Seeing Under the Fig Tree.

JOHN 1:43-51

⁴³The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” ⁴⁴Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. ⁴⁵Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” ⁴⁶Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” ⁴⁷When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” ⁴⁸Nathanael asked him, “Where did you come to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” ⁴⁹Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” ⁵⁰Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” ⁵¹And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

As many of you know, my other work life involves the feeding of about 100 people twice a week across the bridge at Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community. It’s a crazy, eclectic bunch of people who come for a meal on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We get shut-ins and homeless folks. Drunks and NA regulars. We get mechanics and train riders and retired steel workers. We get atheists and agnostics and Bible-beating born-again Christians and old-school Catholics who are still shocked that the mass is no longer in Latin — let alone the thought that I am a female pastor. 

It’s usually great. I get in to these insane and slightly disgusting conversations about ingrown toenails and sciatica and the brilliance of the Bush presidencies. 

And I always end up getting in to these theological discussions with one-tooth-Bill. He claims to take everything in the Bible literally, and spends most of his time picketing - I mean praying - at the Planned Parenthood downtown. When he’s not telling me that he thinks I’m getting fat, I’m usually nodding my head, trying to listen, trying not to say something that will reveal how very little we have in common. 

But this Thursday was just over the top. After his updates about his newest anti-abortion sign, and a reminder about his literal biblical hermeneutic, he dove in. He was ranting about how he can’t trust anyone, and about how he won’t talk to certain people here because of their lifestyle and about how all he needs is God, and about how the rest of us are going to turn into a pillar of salt because we are living in a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, what with all the Gays and the Tattoo Parlors on the Southside.

I just stood there. 

I stood there and I thought about how very wrong he was, and about how very lonely he must be, and about how he’s really hungry and is going to eat a meal provided by two tattooed gay men. 

He wears this long black trench coat. And another coat underneath. And under that is a maroon hoodie. And I wonder, whats behind all those layers of unkempt cotton and leather and polyester? 

What’s really there? Behind his one tooth and the platitudes and the prejudice and the serious need for a shower and a laundromat?

He’s my Nazareth. That backwards town full of hostile folks who are easily threatened. 

Nazareth in Jesus’ day is an unknown town full of unknown people. A nothing town. It’s not mentioned once in the Old Testament. It’s the backwoods. It’s out in the sticks. Farthest from the farthest suburb. It’s where there’s no public transportation or trash collection or internet access. Where they drink fracked well water. It’s where kids drop out of school in the eighth grade to work the fields or cook meth. 

And here is Bill, what I envision, with my sinful prejudice eyes, as my own personal Nazareth.

Ugh. What good can come out of Nazareth?

What’s the point of all this anyway? Is this anything? This work that I’m doing? This thing that we’re doing called “church”?

Is this anything?

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Or Nigeria or Charlie Hebdo or Isis or Iran or one-toothed Bill? Or Pittsburgh? 

So all week I’ve been slumped beneath my own fig tree. Waiting for the Messiah to come, to look like a king or a prince or at least the next Neo-liberal-conservationist who invests in public schools and has really great hair. I’m waiting all alone under this tree for the Messiah - but only the one who eats locally grown organic kale and drives a Prius and makes a living fashioning beautiful teak furniture from trees that he’s sustainably grown in his back yard while entertaining young children with his arts studio on his front porch. I’m all alone, checking my watch for the fifty-seventh time, waiting for the Messiah to come and do and be and look exactly what I expect. 

And I drag my fig tree with me to another night of feeding hungry and ungrateful people. I avoid eye contact with one-tooth-Bill, because he might shanghai me into another conversation that makes me want to give up on humanity all together. 

But maybe it’s that damn fig tree that makes me remember that for homeless folks - the one thing they miss - it’s that no one looks them in the eye.
No one really sees them.
We might see their cardboard signs and their stained clothes. We might see their bruised knuckles and their callused hands. We see their laziness and drunkenness and poor choices. 

But we don’t see them. 

We walk by or over them. But we don’t look in their eyes. 

This isn’t anything, we think. And we keep walking.

