HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

Ryan D. Neaveill
Sunday, September 22, 2002
Grace United Methodist Church
Decatur, Illinois

This year, for the first time in my life, I planted a garden. When I started way back in the beginning of spring, I knew absolutely nothing about gardens; and now here we are at the begnning of autumn, and I know absolutely nothing about gardens.

One of the reasons I decided to plant a garden was so I could use it to teach my little boy, Levi, about seeds, and planting, and watering, and so on. And so I came to think of my garden as more of a spiritual endeavor—a place to learn things about life and how things grow rather than a place to produce things to eat. And it’s a good thing because my garden didn’t produce anything to eat. I planted about seventy or eighty radish seeds and I got three radishes. I planted about the same number of onions and I got zero onions.

I started some broccoli indoors and it did very well in the Miracle Grow and the consistent warm environment of our house. But then I transferred it out to the garden and it just disappeared.

But then I planted pumpkins and they were a great success. The pumpkin vines eventually consumed the entire garden and then tried to work their way into the rest of our back yard.

So that’s the story of my garden.

But I enjoyed doing it. And it did provide me with some opportunities to think about life and the way things grow.

Jesus used garden themes many times in his parables to teach his disciples about the kingdom of heaven. In the gospel of Matthew, chapter 13, we find three of them:

• There’s the “Parable of the Sower” where a man sowed his seed, and some fell on rocks, some fell among the thorns, some fell on good soil, and so on.
• Then right after that, Jesus tells the “Parable of the Weeds” where the good seeds were planted, but an enemy came and sowed weeds among them.
• And after that is the “Parable of the Mustard Seed”; how when it is planted, it is one of the smallest of seeds, yet it produces one of the largest plants.

Gardens are a rich source of metaphor and a wonderful vehicle through which we can learn about God. So much of what Jesus said was sprinkled with these garden images: “I am the vine and you are the branches.” “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.”

And when we look at the whole bible, we find that it was not just Jesus who used the garden images:

• When we turn to the book of Genesis, we find that it is in a garden where the whole Judeo-Christian story begins.
• In the book of Isaiah, we are told that we are like grass and our glory is like the flowers in the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of God stands forever.
• Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.

God has a lot to say about gardens and growth.

But one of the things that frustrates me, particularly in my own spiritual life, is how long it takes to grow. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hear God’s word, believe it, and immediately be like Jesus? But it doesn’t work that way does it? At least it hasn’t worked that way for me.

In music we use the Italian phrase poco a poco which means little by little. For example, when we crescendo, or get louder, over a long period of time, a composer will write crescendo poco a poco, or get louder little by little. The opposite of this would be to get loud quickly and suddenly in which case the composer would write subito forte, or suddenly loud. But my life has had little subito or sudden spiritual growth, it has all been poco a poco or little by little.

Little by little God helps us grow.

Ten years ago when my wife Jodi and I got married, we had a pretty care-free life; because we were married for six years before we had our first child—and those of you who have kids know how parenthood changes your lifestyle with its added responsibilities and the limitations it puts on your time and mobility. But for those first six years we pretty much did whatever we wanted to whenever we wanted.

We would often go out to eat at a restaurant, anticipating a nice quiet dinner; but inevitably a young couple with one or two small children would be seated near us. And it always seemed that those children would make a lot of noise, sometimes they’d throw a fit—they’d kick and scream, disturbing the serenity of our evening. And I would glare at the couple and then turn to my wife and say, “When WE have kids, we will NEVER take them to a restaurant!”

Well, the years went on and we finally decided it was time to start our family. In November of 1998 we had our first child, some of you may already know our little boy named Levi.

Months went by and we had really never taken our baby anywhere. But after a while, that desire for our earlier, care-free days of dining out grew stronger. And finally I thought, “Oh, surely we can take this child to a restaurant and he will be quiet and orderly.”

So one evening we all climbed into our vehicle and drove to an eating establishment. So far so good. We went inside, found a table. Everything going smoothly. We pulled up a high chair for the little guy, put him in it, we got our food. And then our little boy got grouchy. He whined, and then he screamed. He kicked his legs, he flailed his arms. He made noises I had never heard before. Worst of all, he took his food and threw it into the air and it came raining down on the heads of the other diners. I was horrified and embarrassed.

But then the magical thing happened. The other diners in the restaurant did not glare at us or scold us. Instead they extended to us God’s grace. They told us not to worry about it. How they had been in our predicament with their own children and how after time passes we would laugh about it. And I was ashamed because I knew that I had not extended that same grace to the young couples who had disturbed our meals. And so that night for dinner, I ate humble pie.

