For those of you who read my blog consistently, you will find elements of this sermon familiar. I used the story I wrote earlier in the summer to commemorate my father’s death as the jumping off place for a recent sermon. The text from the Hebrew Scriptures is Genesis 17:1-8, 17-22, the story of Abram and Sari being renamed and told of the coming birth of a child late into their barren years.
In the summer of 1977–the summer my Father died–a mango tree was planted in our back-yard. Dear friends of my family gave the tree to us shortly before they moved back home to India. The father finished his PhD at the University of Miami, so it was not too long after Daddy died that the tree was planted. Their six-year old daughter and I played and attended kindergarten together. I can remember jumping on the mattresses at her house; they sat on the floor, so her mother felt our safety was not endangered! Her home always smelled of warm spices. I can remember being jealous of the pretty red dot her mother painted so carefully on her forehead. I can remember the cool embrace of her mother and father, always so glad to see me come to play. Her parents’ car had rotten floorboards, so you had to hold up your feet. I loved watching the road go by, especially in the rain.
The tree commemorated my friendship with their daughter, my Mother’s addiction to mangoes ( I still have nightmares.), and Daddy’s life. I can remember the father digging the hole and planting the tree. A small tree, with stakes and ropes to keep it upright. The hole was too big, but my Mother felt it would help the tree to mulch around it, so it was never fully filled in to the top of the hole. And mulch we did! Year after year, the best of the table scraps, grass clippings, and refuse went under that tree. Even the dead bunnies from a prolific surprise by my rabbit Baron (who then became “Baroness”) went under this tree. The offerings to the gods never were as thoughtful or as sacred as what we offered our dear mango tree.
When we sold the house ten years later, we still had never tasted one mango off our blessed tree. She never bloomed. Not once.
We sold the house on 100th Street to a Greek Orthodox priest. He invited to his open house to see all the renovations he made to our old home. We walked through the house noting each change, including the central air conditioning we never had. My room was now an office. The interior garden taken out, paved and a big hot tub put in its place. The Buddhas and totems were gone. The little concrete pond where Kelly Grey and I poured a whole bottle of bubble bath before turning on the pump and filling the patio with bubbles, gone. A huge satellite dish could be seen looming in the back yard. So much change, yet so much the same. We noticed and took in all the ways “our home” had become “his house.” As we finished our tour, we walked through the master bedroom and bath, then the laundry room, which put us at the very back of the expansive indoor patio and overlooking the back-yard. Mother and I saw it at the same time. The mango tree laden with fruit.
Mother turned to me and said, “It is time to go.”
Our faithfulness to our little mango tree not too unlike Abram’s to God. Dutiful to a fault, yet the promises of fertility beyond the grasp of reality. Don’t you just love it that Abram hears this covenantal blessing from the Holy One and laughs? Can you see him? I can. I can in large part because I have been him. All of us come to that place where we feel “settled” and accept—in a sense—our lot in life. Things may not be the way we originally hoped, but things are what they are and we try to hold onto that little corner of the world we call our own.
We do not look to the sky to see promises like stars painting the eternal ceiling above us with abundance. We do not want to be renamed anything other than what we are right now in this very moment. We only want to stay the course, keep things the same. Maybe we might complain about how they used to be when they were better, because the past somehow seems better in the rear view mirror than the uncertain future ahead. We did not feel that way about it when it was our present reality—of course—but now the luxury of time has given us the gift of forgetting the bad parts and putting on a pedestal the good.
Abram understands this too. He cries out to God to just let Ismael—his illegitimate child with his wife’s slave—be “enough” of God’s blessing for him. Let us look at our text again:
Abraham fell face down; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!”
Abram wanted to keep the status quo, and changing it—even in ways that brought forth more fruit, more complication, more change, more work, more legacy, more life—inspired great fear, trepidation and well, laughter.
One of my responsibilities in my job with hospice is to lead a bereavement group. Week-after-week I often hear the same stories repeated about the way a loved one died, the ways in which modern medicine failed, the ways in which other family and friends just do not help with all the hurt, the ways in which life will never be the same without the one who died, the ways death changed life and the anger at those changes. I hear these stories from the same people week-after-week, and my heart hurts for them because I see how stuck they are, and I long to offer some kind of healing balm that might validate their pain, but also inspire them to embrace this change and the fruit it might bring to their lives. That old mango tree in the yard of my childhood home keeps coming to mind.