Or. This is too much. and we keep walking. 

I can’t handle one-tooth-Bill’s ranting and hatred. So I come up with an excuse, and drag my fig tree along with me - ‘cause I know, if I just wait a little longer, my Messiah will show up any moment now. 

In the meantime, I wash the dishes and wipe down the tables and try to ignore one-tooth-Bill's ranting, and I wonder to myself, “Is this anything?” Can anything good come out of this? Where is this Messiah we’ve been waiting for?
I’ve got Nazareth-eyes.
 Eyes that can only see what I expect, eyes that can only register what I think I want. All the rest becomes invisible.
And then I feel invisible.

So often I feel so invisible in this work. You work your ass off to feed people, to give them a warm meal, a place to rest, a safe community to belong to, and they scarf down their meal and drop their dirty dishes in the bin and put on their coats and jump back on the bus. Gone. And then they come back, hungry all over again. 

Or you spend twenty hours thinking about a sermon, and in fourteen minutes it’s over, and people leave with balanced checkbooks and grocery lists and coffers full of daydreams. 

And I think that’s where all the “Is this anything?” comes from.

It comes from our feelings of invisibility.

Isn’t that why we’re so nasty and mean and judgmental - or passive aggressive -  on the internet  and in our cars and waiting in line at the grocery store? 

Our doubt about ourselves, about this whole God thing, comes from not feeling seen and heard and loved. 

Our ugliness and Nazareth-eyes comes from this feeling that no one really knows us, no one really sees us.

And then there’s Jesus.

Jesus who sees.

He really sees.

That’s what I think astounds Nathanael. 

It’s not that Jesus is clairvoyant or a miracle worker or a mountain mover.

So far in the Gospel of John, Jesus hasn’t done a THING to merit being called the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Anointed One. 

He’s been baptized. 

He’s met some people.

He’s traveled around.

There are no parapets, no trumpets resounding, no parade of elephants and soldiers and dancers and tapestries and sabers. 

There are no easy solutions for wars and violence and global warming and racism.

There’s just dust and sandals and fig trees. There are simply two eyes that can truly see things as they truly are.

“How did you know me, Jesus?” Nathanael asks. 

"I saw you under the fig tree." 

But Nathanael is seen. Is truly seen. 

And because Nathanael is truly seen, he gets it. Something registers. Something clicks. Nathanael doesn’t need floods or pillars of salt or resurrections or political insurrections. He just needs to be seen.

Nathanael is seen - and that’s enough.

“Rabbi! You are truly the Son of God!” he says. 

It’s enough.

It’s not just anything. It is something.

It’s everything.

There’s no miracle healing. There’s no prophetic reading of scripture. There’s no forefathers or lineage or parting of the heavens or multiplying bread or magic storm-stopping. There’s no miraculous resurrection or virgin birth. 

There’s just an encounter. A true seeing of another human being.

And that’s all it takes.

Jesus sees Nathanael - truly sees him for all that he is. He sees the holy and the good and the hopeful and the spirit in him. That’s the miracle. That’s whats so astonishing.

For Jesus, a fig tree is an axis mundi.

This is just a fancy term for what anthropologist Mircea Eliade calls a point that humans acknowledge as a “thin space” - a place where the division between heaven and earth dissolves, a place where God enters in, a holy place. An axis mundi is a place where the heavens are opened and the angels are ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

But for Jesus, the heavens ARE opened and the angels of God ARE ascending and descending upon the Son of Man right there by the fig tree. Everywhere Jesus looks is sacred, is the place where the Spirit is indwelling.

For Jesus, the boring ol’ fig tree on his way to Galilee is the place where true seeing happens, where an encounter with the divine occurs, where the heavens break in and God is here on earth. 

It’s a special kind of seeing that Jesus has. And as he truly sees Nathanael, Nathanael is able to see it too. 

