Dr. David D. Young
May 29, 2005
Romans 5: 1-11
Luke 13: 6-9
How Does Your Garden Grow?

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maidens all in a row.” David, David, quite contrary, how does you garden grow? With all that is contrary and contradictory in your life – how does your garden grow?

“All you need to grow fine vigorous grass,” quipped someone, “is a crack in your sidewalk.” Our lives are contrary, sometimes contradictory and often cracked. The question is – how does our garden grow?

The following story comes from the wonderfully whimsical, Wittenburg Door Magazine,

Several years ago I taught a primary Sunday school class. One quarter, the teacher’s guide suggested putting a sweet potato in water with a sign: GOD MAKES THINGS GROW. I did this. Whether from lack of heat during the week, or lack of light, or both, nothing happened. Toward the end of the quarter the Sunday School Superintendent suggested I remove the display before the children became atheists.

Sometimes things just don’t grow. Have you ever tried to grow seeds in your kitchen window? I’ve tried it by putting three toothpicks into a fairly large seed or pit and then balancing it on top of a glass of water – so that a portion of it is in the water. When I’ve done that, all I ever seem to get is dirty, gunky, stagnate water that keeps drying up.

Perhaps you have known people like that – people who aren’t growing and have simply stagnated – most probably because they have chosen not to grow – for whatever reason. Sort of like the couch potato lying comfortably on a sofa who said, “I’ve decided I’m just like any other person, except I have a smaller percentage of active ingredients.” He certainly was expressing a feeling on the more stagnate side of things.

Well, our gospel text which, Clem Lepoutre read for us, has Jesus telling a parable about a fig tree that had not necessarily stagnated – but it definitely had not grown very much. It was as though the tree were in limbo – not knowing whether to die or to stretch forth and bear fruit. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been in that kind of limbo – not knowing whether to stay put and comfortable (not doing anything) or to stretch out and bear fruit on God’s behalf.

Let’s hear the story again,

“Once upon a time a man had a fig tree growing in his garden, and when he came to look for the figs he found none at all. So he said to his gardener, ‘Look, I have come expecting fruit on this fig tree for three years running and never found any. Better cut it down. Why should it use up valuable space!’ And the gardener replied: ‘Master, don’t touch it this year till I have had a chance to dig around it and give it a bit of manure. Then, if it bears fruit after that, it will be all right. But if it doesn’t, then you can cut it down.’”

In verse 7, it is clear that the tree was given ample time to demonstrate its fruitfulness. And the discouraged, owner said, “Let’s just get rid of it – why should it use up ground and exhaust the soil?” It is as though he were saying, “Why should we let it waste the gifts which have been entrusted to it?” But the gardener urges the owner to give the tree another year of grace.

Now please, remember that it was on that first Easter morning when Jesus was first identified as the gardener! Could it be that Jesus was the greatest gardener of the human spirit ever to live? And in the case of our parable for today, we have a gardener of grace willing to fertilize for future growth. Without guarantee, he hopes for future fruitfulness. And hence, the sermon title for this morning “How Does Your Garden Grow?”

You see, despite our postponement, our delay, and our hesitation to always bear fruit for God – God as the vineyard owner is patient with us. And if per chance Jesus is the gardener – then we can make a new start – no matter how stagnate or lacking we’ve been.

Yes, there is a warning in the text about the tree being cut down – judgment is also a part of the Christian faith. But the amazing thing about this morning’s parable is that we are left hanging – we don’t know what the future of the tree was.

So too, are our lives open-ended. The final assessment of our fruitfulness is not in. The potential for growth is in the here and now, today – just as it was for that fig tree about to be fertilized. Is not today – truly the first day of the rest of our lives?

60th birthdays are often very significant for people. And such was the case a number of years ago for the French Priest and Paleontologist, Pierre Teihard de Chardin. Upon turning 60 he had this to say,

“Well, on the first of May, I entered my sixties. It’s incredible how quickly time goes: my whole spiritual life consists more and more in abandoning myself (actively) to the presence and action of God. To be in communion with becoming has become the formula of my whole life.”

To be in communion with becoming – with growing – is the formula for our whole life.

Hear again with me the words of Paul from the first few verses of the 5th chapter of Romans,

“We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”

That is the fertilizing process – isn’t it?

When our difficulties are properly sustained – and not seen as curses – they can nurture and fertilize our faith and growth. Often, the things most people avoid at all cost – things like suffering, sharing someone else’s burden, and pain – are in the end – fertilizers of faith. But isn’t that what natural fertilizer often is – the less pleasant stuff? – the four letter “s” word of contemporary culture that I’d better not mention in church.

You see, God can take the crummy stuff, the “s” word of our life and use it for good. Perhaps you can think of a time in your life when something happened that wasn’t particularly pleasant at the time – but in the long run you realized how it enriched you for future growth and strength in faith. The point is, not all that fertilizes your faith will come in the form of joy and happiness – it is a mixture. The sunshine and warmth – yes but also the rain and the refuse as well.

