Dear Friends,

This year’s Lenten series on “Creation Care” is having a big impact on me, in ways I had not expected. Maybe it is all that we’ve got going on in our world, but I feel more connected to everything and everyone than I ever have, not to only the humans whose lives have been disrupted and dislocated through a two-year pandemic and now a horrible war in Europe, but to the plants, animals and elements whose very existence is at threat due to drastic changes in climate. Our discussions on Wednesday evening are reminding me how easy it to distance ourselves from the sources of water, food, energy, shelter, and clothing that are essential to survival. And I’m both humbled and inspired by the examples set by those among us who have had the courage, passion, and commitment to begin turning that around.

When Jesus walked the earth in first century Palestine, it would have been nearly impossible to ignore where your water, bread, clothing, shelter, fruits, vegetables, oil, or meat came from. Most of his followers were people who tilled the soil, fished the seas, sheared their own sheep, wove their own garments, made their own bricks. Think about the images Jesus uses in his parables: sheep and goats, lilies of the field, mustard seeds, grapevines, and in this Sunday’s gospel lesson, a fig tree. People knew the properties of these creatures of God and could easily relate their lives to them. They also understood how their lives depended on them, especially during times of drought and famine. The concept of waste was nearly inconceivable.

Which leads me to the parable Jesus offers us in Sunday’s gospel. He tells of a fig tree that keeps on year after year, not dying, but at the same time not bearing any fruit. For three years the landowner comes looking. Surely a fig or two will have come, but again and yet again he finds none. “Cut it down,” he tells the gardener. “Why let it waste soil?” But the gardener takes pity on the tree, begs for one more year, promises to nurture it, dig around it, lay manure on it, love it into fuller life.

As I ponder this parable during this season of Lent, I have wondered, what it would mean for us to approach our own lives as a gardener, to “dig around” what seems dead in us, among us, and around us? How might we purposefully poke and prod and get our hands dirty for the sake of love? The soil that seems least likely to yield fruit could be the very site of new growth. Perhaps it is into the very people or things we’re ready to discard that God is mostly like to breath in fresh ways.

Our Lenten Journey began with a reminder that we are dust, we are soil, and it is to that soil that we and all of life return. But it is also in that soil that life is born anew. So, I invite all of us to look again at the fallow, seemingly dead or shriveled places in our lives and in our world and be willing to consider the surprising richness is likely to reside there. You might find that the “no longer” or the “not yet” turns out to have been the “yet to be.”

In Christ,

Amelie