And so, Jesus promises, you’re going to see a lot more fig trees. You think this is a big deal? My seeing you? You’re going to see everywhere. You’re going to find fig trees all over the place. And it’ll be like heaven has torn open, and the separation between this world and the next has dissolved, and you’ll see Jesus in all the places you never thought good would come from -- including in some angry lonely guy with one tooth who rants about how he he’s glad he won’t have to spend eternity with all those tattooed gay people. 

Can anything good come from Nazareth? Can anything good come from one-tooth-Bill? 

Come and See. 

Come and see and get yourself seen.

We’re all looking for the heavens to open and the seas to calm and the winning lottery ticket. 

And we get a fig tree.

A park bench.

A cup of coffee and an uncomfortable conversation with One-Tooth-Bill.

A highway overpass and a couple of dirty sleeping bags.

We get midnight panic attacks and toddler temper tantrums and folks cutting us off in traffic. We get missed appointments and broken relationships and unanswered questions.

But with the eyes of Jesus, they all become fig trees. They become axis mundis. They become places where the heavens can be torn open and the angels are descending and ascending upon the Son of Man. A place where you are truly seen. And a place where you can truly see.

Nazareth becomes the birth place of the Son of Man. 

The backwards stix of a town becomes the root of the tree where God’s grace enters in, where the division between heaven and earth dissolves, and where the one who truly sees and knows and loves us comes from. 

Come and See. 

Come and See.

Come. And be seen.

Thanks be to God. 

Enter In - Or, Sometimes You Post Your Not-Your-Best Because It's the Healthy Thing to Do.

MARK 1:4-11

⁴John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. ⁶Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. ⁷He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. ⁸I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

⁹In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Yup, you’ve got it folks! You’ve just tuned in to another episode of “What doesn’t make sense to Jenn this week?” 

Right along with when did it become acceptable to wear leggings as pants, and why are the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo still on TV, Jenn has yet more things she doesn’t understand about the Bible. And this week is a doozy. It’s a veritable whirlpool of swirling, swarming, frothing questions. 

For instance: 

If this is baptism for the forgiveness of sins, why does Jesus get baptized?

Does he think he needs to be cleansed of some sin? Like a gossiping old woman at her weekly hair appointment, I want to ask, “What did Jesus DO?”

Who hears God’s pronouncement?

Who sees the heavens rip open and the Spirit come down?

Does this voice announce what has always been true about Jesus? Or does it suddenly become true now that it has been spoken?

What does Jesus think of all this?

What does it mean that Jesus is God’s Son? 

What does it mean to be baptized with the Holy Spirit?

Such a confluence of questions upon questions mixing with questions and frothing with doubts. 

This is where Mark chooses to start his gospel - his good news - with the confluence of a dirty vagabond from the wilderness who eats honey and locusts and wears a nit-infested camelhair tunic, he’s wandering around, straight from the wilderness, shouting that the end is near.  With the confluence of a muddy river and a crowd of sinful people who don’t want to be caught dead at the end still bearing all those sins, and a man who gets baptized whom we didn’t think needed to be baptized, and a buttload of questions.

Mark presses the fast forward button through references to God’s first creation, through prophets and psalms, through the Exodus and Elijah, to the end. The beginning of Mark’s gospel starts with a crowd of folks who are preparing for the end.

And they prepare by entering in to a moving river to be washed clean.

The end is here, Mark says, John says, his followers say, Jesus says, so let’s go to the river, the place where nothing stops moving, where nothing ever really ends, where things get churned up and mixed up and roll above and beyond and under each other.

Rivers are a force.

They can plow through mountains. They change landscapes. They overflow their banks and create new ecosystems. They gather up silt from one side of a bend and deposit it on the other. They change course and leave lakes behind. They twist and they turn and they keep moving. Sometimes at a slow meander. Sometimes as threatening rapids. 

And from the very beginning, from the very start of these rivers, before there were rivers, before there was rain and rapids and outlets that dump into the sea, before there were clouds that gathered and refilled the oceans, God hovered over the waters. The Spirit of God has been since the very beginning.  And there has been an ancient pull of these rivers that continues the cycle of water, gas, rain, and river, ocean, pond, lake, sea. The Spirit and the sea. Always together. Always flowing and colliding and hovering.

