“How Do You Know If You Are Ripe?”                                    Allin Walker

READING  from the lectionary: Luke 13:6-9

[Jesus] told then this parable: “A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it, but he found none.  So he said to the vinedresser, “Look here!  For the last three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any.  Cut it down.  Why should it go on using up the soil?” But he replied, “Leave it, sir, this one year while I dig round it and manure it.  And if it bears next season, well and good; if not, you shall have it down.”

READING by Walt Whitman from “Leaves of Grass”

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your flesh shall be a great poem…

IN CONGREGATION

So, as I told the kids, we’re going to think together about RIPENESS and let me ask you, How Do We Know If A Person Is Ripe?  Perhaps a kin to people who seem to be old before they were ever young or who never grow up….  Or people who like a store bought tomato never seemed to fulfill their potential and die without ever having lived….

If nothing else I say this morning sticks with you, imagine comparing your life  to the difference between a store bought tomato that has been forced to be ready for shipment and delivery in the middle of the winter- one that is perfect and hard and tasteless AND a vine grown, midsummer, bright red juicy, irregular heirloom tomato…. Which is your life like?  In this way, Jesus spoke in parables…….

AT PULPIT

It’s been a long time since I’ve done the heavy lifting of rigorous theological thinking and I’m not so sure that that’s even what most of us need these days.  Most of the people I know continue to wrestle hard enough with living up to the parts of the Bible they know and understand without getting caught up by the mysteries of the faith.  I mean, how complicated is it to understand what is demanded by “Do unto others as you would have done to you”?  Although there is, by the way,  a new 300 page book on even that titled “Why Can’t We Be Good?”

Nevertheless I do some theological “keeping up” often because friends or family run across something they think I ought to know about and send me a theological treatise of one kind or another… usually it will have some politics mixed in so you can imagine that I got a couple of recommendations to read Jim Wallis’s The Politics of God and Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God.

Not long ago I got a spate of theology and gardening and farming books like Kieran Egan’s Building my Zen Garden and Justin Isherwood’s Book of Plough.  Throw in Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid that I got from our daughter and son in law and Barbara Ballenger’s Prayer Without Borders that I got from Margaret and you’ve got a pretty good survey of the range of religious stuff that interests me these days.

I tell you this because most of these affirm my basic rootedness in the Christian faith without challenging me to do too much of that heavy lifting theological stuff.  But every once in a while I’m given something to read or listen to that really does shift the way I think about the way things are.  Most recently that has been the work of Neil Douglas-Klotz who has spent the last 25 years of his life translating the biblical sayings of Jesus that seem most likely to have actually been said by Jesus back into the original Aramaic language in which he most likely said them.  It’s an onion peeling effort of stripping the biblical Jesus down to the essential Jesus then literally trying to put words into his mouth in ancient Aramaic then translating those back into English.  Much of what Douglas-Klotz ends up with is truly revolutionary- Jesus stripped of all the Greek, Latin, Cannonical, Eclesiastic, Catholic, Western, Revised Standard, Good News that has made him seem so obscure and different from us and made his God totally other and totally separate from our daily lives.

Because I don’t do much of that heavy lifting work anymore I want to tell you right up front that I cannot tell you whether Douglas-Klotz’s effort is 100% accurate or not.  I can

tell you his credentials are stellar, his references impeccable and his impact profound.  It’s his work I’m drawing on this morning when I ask you to think with me about the question “How do we know when we are ripe?”

Our word “Ripe” is the closest Douglas-Klotz says we can come to an accurate translation of the word usually translated in Jesus’s sayings as “blessed” and we only have to start here to understand some of the impact Douglas-Klotz’s work can have on the faith that nurtures and sustains us.  For other conversations and other times are his understanding of our word “peace” not as absence of conflict but as “fulfillment of potential” or “life” not as animation but as sustenance or God not as spirit but as breath…. Breathe and you are intimately connected with God and with all creation as Jesus would have said it. 

Over and over Douglas-Klotz takes our language forms that place Jesus’s words “out there” or separate from our day-to-day experience and roots them in the stuff of our lives.  Ripeness is like this.  In the way we’ve been taught to think, blessed implies that one receives something good from someone or some thing or some place that is otherwise separate from us with the implication that if you want to be blessed, you have to earn it or be worthy of it.  The good things of life have to be in some way earned and life becomes the task of figuring out what we must do to earn that which is good.  The extent to which you are good or bad determines the extent to which you are blessed or… or I suppose, not blessed which is to be damned…. Or as Jesus might have said it, to be picked before your time or in the world of tomatoes, to be forced to be a midwinter store-bought tomato that will never be truly ripe.

