No Ordinary Gardener

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost 

Genesis 25:19-34 • Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

Video of Sunday, July 12 service

I know many of you are gardeners, and I love hearing about your gardening and seeing your photos.  I love our gardening conversations. I love sharing plants! Mexican Feather Grass from my garden.  Society garlic from yours.  Please take a cutting from my Hens and Chicks.  How about a tomato plant?  It all feels so exquisitely abundant and gloriously communal.

We now have a helper in our garden, who a number of you have met in Zoom conversations.  Poppy is an enthusiastic doggy assistant.  Oh joy, you’re digging!  Let me help! Soft wormy earth? Oh, my favorite!   Fortunately she likes to please, so all is not lost.   We have a particularly forgiving Cosmos daisy and a stalwart Sweet Woodruff that have both tolerated being dug up repeatedly, and don’t seem to mind being carefully reinstated in the earth.  Ah well….

In gardening, there are always triumphs and disappointments. There always seem to be elements of mystery too.  Why am I having such trouble growing mint in Glen Park when it’s been determined to take over any other garden I’ve worked in.  And please let’s not talk about Morning Glory….people actually buy that in nurseries! Do they not know the monster they’re introducing?

This year’s triumphs for me, although I probably shouldn’t say it too loudly, have been my native Milkweed.  I proudly germinated a number of seedlings last summer.  Then they just disappeared?  I was so disappointed!  This June they have reappeared in abundance! Now it maybe that the inheritors of our little garden are going to curse who ever introduced them. It is possible Milkweed may take over, but then the garden will be full of butterflies and the world will be a better place!

Whether working with pots on a deck, or out in our present garden, gardens are my happy places.  I think many of us share that feeling of being one with something so much bigger than our own small sphere.  Yes, there can be reckless redundancy, dormancy, and death, but there is also hope, promise, beauty and abundance.

In our gospel passage for this morning, we have the familiar Parable of the Sower.  This is no ordinary gardener, and this is no ordinary garden!   Perhaps you are familiar with the Sufi image of God as found in the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz : God as the jovial, whirling innkeeper, welcoming all into the wild, joyous dance of creation.  As I think of that God, it is all too easy to imagine God the Sower, whirling and sowing seed with abandon!  I find it a breathtaking image and I feel certain of its truth.  

This is no careful gardener, neatly weeding, meticulously casting seeds in well-amended, tidy rows.  This is a gardener who knows that there is enough, there is plenty, indeed there is abundance!  That nothing is wasted.  That seeds falling on the stony path will still provide nourishment and life to a bird or a small mammal.  It may even be rained on and washed to a place where it might germinate another year.

God the Sower scatters words like seeds, and not one of them is ever be wasted.  I think of the lines from the 2nd Song of Isaiah that we often say as a canticle in Morning Prayer:

For as rain and snow fall from the heavens and return not again, but water the earth,
Bringing forth life and giving growth, seed for sowing and bread for eating,
So is my word that goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty;
But it will accomplish that which I have purposed, and prosper in that for which I sent it.

God’s word is abundant, and it will accomplish what God intends for it.  The time frame involved is a little harder to grasp.  God’s time is not our time.  We are creatures of little patience: if it hasn’t happened by yesterday, well, let’s move on. I gave up on my milkweed, but they were just resting and developing out of sight.

What is required of us is that we allow ourselves the time and space to notice, embrace, and treasure God’s gifts given to us, indeed to all creation.  God’s gifts are so omnipresent and so abundant, that, yes, we are going to miss many of them.  And that’s okay.  Creation is full of redundancy, and none of it goes to waste.  We don’t have to pay fierce attention all of the time: you’d have to withdraw from life completely to have even a chance at that.   We are invited to find times when we can quieten down that busy world, and focus on the word of God, wherever it may be:  in scripture, liturgy, music, nature, beauty, your garden, your kitchen, around your dining room table.

Those words will fall into rich ground, and you can be, as our gospel tells us:

The one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields,

in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

As today’s collect prays:

Divine sower,

scattering seed, never hoarding,

wasting life - or so the world thinks:

give us the depth to receive

the gift so freely given

and the maturity to revel

in love’s abundant, reckless growth;

through Jesus Christ, the grain of life.  Amen.