Pity the California native plants. Many of them lose their leaves in summer, when it doesn’t rain for seven months around here. Smart, right? “Summer dormant.” “Stress deciduous.” Except gardeners think they’re dead, and rip them out of the ground. Or declare them too homely to possibly be seen in a public garden. Nobody says that about the roses or trees that are bare in winter. More attentive gardeners see the native plants turning brown and assume they need more water. But they are not used to water in the summer. They never developed resistance to rot; they never were exposed to warm wet soil in thousands of years on the coastal hills of California. So water them well when it’s hot, and they’ll die for real. Stress deciduous. We don’t know how to cultivate what belongs here, because it is so different from what we expect in its inevitable imperfection. Living things are always imperfect. If you want perfection, buy lawn furniture.
God is the master cultivator. God is not surprised by our imperfections. So…when we are in horror and shame at our failures, not ready to face the world, thinking we want to hide from everyone including the God whom we have failed, because we are only good for the compost heap, guess what? God might be smiling and saying, well, what do you expect? I knew you were stress deciduous, even if you didn’t. People are like that; they fall apart now and then. Don’t panic! You might need a pruning. But you’ll green up and sprout again. You’ll bloom when it’s your time.
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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ
March 10, 2019
God Cultivates
Psalm 65 Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion; and to you shall vows be performed,
O you who answer prayer! To you all flesh shall come.
When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions.
Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts.
We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, your holy temple.
By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation;
you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.
By your strength you established the mountains; you are girded with might.
You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves,
the tumult of the peoples.
Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs;
you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.
You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it;
the river of God is full of water;
you provide the people with grain, so you have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges,
softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.
You crown the year with your bounty;
your wagon tracks overflow with richness.
The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy.
It’s been a bad year for roofs and a great year for gardens. Every morning I go to the kitchen window and check on my happy garden residents. Hummingbirds love the Baja Fairy Duster. Bare spots that I’ve struggled to hide for years are finally getting filled in with volunteer sages and baja daisies. My toyon needs a chain saw; it’s taller than the roof and shows no signs of stopping. And sometimes the dewdrops lie on the sagebrush like jewels in the rising sun. I plant, I trim a little, I weed, I watch. Once a month if it hasn’t rained, I water. I haven’t watered in a while. I pinch, I rake, and I enjoy. That’s cultivating a native garden.
The Christian origin story describes our first home as a garden, and God was the gardener. I like that. Of the many metaphors for God in our Bible, God cultivating comes up frequently. The ancient Israelites were farmers and herders, in symbiotic relationship with the land. Jesus has parables of seeds and weeds and trees, of sheep and mother hens; they all show that he knows how to cultivate. The way he treated people showed that he knows how to cultivate what is good in us.
Cultivation is an earthy kind of power, power with. It seems ordinary, but it is life-giving. Somebody better know how to cultivate, or we’ll starve. We are more impressed with dramatic power, power over. Kings were the pinnacles of earthly power in biblical times, so of course many writers in the bible called God King and gave God kingly attributes including punishment and control. Is a king your image for God? Our Bible predates our experiments in democratic government. When people say they don’t believe in God, it is usually that dictator in the sky that they mean. The god who dictated unchanging ethical laws thousands of years ago, and a human hierarchy to enforce them. The god who has all power over us, and chooses to let people suffer anyway, sometimes horribly. Jesus Seminar scholar Dom Crossan said, “Tell me about the god you don’t believe in, because I probably don’t believe in him either.”
Jesus saw God as Abba, father, dad. Loving parents cultivate; they do a minimum of dictating. They do their best to nourish and protect and guide their children, knowing that the children must do the growing for themselves, and become themselves.
Metaphors for God might seem like abstract matters, but I don’t think they are abstract at all. When I pray, what am doing? Am I trying to get loud enough or close enough or grovel enough at divine throne to beg a favor from a King? Or am I tugging on the sleeve, bending the ear, of a beloved mentor, confiding in someone who can’t wave a magic wand to solve my problems, but has some pretty good ideas about how to nurture and guide and comfort me?
God doesn’t dictate, God cultivates. Cultivating is the patient work, mostly behind the scenes, that allows for growth and transformation. We don’t control growth and transformation, ours or anybody else’s. But we can do the groundwork: we can do some cultivating. Before we figure out what we want to cultivate in Lent, let’s observe how God might be cultivating…us!
People in cultures around the world are skilled at various ways of cultivating. It has been our survival for thousands of years. Most modern farmers have a lot more in common with dictators. They use chemicals and machines and hybridization if not GMO’s, to force an abundant harvest, at a cost. They prefer monoculture. Sameness. It’s easier. They grow thousands of acres of the same exact plant, at yields three times what my husband’s grandfather used to get in the nineteen-thirties. They use huge amounts of fossil fuel and strip the soil and poison the water. They do not really cultivate at all. They are mining the earth.
