In a little Georgia country church, there was a story that the older folks in town loved to tell again and again, laughing over it, savoring and embellishing it. The tale involved a certain Sunday night in the October of 1938. It was a time when the rumblings of WW II could already be felt, a time of anxieties and fears. Evening prayer services were in full swing when a man named Sam, a member of the congregation who lived down the road from the church, charged into the prayer meeting trembling with fear and excitement. Finally gaining the breath to speak, he shouted, “Martians are attacking the earth in spaceships! Some of ‘em have already landed in New Jersey!” The preacher halted in mid-sentence; the congregation stared at Sam blankly. “I s-s-swear,” he stammered, now a little unsure of his footing. “I h-h-heard it on the radio.”
As it turned out, what Sam had heard, was Orson Welles’s now infamous Mercury Theater radio production of War of the Worlds, but no one in the congregation was aware of that at the time. For all they knew, the world outside was coming to a flaming end. The little flock looked apprehensively at the preacher, but the man in cloth was mute and indecisive, scared to take a stance, petrified by the possibility of embarrassment. For sure, it was the first time his sermon had been disrupted by interplanetary invasion and he didn’t know what to make of it. Finally, one of the oldest members of the congregation, a red-clay farmer of modest education, stood up, gripped the pew in front of him with his large, callused hands, and said, “I ‘speck what Sam says ain’t completely true, but if it is true, we’re in the right place here in church. Let’s go on with the meetin’.” And so they did.
Spaceships landing in New Jersey… Signs of the end of the world… It would be easy for us to dismiss these ideas as the result of a naïve brand of religious expectation that to us snobby northeasterners seems to grow particularly strong in the old south. But snobbishness will never lead us to a better understanding of Jesus. The old farmer sized it all up, measured it against his rough-hewn view of providence, and instinctively made the right decision. It is better to be in church praising God than running around shooting buckshot in the sky.
According to Jesus, most of us, including all kinds of educated people, including clergy and bishops, are not nearly as astute as this farmer at reading the signs of the times, at distinguishing what matters and what doesn’t, at discerning what is happening in God’s world. Indeed, Jesus says that most of us are far better at meteorology than theology. “You hypocrites!” Jesus thundered at his contemporaries. “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why don’t know how to interpret the present time?” And I could hear him say to us, “You people know how to turn on the weather channel and predict a snowstorm two days before it arrives, but you miss some of the important signs.”
Jesus is talking, of course, about God’s pregnant time, the breaking-in of God’s reign like a thief in the night, plundering and destroying the old order. “Watch for it” Jesus says. “Be on the alert. Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” The signs of this new reality breaking in like an alien and summoning us to a new way of life are all around us. But what are we looking for? Armageddon-like rumblings in the Middle East? Some readers of the “Left Behind” novels might say as much. Violence in the schools? The end of American dominance in the world? Two devastating earthquakes in a matter of weeks?
“You haven’t a clue,” Jesus said, “about how to interpret the present time.” No sooner had Jesus issued this challenge than some in the crowd stepped forward. “Don’t say we cannot read the times. How about that terrible incident in the temple, the one where Pilate’s police slaughtered some innocent worshipers from Galilee?” “No,” Jesus responded, “it isn’t a sign. And don’t bother bringing up the tragic case where the tower of Siloam collapsed, killing 18 people,” he added. “That is not the kind of sign I mean either.” So what is the sign of God’s pregnant time? We must watch closely and faithfully, or we will miss it.
To sharpen our vision, Jesus tells a parable about an orchard owner who was frustrated by a barren fig tree and ordered the gardener to cut the tree down. “Sir,” pleads the gardener, “let’s nurture it, care for it and give it one more year.” That’s it. That is the sign of the times, the clue to the breaking in of God’s reign. Not invaders from space, not Ahmadinejad as King Belshazzar redux, not wars or earthquakes, but instead the gracious and patient hand that reaches out to halt the ax, the merciful gesture resisting all that would give up on the barren and the broken, the merciful voice that says, “Let’s give this hopeless case one more year. Can we make this a sign of our times?
Jesus could have talked here about the young apple tree that sits in my garden at home on Tanglewood Drive. A friend gave it to me as a housewarming gift in 2005. It is now in its fifth year. So far, it has produced on average 1.5 apples per season. This spring I will find myself again in that patch of land, trying to prune this dwarf apple tree in a different way, perhaps giving it some cross-fertilizing fruit-tree company or try some other tricks. So far, I have taken the approach that it’s probably the inexperience of the gardener, not the fault of the tree why it hasn’t produced more. We will find out.
Clearly, the finish line of this gospel passage is very comforting: “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.’” This tells me that God is a lot more patient with people – with the faults and imperfections of human nature- than we are ourselves. Even if a person is out of luck and out of confidence and maybe guilty of certain character faults or the victim of painful inner rumblings, God will say, “Let’s give this tree a little bit more time and nurture it, it may come along.” That’s the definition of grace – undeserved second and third chances. What’s more, we don’t know what the gardener in this metaphor will do if the tree won’t produce in the following year. Will the gardener really cut it down or will he say, “Let’s give it yet another year…”? It’s within the power of God the gardener to extend grace as often as necessary. And God is generous. We could read this parable also as a metaphor for the struggles of the so-called main line churches. They haven’t produced the most impressive crop in the last generation or so. Perhaps God is looking at this tree saying to his servants: nurture it, fertilize it and give it some more time. It may come along. The signs of this new reality breaking in like an alien and summoning us to a new way of life are all around us. It is in the area of environmental stewardship, it is in a world hungry for spiritual food – can we feed them? It’s in ever changing modes of communication, the lifeblood of any human organism. But the signs of alarm are tempered by God’s patience. “Give this tree another year,” God says. It will figure out the signs of the time. It will adapt. It will grow. And so it will, if we trust in our vision process and in all of our endeavors the best predictor of the spiritual weather forecast: the Holy Spirit. Amen.