There was a Pentacostal minister turned comedian named Sam Kinison. His act included a lot of yelling, and a lot of it was pretty rude.

I remember one joke, which I will clean up a bit here:

Oh, your starving. You have no food. You know why? You live in a desert!

Move somewhere there is food!

We have deserts here. We don’t live in them!

Sam Kinison was from Yakima Washington, but lived in Los Angeles, which is not a desert but has a Mediterranean climate.

He died in a head-on collision with a young person who had been drinking and whose pickup truck crossed the center line.

Sam was on his way to a show in Laughlin Nevada, in the Mohave desert.

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Let’s go to God in prayer.

God of wisdom, may the words that I speak, and the ways they are received by each of our hearts and minds, to help us to continue to grow into the people, and the church, that you have dreamed us to be.

Amen.

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When one is hungry, it’s hard to do much else. The obvious effect would be less energy to move and do things. But there are other effects too.

Brains are mostly made of protein, but they run on sugar. When someone’s blood sugar runs low, they can have trouble thinking. Even lower and they may lose consciousness, and perhaps even enter a coma.

The body will convert fat to energy, but in times of deep need it may also convert muscle. That’s more than just weakening arm and leg muscles: it weakens the heart too.

There is a lot of food in this world, but it is distributed unevenly. The United States grows so much food that it exports to other countries and even converts some of its corn to ethanol for fuel.

California’s Central Valley has only 1% of the nation’s farmland but produces 8% of the value of crops, and a third of the nation’s fruit and vegetables, including tomatoes, melons, nuts, citrus fruits, table and wine grapes, kiwis, olives, and figs.

Part of what nourishes these plants is rich soil, made up of brown loam over brown clay. This soil, named San Joaquin soil, is the official soil of California. I don’t know how many states have an official soil. California is the only one I know. But if you’re going to grow figs in the United States, this is the soil where you want to plant.

In our reading from Luke, a landowner planted a fig tree in his vineyard. And he was unhappy because the tree wasn’t producing fruit.

Now the way domesticated fruit plants survive is by producing fruit: Those that produce well are kept and their offspring are propagated for more fruit. And so what any domesticated fruit tree does to be nourished by its owner is to produce fruit.

If it can.

A fig tree can take anywhere from a year to five years to produce fruit, depending on the variety of fig and the growing conditions where it is planted. And this fig tree has been there for three years, a fair amount of time to wait.

But maybe it’s just hungry.

And so the person working the vineyard, who obviously has experience with plants, asks the landowner to give the fig tree another year, during with the worker will nourish the plant.

Trees do better when nourished, even in a Mediterranean climate.

And people can live in deserts, like Laughlin Nevada or Las Vegas, if food and water are brought there.

Even the Central Valley relies heavily on irrigation.

People need food and water to survive and thrive.

Our nation once gave food to areas in need. We gave out of our abundance. Will we be like the landowner who demands results without nourishing?

Our nation once provided food to needy families via SNAP and help for food pantries. Will we expect the hungry to have the strength to work for the food they need?

Our nation once provided meals to children in school. Will we expect the brains of growing students to thrive with insufficient nourishment?

I’m not suggesting we give people a year and then cut them down. I’m suggesting that people need to be fed.

And until they are fed, we really shouldn’t be asking much of them at all.

It’s ironic that a man who blamed people for living in a desert, demanding that they move,

would himself die on a highway going from where food will grow on his way to a desert.

So my challenge to all of us this week is to remember that those in need

must first have their needs addressed before we can expect them to give back.

As the modified saying goes:

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day while you teach him to fish.

Amen.

* Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue

* Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James version of the Bible.