July 11, 1999
Isaiah 55:10-13
Matthew 13-1-9, 18-23

My family–my wife Nenelle and my daughter Erika are here with us today–and I have lived in North Berkeley since 1963. We moved uphill in three fell swoops, from Cragmont to Euclid to Park Hills. Our last house but one had a spectacular view of the bay, three bridges worth.

Our present home, although it's virtually on the ridgeline, has no bay view. Instead, it has a garden. The garden is what called out to us that Sunday afternoon 14 years ago when we first saw the house. For 14 years, we've tended that garden. We've poured imagination into it, and sweat–and money.

What has it given us back? Well, for one thing, frustration. We have roses–sometimes. We love roses.  Deer love roses. Season after season begins with hope for our roses. They leaf out, they form buds, the buds open, we congratulate ourselves, and then the deer congratulate  themselves, and enjoy a tasty appetizer. And speaking of appetizers, I think there's a special circle of hell for the misguided soul who brought snails to California. He has to eat recycled rubber tires for all eternity.

Frustration, yes. But we also take an immense joy from our garden that the view never gave us. The garden gives us an intimate view of the world, not a distant one–we're down in the dirt, sorting out weeds from valued seedlings, we're collecting seeds for next year's lupine, we're picking aphids off the rosebuds. The garden touches all our senses: fragrances that envelop us as we walk out to get the paper on an April morning. The ever-changing picture of the seasons: The full burst of spring green and red and white and pink and purple. The softened, diffused picture through our summer fog. The wilt and droop of mature flowers in May and September heat. The brilliance of dogwood and liquid amber as Thanksgiving approaches. The quiet of winter browns and grays. And sounds: the evening breeze rattling the poplars. And tastes: the shock of intense flavor in a little white alpine strawberry. Every day, every  hour of every day, the garden gives us a different gift. And touch: the sudden brief pain of a thorn, the firmness of a sun-warmed blackberry.

I heard an interview with Andrew Greeley, who happens to be both a Roman Catholic priest and a best-selling mystery novelist. The interviewer asked him why, in modern America, where so many Roman Catholics disagreed with some fundamental positions taken by the Vatican, so many Roman Catholics still remain in the faith. He answered, "It's because we have the best stories." Garden stories reach us because as a species, we are still drawn to the soil and what grows in it. In fairy tales, seeds drop into the soil and turn into giant beanstalks or cockleshells. In  The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald likens the New World to a green garden, fresh and innocent. Gardens touch our soul. If souls come in colors, I think many in this sanctuary are colored green.

It's no wonder that the Bible is filled with narratives, and allegories, and metaphors based on the garden, from Eden to the Song of Songs to John, the most mystical of the Gospel writers. It's equally not surprising that most biblical garden references speak or sing of the garden's beauty. For the most part, the biblical garden is a place of nurturing, of comfort, of spiritual growth–a place where God walked closest to us humans. And many of us believe that even today, God's presence is strong among the green growing things. My other daughter, Francesca, made a cross-stitched sampler when she was a little girl, a gift for her grandmother. The poem it bears, which I bet half of us in worship this morning know, goes like this:

 

The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth.

One is nearer God's heart in a garden

Than any place else on earth.

In this morning's reading from Hebrew Scripture, Isaiah uses the language of the garden when he brings God's word to the troubled and oppressed people of Israel. They were oppressed because Jerusalem and Judah had fallen to the Babylonians, and the leaders of the Jewish nation lived in exile in Babylon. In Isaiah's great, optimistic passage of salvation, God has just reminded them of the covenant with David. Then, in an outpouring of poetry that includes one of the most striking images in Hebrew Scripture, God promises that the mountains and the hills shall burst into song, and that the trees of the field shall clap their hands! And what precedes these lovely and exciting words? God's description of falling rain and snow, and the purpose of their falling: they are like God's word, which will accomplish what God wants: redemption of God's people, of those who look for God and trust in God.

Even if the people of Israel have previously done wrong, God is eager to forgive them, to provide them with rain and snow and seed and bread. All they have to do is . . . change their ways. God asks them to reaffirm their side of the great covenant.

