The generation that entered into the wilderness, following Moses and guided by the cloud, was not the generation that entered into the Promised Land. No one who set foot from Egypt entered into that place, and Moses himself only got to glimpse it from a distance. He knew that his people would arrive there, but a changed people, a new generation, and none of those who crossed through the sea in flight from oppression.
Paul writes that some of those who journeyed with Moses complained, and so were destroyed. The fact is that all of them were destroyed, and I have to imagine that all of them complained. All of us will die, and none of us get to enter the Promised Land on this side of death, although we may be so blessed as Moses to see it approaching for those who will follow us.
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The Gospel begins with a contemporary account of brutal killings and senseless deaths in the heart of Jerusalem, the first at the hand of the State, and the second an act of fate. Jesus proceeds then into a parable, the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree, and the gardener who works to save it from its imminent destruction.
There has been a profound surge in senseless deaths this week as promised pauses in Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, and Russia have given way to violence. Apparently in the midst of all kinds of enthusiasm about how war could give way to outwardly peaceful economic redevelopment to benefit the rich and powerful all around the world, Gaza experienced its most deadly attacks since the beginning of that war. The most neutral sources I could find say that since Israel broke the ceasefire this week, something like six hundred Gazan people have been killed.
Those deaths come from air strikes on a population huddling together to struggle to survive.
The man who owns the vineyard says that the fig tree hasn’t borne good fruit yet, and so it should be destroyed: it’s a waste of space, a waste of soil.
There are people who look at Gaza and see a space twice the size of Salt Spring that could be put to much better use, who look at a swath of Ukrainian land three times the size of Vancouver Island, and see a waste of soil.
They cut down lives by the hundred in nighttime strikes, and raze whole cities to the ground.
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My partner Corvi works in climate change with a research institute in Victoria, but perhaps not in the way you might think.
I remember being a kid in the early ‘90s and hearing about climate change in much the same way as most of us now are pretty well accustomed-to: lots of information about what’s to blame, lots of urgency about how we need to stop it, and slow progress mixed with occasional regressions as we try to figure out how to balance financial and political power against the collective wellbeing of humanity and the ecosystems of which we are a part.
Corvi’s work is different. He works with teams of people who try to model what actually seems likely, and what we can do to adapt to a changing world.
If the climate changes in the kind of ways we might reasonably anticipate, then there are large-scale shifts in when and where rain falls, in what kinds of surface vegetation makes up our forests and grasslands, and whether salmon can complete their life-cycle in warmer and dysregulated bodies of water. There are days when it is devastating, and we might all wish it weren’t so, but there are people working very hard to figure out what to do about it.
Work like that helps you make decisions about how you might need to build your infrastructure differently, from the effect of increased heat on buildings and the people in them, to the culverts that need to be able to carry storm surges beneath our roads. Maybe you work out that you need to change how you manage dams on rivers so that salmon have some chance to survive. You make different decisions about the kinds of crops you decide to grow.
This is the hope and the work of the gardener.
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We all have to work to resist all the powers of evil that possess our world, however little or large, but we will not be able to change everything. We have not gotten very far from the brutality of Pilate against the persecuted Galileans, nor from the suffering of Christ on the Cross. There are, however, things that might just bear good fruit. Maybe it’s even worth working to support them whether they will be an instant success or not. Overnight victories are very, very rare.
It is long, and slow, and difficult to journey in the way of the gardener, and in the way of the people who walked with Moses out into the unfamiliar abyss of the desert. They had a little comfort here and there in the form of cloud and manna, but their destination was uncertain, and none of those who set out managed to arrive. Banding together in all their frustrations and complaining, however, they managed to see a new generation into the Promised Land.
I think of the work of places like the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, who are not treating past traumas of a conflict experienced for a short while a long way away, but who are joining together with the walking wounded in the midst of constant terror, at home, for years. They are not going to stop the war machine, but they might help keep someone going for one more year, and something might just be different in one more year.
We can wish that the world were different than it is, and we can work to nurture and save those who are really here with us in the world as it is, and work together to prepare for the world as it might become.
It is a difficult journey towards that modest Promised Land, where perhaps not everything is perfect, but it might just be good enough. All of us will die along the way, but the world we make for generations yet to come can, perhaps, be just a little gentler, a little more peaceful, a little more bountiful. Such transformation occurs not at the hands of strong men who will claim to impose their will overnight, but by the work of many gardeners who can see the value in a tree here or there which someone else might just as soon destroy.
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May we be so bold as to work to better the world by our hands, our lives, and our labours. May we pray that there might be better fruit in a year, and better still in a generation. May we know that our good work is not in attaining perfection, but simply in the saving work of love.