86 ii Calvin, John. A Harmony of the , 3:18. Vol II, Trans. Torrance, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1995. iii Augustine. Sermons on New Testament Lessons, 39.2, Nabu Press, Charleston, 2011. iv Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1986, p. 65. v Derrida, Jacques. Glas, translated Leavey and Rand. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1986, p. 49 vi Zelle, Trina. “Storyteller’s Song,” Northfield Women Poets, Heywood Press, Northfield, MN 1986, p. 13 vii Meeks, Wayne. The First Urban Christians, Yale University Press, 1983, p. 126. viii Wink, op cit. p. 62. ix Borg, Marcus and Crossan, John Dominic, The First Paul, HarperOne, NY 2009, p. 139. x Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1996, p. 166 xi Hayden, Robert. “The Year of the Child,” Collected Poems, Liveright Publishing, NY 1985, p.179

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