“Out of Our
Minds: Blooming Where We Are Planted!”
Speaking of and in parables, Jennifer
Reid has written an original one about family values. It’s called “In the
Dark." Copies are available and performers are needed. Parables are
deceptively short if not sweet, plain if not simple. They last forever.
Each time we encounter one, it’s like trying to step in the same river
twice. We see ourselves, our situations, anew every time. They always ask
us where are we, how many people are we, how many parts of us are here? In
bits and pieces, and fits and starts, and glimpses and glances of God’s life
on earth.
Even as Jesus is both sheep and shepherd,
so we are both seeds and sowers. The older I get the more reassured I am by
how Jesus talks about God’s word – whom we are -- as seed and our work –
which is God’s -- as sowing. Ours is not to know when, and where, and how,
and how soon, and how many results of our lives or our works there will be
to see. Ours is to go on being sown and sowing -- putting the word and the
witness of life and our lives “out there” the best we can – all the while
trusting in nature and trusting in God who is so identified with elements,
seasons, patterns and processes of nature. And we human beings -- just one
species of so many yet the one with such great powers to be as destructive
as we are creative – we are a part of that nature with whom God becomes so
identified – in fact, in whom God chooses to live and to move and to
exercise God’s very being! God is embodied, God is implanted in us!
Therefore, we never stop growing! We find hope in the human however
hardened we are.
Jesus seems to be saying only one seed
among four falls upon good soil – finds the conditions it needs to take root
and grow. That’s barely a big-league average and not exactly what one
expects out of God! God may be unconditional, as we say, especially in
God’s love for us and for life. But even God has to work with conditions!
Even God has to work with birds and with thorns and mostly with rocky ground
– even with the “Nevadas” of God’s life! -- where there is not a whole lot
of soil to begin with. Seeds of God are forced to try to grow up too soon,
to come up before we are ready. We find the transition from darkness to
light, from dream world to real world, so harsh and intense we can’t last.
We never quite find the chance to belong, to choose for ourselves -- to put
down our own roots, get solidly grounded, and bloom right where we are
planted! The “chrysalis flights” for young people such as have been here
these recent weeks are to help teach them patience persistence in faith,
hope, and love – with God, with parents, with church, with peers, with
conditions, and with themselves.
Tragedies of our own lives and of the
world show us each day how much strength and courage and dignity and
resiliency we are capable of as a species – even in spite of ourselves!
Even in spite of the ways we seem to work so hard against ourselves. Look at
London these days. Listen to these poems as “Words for Meditation.” Jesus
himself is “green” – always breaking new ground, always turning old ground
into new, always making a future, a way out of no way. God is so patient,
persistent as to wait centuries, even millennia on all us slow seeds! Does
it not seem we wait upon one another that way? Parents on children –
children on parents? Teachers on students – students on teachers? Pastors
on congregations – congregations on pastors? Can I get a witness? Each of
us knows there is hard and unfinished business to do – in others as well as
in us!
The poet seems to be saying – like old
Ecclesiastes! -- everything has its time! For all of the obstacles, all of
the hardnesses, “good soil” and “harvest” will have the last world about
life! Yet how do we keep from killing ourselves in the meantime?! How do
we keep from crushing what is, in effect, the very foundation of our own
civilization, our very own biblical origins – as we are doing now in Iraq?
Where for the first time ever now a whole nation has been put on the
“endangered cultures” list of the world? The poet says the seeds will
outwait and outlast the stone. The stone has its time as well to be
crumbled into good soil! Even the hardest of ones among us, the hardest
parts of our own selves, never lie beyond the reach of redemption! God is
not done with us yet! We will be thought so foolish to endure in our hope.
Many will question how seeds of life can hold out in such stony places as
war for so many thousands of years! But the poet, perhaps with Jesus in
mind, asks back, “What kind of seeds do you think we’re talking about?”
What kind of seeds? Are we? Are our children?
I remember the women of South Africa
living their witness against apartheid and saying, when you have struck us,
you have struck a rock! Claiming the strength of their own resistance!
Even as they, and their children, throughout southern Africa, are living
their witness against HIV/AIDS today. May we be like seeds striking rock!
May we not worry, says the poet – not be afraid of vast darkness or of our
own tinyness – the very small difference each one of us seems to make. We
have such life in us! Seeds, like embryos, are so miraculous – everything
needed is already in us from the inception! Even whole nations are here in
Rebekah -- whose children begin to compare and compete with each other
before they are born! “There’s nothing to do except grow,” says the poet!”
Esau and Jacob are born into such deadly difference. So they spend their
lives growing into such reconciliation! Whoever, wherever, whenever we are
– however often we fall among thorns! Just dig it, says the poet! “Just
grow!”
