A sermon by William C. Hiss, Vice President for External Affairs, Bates College, August 12, 2007
Genesis 2:2-4
Matthew 13:1-35
There is a little poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado of which I am very fond. In Spanish, it goes like this:
Érase de un marinero
Que hizo un jardín junto al mar
y se metió a jardinero.
Cuando el jardín estaba in flor,
Se fue por esos mares de Diós.
In English, it says:
One upon a time there was a sailor (or fisherman…)
Who made a garden near the sea,
And became a gardener.
When the garden was in flower,
He sailed away across the seven seas of God.
I was first drawn to this poem by its title. It is called “Parabola,” which in Spanish means both parable, a little story with a moral overlay, and a mathematical parabola, the curve that comes from infinity, touches a single spot, and then goes off to infinity again. As a parable, this little poem is a simple Christ story. Christ comes from the infinity of his father’s heaven, touches a single spot of time, and returns to infinity. Thirty-three years, a micro-second of history, a few dozen public sermons, some private lessons and teachings given to his handful of followers, a public execution, and the followers are left trying to hold their roots in stony soil. Jesus comes, touches time and goes off again into infinity. A sort of Christian version of Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered,” but for many years after Christ’s death, lots of early Christians were not very confident about the conquering part.
It was as a mathematical parabola that I first began to think about this poem, about the eternity of time that we will all spend elsewhere, and the relative instant of time that we spend on earth. This line of thinking I found a little depressing at first. Hamlet talks about the places from whose bourn no traveler returns, and Pascal wrote that the infinite silences of the universe frightened him. All of us have heard the little analogy about man occupying the last two to five minutes of history’s day.
To be sure, you can take comfort from the metaphor of the parabola, and say that it is the instant of contact that defines the curve, and gives it reality. We can say bravely to ourselves, Christ got done what he needed to do, and we can too. But still, taken in that sense of a poem about time, it is a little cold and forlorn. So I came back to it, thinking of it as a poem not about time, but about gardening. And in that context I began to say, yes, of course, time is short, but so what? That is what the seasons are, that is what we are given.
I have been living in Maine for about 40 years, and gardening for most of that time. Along with everyone else in Maine since the 1700’s, I know that gardening here is a chancy affair. If you put your seeds in before Memorial Day, they are likely to rot in the ground. Leave your harvest until the third or fourth week of September, and it is likely to be killed by a frost. What lies between is the stoic determination to make the land say yes, when lots else wants to say no. Thoreau said about his garden that it was making “the earth say ‘beans’ instead of ‘grass.’”
People in Maine talk about their gardens the way they do about their wood supplies, their animals, and the weather—all the other things that are important, but significantly uncontrollable, or shaped by the givens. There are lots of givens when you have a garden. First, you usually don’t choose the land. You happen to own a piece, and so that is where you put your garden. At best, you choose the seeds by guesswork and reputation. I think half the years I have had a garden, people gave me some seeds or seedlings, and I stuck them in the ground because it was what I had. The weather in Maine is always iffy—too much water or too little, too much early heat, or not enough in August for the corn. The best tomato crop I had in years was taken out by bugs. Sometimes we forget to let the dog out enough to leave his scent around the garden and so the critters, the woodchucks, raccoons and deer, will come in the night and clean you out. We may have smaller crops or flowers than we figure we deserved, given the amount of work we put in. The fruits we get may turn out to be smaller, or more misshapen. There may be little left for the freezer. There are lots of uncontrollables when you have a garden.
But, you know, there is one factor that we do control. There is one thing that we do choose. We choose whether we will have a garden in the first place! We choose whether we will try to bring some seeds to fruition, or not! We choose whether we will try to make the earth say “beans” instead of “grass,” or not.
So it is with our lives. Of course the season is short, and there are lots of givens. Most of us at one point or another in our lives felt that if we had had a choice, we might not have chosen the parents that we got. Our education has put a stamp on us one way or another. We take in social values through our pores from our peers, for better or worse. We may have religious and spiritual support in bushel baskets, or in teaspoonfuls. It is the garden we bring to flower, whatever it is. The issue is still ours: we choose to have a garden in the first place.
Of course the time is short: it is what we’ve got. We use it, or we don’t. We may say to ourselves, well, the scope of my life is so narrow. Here I am in South Portland or Cape E. or Minot or my little street, or here I am as a small cog in this bustling city, so what am I supposed to do? Who would take notice of me, and what could I do?
I grew up in a little town in New Jersey just about the size of Minot, where I live now, and have lived in New York, Boston and Glasgow, in rural North Dakota, and in two or three rural villages in Maine. In my work I have traveled around America, and have gone twice to Hanoi, a city of several million, to adopt our daughter Jessie and just 16 months ago to let her see her home country. I can’t see that it makes any difference. There is work to be done everywhere.
It is pretty easy to avoid the garden. You can say, “Well, I can’t see exactly what I might do”, or say “Religion is so complex, it’s all relative, I don’t what to offend anyone, so I won’t say anything.”