There is something very spiritual about rivers. All of the major religious traditions acknowledge this. In the Hindu Tradition, there is this thing called the Triveni Sangam. It’s the sacred confluence of three rivers - the Ganges, the Yamuna and an invisible river called the Saraswati. It is believed that all the gods come in human form to take a dip at the Triveni Sangam and expiate their sins. And so, anytime there is a confluence of rivers, the Hindus believe that it is an auspicious thing - that it is especially sacred. And yes, even Pittsburgh has a special significance because of its confluence of the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio rivers. 

It’s the end of rivers colliding with the beginning of rivers in a forever dance of humanity, creation, Spirit. Endings and Beginnings. Things colliding. Getting churned up and mixing and rolling above and below and around each other. It’s a mess. And it’s sacred.

And John is shouting, “come! come to the river. because it’s the end. this is it. it’s all going to be over soon. come to the river, the thing that never ends, the place that flows and flows and has been here since the beginning of time, come at the end, to the beginning.”

And Jesus comes. Jesus enters in. Jesus starts his earthly ministry at the end. Around a bunch of people getting ready for plug to be pulled, the air to be let out, the coins to be placed upon the eyes of humanity.

Why does Jesus get baptized? Why does Jesus step in to that muddy river? Why does Jesus enter in?

Mark starts his good news by telling us that the end is at the beginning, and the beginning is at the end. And the answers are in the confluence of questions. 

Buechner says, “God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.” 

So here is Jesus, letting the waves of the river wash over him, and in this confluence of water and humanity and Jesus, something sacred happens. The Spirit that has hovered over the waters from the beginning of time enters in, and the division between the earthly realm and the heavenly realm is torn apart, and the Spirit lands upon Jesus like a dove. 

A clunky, klutzy, dove. Basically a white pigeon.

This is a sacred confluence of river, humanity, and Spirit, coming to Jesus to begin something new, but also something that has been flowing since the beginning of time. 

Mud and humanity and Jesus mixing and churning and the Spirit entering in. A beginning. And an end.

I’ve been feeling so much pressure lately to figure out a way to get this place to survive. What’s the secret formula, the magic ingredient that we just need to add or mix or configure so that Greenfield Presbyterian Church survives? What do we need to do or change or make so that we stay open one more year? How do we get folks in to this building, in these pews, their checks in the collection plate? If they only knew how cool we are, they’d come in droves, right??!!

God, what do we need to do, to know, to be, in order to stay open?

I don’t think I’m the only one who obsesses about this, am I?

So many questions.

And Buechner says, “God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.”

God enters in to the river. Into the muck and the mud and all the humanity.

God gives God’s self at the moment when we think it’s all over. 

God enters in to a rhythm that has been flowing since the beginning of time. Into the confluence of real stuff - of humanity and sin and water and cheap wine and everyday bread. 

I don’t think we need to change the core of who we are. I don’t think we need to be or do something that we aren’t or can’t just to survive. I think we need to enter in. I think we are already entering in. We are being who we are. And that will change us. And when it ends, just like all things end, it’ll be a new beginning. And I have no idea what that will look like. 

But when we enter in the skies will tear open, and we will hear God’s voice, and what we think is the end will become a new beginning. 

Let’s enter in and let the waves support our weight. Let’s open our hands and let the water rush between our fingers. Let’s enter in and see where the current takes us

Let’s enter in to the muck and mud of humanity. 

Who knows what it will look like.

Who knows whether it will be sustainable or practical or in a building with stained glass and a beautiful organ.

Who knows.

God doesn’t give us the answers. God enters in and gives us God’s self. 

Maybe we are at the end. Maybe this is the end and there is nothing to do but go to the river and enter in. Maybe. 

Maybe that will lead us to a new beginning. Maybe something new will start.

One thing I do believe, though. I think that when we enter in, we’ll hear the voice of God. We’ll enter something sacred. Something will open up and the Spirit will land.

Let’s give ourselves. Let’s enter in, and let’s see what happens. Let’s hear God’s voice.

Thanks be to God.