Let It Be (Luke 13:[1-5] 6-9)

Morton Bay fig tree in Perth ©Rfunnell (flickr)

​This sermon was originally preached on Sunday, March 23, 2025 at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The full service may be viewed here.
The sermon is below.

Gospel:Luke 13:[1-5] 6-9

---

Good morning, Beloveds. So, for those who don’t know, I am the youngest of four girls born within six years of each other. My mom and dad, who was a pastor, were well-known and beloved in our community, schools, and churches, and my sisters were all smart, gifted, dutiful daughters who excelled at most everything tried, which means I was born and raised simultaneously in the shadow of giants and under a microscope. At school, I was always welcomed as Melani, Michelle, or Charis’s sister and weighed against the standards they set. And anyone who saw or heard that I was a “Courts kid,” immediately clocked me as “Sam and Mary’s daughter,” a pastor’s kid, and graded me accordingly. 

The problem was, I’ve always been the black sheep, from birth and even before. My conception was a profound and shocking accident -- or, like my mom always corrected me -- a miracle so determinedly willed by God that nothing could prevent me from becoming, and believe me they tried. I was born. Instead of being the boy they all hoped for, I was just another girl, but a weird one who dressed oddly, was overly-sensitive, and was insufferably dramatic. So I worked hard to fit in: I was a model student who excelled academically. A model PK who immersed herself in church and theology. And within our family, I became a shapeshifter, moving like smoke or water to fit into and fill whatever cracks, clefts, and crevices were left after everyone else took their place on the family stage. 

But I still didn’t. So I worked even harder to self-differentiate, and become a person with her own name and identity, instead of one who only existed in relation to someone else. I figured if I was gonna stick out like a sore thumb, I might as well paint the nail too. Instead of joining choir, I joined marching band. Instead of joining theater, I joined winterguard. Instead of singing the songs my sisters already sang better, I made up my own. I earned a degree in theology and then took my songs and myself to Nashville. And over time, I excelled at being different. 

But those times when I failed to meet the standard crushed me and stuck with me. The pressure to succeed was heavy, but the burden of failure was unbearable -- especially when my failure wasn’t something I did, but something I was. 

So, I think, friends, that I know something of what our beloved Fig Tree is going through in today’s gospel, and I bet some of you do too. 

And she is beloved. Because unlike in the other gospels where the fig tree is cursed, Luke instead presents Jesus giving this short but important parable, inviting us into her barren-bodied life through a conversation between one man who owns her and is disappointed in what she’s become, and another who wants to save her, while she, needless to say, remains silent.  

So I want us to gather at her roots, but first we need to meet the people Jesus leads there, because their story is the key to hers. It begins in Luke 13:1. Jesus’s listeners are grappling both with Pilate’s slaughter of a group of Galileans whom he further defiled in death; and the deaths of 18 others who were killed when a tower collapsed on them. And they are asking why these people died. According to prevailing thought, such fates were the result of sin, so just like the crowd who gathered in John 9 asking whose sin caused the man to be born blind, this crowd wants to know what the dead did to deserve it -- so they can avoid the same fate.

But Jesus isn’t playing. Instead of affirming popular opinion, he declares twice that neither the slaughtered nor the crushed were worse sinners than anyone else, nor were they any more deserving of death than those with him now. And he twice proclaims that unless they repent -- Unless they change their minds, reconsider their patterns and beliefs, and find new ways of Being -- they too will perish. Not because “God is lying in wait for them,” as Rev. Dr. J. Mary Luti writes, “but because too many of them are lying in wait for each other,” and are "punishing each other [well enough].” So unless they find new ways of Being that breathes Life into a violent reality without diminishing the sacredness of victims who’ve died, they too wither and die. Repent, or perish, he says. Put on a new mind, and learn a new way from a barren fig tree. 

Now, it’s important to underscore that when Jesus wants us to identify himself or God the father in a parable, he instructs us to look for them by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like this:” But he expressly does not say that here, which means God is not the owner in this story, and Jesus is not the gardener. Which meant that when I opened the text, I had to repent of the presumptions I began with, and start again to find myself in parable: I had to reconsider, flip it upside down, turn it inside out, and re-orient myself entirely within the story. Not as either owner or gardener or tree, but as each and all of them in turn. Because that is where the fruit is for us. 

I was shepherded through this reorientation and re-imagination by Barbara Brown Taylor, who had this to say about this parable¹: “Every year, the owner reaches into his tree and every year he finds nothing. Meanwhile,” perhaps “the tree has grown so bushy that it is putting some of the grapevines in the shade…. So It is past time for the tree to go, not because it is bad but because it is supposed to be good. It is supposed to bear figs—that is its purpose in the world—but instead of figs it is producing nothing but shade...” So cut it down. 

