Kingdom Gardening

“[Jesus] also said, “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 in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.” – Mark 4:26-34

The New Testament lesson for the day – II Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17 – is also referred to briefly.

Today’s sermon is for all you gardeners out there.

I’m just an amateur gardener myself. What I lack in knowledge I make up for in persistence. But I love gardening, partly because working in the garden brings to mind thoughts about God. The Bible itself begins in a garden, the Garden of Eden; and the turning point of all of human history happened in a garden, the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed ‘not my will but yours be done’.

Have you ever heard the old saying about being ‘nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth’? That thought comes to mind a lot when I’m working in the garden, and the other day I decided to find out where that came from. It’s from a poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney called God’s Garden, and the poem goes like this (in part):

THE Lord God planted a garden
In the first… days of the world,
And He set there an angel warden
In a garment of light enfurled.

So near to the peace of Heaven,
That the hawk might nest with the wren,
For there in the cool of the even
God walked with the first of men.

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,–
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

At the moment, in the middle of June, we’re kind of in between planting and harvest (with the exception of the strawberries, which are just finishing). Planting season in Western PA begins in mid-May, and harvesting begins around July, so most of the garden work this time of year is weeding. As I’ve been working in the gardens the past few weeks I’ve been putting together a theology of weeds.

In the Bible weeds represent sin (sometimes ‘sinners’ but usually ‘sin’) and weeding has to do with getting rid of sin and doing things God’s way. Here are some things I’ve noticed about weeds:

• Weeds are persistent. Pull up three and five more grow in their place. It gets discouraging sometimes and sometimes it makes me want to give up… but I know if I stop weeding even for a week the weeds take over completely!
• Weeds are tougher than the plants I’m trying to grow. They have thicker stems, they have deeper roots, they have more prolific seed-pods. I mean, look at the dandelion – those seeds come equipped with their own little parachutes! Good luck getting rid of them all.
• Weeds are sneaky. They hide under bushes. They wrap themselves around good plants like vines and try to choke them. They grow real close to delicate little flowers, so that I can’t pull up one without pulling up the other. I look at those weeds and I say ‘you are taking advantage!’

In Matthew 13 Jesus tells a parable about a farmer who sows wheat and gets up the next day and finds an enemy has sown weeds in his wheat, so that when the wheat grows up so do the weeds. The farmer’s servants come and say, “Sir, didn’t you plant wheat? What’s up with all the weeds? Do you want us to tear them out?” And the farmer says, “no… you’ll tear up the wheat with it. Let them grow together until the harvest and then we’ll separate them out.” With those precious little flowers of mine that’s what I have to do: I have to at least let them grow bigger and stronger before I can weed around them.

So that’s been my meditation in the garden for the past few weeks, about weeds and sin and how much alike they are.

Jesus talked a lot about gardens in his parables. He talked about vineyards, and he talked about fig trees that don’t bear fruit, and about seeds that fall on the path, or on rocks, or among thorns, or in good soil. He said, when talking about the Pharisees, ‘every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted.’

Today we have two parables where Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a garden.

In the first parable Jesus says the kingdom of God can be compared to a farmer who scatters seed and then goes about his business: he gets up, goes to sleep, does whatever he needs to do. The seed sprouts and grows on its own and the farmer has no idea how that happens. The wheat grows up out of the earth, first a stalk and then a head and then the full grain (remember that Thanksgiving hymn – “first the stalk and then the ear/then the full corn shall appear”), and when the grain is ripe the farmer immediately puts in the sickle because the harvest has come. That’s what the kingdom of God is like, Jesus says.

Verse 34 of Mark chapter 4 tells us Jesus “explained everything in private to his disciples” but this is one of those parables where the disciples didn’t write down what Jesus said. So we’re not sure exactly how Jesus might have explained it, and we could come up with a number of interpretations.

