Prayer and Fig Trees

I'm in the midst of preparation for Sunday's sermon.  This week, we'll be talking about the spiritual discipline of prayer.  Last week was about study and meditation and there will be a post coming today or tomorrow, as promised about those disciplines.  For now, I'm focused on prayer.

I'm preaching a text that isn't included in the lectionary and you may not hear in many churches because of its complexity, unfortunately.  Mark and Matthew tell a story of a hungry Jesus who finds no figs on the fig tree, gets mad, and causes its demise.  The tree wilts on the spot.  You can find Mark's version of the story at Mark 11:20-26. 

In studying this passage, some things began to resound with me having to do with the survival of the church.  I think its speaking to me this way because I've been in the presence of some conversations lately about the survival of the local church and how things are changing in today's climate.

Just this week, a church member recited some statistics during a church council meeting.  Studies show that all mainline denominations are shrinking at a staggering rate.  Older generations are dying off and younger generations simply aren't finding what they're looking for in many of our traditional churches (no, this isn't going to be a knock on traditional worship or traditional ways of doing things).  Meanwhile, I've recently read an article by the Alban Institute on what might be an underlying cause of these symptoms.  The article reminded me that when we consume ourselves with these depressing statistics, we have the tendency to retreat into a survival mode.

We begin asking questions like: "How will we secure our financial future?"  "How do we show people that what we're doing has some great meaning?"  "How do we assimilate more people into what we're already doing?"

That's not going to work.

Those were some of the problems that the Pharisees and the temple leaders were trying to address in Jesus' time.  You see, just before Jesus cursed the fig tree, he spent some time in the temple confonting some of the deficiencies of the leadership.  The fig tree became a symbol of what would happen to the temple if it was found fruitless.

God has plans for his temple to become not just a Jewish place of prayer, but a house of prayer for all nations.  Note that I said nations and not faiths.  Part of the problem with the temple is that you had to become Jewish to pray there - contradictory to God's plans.  The Jewish temple must become a place for all people to pray, to encounter God, and to nourish their faith.  If the temple and it's leaders couldn't bear that fruit, or wouldn't bear that fruit, it would, like the fig tree, experience destruction.

I would encourage us, as Christians and church leaders, to learn a lesson from the fig tree.  In the face of decline, we should ask how we can preserve what we have, but how we fall in line with God's will.  Instead of trying to hold all things in, we should reach out with reckless abandon.  We should be inviting in all people of all nations by loving them and caring for them wherever they are.  Forget about numbers.  What are we doing to make a difference to the 60+% out there who don't know Jesus?

It was Jesus who said, "Those who love their life will lose it and those who hate their life will keep it for eternity."  The same can be said for the church.  Kudos to the churches and church leaders out there who have figured this out and are witnessing others' lives changed by Christ through the devotion of other Christians.