The Need for Advocates

A sermon on Luke 13:1-9
Preached Sunday, March 23, 2025 at Saratoga Springs UMC.
Video available here, using the All We Need worship series from Barn Geese Worship.

“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”

I’m sure some of you have heard this before. Maybe you’ve even said this before. It’s in my list of the Top Three Things That Aren’t in the Bible, right up there with “God helps those who help themselves” and “Everything happens for a reason.” My favorite runner-up for this list is “God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers,” if only because of the meme value. In my household, we regularly say that God gives his toughest battles to his sleepiest soldiers as we roll over and hit snooze once again.

And you are completely forgiven if you thought these phrases were actually in the Bible—the Bible’s big and there’s a lot of stuff in there and each of these phrases sound like something that should be in the Bible. The Bible should encourage us and comfort us. That’s part of what makes it holy. And in the case of “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” well, there is a scripture that sounds an awful bit like it. It’s from the lectionary reading from Corinthians today, 1 Corinthians 10:13: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength.” That’s just the first half of the verse, though. The second half goes, “but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

Huh.

Sounds like an advocate to me.

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.

So that’s where we’ll end. But let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?

At the top of our gospel passage today, folks are asking Jesus about current events. Pilate has committed an atrocity: he’s murdered some folks from Galilee, presumably while they were offering their sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem. This is on top of another disaster at the tower of Siloam, where eighteen people were killed.

We don’t know details about these events, other than that they were awful. There’s a chance that the tower of Siloam was a supporting structure near an aqueduct or one of the pools in Jerusalem, meaning that the collapse could have had more far-reaching impacts that the just initial destruction. And Pilate, well… Josephus tells us that the governor of Syria had Pilate stripped of his governorship and summoned back to Rome a few years after Jesus’s crucifixion because he just could not stop using excessive force to quelle uprisings in Judea. So yeah. Things are bad.

And from Jesus’s response to these events, it seems like people were asking him why these things happened. Why did God let Pilate massacre these people? Why did that tower fall? Everything happens for a reason.

But Jesus says to them, “You think these people were bad people and that’s why bad things happened to them? No! Obviously not! But unless something changes, this will happen to all of us. Do you think that the eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell were worse people than everyone else in Jerusalem? No! But if it could happen to them, it could happen to any of us. We must repent. We must make a change.”

Which is not a bad little sermon on its own. It’s a good little bit of advocacy too. You could put some of that on a sign. Gives real Martin Niemöller, “First They Came” vibes.

But then he tells this parable that, I think, ruins the vibe, unless you know a thing or two about fig trees.

The edible fig was one of the first plants to be cultivated by humans, as far back as 9000 BCE in the Jordan Valley, north of Jericho. We cultivated it before we cultivated wheat or barely or beans. And some of that history is preserved in Genesis 3, where we see the man and the woman in the Garden of Eden cover themselves with fig leaves after they eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There’s actually an Orthodox Christian tradition that the fig tree that Jesus curses in another parable in the gospels is the tree, the actual Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And fig trees are used symbolically through scripture. When you see a fig tree mentioned, you’re meant to think of peace and stability and flourishing. When you hear, “Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree,” you’re meant to think of prosperity that reaches every household, all across the land.

And fig trees are big! I mean, there are varieties of fig that thrive as potted indoor plants and there are varieties in the genus that are shrubs, but the fig trees Jesus talks about can grow up to 20 feet tall, which is not what I was picturing! And that’s potentially part of why they would have been planted near or in vineyards—they could provide shade for the grapes. They also fruit around the same time as the grapes and produce a sweet sap that would draw insects away from the grapes as they ripen. On top of that, fig trees can grow in nutritionally poor soil and actually help to renew the soil—their roots go wide, not deep, though they can dominate an area if they’re left on their own. But in general, it wasn’t unusual to see a fig tree planted alongside a vineyard. In fact, it a was a bit of a status symbol. Remember? Figs mean prosperity.

So here comes this vineyard owner, to his own vineyard. And we get the impression that he’s a real “God helps who help themselves” kind of guy. He’s not the guy working the land—he’s got someone else working the vineyard, so you know he’s got money. I mean, he’s got a fig tree! It’s gotta be a prosperous place.

But still, he comes on his yearly visit and for the third year in a row, there’s no fruit on the fig tree. Now, the man’s growing grapes, not figs, but let’s set that aside for the moment. It seems like the owner is not from around here, because he doesn’t know the first fruits law in Leviticus 19 that says that you can’t eat the fruits of a fig tree from its first three years, or he doesn’t think that it’s a practice someone would actually observe. Setting that aside as well, though, it’s clear he doesn’t know why a fig tree would be there in the first place. He calls the tree a waste, a waste of soil. He wants it cut down.

It's a familiar tune.

So the man who works the soil, who really knows how things work, has to step in. See, he knows the value of the fig tree. He knows how it helps the grapes. He knows how it can help the soil. He knows the cultural importance of it. So he makes a show out of it. “Sir, sir, I completely understand. But why not give it one more year. I can fertilize it, I can make sure the roots aren’t interfering with anything, and if it bears fruit next year, great! If not, you can cut it down.”

He makes this promise to the vineyard owner because he knows the tree is doing what it’s supposed to for the vineyard, and that it’ll fruit next year, no question.

And that’s the end of the parable. We don’t know if the worker’s advocacy is enough. We don’t know how things turn out a year from then. So the point of the parable can’t be that advocacy works. We don’t know that it does.

The point has to be that we have to try.

In the face of people like the owner in the parable, we have to advocate.

In the face of disaster and its own-going effects, we have to advocate.

In the face of violence and repression, we have to advocate.

And that’s just what we learn from this passage here in Luke’s gospel. When we expand our gaze, we can see that there are so many situations in this world that need our advocacy. The friend navigating a serious illness on their own. The single parent doing the best for their kids. The widower figuring out how to live in that empty house by himself. The trans or nonbinary kid watching this world that does not know how to love them well or at all. The people in our community who need food, shelter, sleep, mobility aids, healthcare, help of all kinds. We are called in all these situations to stand between those who would want to tear down the vulnerable around us, insist on more time, and then get our hands dirty with shovels and compost and earth.

And sometimes, all the time, we need advocates too. We have Jesus, of course, always, we have the Spirit, the Advocate, with us always, but so often, we try to do life on our own. We try to take on burdens we were never meant to carry alone, try to face down Goliaths that we were never supposed to confront, on our own. We think we are the toughest soldiers and God has given us the hardest battles. Or I have thought that, anyway. Maybe some of you have too.

But that’s not what the Bible says. That’s not the lesson from our parable today, and if explore our scriptures and our faith long enough, we’ll find that it’s never the lesson we need to learn. Remember, the truth is that 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, others like a worker in a vineyard, caring for a fig tree.

And we have the chance to offer that aid to someone else every day.

So go. Do. Advocate. And let others do the same for you.

Amen.