Trees & The Future

Note: The following is a sermon delivered on March 23, 2025, at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, based on readings from the Third Sunday in Lent, Year C. An audio version is found above.

My grandfather, Carl, was once an accountant. Now north of 90, his working days are behind him. When I was younger, he was cautious on my behalf. When he heard I wanted to study English or Music or, gasp, Theatre, he’d say:

“Why not be an accountant? That’s a secure job.”

Or

“Take a business class—something practical to fall back on.”I ran from that advice. I did not want to color inside the lines. To this day, I swear I have an allergy to cubicles.

I simply could not see the world the way he did. I wanted freedom. To be weird. To pursue my passions. To explore. As I saw it, he wanted me to have a safe job, a steady paycheck, and a conventional life.

I wanted to make an impact. He wanted me to play it safe. We did not agree.

You see, there are different ways of looking at the future.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the story of a landowner who plants a tree in his vineyard and, after a few years, expects something to show for it. He’s frustrated. Maybe his family invested in that tree for the sweet fruit of retirement. Maybe he could sell those figs to finish the addition on his house. Maybe those figs represent a cash crop or a side hustle. Maybe his family’s future is tied up in those trees.

The first man in the story has what Martin Buber, noted twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, calls an “I-It” relationship with the tree. The “I” is the man. The “It” is the object that serves a purpose. The fig tree is an instrument, a utility, a means to an end.

The “Its” in our lives are the things we insist must be productive. The tree must bear fruit. We must produce—a good wage, a career, an identity. And before long, someone – usually ourselves – is standing over us wondering why we aren’t doing something more.

So many of us have the landowner’s knee-jerk reaction, don’t we? A government agency that doesn’t give a clear return on investment? Cut it. A church without enough programs and average Sunday attendance? Optimize it. An employee at a performance review? Bring them down a notch or two. Make sure they know they can always improve.

Our lives, individually and collectively, become the “It” in the “I-It” relationship. Something to work on. A hustle. A project. Whole industries built on self-improvement. Everything, everywhere telling us we aren’t enough.

The landowner, maybe an old man, looks at the tree from a distance, wondering why it doesn’t produce. Under such a gaze, I imagine anything would wither.

This Lenten season, the tree is not budding. The landowner wants to cut it down. Find something else that spot of land can do. The landowner is not impatient—three years is long enough for any tree worth its soil to prove itself. If a fruit tree isn’t producing by now, will it ever? How much longer should he wait? How many more seasons should pass before it becomes clear this tree is a waste of good land?

But there’s another way to look at the future, a slower one, says Jesus in this parable. And that is what the gardener does. “Hang on. Let me try a couple more things.” Let me irrigate. Let me ventilate. Let me enrich the soil. Let me put some manure around it. Let’s give it some more time. The gardener interrupts the cycle. She doesn’t say the landowner is wrong. Just: Not yet. Hold off. Let me work. Let’s see.

The gardener has what Buber calls an “I-Thou” relationship with the tree. The tree is not valuable only because of what it produces, but how it works in relationship with the lives around it. The gardener understands the ecology of the vineyard. She wants to tend to it, not just to make it produce more, but because the tree occupies a space in the ecosystem and in her own imagination of what the backyard is and could be.

She is a park ranger for the estate. A specialist whose work even the landowner cannot fully compute.

She knows the landowner’s budget last year was missing a line item for the irrigation system she knew would transform the place. She knows the landlord's kids trample too much on the ground at their parties. She knows the bees are behaving differently this year. She’s seen the mama bird nesting there, and what it will cost that bird and her family if the tree comes down. The tree is where the gardener once nestled up under the stars and heard the voice of God. She sees the tree up close and understands what it needs.

Maybe the landowner will be right in the end. Maybe the tree really is barren. But she wants to try anyway. She believes something is still possible. “Give me just one more chance,” she says.

We don’t know if the gardener’s ideas are persuasive. The story ends before we find out the landowner’s decision. What if the landowner cut down the tree? What if the gardener persuades the landowner to give her and that tree just one more year?

We are the tree sometimes. And while there are voices passing by asking why we aren’t being productive in quite the right ways, we are grateful to have a Gardener who knows us well, who tends to our lives, and who—every year—insists on giving us just one more year and another try to bear fruit. Maybe, the Gardener knows, our blossoming is yet to come. Meantime, she and we can draw in close and make sure this is a season where we’re fertilized and nurtured.

My grandfather was an accountant, but he was also a woodcarver. He took up the craft of carving wooden ducks and then figurines. One year, at my parents’ request, he carved a nativity set for a church play. That creche now lives in my home at Christmastime.

My grandfather sees trees up close, too—looking for the right length, eyeing for knots and burls, tending carefully to the specimen before him to make sure it’ll suit the purpose. He doesn’t rush to cut, but when he does, it is with intention. Not to discard, but to create.

Maybe the real future of the vineyard is when the Landowner and the Gardener each play their parts. The Father or grandfather who knows the beautiful thing we are becoming, the Spirit who joins us down in the dirt to make it happen, and the Son who, today, tells a story about it all. Many different kinds of stewards, perhaps, each an I and a Thou, luring us gently back and forth between the need to prune and the need to be patient.



In such a vineyard, as we live with and play off each other, the point is not just to keep trees standing for the sake of standing, but to nurture what is alive, to reshape what is broken, to transform what seems useless into something sacred. Or to shift our perspective to see that it has been sacred all along. Maybe the Gardener and the Landowner know something we don’t. Maybe what looks like waste is actually waiting for renewal. Maybe what looks like failure is simply unfinished.  Maybe we are never just one thing—landowner or gardener, worthy or wasted. Maybe the line between waiting and pruning, between hope and despair, is thinner than we think.

I suspect our characters in today’s story do know a little something about trees without any fruit on them after three years. Those trees look a lot like empty crosses. And in time, even they will bear unexpected fruit.