See once upon a time, I dated Plant Geek. Plant Geek is getting a PhD in Horticulture from the University of Florida and works down in South Dade studying Mamey for his dissertation (of all things!). His adviser went to Costa Rica for six months in 2005. Plant Geek house sat and dog sat in his absence, and this was the time of our dating.
We walked around the yard, moving between all the various fruit trees and plants. What else would you expect from a horticulture professor specializing in tropical fruit?! When we came to one particular mango tree, Plant Geek started to pick some of them off for me and Mother. He always considered himself to be her “Dealer,” given she really is a Mango Junkie. And what a good Dealer! More varieties. More mangoes. Needless to say, Ms. Audrey loved how it worked out that I dated Plant Geek during mango season!
As we stood under the tree, so laden with fruit, I thought of our tree on 100th Street. I told Plant Geek the whole story of our mango tree–even the dead bunnies–and how it never blossomed or gave us fruit. I told him about finding her drooping with fruit just a year later. I wanted to know one thing: Why?
He told me the answer was simple. We had been too good to the tree. Trees need stress in-order to bloom and give off fruit. Reproduction, which is what the fruit is all about to the tree, comes about when the tree gets scared it might die and so it sends forth the fruit to ensure its survival in the next generation. In commercial growing, he told me, they actually use drought and flood to force stress their trees into better production. Our tree never experienced a single stressful moment until we sold the house to a man not quite as dedicated to her nurturing. She did the only thing possible. She freaked out! She brought forth fruit for her survival.
How often all of us get stuck thinking life should be about rocking along and keeping everything nice and even and happy. Oh to have an easy stress free life! What wouldn’t we give for that! And, how much we need safety, security, good food, water, and tender loving care to grow to be strong, healthy and happy. But the truth is that part of what inspires our imagination and makes it sparkle with possibility much like the stars in the darkest night sky, is stress. And like Abraham, we too shake our fits at God and want things to just stay the same and for our lot to be secure.
Unfortunately, life is not like that. I recently remarked to my bereavement group that given how I am younger than all of them, and I know “life is not fair,” I was sure they knew this too. “So,” I asked, “What did you do in the past to help deal with the ways in which life was unfair?” The room fell into an awkward silence, and when someone finally spoke it was to tell the same story from the week before about trying to keep some piece of their loved one “alive” in their home.
Now do not get me wrong, all of us need places where we can bemoan, mourn, and cry out in anger and anguish the terrible changes this unfair life brings to each of our doors. We all go through terrible emotional droughts, and for many in my group that is where they are and where they should be. I understand. When my father died thirty years ago his death ushered in a terrible drought in my life. From his death June 28th, 1977 until the one year anniversary, I saw more than some see in a lifetime. Daddy, Grammy, and my best friend from church all died. My sisters came to Mother and told her they never wanted to see us or have anything to do with us again. With them went their husbands, Aunt Clem and Grammy, before she died later in the Fall. Our dinner table went from nine to two in less than one month. Losing my family like that has proven to be the most powerful loss of my life.
But my life has not just been about those losses, just as Abraham and Sarah’s was not just about barrenness.
For now I seek to embrace the good covenant I have with God, one you have too. The covenant that no matter what happens God with be with us. The covenant that grace is enough and mercy plentiful. The covenant about loving God, my neighbour and myself. The covenant that focuses on forgiveness and inclusion at the dinner table of all God’s children, even when they are barren or stressed out!
I want to embrace with gratitude all the love wrapping itself around my life. I possess more love than I know what to do with from both friends and family. When I was ordained last fall, the most beautiful moment for me came during “The Laying On of Hands.” Being surrounded by all of these loved ones blessing me and my calling to walk beside all of God’s children surpassed any other moment of my life. That moment did not come easy. Years of study, poverty, questioning, giving up, trying again, waiting, wondering and working had to transpire before I found myself on my knees at the altar surrounded. I felt more love in that one moment than I had ever experienced in my life. I could feel the mango tree of my own life overflowing in fragrant fruit.
So, tell me friend, what about your own tree? Do you feel the stress of your life bringing forth new fruit and the abundances of creativity, friendship, compassion and love? Or do you just laugh when God wants to bring you out of your barrenness–even if it is painful and stressful–and pray for the status quo?
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