Popeye Goes Sci-Fi

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

"God said, 'Time, time belongs to me
Time's my secret weapon,
My final advantage'
God turned away
From the edge of town.
I knew that I was beaten
That now was all I had..."

from "God Said No" by Dan Bern

You know, I love the readings for this week because they're full of crazy. First, in Exodus, we have Moses taking care of some livestock, when he sees a bush on fire. Then he has a discussion with God, which, frankly, makes me wonder exactly what kind of bush *cough cough cannabis* was burning. After a conversation about appropriate footwear and the future of Israel, God tells Moses his name: IAM. Then, in the Psalm we have what reads like an erotic love poem to God. In Corinthians, Paul basically pulls a Star Trek The Next Generation-style time travel move and tells Christians that their ancestors drank from a rock, which is Jesus, even though they preceded him by hundreds of years. Finally, we have a parable in which a man has planted a fig tree in his vineyard, and it hasn't borne fruit in the three years since, so he wants to chop it down until his gardener intervenes. Do you know how long it takes a fig tree to grow to maturity and bear fruit? I looked it up: three to four years. So that fig tree is only just barely at the age that you might expect figs from it, but this guy has been looking for figs every year for three years. Like I said, lots of crazy.

Now, I know that I'm about to ignore the elephant in the room, because we traditionally interpret the fig tree to be God's people who are getting one more chance to get their act together and bear the fruit of God's kingdom. And I know that there's a whole lot of repentance talk in today's readings. But many of us have heard those interpretations all our lives, and really, I just don't think I will have anything to say that's going to blast the lid off the whole repentance thing. At our house repentance looks like this: 1. ask if the person is okay; 2. say I'm sorry; 3. ask what you can do to make it better; 4. promise to do things differently from now on. Number four is the hardest part. And that's what I've got on repentance.

But all this talk of turning back toward the straight and narrow masks the really cool sci-fi thread running through these passages. And I really like those time episodes in Star Trek the Next Generation. They're fun to think about. I take a great deal of solace in the fact that when Moses asks God's name, God says, "I AM who I AM," and not just because it's fun to imagine God as a salty sailor who gets stronger when he eats a can of spinach. No. In all seriousness, I think God's name here is profound. This is just my pet theory, and I'm not sure I have enough evidence to actually back it up, but I believe that God is perpetually in history's every moment, in the present. I believe that one of the essential things that separates us from God is that we only move through time in one direction--forward--and at just the one speed, which makes us regret the past, worry about the future, and care way more about right now than the big picture.

In contrast, God, if God is not bound by time, is capable of experiencing every moment of our lives simultaneously in the present--our births, our deaths, our happiest days and the ones most filled with despair. What must that be like? A person's life would cease to be a narrative--partly because without past and future, causation becomes a lot less relevant, and if God experiences all time at once, in the present, there's not going to be very much narrative tension in our stories. In fact, I think our lives, taken that way, must be very much like poems, capturing the essence of a thing, or one of those word maps, where the more often a word is mentioned, the bigger the word is. You can't ever find a coherent sentence, but you still get a good idea of what the piece of writing was about.

word cloud of this blog post

This is not to say that God is distant or aloof. After all, when we are in the midst of great pain, God is right there with us, experiencing our present pain with us, and when we are, like the psalmist today, enraptured, God is also enraptured. But what would it be like for us if, when we imagine God beside us, feeling our regret about the wrong road taken, we imagine that God is simultaneously with us as we take that road, knowing how we're feeling about it after the fact? For me, this makes God more approachable, more sympathetic than an all-knowing, all-seeing God who knows our fate before we live it. God knows our fate as we live it. The distinction is as essential as the difference between reading a piece of music and playing it. 

Paul seems to be thinking of something similar to my little thought experiment when he writes to the Corinthians. Because if Christ exists out of time, then of course he can be saving those who, in our one-way-only perception of time, came before him.

And even though we typically interpret the fig tree as the children of God who have not born the fruit of their faith, I do think it's possible that Jesus is also talking about our limited perception of time. He was a guy from a farming community who ought to have known how long fig trees took to mature.  Maybe he's telling us something similar to Paul: You people are impatient. You get angry at an immature tree for not bearing fruit? Step outside of time, he might be saying. If you want fruit, nourish the tree. Give yourself over to the task. Don't worry about when it will finally bear fruit. I am eating the figs right now. They are delicious.