Because it is God who grows in us, says
Paul. We do not have to do it all by ourselves. In fact, the harder we try
– to be good, to be moral, to be somehow more like God than others – the
harder we may fall. We remain so fixed on ourselves, on where we stand in
comparison and competition with others – My mother likes to say, “All
comparisons are odious!” – -- like morally-challenged muscle-builders
preoccupied with admiration for our own mirrors. We never get around to
resisting the real and common enemies of sin and of death in our lives and
our life together. We’d rather kill messengers than tend to messages.
Paul’s question is, how can we believe God is in us? Alive and well and at
work in us all? Even by God’s own choosing! That God even now is giving us
by the Spirit not only the works of Jesus to do, but even greater works than
those! For Jesus never stopped war, or abolished weapons. Jesus never
ended misery and poverty, hunger and homelessness. But Jesus -- that seed
who falls into the earth to die in his singularity, in order that he may
bring forth much fruit in us! – Jesus gives us everything needed to
accomplish these works for the world!
Paul says we have to get out of
ourselves! We have to get over ourselves! The world does not revolve
around us, around our morality or our culture. “Obsession with self in
these matters, “ Paul says, “ is a dead end; attention to God leads us out
into the open, into a spacious, free life.” Remember Hemingway’s “clean
well-lighted place?” Into a spacious, free life! “Focusing on the self is
the opposite of focusing on God.” In fact, we might say, we not only have
to get out of ourselves! We also have to get out of our minds! In order to
get into our hearts. Into acceptance of others, as well as ourselves, as
persons in whom God is dwelling, is planted, -- making each one of us just
as alive, just as fruitful as Jesus! We have to get planted, rooted,
grounded right where we are – just like a tree, planted by the Truckee. We
are not just a private self but part of a corporate one – like seeds, soil,
roots, trunks, branches, and blossoms – and all that goes into a tree, a
garden of which, of whom every planting is part.
Tom Roberts, editor of National
Catholic Reporter, invites is to learn from our gardening – the very
task of tending the earth God gives us in the beginning. Hear how he uses
“nonchalance” in ways we speak of God’s grace in our lives. “My father was
an excellent gardener – and his brothers still are. They have a nonchalance
about it that can be unnerving to the new gardener, full of enthusiasm for
precisely how things are done. They remind my of the German orchardist I
once interviewed. When asked how he managed to produce such spectacular
Winesap apples, he shrugged and said, ‘Things want to grow.’”
Things want to grow! People want
to grow! “Perhaps that is the allure” of gardening, Roberts goes on.
“There was a nonchalance I experienced at some point in my life about
families and gardens and the like. Things wanted to grow, and there wasn’t
an inordinate amount of fussing about exactly how. There was, instead, an
easiness with it all, an understanding that in the matter of people and
plants, not much could – or should – be done to rush things.” God’s grace
in us in so many ways waits for our “time” to come, and keeps us alive,
awake, alert, at work in the meantime. In words to the gospel hymn – “Lord,
help me hold out. Lord, help me to hold out. Lord help me to hold out –
until my change comes!”
I am coming back to close with the women
of Africa. In truth, Africa is not so much a poor continent as an
impoverished one. Africa is rich in land, in resources, soils, waters,
minerals, and deeply spirited and resourceful people. We know the old story
of how the missionaries came with the Bibles while the people had the land,
and the missionaries left with the land while the people had the Bibles.
Africa has been made poor by colonization, occupation, exploitation and
oppression – both from without and from within – for we so often internalize
our own oppressions. Africa is much like Esau, its birthright both stolen
and sold. Wangari Maathei is now minister of the environment for the
government of Kenya – a government that used to feel so threatened by her
that she was beaten, arrested, repeatedly jailed, forced to hide underground
(like every good seed!) as colleagues were killed and her organization
nearly abolished. Her organization, the Green Belt Movement, had planted 30
million trees in 30 years! She realized without a healthy environment, no
other positive changes were possible. “When you’re in poverty,” she
thought, “you’re trapped because the poorer you become, the more you degrade
the environment, the poorer you become! It’s a matter of breaking the
cycle.”
It’s a matter of Jubilee! Of the
Pentecost work of the Holy Spirit in the early church! Planting a tree, she
says, was the best idea she ever had -- “It is easy, it is doable, and you
could go and tell ordinary women with no education: OK, this is the tree.
It is now flowering. We’re going to observe the tree until it produces
seeds. When they’re ready, we’ll harvest them. We’ll dry them, we’ll put
them in the soil. If they’re no good, we’ll eliminate them. We’ll nurture
them. We’ll plant them in our gardens. If they’re fruit trees, within five
years we will have fruits. If they’re fodder, our animals will have
fodder.” “The tree for me has become a wonderful way of breaking that
cycle!” What a Jubilee tree, a Truckee tree!
Last year Wangari Maathei was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Peace. She ended her speech with the story of a hummingbird
that tries to put out a forest fire. When mocked by other animals, the
hummingbird replies, “I’m doing what I can.” I’m doing what I can. We’re
doing what we can! And all the hummingbirds of the church said – Amen!
Rev. John J. Auer
