The 2nd Sunday of Pentecost
The Rev. Mariclair Partee
I have planted a small vegetable garden this year. After three years of city life and two years after that with no yard to speak of, I was very excited when I found my house here in Bethlehem with its small backyard, and started planning out my beds and flowers in January, all on paper since I wasn’t even sure exactly what my yard would look like once the snow melted!
I joined the throngs of folks nationwide, inspired by the gardening efforts of our first lady, and bought all sorts of seeds. Heirloom, Old fashioned, hybrid- you name it, I bought it, even some seeds for vegetables I’d never seen before, like neon colored swiss chard, and radishes that were purple on the inside and white on the outside. I started clearing a patch of grass as soon as I moved in in late-March, and chomping at the bit I started seeds in baking dishes inside, so I could plant them as soon as the last frost passed (around late-May in these parts). Patience isn’t a virtue I was blessed with.
Finally the time came to plant seedlings and some seeds in the actual ground, and now, a month or so later, I have a pleasant little patch of sunflowers and green beans and tomatoes and those inside-out radishes and lots of other things, all squeezed into a corner of my yard. I’ve even started thinking about what I’m going to do with my bounty when it comes, and have been watching instructional videos on canning and pickling on YouTube, though I guess I shouldn’t count my green beans before they have hatched, as it were.
Gardening for me is more than a hobby and a fun way to put food on my table. It is a way of encountering Do in my life. When I was growing up, every year I would help my mom dig her big garden. She always had a large garden and grew corn and squash, peas, and zuchinni, and she actually made it to the canning and freezing part, so that my family would eat green beans and stuffed peppers all winter that Mom and Dad had harvested from our own backyard. When I was 5 or 6 years old, I got to grow my own little row of crops. I was given cherry tomatoes to plant.
My mom knew that it is almost impossible to fail with cherry tomatoes, and so she shook out the shrivelled tiny seeds into my hands, helped me space them evenly in my row, and patted the dirt back over them. Within a week or two, tiny sprouts appeared, and after that the sprouts developed ragged leaves, and in the blink of an eye, it seemed, those tiny seeds had turned into bushes, absolutely covered in small round red fruit. I did not know how this was possible, but I knew God was present in the miracle of growing things, and I felt joy in him.
My cherry tomato bounty of that summer is a family legend, as there are only so many things one can do with these tiny tomatoes, and after a few weeks we were giving them away by the bucketful to neighbors and relatives and anyone who would have them. It actually took me about ten years to eat tomatoes again, but the lesson that I learned was that, from the tiniest, least likely beginning, God brings forth miracles. Now, as I remember digging my bare toes into the rich dirt of that garden, looking on the wonders God had created with my help, “[my] Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul”, to borrow the words of Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and poet.
All of the readings today seem to share in this experience, as they are filled with images of growing things, cedars and mustard plants, things green and succulent, cradling birds and all manner of living things in wide branches, offering shelter and shade to the world.
Is it any wonder that the writers of these texts, trying thousands of years ago to explain the mystery of God’s relationship with each one of us, could only use language of the mightiness of nature?
A cedar tree was not only a source of wood and fuel in ancient times, but the tallest thing most people would encounter in their lives, reaching far into the sky, beyond a person’s imagining- mighty, like our God.
And grain or seed, scattered on the ground, became wheat- a staple of a family’s diet, and the mystery of its growth was a sort of magic that kept that family alive, secure in its daily bread, for one more season- sustaining, like our God.
And a mustard seed, like my cherry tomato seeds, grew from a tiny speck into a giant shrub, offering a bounty so out of scale with its beginnings and what is put into it thatit confounds reason- transforming, like Jesus Christ.
And so, we are told, these wonders of the created world were given to us as a gift, by God, so that we might delight in God’s love for us, and in creation. For we can always find shelter in God’s expansive embrace, and solace in God’s branches. Comfort is offered to us, and delight, from a tiny speck of a mustard seed, which can grow into a whole world.