“The owner,” she goes on, “is clearly a member of John the Baptist’s church, where every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

“But his gardener must belong to some other church, because he pleads for the tree’s life, [saying] 'Let it alone,' or, in his own [Greek] tongue: [aphiémi], ‘forgive it,’ as in ‘forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Give me one more year with it, the gardener says to his boss, then you can cut it down and I won’t stand in your way.”

Look even closer with St Barbara, you’ll see something profound: “The gardener [is not only] pleading with the vineyard owner, but …also defying him. 'You can cut it down.’ he says, “‘I won’t do it, not even then, but if you still insist on killing it a year from now then you can cut it down.” But let it be.

And that’s where Jesus leaves us, she says: “In the middle of a conversation between the gardener and the owner [inviting us to] listen" to their back and forth, “the same way the fig tree does—trusting us to find the gospel in it.”

Jesus offers no more resolution to this parable than he does to the problem of evil and tragedy that overwhelms the people in the verses that precede it, because there is none. The truth is, people are slaughtered by tyrants, not because they are sinners under the condemnation of a god who metes out divine justice through the violence of evil kings, but because our kings too often have at their disposal all the weapons they want, and the unimpeded power to cut people down at will without redress or repercussion. So they do it  just because they can. Such is the nature of power and evil in this world.

Likewise, at times, people are crushed by falling towers and broken bridges; or killed in hurricanes, fires, floods, and tornadoes; not because god weaponizes crumbling infrastructure and natural disasters against the sinners he wants to punish, but because poorly maintained roads crumble, and because our climate produces storms that cause catastrophic destruction without choosing favorites. There is no supernatural or divine cause, it’s the nature of this planet.

And so the only question worth asking is: What are we gonna do and who are gonna be with the time we have?  If there is no answer or end to the problem of evil, what can liberate us to become our fullest, truest, most Alive Selves, and inspire us to grow Life anyway?

For that, I ask you to consider the words of Jesus and look to the trees:
Some will bear figs within a year of planting; most by their third or fourth season. Some will wait till their eighth or ninth year to grow their first figs. But let it be. Let life be.

Look to the trees and hear their gardeners: Many will thrive for years and years and then go quiet for a time, bearing no fruit at all. This is no one’s fault and everyone’s responsibility: Where there is drought, give it water. Tend the soil where the air is too hot or cold. Protect against the bugs and spiders that drain essential nutrients, and welcome the tiny wasps that pollinate its buds. And if nothing else, remember that God rested, and the trees should too. But let it be. Let life be.

Know this, also: Some trees will never bear the fruit expected of them. They are barren indeed and will only ever cast shade, and these too are good trees. For I have sat under their shade, and been cooled by their leaves’ breeze, so I refuse to look at a living tree and curse its “fruitlessness,” not just because Luke’s gospel explicitly refuses to do so but because I believe at my core that every tree that has ever been planted has already become what it was created to be: A Tree. Its beauty and worth are inherent, and inherently worth preserving -- and anything else it produces is a gift of excess from an Exceedingly Abundant God. So I will let them be. I will celebrate their life.

Put another way, I refuse to cut down anyone who “fails to produce fruit” according to the definitions and expectations of those who claim ownership over hearts they have not tended, or issue condemnations of lives they have not nurtured. 

I renounce and reject, outright, all declarations of wasted soil and worthlessness issued from pulpits like this one, against Sacred Lives who bear the image and imprint of God, and show us what, and how, and who God is in both the fruit they produce and the shade they provide. 

And I rebuke, in Christ’s name and will resist with all my strength and heart, every fiber of my being, any and all who come with axes for the roots God has planted. For I am called to Life and will preserve it with all my power.

This is personal for me. To this day, I remain the Black Sheep of my family, a living rebellion against their particular standards. In fact, as your out-and-proud queer bisexual pastor, I am a blight on much of what my family stands for theologically, socially, and culturally. I have not borne the fruit expected of the Courts Family Tree, but have instead cast shade and shadow where they most want the light to shine. And I know there are some who would like nothing more than to cut me down and see me cast into the flame -- so deeply have I disappointed some who claimed early ownership over my life and its purpose. 

But to God be all glory, thanks, and praise for this Good News: For those who need rest in the heat of the day, I have shade! For those who need patience and more time to grow, I have a lifetime. For those who hunger for liberation, and crave the permission to be and be Loved just as you are, without exception or expectation, here is a whole grove of endless fruit, planted, grown, and preserved for you. I have taken and eaten and seen the Glory of God. You can too!

Take, eat, and Live!
Amen.

¹Brown Taylor, Barbara, “The Wake-Up Call” (pp.139-146). Always A Guest (Westminster John Knox Press).

---