The human art of cultivation is not lost. My son’s good friend Anthony had grandparents from rural China who came to live with him in Irvine when he was in grade school. They turned his little yard into a vegetable garden high-rise. They knew how to cultivate, with little space and much attention and love. Their garden was a glorious explosion of food. Experience helped I’m sure, but there is no substitute for attention and love, and that’s how God cultivates us.
Successful cultivating means relationship, paying attention to the particular situation and needs of what you are growing. It means nurture, and wisdom and patience. It means understanding the nature of a thing and allowing for its nature, not forcing it to be and do what it is not. It means guiding and helping, but not controlling. Thank you, God.
David Vetter is a pioneering organic farmer in Nebraska. He is featured in a movie called “Dreaming of a Vetter World.” He plants nine different crops in a complicated rotation to keep pests down so he won’t need to use pesticides. When Vetter was asked why more farmers don’t go organic, he replied, “… because it’s more work, and it takes more thought.” Yeah, relationships are like that. They take work, and thought.
Traditional village farmers in Central America were dismissed by Americans for their inefficiency. These farmers might have eleven tiny plots scattered along a couple of miles of paths in a complex patchwork with all their neighbors’ plots. The Americans who watched them figured they inherited this crazy patchwork and just didn’t have the initiative to consolidate it. But then somebody actually studied this style of farming and realized they weren’t as dumb as they looked. Crop failure was more than economic loss for those folks, it could be starvation. But if one tiny plot of corn got mowed down by insects or a flood, another a mile away would probably still be safe. The power of diversity instead of the sterility of sameness; those farmers knew how to cultivate. How does God cultivate us? Diversity or sameness? Clearly God prefers diversity. And if your family or your culture didn’t know how to cultivate your unique self, trust that God does. Sameness is boring. I am so grateful that here in this church we can proclaim God’s love for people in all their diversity, their sexual and gender diversity, their ethnic and racial diversity, among other kinds. God’s children of all kinds being themselves and caring for each other. That’s God’s garden.
Cultivating also requires putting up with imperfection. If you want to cultivate anything new, be prepared. You will meet new forms of imperfection that will surprise you. The roses on our patio have been bare sticks for two months now. Does that bother anyone? No, we toleratethatkind of imperfection as the cost of growing roses. We whack those rosebushes down to sticks on purpose. Likewise, we don’t expect the persimmon tree in front of the kitchen to hold its leaves all winter. Actually I didn’t have a clue before I came here whether persimmon trees were deciduous or evergreen, but I knew not to declare it dead when it lost its leaves in late Fall.
Pity the California native plants. Many of them lose their leaves in summer, when it doesn’t rain for seven months around here. Smart, right? “Summer dormant.” “Stress deciduous.” Except gardeners think they’re dead, and rip them out of the ground. Or declare them too homely to possibly be seen in a public garden. Nobody says that about the roses or trees that are bare in winter. More attentive gardeners see the native plants turning brown and assume they need more water. But they are not used to water in the summer. They never developed resistance to rot; they never were exposed to warm wet soil in thousands of years on the coastal hills of California. So water them well when it’s hot, and they’ll die for real. Stress deciduous. We don’t know how to cultivate what belongs here, because it is so different from what we expect in its inevitable imperfection. Living things are always imperfect. If you want perfection, buy lawn furniture.
God is the master cultivator. God is not surprised by our imperfections. So…when we are in horror and shame at our failures, not ready to face the world, thinking we want to hide from everyone including the God whom we have failed, because we are only good for the compost heap, guess what? God might be smiling and saying, well, what do you expect? I knew you were stress deciduous, even if you didn’t. People are like that; they fall apart now and then. Don’t panic! You might need a pruning. But you’ll green up and sprout again. You’ll bloom when it’s your time.
As we live into our identity as a Creation Justice church, it is our job to proclaim to the world that the earth is sacred, and that care of the earth and its creatures is a moral responsibility, a sacred imperative. It’s never been more important to speak up for the earth than now. We are cultivating a change of heart, so that we can have a future.
It’s also our job to enjoy this world that God has given to our care, to savor its beauty, to learn its wisdom, and to treasure its gifts to us. When we visit sites of natural beauty, and hike, and bird watch, and garden, we cultivate relationships that make it a joy and a privilege to care for our earth. And for one another, with patience for our imperfections.
And as we do this, we are learning how God operates. God doesn’t dictate, God cultivates. With patience and wisdom and attention, knowing that we have our seasons of growth, and our times when we look ready for the compost heap. God lovingly cultivates us, in our imperfections, in our uniqueness. And delights in our growing and our blooming, and our sprouting anew. Amen.
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