So the promise God makes requires some nationwide gardening efforts, rooting out weeds of wrongdoing. Once that happens, God assures the people a weed-free garden, filled with cypress instead of thorn, and myrtle instead of brier. God offers fragrance in the shade instead of tangled patches of pain. Those people who are receptive and trusting will not be cut off from God's loving attentions, and the metaphorical garden of their nation, Israel, will flourish once more.

Some 550 years later, when Jesus told his disciples the parable of the sower, he had been rejected by those he'd been sent to save. Just as the leaders of the people of Israel had turned their back on God during Isaiah's time, they were doing so again. And just as God offered redemption for the repentant in Babylon, Jesus, the God-sent servant of humankind, offered redemption for the repentant in Palestine. But only a few heard his message and took it to heart.

Thus the parable of the sower. It tells a gardener's story. We know that each seed that falls on the ground has the potential to grow into a sturdy, beautiful plant. But we also know that the seed needs to fall on the  right ground, and it needs to be protected, watered, and fed. If it's not, nothing worthwhile will grow from it

The parable tells us that being passive ground is not enough. The seed may lie on the hard, unprepared surface, and birds will feed upon it. Likewise, we can close our ears to the word about the realm of God, and the consequence is sin and moral failure.

We must at least open our ears to hear, to allow God's word to penetrate our consciousness. Even that is not enough. We must also hear God's word with joy in our hearts. But if we make it part of our lives only when times are good, we indulge in an undisciplined approach to spiritual practice and belief. And that is not enough.

We can hear the word but ignore it, instead letting the routines of daily life anaesthetize us and the pursuit of wealth distract us. So we must also free ourselves from the barren chase after mere wealth and from the deadening effect of mindless routines. And even that is not enough for a disciple of Christ. We must also be good soil, hearing the word  and understanding it, so that we may bear fruit and yield 30, or 60, or 100 blossoms for every seed that falls on us.

When we do, we are doing what Jesus asked of the disciples: we hear the word, accept the word, and live the word when times are good and when they're not, when they test our faith to the utmost. But how can we prepare ourselves as gardeners prepare the earth for the seed? How can we be the gardeners of our own spiritual backyard?

We can do that by dedicating a part of each day to God. We can do it with a prayer first thing after awakening. We can do it during a morning run. We can do it reading a beloved book. We can do it by service to the church. We can even, we can especially, do it while we work in the garden.

We discover clues to God's garden plan in Scripture and scholarship, and our moral life grows tall. We look for help in our community of faith when storms bend the stalks, and community stakes them against the wind. We find abundant irrigation for the bedding plants of our faith in prayer, when our faith suffers drought.

The important thing is this: that we do what good disciples and good gardeners must do. We must tend our plants and our soul in all the seasons of our life, during the dry season and the flood, during the planting time and the harvest.

When Nenelle and I were first planning our garden 14 years ago, we told the experienced friends who guided us that we wanted a low-maintenance garden. But our garden demands much of us in return for its pleasures. It needs maintenance: on-going, loving informed attention.

Likewise, ours is not a low-maintenance faith. During Jesus' life, his affinity was with those considered by the elite to be weeds in the social garden. His cruel death, the tribulations of Peter and Paul and the martyrs through the ages, and the transformation of the faith of the oppressed into the religion of the rulers: these events are evidence of what Christians faced and continue to face: a constant struggle, to be faithful and yet true to conscience, to be caring in the face of overwhelming need, to be in the world without surrendering our bond with the Holy Spirit–these are challenges that demand constant attention.

We are sowers of seed and receivers of God's bountiful showers of grace. The interplay between who we are in God's sight and how we act in the world that God created us to occupy defines us as people of faith. Let us remember that we are the garden, receiving God's gifts and graces as passively as the earth receives the sun's warmth and the cooling rains. And at the same time, let us be always mindful that we are the gardeners, tilling the receptive soil of our conscience and our consciousness–together, as a people of God, to do God's work in our own backyard and in the community garden. The soil awaits us, and the garden tools are in our hands. Let us use them well.

Amen.