For example, the gardener could be God, scattering God’s word into peoples’ hearts. In a way this makes sense because God can be seen as the Gardener and in Jesus’ parables the seed always represents the Gospel. But in a way it doesn’t make sense because God is not like the farmer in the parable who goes about his business ignoring the seed and letting it do its own thing. God does know how the seed sprouts and how growth happens. So that interpretation only fits partly.

Another possible interpretation is that gardener represents those of us who share the Gospel with others. That’s not just clergy, that’s anybody who shares the faith. When we talk to people about God, we are tossing the seeds of the Gospel out there. Like the farmer, we have no idea what’s going to take root, or when it will start to grow, or how fast it will grow, or how long it will take to mature. We scatter the seed in faith and we go about our business.

I think this interpretation fits pretty well. The only thing that doesn’t fall into place with this interpretation is the harvester… and I’ll come back to that in a moment.

But I wanted to share a third interpretation from an old English preacher named Charles Simeon. Simeon was an acquaintance of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Simeon was young enough to be Wesley’s grandson, and the two theologians were… well they had their differences. Simeon was Calvinist and Wesley was Arminian; Simeon was a Cambridge man while Wesley was at Oxford; and the rivalry between those two schools was worse than the rivalry between the Steelers and the Ravens. Wesley and Simeon are a powerful example of how two religious leaders can disagree without dividing a church. The two men only met twice in their lives, but they actively searched for common ground, and they found it, and they stood on it. And if the leaders of the Anglican Church at the time had listened to Simeon (who was just a young pup in those days), the Methodist movement might still be Anglican. It’s one of those interesting moments in history.

Anyway, Simeon interprets Jesus’ parable is an illustration of the inner workings of grace in a person’s soul. He says God’s grace, like the sprouting of a seed, is spontaneous, gradual, and inexplicable. Spontaneous, because there is something in the nature of a seed that causes it to sprout – not by itself, but with help from (as he puts it) “the Sun of Righteousness and showers of the Spirit”. The growth is gradual, because the blade, the ear, and the full corn don’t happen all at once… and likewise Christians grow from being newly converted, to a more solid and hopeful walk with God, to having real experience in dealing with good and evil. And growth is inexplicable, because we can’t explain how a seed grows or how grace works. It just does. They just do.

And then when the grain is mature the harvester immediately puts in the sickle and brings the grain into the barn.

In all of Jesus’ parables about gardening there is no other way to interpret the ‘harvester’ except as God, bringing God’s faithful home. When the fruit is mature, the harvest comes. God has eternal purposes in mind, and everything we live through in this life is aimed toward that goal.

The psalmist prays, “Teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.” (Psalm 90:12) Paul writes to the Corinthians saying “we walk by faith, not by sight; we have confidence, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord; but whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him.” (II Cor 5:7-9) If we are living by faith our journey home to God is a continuation of what we’ve already begun; a continuation of the grace God is already working in us.

Jesus immediately follows up this parable with the parable of the mustard seed. If the grace working within us sometimes seems to us small and easily overwhelmed by weeds, we can rest assured growth will happen. If the church herself sometimes seems to us to be too small to take on the evils of the world around us, this parable is for us too. Do we wonder what difference our little church can make in the world? Do we fret over small numbers, remembering the days when the churches were packed every Sunday? Jesus says, ‘look how small the mustard seed is, and how big the mustard tree is’.

So what can we take away from these parables today? Two things. First, God is a wise and experienced gardener and we can trust God’s ability to work with us plants. From planting to harvest, God is in control. So fear not! As I’ve mentioned before, so much in our world is designed to make us afraid, so that our actions are motivated by fear. I believe with all my heart one of the greatest ways we can bear witness to God in today’s world is to live fearlessly.

And second, keep on being faithful in scattering the seed, even when we don’t know what becomes of it. God will take care of both the growth and the weeds. And with a tip of the hat to Simeon, ‘let us wait for the former and the latter rains… and expect a variety of seasons…’. Amen.

Preached at Fairhaven United Methodist Church, Spencer United Methodist Church, and Incarnation Anglican Church in the Strip, 6/14/15

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