“A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.” [i]
This quote from world renown horticulturist from the early 20th Century, Gertrude Jekyll, really speaks to the impact a garden can make on a person’s everyday life. However, if you are anything like I am, gardening is not as easy as it may seem to be. It just does not come as easy to some of us as it does to others.
Over the past 13 some years of my relatively short adult life, I have always felt like gardening should be an easy and enjoyable activity to do. However, from my attempts to keep plants alive in pots, to trying my hand at growing a few of my own vegetables and herbs, I have found it has not been as easy as I imagined and thus, so far, just not as enjoyable.
Gardening can be quite difficult. Especially for those of us with a less-than-green thumb. Maintaining and keeping a garden alive is hard work. What with all the watering, the dead heading, the weeding—oh the weeding—and of course we cannot forget about the more watering. And here in lies the part of gardening that I just do not understand. How can something that occurs naturally in creation be so difficult when we try to take control of it for our own benefit?
Perhaps it is because we are forgetting that most important aspect that gardening is meant to teach us, which Ms. Jekyll speaks of. Perhaps we are forgetting that in addition to the patience, watchfulness, industry, and thrift, we also must be able to sit back and trust.
Ironically enough, the Scripture readings presented before us today also speak about this idea of trusting, and they just so happen to be using gardening references to do so.
The very first blossom these texts give us come from the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. The prophet here is offering the people of Israel a promise of better things to come if they but trust in God to see them through. And of course, he is using a gardening metaphor to do so: “I myself [says the Lord God] will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out. I will break off a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.” [ii] This, in turn, the prophet declares, will allow it to produce and bear fruit; becoming a noble cedar in its own right where every kind of bird will live and find rest in the shade of its branches. [iii] The prophet is giving the people a promise that they will one day be restored to their full splendor they once had before their captivity at the hands of the Babylonians.
Now, to truly understand the trust part of this excerpt, it is useful to refer back to the earlier verses of chapter 17. You see, starting at verse 11, we read an explanation of the parable that began back at verse 1 that used this same sprig transplanting imagery. In this explanation we hear how Israel’s then appointed king did not trust in God’s deliverance when they were in captivity by trying to take matters into his own hands, and in doing so, only ended up making matters worse. [iv] For God's people to truly be delivered from the hands of their Babylonian captors they, like in gardening, had to learn to sit back and trust. In this case trusting in God alone for their deliverance.
We continue to grow this gardening metaphor by turning to the appointed Gospel lesson for today. In this text we have not one, but two gardening references to speak to us about the importance of trusting in God. In both of these cases the evangelist is recounting parables that Jesus spoke to a crowd that had begun following him while he was teaching and healing in his hometown. [v] In the first of the parables presented before us today, the evangelist recounts Jesus talking about the growing process itself and how that relates to the kingdom of God. The seed is planted, it grows, it bears fruit, and finally it is harvested. [vi] Sure the gardener has work to do in this process, but as the evangelist writes, once the seed has been sown the gardener sleeps and rises night and day trusting that the seed will sprout and grow; even without fully understanding how or why. [vii]
This is followed directly with another of Jesus’ parables using gardening imagery; this time the image is that of a lowly mustard seed. A parable that is centered on trusting that no matter how small or insignificant a single seed may seem, in this case the seed of God’s kingdom, that seed can grow to be a life-giving tree or shrub (depending on your translation) that “puts forth large branches for the birds of the air [to] make nests in its shade.” [viii] This is all to say that the size of the seed planted is not what matters, but the trust in what God is able to do with it.
My friends, we ourselves are no strangers to feelings of captivity and the helplessness that comes with that. Captivity can come in many different forms in our daily lives; from the captivity of our own sinful natures, captivity in a dead-end job, or even the captivity of wanting to feel a certain way, but for whatever reason we just cannot.
As a society we have just begun to come out of our own collective captivity; one of the most trying times in recent history due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. People all over the world got laid off or lost their jobs altogether, time could not be spent with friends and family, loved ones were taken from us much too soon. Through these trying times people have had to find any way they could just to get through it; to get to the point we are at now where things are just starting to get back to some level of what we used to think of as normal. And do you want to know what a lot of people turned to in order to help them get through these tough times? Yup, you guessed it, gardening.
According to an online poll, 64% of the 1000 adults that were surveyed for this study said they took up gardening in 2020. [ix] And, according to the same article, this is not anything new for us as a society. Throughout the years, through many national crises, the World Wars for just a couple of examples, people would turn to gardening, not only for a source of food in the midst of scare production, but also for their overall wellbeing. [x]
This really should come to us as no real surprise given what we have read in the Scripture lessons today. For it is in that image of a seed that our hope is grounded; trusting that things can and will change. In terms of this pandemic, we had to be able to trust in society as a whole, our loved ones, and even complete strangers to all be doing their part to help see us through this shared hardship.
Most importantly, however, these gardening images remins us to trust in God. The God in whom St. Paul wrote who has brought about “a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” [xi]
And so, the words of Gertrude Jekyll have never rung truer, “A garden is a grand teacher…Above all it teaches entire trust.” [xii]
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[i] Stephanie Kirby, “Garden Quotes that Inspire Kindness,” Everyday Power, March 31, 2021, https://everydaypower.com/garden-quotes/#:~:text=Garden%20quotes%20on%20the%20impact%20that%20a%20garden,always%20the%20garden.%E2%80%9D.%20%E2%80%93%20Minnie%20Aumonier.%20More%20items (accessed June 6, 2021).
[ii] Ezekiel 17:22, NIV.
[iii] Ezekiel 17:23, NIV.
[iv] Ezekiel 17:11-21, NIV.
[v] Mark 3:19-20, NIV.
[vi] Mark 4:26-29, NIV.
[vii] Mark 4:27, NIV.
[viii] Mark 4:32, NIV.
[ix] Fran O’Leary, “Gardening popular during pandemic,” Farm Progress, April 30, 2021, https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-life/gardening-popular-during-pandemic (accessed Sunday June 6, 2021).
[x] Ibid.
[xi] 2 Corinthians 5:17, NIV.
[xii] Kirby, “Garden Quotes that Inspire Kindness.”
