Gardening Tips

How many of you are gardeners? What do you plant, vegetables, flowers, herbs? My father liked trees. He planted exotics like deodars and tapped our maple trees for syrup. My mother liked flowers and shrubs. And BOTH liked vegetable gardens. But I never got into it. I like the idea of gardening, you understand, and I can admire gardens all day long, but you have to admit it’s an awful lot of work. And it takes an awful lot of skill, too. How different all the plants are! They bloom at different times - that is if they bloom at all - and some need a lot of sunlight while others would just as soon stay in the shade. They need different nutrients and different soils and different climates. But one thing they all need. They all need water.

When you cut a branch or a twig - or a leaf or a flower - from its stem, you have to put it in water right away, or it will begin to die. Some cuttings will die even if you do put them in water; the dying process is just postponed. Some plants, however, will begin to put out new roots, and pretty soon you have a seedling you can go and plant right next to the old one.

But if you don’t put it in water it’s a goner. Even that orchid you put in the refrigerator after the prom isn’t going to last forever. And the palm branches the people waved as Jesus came Jerusalem that long ago day had an even shorter life span. By the time the day was over, all those once green fronds were lying in the dusty road, slowly turning brown.

It must have been an exciting scene, mustn’t it? There he was, mounted on a donkey in fulfillment of prophecy, coming into the city for the Passover, and along the roadside were crowds of people waving branches and shouting welcomes. Some even threw their cloaks on the road in front of him as a gesture of honor. The religious authorities were stymied. Jesus was too popular; they simply couldn’t move against him. “See,” they said to one another, “you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!" [v. 19] The disciples were undoubtedly nearly delirious with the thought that this was the time when Jesus would proclaim that he was the Messiah they’d all been waiting for, the Romans would be kicked out and they’d be partners with him in the building of the righteous kingdom that all the prophets had foretold. None of that gloomy stuff Jesus had been scaring them with was going to happen, look how the people loved him!

But Jesus knew better.

He knew what was in their hearts. John’s gospel, unlike the other three, begins with Jesus in Jerusalem for the Passover. And John tells us:

"When [Jesus] was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people... "[Jn 2:23-24]

He knew that what was in their hearts was too shallow to last beyond the day. Jesus knew that all the hoopla, all the cheering and waving, didn’t really mean a thing. He knew that what looked like an unstoppable grass-roots movement would be as dead the next day as the palm branches they were waving around so fervently. Their Sunday worship wouldn’t last out the week. By Friday, they’d be calling for his blood.

At the end of his life, the apostle John wrote down a vision which we call the book of Revelation. Early on there is a collection of letters to seven of the cities in Asia Minor, what we now know as Turkey. The letters describe the condition of the churches and warn them what they have to do to straighten themselves out. Two of the cities are in great shape. Not by the world’s standards, mind, they’re poor and persecuted, but by God’s standards they’re at the top of the heap. They are faithful. All they have to do is hang on, their eternal reward is ready and waiting for them. The rest of the churches all have some pretty glaring problems. A couple are tolerating heresy, one is gotten too legalistic, another is just going through the motions. The letter to the church in Sardis says, “I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you are dead.” [Rev 3:1b]

What does it mean? What is a church that appears alive but is actually dead?

I think it’s something like that cheering and shouting that went on that day so long ago in Jerusalem. It was worship that had been cut off from its source.