Share your bananas
Thumbnail Image by Alexa from Pixabay
Title shamelessly nabbed from Koko the gorilla and Anne Lamott
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
October 5, 2025—Proper 22C
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Luke 17:5-10
That was a timely message from Habakkuk, wasn’t it? “O LORD … Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails” (1:2-4).
Which is a pretty fair echo of what I hear all around me, all the time. No matter where you fall on the issues, no matter whose fault you believe all this to be, there is a shared sense of helplessness, of frustration, of anger, of despair. Destruction and violence are before us. Strife and contention arise (and arise and arise and arise!). So we hear those words from the prophet, and it is as though the bible is playing a very depressing game of “This is your life” with us.
Because it turns out, this is not the first time people have felt awash in frustration, strife and contention. Which does offer some hope, that though our current time is a particularly striking time in U.S. history, this might not be the end of the world after all. Still, the emotion remains, so we are eager to hear God’s response to those ancient Israelites (and thus to us). What does He say to them in their frustration; how does She lift them out of their despair at a world gone mad?
It’s apparent God knows how much we need to hear this, because She commands the prophet to “Say it loud and clear." Stick it on a big old billboard. Post it on your facebook and make it a sponsored post, because we want people to pay attention to this. Got that? Okay. So, here’s the thing: This (all of this craziness and injustice) is not the end. How do we know that?: because the end will not be destruction and violence and contention. Because in the end, God will win the day. As Martin Luther King Jr. stated it, “the arc of the universe bends toward justice,” but we’re still in the middle of the bend. We just have to keep moving. If you like a baseball metaphor, author Anne Lamott likes to say: “Goodness and karma bat last.” Which is really just a paraphrase of the great saint Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
It’s not over, so do not despair. In the meantime, however, there will be contention, there will always be injustice (there always has been). And there will be those whose spirit is not right within them. Your task is to live with a right spirit within you. Your task is to live according to your faith.
In another phrase of Anne Lamott’s, under the heading “The Law of the American jungle”: Remain calm and share your bananas (per Anne Lamott, facebook post, 10-1-13).
Share your bananas. Share things that will feed others. Share sweetness and sustenance and whimsy. Don’t share your rage and anxiety, your scorn and your hatred. I’m not saying don’t have those things: sometimes they are the most honest, real and necessary response to things happening in our lives and our world. I’m saying don’t let those things be your contribution to the situation. Don’t slosh buckets of them around (not in conversations, not on social media, not even in your own troubled spirit). I beg of you: Own and recognize your anxious rage, but don’t let that BE your response. It won’t help anything. To add one more metaphor onto an already large heap: all it does is sow rocks into the field we’re hoping to harvest. And our task is to be working the soil so that things can grow. Our task is to be just angry enough to give us the strength to remove rocks, but not so angry that we can’t also be working to loosen the dirt, adding things that will sustain and feed the harvest.
Keep a foundation of calm. Do it by sharing your bananas.
It sounds simple. But how do we do that, in the middle of a monkey cage with screaming chimpanzees jumping around, grabbing our bananas and sometimes even throwing poo at us? Suddenly it’s not so simple, and frankly, it never has been. Which is why it’s the same question the disciples had for Jesus in today’s gospel. They didn’t know how to do it either. In fact, they were clearly at a loss.
It comes in the midst of a whole bunch of stories about how hard discipleship is. Jesus has been hammering it home, how much this life will require of them. And maybe they’re just intimidated, and so they decide to ask for (just a little) more faith. But Jesus snaps, in a way that will sound familiar to anyone who has ever faced down a whiny child demanding an Xbox when he already has a PS5 at home.
You don’t need MORE! You just need to use what you’ve already been given!! Faith isn’t fairy dust, and it isn’t currency to be spent. It’s something that disciples simply need to live. It’s following the example Jesus has already set for them. It’s claiming the life he lived, and the life he can live within them! If only they would do THAT, they could move mountains!
You can move mountains (though let’s be clear: mountains move verrrry slowly). You can change everything around you, at least a little, if YOU live with Christ’s spirit within you. If you let his life grow inside you, He will fill you with his power and allow you to be different in this world.
None of this is going to happen automatically. It doesn’t update in the background, while we continue doing all our regular work in another window. It requires attention. It requires stopping to look at the life that is around you. That’s why gardening is such a good metaphor. We must stop, and be willing to get our hands dirty: sifting through, perhaps spading and breaking up the earth. We are surrounded by a world that sometimes seems choked by rocks and weeds of all kinds. Heck, some of them, WE put there. It is our task to look at that. To see it all. To see the rocks and the weeds, but not despair. To see, also, the worms and the decaying leaves and the good soil that support so much growth and life.
Let your heart be moved by the desire to improve the soil: to add nutrients, rather than rocks, to the mix. You will get bruised; your fingernails will get dirty and break. It might hurt for a while. But your hands will become tougher: you will get strong. And you will be a life-bringer, a healer, a mountain-mover.
All you need to do is claim the faith Jesus offers. Put your trust in him, rather than in the world’s cynical, self-involved wisdom. Step back from the cycle of frustration, blame and unrighteous anger, and allow Christ’s peace to dwell within you. It is his gift to you. Breathe in. Breathe out. Ground yourself in him. This is not the end. Breathe. And when you find yourself losing your grip … when the calm is hard to find … the very best way to get back in touch with the Christ inside you is to work the earth, and find some way to share your bananas. May it be so. Amen.