How Does Your Garden Grow?

Preached by Reverend Peter Lougheed at Emmanuel United Church, Sunday, 14th June, 2009

How does your garden grow?

We were sitting around Perkins yesterday morning at the monthly men’s breakfast. You can learn all kinds of things at these gathering, like how to work the slot machines in Las Vegas, that Mennonites give you a choice of wine or grape juice for communion, that when you plant astilbe, they require a mixture of of sun and shade. I could have used one of these experts the last time I did a major piece of work in our garden.

An advisor told me that these two sorry looking plants in our front yard would only got more dilapidated with age. They should definitely go.

So I began to cut away the dead branches. I dug away half of the earth around the roots and then didn’t have time to finish. When I finally got around to dealing with them, the two shrubs had suddenly started to bloom. They actually began to look pretty good. But they were half dug out, I had cut away half of their roots and I had already bought their replacements.

I said to myself, “Nice try but it’s too late. You should have been doing this the last two years.”

As I was removing them, people walking by told me what a shame it was to dig up such beautiful plants. They looked around the rest of the garden as we talked and I could see them thinking, “Those are the only two plants you have in your whole garden that are worth keeping.”

But I was committed to the task, so I continued. When I finally pulled them out, I found a tag around the roots . It was a ‘Wegelia.’ I Ieft the plants, roots, earth and all, on the sidewalk beside the garage. For a week or so they sat there on the concrete, with their bright red flowers, looking healthier than I’d ever seen them.

Since then I have looked up how to care for a ‘Wegelia’ and realize that I should have been cutting them back by up to a third each year and doing all kinds of other things to keep them healthy.

Plants do their best to survive. Some of them can endure plenty of neglect and still manage to bloom, but to get the best out of them, you need to know what you’re doing and you need to help them out a little.

In these two parables of the seeds and the plants, there are two active agents. God and us.

The miraculous process of growth, this interactive process between the earth and the environment, happens on its own without our intervention.

“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow , he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head then the full grain...”

“The earth produces of itself....the farmer does not know how”... We know the science of the process better now, but the growing is still a miracle and it is still a gift. For those whose eyes are open, this earth of ours will never cease to amaze and cause us to wonder at its interconnectedness, its balance, its beauty.

Growing things are a gift but they also may occasionally need some help. There is an art and a science to nurturing plants. We can help those plants reach their God-given, built-in potential.

God is not outside of all of this, like the watchmaker who started creation ticking and then took a vacation. God, in Spirit, is intimately connected to the whole process of growth, both in plants and in human beings: sowing seeds of potential, nurturing those seeds and bringing them to full bloom. This is God’s work and it is also our work.

When I read a biography I am always interested in the influences that contributed to an individual’s personal development. Don’t you wonder about the teacher who inspired a love for math in a young Stephen Hawking, or whose painting it was that awakened Emily Carr’s love for art, or whose music first captured the soul of Louis Armstrong? Did these people have any idea of the influence of their words or actions?

That’s the way seeds often work. Insignificant little influences accumulate and then one day one of those little nudges, turns you in a certain direction. Over our lifetime each of us has the occasion to influence the lives of many, many lives: dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands. There are so many opportunities to plant or nurture a seed.

Boris Yeltsin was once interviewed about what allowed him to take such a courageous stand during the collapse of communism in the former USSR.

Yeltsin considered the question and then answered that it was an ordinary electrician from the dock yards in Poland, Lech Walesa. When he saw Lech Walesa risk his life to bring down the totalitarian regime in Poland, Yeltsin began to think, why not here too.

When Walesa was asked what it was that inspired his stand for freedom, he pointed to Martin Luther King Jr.

When Martin Luther King was asked the same question years earlier, he said he had been inspired by the courage of an ordinary woman, a seamstress, who refused to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus - a 42 year old woman who later said that particular December afternoon was not a convenient time to be arrested. Rosa had notices to send out for an upcoming meeting. She had to prepare for a weekend workshop for teenagers. But she felt the time had come to stay in her seat.

You can trace the influence of Rosa Parks on history and you could say that this small, stubborn woman of faith caused the fall of communism.

One of the great poets of Hebrew scripture is the writer we call Second Isaiah. At the end of the great exile, he writes enduring words of hope to the Hebrew people. He tells of the life-giving rain which falls upon the earth. This water brings life to the seeds and plants and then returns having accomplished its mission. Isaiah says, that’s how God works. This recycling energy of God touches our lives, offers the potential of harvest and then begins again. And it is up to us to make something out of what we have been given.

Over the last thirty years, Jim Wallis and his Sojourners movement have been one of the most effective voices connecting social justice and faith.

In one Jim Wallis’ recent books, God’s Politics, Why The Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, Wallis tells of the influence of his mother. When Jim and his siblings went off to school, his mother Phyllis told them there were two things they had to remember. These were nonnegotiable. First of all, if there was a boy or girl at school that nobody was playing with, it was their duty to play with that child. And secondly if a bully was picking on someone, they were to stand up to that bully.

You could look at Jim’s whole career and say that all of his work has grown out of those two moral imperatives that his mother laid out for him on the first day of school. The kingdom of God grows out of the smallest of seeds. The community that Jesus envisioned can arise out of one small conversation, out of one courageous act.

Farmers and gardeners know that. Those who grow plants know that as they sleep, the seed does it’s thing. It grows. Out of the most unlikely beginnings, a flower comes into bloom, food is produced, a tree appears and birds hatch their young in the branches.

Jesus says, that is what the kingdom of God is like. You see it at work all around you, in the sowing of seed, in the growth and in the harvest.

We are part of God’s growth plan, we who gather to sing and to reflect, to baptize and break bread. We are the sowers and the seeds that God is going to work with. We have some planting to do, and some nurturing. God calls us to take on this important work with hope and compassion. Trust that God will bless your attempt.

The smallest seed of faith holds the potential of harvest. That’s how it is with God.

May it be so for us. Amen.

with thanks to: William Bausch, Canadian Idol, Sharyl B. Peterson, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Brett Hesla, Jim Wallis.