Try as we might that sense of needing to earn goodness- to earn being blessed-  is so deep rooted in us we just cannot help but think in terms of brownie points earned or lost in the book of the great score keeper.  Everything is out there- the brownie points, the record  book, the scorekeeper.  Our lesson from Luke takes us right there.  The fig tree doesn’t please its owner, therefore it must be cut down because it is not good.  It doesn’t produce the fruit it is expected to, therefore it is useless. 

Knowing very little about raising fruit trees, I went online to the University of Wisconsin Extension web site and asked them “Why don’t fruit trees bear fruit?” and low and

behold, there are books and books on the subject.  Near as I can tell, none of the reasons blames the tree itself.  It is assumed to have the potential to bear fruit under the right circumstances.  If it’s planted in the right soil, if it gets enough sunlight, if its planted close enough to other fruit trees, if it gets enough water… it will bear fruit.  But, even more, the tree is not morally wrong or evil because it doesn’t bear fruit.

Think how different it would be if all our lives we had been taught that our reward of living well is not blessedness from afar but ripeness from within.  We would have been taught not, blessed are the peacemakers, but ripe are the peacemakers as if to say, you will know the peacemakers by their ripeness.  There is nothing wrong with those who are not peacemakers, they just are not ripe yet, not juicy yet, not full of life yet, not ready to

be smelled, tasted, felt by others yet.  Not being a peacemaker then feels somehow like being an adolescent, being a peacemaker feels more like being mature. 

All the grocery store images of people trying to find the fruits and vegetables that are just at the right stage of ripeness are delicious.  Smell it, feel it, thump it, shake it, judge its color, feel its weight.  We even know that sometimes we can be deceived like with mid winter tomatoes that may look great, perhaps feel great but taste like cardboard….

These grocery store images says Douglas-Klotz are exactly appropriate to the way Jesus taught his peers about the fulfilled life, the abundant life that he came to invite them to enjoy.  The people he taught were by and large earthy, rural, unsophisticated, no nonsense kind of folks who knew ripe fruit when they tasted it, who knew sour wine when it was served them, who knew that you couldn’t always judge what was on the inside by how the outside looked.  If Jesus had tried to teach them about Blessedness as it has been defined for us, his hearers most likely would not have cared a whole lot one way or the other… just like us.  Jump through hoops for promises in the by and by…. ummmmm, maybe not.  Ripeness though, I’ll have a bite of that.

Imagining what life is ultimately about in this way has been for me life changing.  It helps me understand why it is that we in this church may feel more affinity with those who are faithfully Buddhist or Sectarian or Roman Catholic than we do with our fellow protestant Christians and their oppressive blessedness. .. they just aren’t ripe yet, they’re not juicy enough, rich enough, deep enough, loving enough but there is hope for them because ripeness is not something they will have to earn, it is already in them, working perhaps even in spite of them, waiting to burst forth in them at the proper time.

All we can do is wait and water and fertilize and let the sun do its thing to help them grow although it is true that if you bring them in from the cold and put them on a table inside where it is warm, most of the time they’ll get ripe on their own without the sun.

Here I hasten to say that ripeness has absolutely nothing to do with being perfect or uniform!  To keep tomatoes perfect they have to be picked long before they are ripe.  While they are still hard and thick-skinned and tasteless.  The best tasting fruit often will have been shaped into twists and turns, wrinkles and blemishes… far from perfect, but perfectly ripe.  “Grandma, why have you got so many wrinkles” might ask the intrepid grandchild.  To which the answer ought to be “I earned every single one of them getting ripe.”

Is it wrinkles that then answer the question “How do you know if you are ripe?”  I have a quote on the wall in our home office that says “In the world to come each of us will be called to account for all the good things God put on this earth that we refused to enjoy.”  Beside it is Walt Whitman’s recipe for ripeness which was the second reading Kate read for us.

Jesus said not only “ripe are the peace makers”, but” ripe are those who know that they are sustained by God”…. And then he taught his disciples to pray in Douglas Klotz’s words translated from the Aramaic and then my retranslation of his English:

O birther of the cosmos intensify your life giving sustenance that is eternally within us.  From within all the different embodiments of your sustenance that you have created, let your sustenance emanate so that unity in and through you reigns. May your sustenance flow freely within us to nurture us in every part and way and may we not inhibit others being nurtured by it within themselves as well.  May we not be enticed by surface things but freed from them for it is then that your power and your energy that is the deep resonance that makes everything that is be in harmony.  From age to age it has been so and may it continue to be so.