Epiphany 6, Year C
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
Jeremiah 17: 5-10, Psalm 1, 1 Corinthians 15: 12-20, Luke 6:17-26
Rachel will tell you that I used to keep house plants at home in Indiana - including some cactuses - I'm not sure what the cactuses say about me (!), but they have a compelling advantage over regular house plants - they don't need a lot of water!
I think its fair to say that I don't have a green thumb! On the whole I used to wait until the regular house plants were dragging themselves across the floor toward the faucet crying "water! Water!" before I remembered to get out the watering can!
Out of guilt, I suppose, I would then nearly drown them!
Anyone who is like me with house plants finds out fairly quickly that you don't get healthy plants that way! They tend to be spindly, weak, anemic, and with no strong root system.
They hang on as long as they can, but it wouldn't be fair to characterize it as "living" - they're simply a shadow of what they're meant to be.
That's a metaphor for the way many people grow up. When a child lives with parents who are alternately attentive and neglectful, who alternately lavish emotional attention, and then absent themselves - then that child is always walking on egg-shells. It becomes very important to be able to sense the mood, to know what emotions will be on display, to figure out quickly which sort of parent will show up.
Children in these sorts of families learn how to 'disappear' into the background to avoid either being alternately demeaned or drowned in kindness.
They learn, too, how to take on all sorts of different roles: the perfect child, the comedian, the scapegoat - so as to deflect the family tensions and keep everyone calm.
I'm very familiar with families like this - mine certainly had significant elements of them.
What you learn is not to break the family's rules, which are three: "Don't feel. Don't trust. Don't tell."
Back to the house plants. You've seen the ones that do well - that are well cared for. They have great roots, big blossoms, bright, vibrant, shiny leaves. They don't just survive, they thrive. You can tell just by looking at them.
And so it is with people.
Which brings us to Jeremiah. The withered shrub and the watered tree are all about trust. And since Jeremiah is talking about humans and God, it's not difficult to figure out what's going on. The withered shrub represents those human beings who try and "go it alone", Who aren't willing to trust. Jeremiah says they're the ones who've been neglected, who's souls are parched from lack of attention, who don't know that they need others to make the journey.
The tree that's got deep roots, on the other hand, that's had plenty of water, that's not been neglected, this tree is like those human beings who figure out they can't "go it alone" that they need God, and each other, to make the journey.
The problem, Jeremiah says, it that the human heart plays tricks on us. It convinces us we don't need each other, that we can go it alone. Jeremiah believed this described the Jews to a T. They had come to believe that it was by their strength and intelligence that they were successful - and that God blessed them for that - they'd lost sight of the prior fact that even their intelligence and strength were gifts from God.
The flip side, of course, is that the Jews of Jeremiah's time believed that those who were poor, who were outcasts, who were hungry, who were weak - they believed that it must be because these wretches had somehow failed, and now God was punishing them.
God, for these folk, was Judgemental. In the words of a famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards, they were "Sinners in the hands of an Angry God".
And then there's Jesus, who, Luke tells us, who said to these same wretches: "no, you are not cursed. Your condition isn't a sign of God's disfavor - God blesses you, even now."
Even in the midst of pain and suffering, God blesses you.
Even when you seem to have lost everything, God blesses you.
Even when you feel abandoned by friends, God blesses you
Even when relationships are wrecked on the bitter coastlines of emotional turmoil, God blesses you.
No matter what happens to you, God blesses you.
Jesus says this in the words of the beatitudes, but they're not really his words. He heard them from his mother, you see, who cared for him, and loved him, and nurtured him, and, no doubt, sang to him. The beatitudes are Mary's Song, the Magnificat, which Luke shared with us earlier in his Gospel.
And Jesus reminds those who think that they can do it all themselves, who think that success is a sign of God's approval - - he reminds them that nothing could be farther from the truth. It's not about having wealth, he says, it's the attitude you have about how you got it - that it's a gift - and its about what you do with it. If "what you do with it" isn't somehow bound up with loving and caring for others, and loving God, then that road you're going down is going to end at a cliff's edge, and you won't be able to stop when you get there.
The way he emphasizes this is by replacing the Jewish Purity Code: "be holy, as your heavenly father is holy", with the compassion code, "Be compassionate, as your heavenly Father is compassionate."
The greatest gift of this passage, though, is this one. Jesus never says that "once a beggar, always a beggar," "once a wilted house plant always a wilted house plant", "once an insensitive 'go-it-aloner' always an insensitive 'go-it-aloner'"
Healing is not only possible, through God's grace, it's offered as a free gift to anyone who reaches out their arms in hope and asks. No need to play the roles we learned in childhood - remember? The perfect child, the comedian, the scapegoat
The grace of God brings trust and hope, it brings solidarity in community, it transforms wastelands and deserts into verdant pastures and forests.
And when we embrace that trust and hope then we will know for sure, that just like a tree that's planted by the waterside, we shall not, shall never, be moved away from God's good community of grace and joy, ever again. Amen.
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