Little by little God helps us grow.

Most of us do a good job of trying to imitate Christ when we are here in church, surrounded by other like-minded Christians, where we hear the good news preached and taught, and where we are nurtured in an environment of helpfulness and kindness and cooperation. We are like that broccoli I planted that did so nicely indoors. But what happens when we are transplanted out there in the real world among the weeds and the bad soil and the dry weather?

If you are like me, you have a hard time of it. I especially have a hard time being like Jesus when I get behind the wheel of a car. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s a guy thing, but if I am stopped at a red light and it turns green and the guy next to me starts to go faster than me, I have to put my foot down until I’m going faster. And then my wife says, “Are you trying to race that guy?” and I say, “Who me? What are you talking about?” and she says, “You know, you don’t look very cool; you’re driving a minivan.” And then, like the title character in James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” I am zapped out of the Indy 500 and put back into reality.

Little by little God helps us grow.

Why do you suppose God prefers it this way? Why did he create a universe where things grow so slowly? Maybe it’s because God wants us to have that time as a gift. Time allows us to prepare for change.

Think about all the things that can happen in the course of one’s life that are sudden and bring about a lot of change in a short period of time. Starting a new job, moving, getting married, getting divorced, retiring, the death of a family member. Psychologists call those stressors, and they have found that the more of those stressors we have in our lives, the more likely we are to get sick or have a nervous breakdown.

But God knows what our hearts and spirits can take. And so I think he gives us time as a gift so that we can gradually grow and mature and change.

Now that is not to say that God doesn’t ever work in sudden and dramatic ways. There are certainly many examples in the bible of God’s swiftness:

• The story of Noah is one. God saw that humans had become evil and there was no hope of them changing their ways, so he sent a flood which pretty quickly wiped out everything so he could start all over again.
• The story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is another. Paul had a complete 180 degree change in his life. He had been persecuting the Christians until God temporarily struck him blind and spoke to him, and then he himself became perhaps the most influential Christian who ever lived, preaching and teaching the good news of Jesus.

So much of God’s sudden and dramatic work seems to happen when things deviate from God’s plan. And God quickly steps in to set things right.

Perhaps the greatest example of God giving a sudden and dramatic solution to a problem is the example of Jesus himself. If you look at the whole timeline of God’s plan which has unfolded for thousands of years. Jesus was on the earth for a very short time—around thirty-three years. And the actual time he spent in ministry was just a few years. Yet in that short time, Jesus Christ changed the course of history and the future of humankind.

C.S. Lewis pointed out in an essay on miracles that Jesus always did what God does, but on a smaller scale. Not smaller because Jesus is less than God, but smaller so that our limited human minds can better understand it.

For example, God creates the grapevine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, God turns water into wine. When Jesus was at the wedding in Cana, he also turned water into wine. The difference is that God performs the miracle according to his own time whereas Jesus did it instantaneously so that we could see and understand the miracle of God’s work.

Also, every year God takes a grain of wheat and, after it is planted in the ground and nurtured, God enables it to produce many more grains. God also says to the fish, “Be fruitful and multiply,” and the fish lay their eggs which produce even more fish. Likewise, Jesus took a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish and, after showing us God’s miracle, fed five thousand hungry people.

God has programmed our bodies so that when we get a cut or a wound it will, over a certain amount of time and under the right conditions, heal and get better. Jesus simply sped this process up, healing people instantly.

God likes to take time with things. God is patient and loves to watch things grow. God loves life. God is not content to do things instantly, although God certainly can and does do that when it is necessary. But usually God spends much time and work perfecting creation slowly and with great care.

And that is how our gardens grow. And that is how we grow; little by little both physically and spiritually.

I think our culture really lost something when we evolved from an agrarian society where most people farmed and made their living off the land to a more industrial and technological society. For in the old days we had to wait for things. And we were used to waiting because we spent much of our lives growing things and making things, and so patience was woven into the fabric of our lives.

But now, we can get so much of what we need immediately. And I’m not knocking that. I mean I’m really really glad that I don’t have to rely on my pathetic puny little garden for my food. I am grateful for grocery stores and restaurants. But being able to get things immediately is maybe both a blessing and a curse.

For although it is good to enjoy the end results and the fruits of what is grown, there is a lot to be gained from the growing itself.

For it is often not in the “arriving” but in the “getting there” that we find God.

Little by little God helps us grow. Amen.

Copyright © 2002, 2007 Ryan D. Neaveill