The best time to plant a tree
Thumbnail image: Alex Indigo, used under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
December 13, 2020—Advent 3B
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is right now!
The internet credits this as Chinese proverb. Then again, that’s the internet, so it might actually be a quote from Abraham Lincoln about his Animal Crossing game! Either way, there is wisdom in it that resonates deeply with today’s readings: readings that tell stories of a people returning from exile, stories of people experiencing persecution and oppression and searching for hope, stories of people buried under the weight of their own sinfulness and longing for change.
Isaiah, in particular, speaks into a time we might well recognize. This part of Isaiah was written for the time in which those Israelites who had been driven from their land for centuries have finally been able to return. They had faced the loss of everything. They had done their best to make a life for themselves in an unfamiliar land. And now they have returned home, and things are … still unfamiliar.
Of course they were! From our perspective, we can almost laugh at people in those circumstances who expect everything to return to normal. To be “as it was.”
But when you are in the midst of such a transition, as we are becoming very uncomfortably aware, it’s harder to recognize and accept that fact. Because we too have been in a strange land. Frankly, we’re still in a strange land (though our exile has left us oddly in place). And when we see the promise of return, when that vaccine is being loaded onto refrigerated trucks as we speak, well … part of us imagines that the return will be swift. And easy. And that the place we return to will be recognizable.
But what if it’s not? Not to mention, what if it would be better if it weren’t? What if God’s redemption doesn’t look like the good old days at all? What if it’s something much more unfamiliar to us? And … what if it takes a while to get here?
We aren’t always very good at this time thing. Don’t know how to hold past, present and future lightly enough to let them interact without getting stuck on any one of them. Don’t always do a great job at living in the present. We want the future to be a destination we can arrive at, NOW, rather than allowing it to act as a guide, a promise, the hope that draws us forward.
Our longing for the past can be similarly limiting. We can fixate on it, wanting to return to that golden age. Even the Israelites returning to the land yearned to rebuild what was, forgetting that the reason they were sent into exile was that they’d failed to live by their covenant with God.
Which means their task, now, is to build something new. To BE something new, allowing God to be more central in their lives, in their society, in all their doing and all their being. This is the world Isaiah describes! Only then will they truly remake the ancient ruins and heal the ancient devastations.
It begins now. Yes, it would have been better to begin before they were exiled in the first place. Yes, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago! But there is no point letting regret and self-recrimination mire us down in how bad we have allowed it to get. No point obsessing about times that we tried in the past but then let it slip, and now every mile we walk feels like we are just re-covering lost ground.
All ground is just ground to be walked. The neglected sapling that died is now fertilizing the soil. We are where we are, and the best time that we have to plant a tree is today. We might not get to see its full growth, but so be it. We plant anyway. For the future.
In the present pandemic, it is so tempting to focus all our energy on what could have or should have been done. Perhaps that’s because we don’t quite know how to think about the future. Once the vaccine has been distributed, and we can begin to move about more freely … what will it look like? Even setting aside the whole “back to normal” vs “new normal” discussion, things will surely change more slowly than we would like them to. Like those Israelites returning from exile, we will neither find ourselves ushered back into our old lives, nor will we enter immediately into some shiny new future.
Instead, we will be somewhere that feels a whole lot like “the meantime.” The middle bit, in which we are working things out, trying things and failing, building things that mostly work out, and planting seeds that we trust will grow us all a future.
As humans, we find the middle bit discomfiting. It’s so unfinished. So messy. So much less than we had hoped or imagined for the future, perhaps so much less than we remember the past having been.
But as Christians, we draw our deep joy from the realization that it’s ALL the meantime. That all of human history lies between one brief shining moment of our creation, at which we were fully united with God … and that future that lies beyond time, in which we return to that union. In the meantime, we are in … the meantime: the middle bit.
Which is, as it turns out, very good news. Because it means we don’t need to wait to rejoice; don’t need to wait until some glorious moment in which we have rebuilt all that has been broken, returning to a great past or having built the great future. Like the church in Thessalonika, who faced persecution and uncertainty, we can nonetheless rejoice in the NOW. Like them, we can refuse to be defined by the current situation of lamentation, moving into a spirit of joy, prayer and gratitude. Right smack dab in the meantime. We can claim a joy that is proactive, rather than reactive.
Why? Because, as John the Baptist points out (he is always, always pointing, that guy), this Jesus is not just coming at some point in the future, he is standing among you right now! Standing in OUR very midst. And his presence with us (in us, between us) is what breathes in us, and allows us to quiet the anxiety of everything that threatens to overwhelm us, and recognize the redemption that God is unfolding all around us.
He is here among us. Within us. In the meantime. When we are returning from exile to a place that is still unfamiliar. When we are trying hard to resist obsessing about past mistakes and past glories. When we are catching glimpses of what could be in the future, of the kingdom of God that can break through when God’s power works through our hands.
The best time for that to happen is twenty years ago (two hundred years ago!). The second best time … is today. May it be so. Amen.