And this is what I want you to remember. This is going to be the take-away of the sermon today. Yes, we’re going to talk about fig trees and advocacy and farming practices in first-century Palestine, but at the end of it all, we’re going to come back to this truth: we all need an advocate. We never get through anything on our own. Everything that we have built and made and endured and survived, we have built or made or endured or survived because of others. And we have the chance to offer that aid to someone else every day.

When you watch a lot of Law and Order: SVU, you notice a line that characters repeat over and over again. It’s a signal that something’s wrong, like when a character in Star Wars says, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” When someone’s about to break, or when someone wants the moral high ground, inevitably, a character says, “How do you sleep at night?”