As I looked at the Gospel for this morning, I found myself hearing snatches of music. I hadn’t had a particularly stressful week, so I didn’t think it was tinnitus. My godfather’s fillings, back in the eighties, used to pick up Radio Moscow if a piece of aluminium foil touched them, but it was nothing as clear as that. Then I realised. It was a song I hadn’t heard in well over a decade, and a memory associated with it, of a programme from well over a decade ago. The programme was an acclaimed and much-watched one, and the theme-tune for it was much-loved, but – here’s a strange thing. The music was never released, as a single or as an album-track. For whatever reason, the theme song for “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” hasn’t been recorded other than as part of a soundtrack.

Which is a shame, for two reasons. Firstly, it’s quite a song. I remember snatches of it after more than a decade, and if the Internet Movie Database is any guide, so do lots of other people. OK, the poetry of the verses is – well, mixed:

This isn’t bad:

Look at all the ways the mystery unravels

Try to find a pattern--is there one to find?

But this nosedives a bit:

Though the sky is stormy

I see reflections of gold and blue

Will the true story ever be told

I wish I knew

And this just crash-lands in a puddle of saccharine:

As I try to learn the answer

And I stumble along the way

I am powered by the love in my heart

By the thoughts in my mind

By the dreams I dream each day

But – and here’s the other thing about lyrics. The verse can be mediocre-to-rubbish in quality, as long as the tune is really excellent and the chorus is strong and interesting enough to hold everything together. Chorus and music together can say something that stays with people. As here. It isn’t Keats – but it says something which means something to a lot of people. And at a specific point in the series, we get to hear what it means to Rosie O’Neill.

Living in time and feeling every moment

Do I walk into tomorrow and never look behind

In a perfect world

Everyone's dreams would all come true

I wonder what will the future hold

How will it all unfold

I wish I knew

I suspect that that’s the reason for the song’s popularity. For most of us, it’s about what life used to feel like, and still does at times – but more and more rarely.

How will it all unfold

I wish I knew

If you are a young twenty-something, it’s what it feels like all the time. If you’re a thirty-something, then you still get snatches of it, the sort of not-unpleasant panic-attacks that remind you that, although you’re starting to settle down, you’re not there yet. But here’s a strange thing. Rosie O’Neill, the central character in the TV series, was somewhat on even from there.

She was played by Sharon Gless, who was Detective Christine Cagney in Cagney and Lacey, and was clearly meant to be a fortysomething lawyer with quite a bit of life behind her. Her marriage had come to an end, and with it her shared law-practice with her husband. She was working as a Public Defender, which seems to be a step back into what is, in the States, a stage of legal existence usually occupied by younger lawyers just starting out, and wondering: What will the future hold/How will it all unfold/I wish I knew… On top of that she has a mother who is scarily ambitious for her. She wants her to be a corporate lawyer, to aim higher, to have ambition – and that’s bad enough to bear when you are a twenty-something just starting out, with your dreams and a clean sheet.

And Rosie isn’t there any more...

So this theme song, about hope, and uncertainty, and wondering what the future might hold, is the soundtrack to the life of a fortysomething woman who has already seen a lot of her life unfold, real hopes blossom and fade, and several things in which she had invested herself completely go right through their life-cycle and die.

Yet still, this song.

What will the future hold

I wonder what will the future hold

How will it all unfold

I wish I knew

It’s almost as though, out of all the scariness, something, something not unlike hope, is struggling to be reborn.

And then – at the end of the first series, just when we’ve begun to understand something about what it feels like to be Rosie O’Neill, where she is – an episode with another theme. A very Biblical theme – in fact the grim theme at the heart of this morning’s Gospel reading.

Judgment…

And for Rosie, judgment comes in a very particular and very threatening form. The School Reunion. And for Rosie O’Neill, the school reunion is fraught with the memory of conflict, a specific conflict between two people who have never got on. And that’s quite apart from the general trauma that school reunions are all about – how have I done compared to him, or her? He was bad enough at school, thirty-five years ago – what if he’s there? And what if he’s been really successful? And didn’t she always look down her nose at everybody?

And the truth is, and we know it, that that isn’t the worst of it. They may be making unfavourable comparisons – but the really awful, hurtful, wounding comparisons, for me, will be the ones I make for myself. What have I become? What have I achieved? We all started out together – crossed the start-line of the marathon that we call adulthood together. And for years we lost sight of each other. And now, we get to see each other again, to find out who’s in front and who’s behind. We get to judge and be judged – the very things Jesus, obviously, now, for very good reasons, says in Matthew 7:1 we shouldn’t get involved in!  And by now, a lot of the race has already been run…

Maybe I’m a bit sensitive on this point, because some genius has decided to have a reunion for our secondary school class later this year. The Caernarfon County School class of ’75. At least, there are plans… So – do I go, or do I not? Watch this space…

I can’t remember the details, not after all this time, but Rosie goes to her reunion, there’s some sort of a huge, cathartic row – and things that have been wrong since the very beginning of adulthood, thoughts, expectations, even self-understandings, the damaging ways people have seen themselves for years, get put right.