As Robert Browning once observed,

“My business is not to remain myself” – that is – to remain unfertilized – “but to make the absolute best out of what God made.”

A delightful piece I gleaned from a church newsletter put this idea into some specifics worth sharing. We might call it “A garden for the summer of 2005.”

First plant five rows of peas:

preparedness
promptness
perseverance
politeness
prayer.

Next plant three rows of squash:

squash gossip
squash criticism
squash indifference.

Then five rows of lettuce:

let us be unselfish
let us love one another
let us be faithful
let us be loyal
let us be truthful.

No garden is complete without turnips:

turn up for church
turn up with a smile
turn up with a new idea
turn up with real determination.

This planting properly carried out and nurtured with the love of God
produces great results.

Turning up for church each and every Sunday isn’t the end all. On the other hand, regular Sunday worship is a way of consistently fertilizing your faith. Just as you can neglect yard work and caring for your lawn or garden – so too, can you neglect fertilizing your faith with regular worship. In both cases there is more and harder work to be done in the long run.

I’ve heard: “Summer attendance drops way down here during June, July and August.” Ultimately, the choice is ours. I am convinced that the more often we come before God in worship – offering up all that we are – both the good and the bad – the more likely we can be transformed into instruments of fruitfulness. When we remain open as a ready and receptive ground where the waters of the Holy Spirit fall, then the seeds of faith grow and ripen to put forth fruit – producing future seed.

I’ve have heard it said that, “Life is not what you make it. It is what you let God make it for you.” Scripture tells us that God is love – that indeed love surrounds us. A fully fertilized faith is one that responds to God’s love.

Preacher and consultant, Ernie Campbell, offers this important insight into the nature of God’s love.

The direction that I find myself taking centers in the word “absorption.” God was in Christ absorbing our sin. We did Jesus in, but God did not condemn. He responded to our iniquity by raising Jesus from the dead, not striking us dead! God did not need to be placated. Rather He needed an occasion to demonstrate in a “once and for all” way that we are everlasting held by a love that will not let us off or let us go.

It is that quality in God to love and keep on loving that awakens an answering love in us. Jesus did not die to make God’s love possible, but to make that love visible. God always loves. What we have in the cross is not a new disclosure but a clearer reading of what is everywhere and always true. Seeing that love is what turns our hearts to the Lord. As a line from “O Come All Ye Faithful” puts it: “Who would not love thee, loving us so dearly?”

Our response to God’s love poured out through Jesus’ going down to death on the cross and being lifted up in the resurrection – is to grow toward God in love. The seed of God’s generative love is shared whenever and wherever we share in genuine love.

How many of you remember the movie - “O God?” If so, you no doubt remember that the late George Burns played the part of God. And as the movie unfolded he revealed himself to the now deceased John Denver who was a supermarket manger named Jerry.

Jerry was given a message to deliver – but he couldn’t get people to take him seriously. At the end of the movie, after much discouragement and a total sense of failure Jerry said, “We blew it!” “Oh, I don’t think so,” said God, “You never know; a seed here, a seed there, something will catch hold and grow.” And so the seeds of faith do – amid a world that thinks it knows better.

For the way of the world teaches us to trust in ourselves and not God’s love. And the only thing that makes sense is common, practical sense – not far out possibilities of faith. For the world knows that what goes up must come down. But those who live by a fertilized faith, like gardeners, believe that what goes down must come up.

That’s what the hinge-point of our faith – the resurrection is all about! That’s what our small death’s are all about. That out of our depths of depression and despair, losses and longings, tragedies and trials – we rise to new life in Christ – because God’s love never lets us go.

Recall again verses 8 & 9 of our Romans text,

God shows love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him.

And remember the gardener’s plea to the owner of the vineyard, “Sir, let me fertilize again and see if it will grow and bear fruit.” God continually seeks our growth. God continually offers us a love that will not let us go. And God continually lifts us up to abundant life.

The 14th century, German mystic, Meister Eckhart said,

“The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer and a diligent field hand, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is: and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God seed into God.”

A fully fertilized faith is one that responds to God’s love poured out to us through Jesus Christ our Lord – by growing to an expression of a fuller kind of love. Paul said it as well as anyone ever has – this time in his letter to the Ephesians,

“We are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”
(Ephesians 4:15)

Christ died for us – and as the Apostles’ Creed says, descended into hell. But God raised him up – bringing forth life and growth out of all the crap and cruelty that was thrown upon him. And God raises us up too!

“What goes down must come up.” – so says the gardener of all time.

In closing I share a thought from the pen of the 17th century poet, Thomas Campion,

“In thy word, Lord, is my trust, to thy mercies fast I flye; though I am but clay and dust, yet thy love can lift me high.”

Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? David, David … “How Does Your Garden Grow?

This summer, let’s do more than care for our lawns and gardens, - let’s fertilize our faith and grow in God’s love! Amen!