A sermon for Wednesday in the first week of the 2023 Chautauqua season at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. Readings include Genesis 15:1-12,17-18 and Matthew 7:15-20

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So here we have it: Judge not – but – by their fruits shall ye know them. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, to ask Jesus to make up his mind?

Jesus asks, “Can a thornbush bring forth grapes, or thistles a fig?” Can a wolf in sheep’s clothing eat nothing but grass?

I’m sure some of you know the Edwin Friedman fable of The Friendly Forest. In that story, a tiger comes to live in a forest, which is very worrying to the lamb who was already living there. The other animals of the forest tried to reassure the lamb that they had instructed the tiger that a condition of living there was to let others there live. Still, there was something about the tiger’s growling, stalking nature that bothered the lamb. Even when the tiger was not actively stalking, the lamb was always worried that it would. Eventually, the lamb announced that it could not stay in the forest any longer – the poor lamb’s nerves wouldn’t take the strain of always being on alert for low growls. The other animals proposed a conversation between the lamb and the tiger to sort things out; all except one, who “was overheard to remark, ‘I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you want a lamb and a tiger to live in the same forest, you don’t try to make them communicate. You cage the bloody tiger.’”[i]

In amongst yesterday’s brilliant sermon, I believe I heard Bishop LaTrelle Easterling quote bell hooks in saying that love and abuse cannot coexist. And Jennifer Senior told us that research shows that spending time with a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a false friend – is measurably more physically stressful than hanging with an outright enemy whose stripes we know.

Beware, then, of the false prophets, Jesus warns; the false friends, the fake fruit trees.

It makes one wonder, what was it like for Jesus, living with Judas all that time?

The sheep cannot teach the wolf to eat grass, to enjoy the snap of a fresh clover stalk and be satisfied. The dove cannot eat plastic olives. Yet Jesus shared even his last meal with the one they called Iscariot.

Perhaps this saying is easier to apply if instead of concerning the true nature of others, it leads us to self-examination. We are not Jesus. We hope that we are not Judas. We try to produce good and satisfying and sound, at least not poisonous, fruit. We worry, some of us, that we come from thistle stock, rather than dandelion, bramble rather than the vine.

You know the saying, that the leopard cannot change his spots. A thistle cannot become a fig tree. But there is one, there is one who can make all things new.

In the description of that strange and mystical covenant scene between God and Abram, there is an intriguing detail – forgive me, I cannot remember where I first read this, and my Hebrew is next to non-existent, but I looked at the interlinear translations online, and it checks out – the deep sleep that comes over Abram, the terrifying, deep abyss of sleep, of non-consciousness, of close to non-existence that comes over him is the same deep sleep that God cast upon Adam, the first human, when God divided that one into two pieces, male and female (Genesis 2:21-23).

After God created the Adam, in that story, God made all of the animals in turn – lambs, tigers, wolves, doves – but none was right to be Adam’s partner (Genesis 2:18-20). So, in that first operation, after putting them into that deep sleep which is as close as we come without succumbing to the abyss, God remade and recast the human; Wil Gafney, in her Womanist Midrash, says that “God puts the creature to sleep and divides it in half.”[ii] The human, who was one, is divided and becomes something new; in fact, two things new! Now more than one human being shares the image of God; we were truly made for one another.

In the covenant that God cut with Abram, in darkness and smoke and fire, just as the first human was made anew into two, just so Abram awoke from the sleep that took him back beneath the primordial waters, a new person, re-created, born again into the life that God intended for him.

We cannot change another’s spots, but as Bishop LaTrelle put it yesterday, we can love them. While refusing to enter into their ravening ways, nor to be torn apart by them, we can still remember that we share the image of God; and in so doing, we can let God do God’s thing with them.

And it is true that we cannot change even our own sin-tempted nature, however we dress it up in lambswool and feathers, but in Christ we are a new creation: “everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) For with God, nothing will be impossible (Luke 1:37).

[i] Friedman, Edwin H. Friedman’s Fables (p. 30). Guilford Publications. Kindle Edition.

[ii] Gafney, Wilda C. Womanist Midrash. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.