And what I particularly remember is that a bunch of forty-somethings stand round the piano, and sing a song that they all remember from their teens, and from their time at school. Their song. And the song is:

Living in time and feeling every moment

Do I walk into tomorrow and never look behind

In a perfect world

Everyone's dreams would all come true

How will it all unfold

I wish I knew…

And these people all together have grown to understand that they are very imperfect people, living in a very imperfect world, with imperfect and in many respects disappointing life-histories, because things didn’t go the way they thought, or hoped, they would.

But that’s OK. And it’s OK, not because it doesn’t matter – but because it still does. Because wherever they are in the marathon, or game, or process of living, they still have something expressed in the lyrics of “their” song: a future; possibilities; hope. They can still live, and  fruitfully…

Judgment:

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

The “fruit” that Jesus’ parable is talking of is faith, as it produces its effects in our living. It’s a living dependence on God that opens our living up to those around us and to the possibilities that God opens up before us. It’s that very living in God, the absence of which is so starkly symbolized by an unproductive fig-tree, that just exists, with a life that doesn’t open out onto anything else. It’s just there…

One of the problems we have very often with Jesus’ parables is that we don’t hear them as parables. We hear them as allegories. So with this parable: we hear it and we think “Who is the man who owns the vineyard?  That’ll probably be God. Who is the gardener? That’ll be Jesus, speaking up for us. And who’s the tree without fruit? Oh, that’ll be people who haven’t been to church for ages…”

But that isn’t how parables work. Here’s one single picture, of a man inspecting his fig-tree, and deciding to cut it down, and getting a gardening tip from his gardener. It isn’t a picture of the judgment, heaven and hell, it’s just Gardeners’ Question Time. But it still is a parable about judgment. It’s a parable about the most desperately serious dimension of our existence. It’s about missing the point of who and what we are.

This fig tree is just there. It’s not doing anything, it’s just existing. It’s done. Cut it down. And the gardener says “No, hang on a minute. Let’s give it a fair go. Let’s give it another year. Let’s treat it well, manure it, tend it – and see if that doesn’t make it productive, bring life back to it.

The Christian faith is about life. It’s about the life, the fullness of life, that God always meant us to have. Life rooted in God’s love and grace. It’s about a here-and-now in which we don’t just exist, borne down by what we’ve become, by what the years have made of us. It’s about a present moment which we can grasp, and which we can allow to grasp us, which opens out onto a future into which we don’t just drift, but are called.  It’s about grasping and being grasped by what God wants us to be, now, and next, and in him forever.

In a way, the story I told you about the “Rosie O’Neill” theme-tune, and the picture of these fortysomething women gathered round the piano at the school reunion, still singing

What will the future hold

I wonder what will the future hold

How will it all unfold

I wish I knew

is a kind of parable. And it’s very like the parable of the fig-tree. For them, too, there was the possibility of being stuck with what the years have made them – of living the future as though it’s just more of the past - but also for them is the possibility of grasping this new period of their lives as something productive and renewing, in its own way. Not a return to youth, but a new reckoning with where they really are. 

But that’s as far as Rosie O’Neill and her friends can take us. They can offer us hope – and hope is a deep component of real, authentic human existence. Hope is a profoundly beautiful thing. Hope is what you have when children tell you what they want to be when they grow up, or when a new graduate tells you what she hopes to do with her degree. Hope is also where people bear with things you couldn’t imagine bearing with, because they believe that there will come a point where things can be different. Hope is there, where people, by any rational measure, are stuck with a present which ought to make them captive, and they focus on a future which will be different in ways they can’t imagine.

And what Rosie O’Neill can tell us is that there can always be hope. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

But the Gospel takes us further. It’s about faith. And faith is where we name our hope, and name our hope as God. Faith is where we trust God, and let that change our lives, our existence. And faith is where what suddenly becomes decisive for us is not what other people – like the people at school reunions – think of us. But it isn’t what our ambitions might dictate for us either, our dreams, our early hopes. It isn’t even the ability to accept what we are, in the grumpy spirit of “I am what I am – take me or leave me...”  It’s the acceptance that God accepts us as we are. And that God’s acceptance of what we are opens up the possibility of becoming what God would have us be. Faith is where a living relationship with the source of life fills us with life, and our lives suddenly point beyond themselves.

Faith is the point at which we can say, and sing:

All my hope on God is founded;

he doth still my trust renew,

me through change and chance he guideth,

only good and only true.

God unknown, he alone

calls my heart to be his own.

Hope believes that there is a future, and that it can be different. Faith places it in God’s hands.