Dwight Moody, the great 19th century evangelist, used to say that he would let no day pass without speaking to someone about the condition of their soul. For many years I thought this was so quaint, so corny, so Victorian, imposing yourself on people, straightening out other people’s lives. Now I am not so sure. Now it seems more realistic. At least in my world, I don’t go through too many days without seeing something visibly and obviously in need of a friend, of someone to reach out and say, “How is it with you?” “How are you doing?” Even in our own families, if only we reached out to our parents, children, nephews, nieces, and said, “Let’s have a cup of coffee and talk.”
Years ago I wrote a history of the Shiloh religious community in Durham, founded in the 1890’s by a Bates grad, and still going as a religious movement—the folks in that movement have been my friends for 40 years now, an unlikely but very rewarding friendship for a liberal UCC fellow. At one point a young man interested in the movement wrote to the leader, Frank Sandford, and asked for a “short course in theology.” Mr. Sandford smiled at the request, took a postcard, wrote “DO” on it, and mailed it back to the young man. It’s a funny answer to a silly question, but perhaps not so far off.
I just came back from a 45th high school reunion this past weekend in the town in New Jersey where I grew up, and last Sunday morning went with many of my classmates to my home UCC church, for a combination normal worship and memorial service for the dozen of our classmates who had gone ahead. Preaching the sermon was the woman who was our Christian ed director in 1962, still there, still in the same job. She remembered me—or said she did—and after 45 years in the pulpit, had something very useful to say—take hope, John! In a town marked by the accumulation of considerable wealth after most of us left, she took on her own parishioners last Sunday, and pointed out that one of the fastest growing industries in America is the storage industry. By definition, she said, leaning her elderly small frame over the pulpit and looking at all of us pretty directly, it means you have more stuff than you can keep in your house or use, and yet can’t bring yourself to give it away or give it up. The parable of the self-storage locker, perhaps?
I would offer a companion piece, which probably arrived in most of your homes last week, the most recent issue of “United Church News.” In it is an account of Bill Moyer’s talk at the UCC General Synod of poverty and justice. He pointed out the huge and growing disparities between the rich and the poor in America, and called on the UCC to take up a new version of Jesus’ prophetic role of kicking over tables of money in the temple. This is a tough topic for church people: how much money is enough, how best to share in a Christian community, and at what point do church people take on social policy questions like tax rates and spending on public housing versus tax breaks for the wealthy.
One of the great traditions of the UCC, inherited from the Old Testament Jewish traditions, is that we live in both the prophetic and pastoral traditions. Many Old Testament theologians have pointed out that when the Jewish peoples got soft and morally lazy and too wealthy and lax about others, the prophets like Amos and Elijah let them have it: “Woe to you, you cows of Bashan.” But when they were suffering and even in chains, the pastoral side would be heard, encouraging them, assuring them of God’s love.
While in seminary I took a year off—right after I was Rob McCall’s roommate, though that was not the reason. I moved from Harvard into East Harlem, by far the best single decision of my life. I taught school in the South Bronx, tutored in the East Harlem Protestant Parish reading program, and worked nights as a chaplain’s aide in Metropolitan Hospital. One night I called on an elderly African-American woman who lived in the housing projects nearby. She had just had both legs taken off at the hips for diabetes. I asked her how she was doing, and she looked at me with a strong smile, lifted both hands straight up, and said, “Free from the flesh!” I thought at first that she was making a gallows humor joke after a ghastly operation, but she meant it literally. She would be in a wheelchair for life, but the most important part of her life, the part that was important to her, her ability to reach out to others, was now set free once again. Her legs were gone, her pain was gone, and she could again do what she needed to do. There were a handful of plants from her garden around her: nephews, nieces, grandchildren, people who lived in her project building, people from her church. And I dare say, me, for I became one of the plants in her garden. She showed me how much trouble and how little money a person can have and still have love in their hearts.
That dual tradition of prophecy and pastoral care is with us today. The gardening involves both, certainly at different times, and perhaps from different people, depending on their talents and temperaments.
What does God offer us with these garden images? In Genesis 2, God planted a garden in Eden, and out of the ground made to grow every good tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. Jesus picks up the analogies in Matthew with his parable about good soil and rocky soil. An intriguing footnote from the concordance: there are several dozen Biblical citations of the words “garden” and “gardens”—it was a parable all ancient people would have understood immediately, most having gardens. But surprisingly, perhaps hauntingly in the context of this Machado poem, the word “gardener” only appears once in the Bible, in John 20:15. When Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, “Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, whom are you looking for?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni,’ (which means Teacher).” The recognition moment of life eternal, grace and God’s love for Mary—and for us?– turns out to include taking Jesus to be a gardener.
Érase de un marinero / Que hizo un jardín junto al mar / y se metió a jardinero.
“Once upon a time there was a sailor who made a garden near the sea, and became a gardener…” Go thou and do likewise. Amen.