In the waning years of the nineteenth century, Guiseppe and Guiditta Vumbacca emigrated from a small village in Calabria to the promise of a better life in America. Once they passed through Ellis Island, where an immigration officer who didn’t understand Italian chopped the final vowel off the family name so that Vumbacca became Vumback, they moved to central Connecticut and resumed the only life they knew: they started a farm. And because a farm needs farmhands, they produced ten children, the eldest of whom, Thomas, was my maternal grandfather. Tom had mixed feelings about growing up on a farm: it was his job every morning before school to go out and milk the cows, and at the end of the day, he had to grab a chicken, wring its neck and pluck the feathers for that night’s dinner. Which explains why, as an adult, he never drank milk and never ate chicken again.
But Tom Vumback loved his vegetable garden. And it is probably because of this that ever since I was little, I always had a vegetable garden too. I can remember lazy summer afternoons helping my grandfather in his garden with easy chores: planting beans, picking tomatoes, hoeing around the eggplant. And when we were finished he would set up two chairs, light his cigar, hand me a bottle of root beer, and we would sit and talk and just listen to his garden grow.
I also worked in my dad’s garden when I was young, but unlike my grandfather, my dad actually made me work. I had to turn the garden over by hand each spring, shovel the chicken manure he had delivered... have you ever worked with chicken manure? Dad insisted it was superior to cow manure, and it certainly was in the department of aromatic pungency... its ordure is forever tattooed on my olfactory. I also had to weed my Dad’s garden, and thanks to the chickens, there were weeds aplenty. I had to stake the tomatoes, pick the beans and keep the zucchini under control. But still, I remember Dad’s gardens fondly, and it is the reason why, in my adult life, I have still always had a vegetable garden. I dug one in our back yard at our first house in Calumet, Michigan, I dug one in the back yard of our parsonage in Bridgewater, Connecticut and I dug one in back of our garage on Conant St.
And it has always been an Italian garden. I’ve planted tomatoes, pole beans, zucchini, several varieties of peppers, eggplant, and onions; my herb garden has oregano, basil, parsley, chives and dill. It’s great to be able to just go out in the back yard and pick what you need when making dinner, because let’s face it - if all of a sudden you’re just jonesing for some dill, and the stores are closed – it’s so nice to just walk out the back door and pick it fresh.
But I’ve come to notice something a little different about my Beverly garden: it only grows what it wants to grow. When I first started it ten years ago, I tried planting what I’ve always planted, with decidedly mixed results. My eggplant was disappointing. The peppers bore fruit, but to paraphrase the apostle Paul, that fruit did not abide. Tomatoes grow great, and I’m sure that’s thanks as much to Jake as it is to anyone. Most herbs grow pretty well, though the basil only grows so big and then stops. My garden loves to pump out the beans – I have three different varieties this year. But oddly enough, one thing that will not grow in my garden is zucchini. Zucchini! Everyone can grow zucchini! You can throw a couple seeds out the church window and have enough zucchini to feed a small nation. But zucchini just will not grow in my garden. I get lots of squash flowers: they grow into bright yellow trumpets that mock me in the morning – but no fruit, no zucchini. So after years of stubborn planting, forming the little hills just so, making sure there is fresh soil and, yes, manure each year, fertilizing as it grew, I’ve given up. And in doing so, I finally learned an important lesson about gardening. You’ve got to listen to your garden. You’ve got to listen to your garden.
Suzanne Munore read us one of those biblical stories that we hear so often, and think we know so well, that the point of it usually gets lost. “Listen!” Jesus said, “A sower went out to sow...” And what do we usually call this parable Jesus tells? The parable of the sower and the seeds, right? But the parable is not about the sower, and it is not about the seed. Listen:
“Some seed fell on the path, and the birds ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it sprang up quickly, and when the sun rose, it was scorched. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns chocked it. And other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold. Let anyone with ears to hear, listen.”
Jesus’ parable is about soil – about the different kinds of soils in which the seed is planted. The sower in each instance remains the same: it’s safe to say that the sower is either God or Jesus, and we get that. Likewise the seed in each instance remains the same: it is the gospel, the good news, the message of redemption that Jesus brings. The only thing that varies in the parable is the soil, the medium into which the seed is introduced. And that soil, folks, is us. It’s not about how good a sower God is, or how fruitful the word-seed is, it’s about us and how receptive we are to God’s speaking to us. The UCC likes to say, “God is still speaking;” the parable Suzanne read asks us, “Are we still listening? Can we hear what God is saying to us?” Are we the well worn path, the place that everybody walks right on by and doesn’t notice that God is trying to say something to us? Are we the rocky ground, have we hardened our shells so that even if we hear God speaking to us, we are too sophisticated to think we need to do anything about what God is saying? Are we the thicket of thorns, where there is already so much going on in our lives that there isn’t room for God to grow in us? Or are we the rich soil, filled with the nutrients and open to the sunlight that wants to stream into us and help us grow and mature into the fruitful people God knows we can be?
Notice that Jesus begins and ends this parable with the same word, “Listen.” And you know, as it turns out, I was not listening to my garden. I was planting what I wanted to harvest, and darn it I was going to keep planting zucchini year after year until those flowers finally produced fruit. But all along, my garden was trying to tell me what would actually grow there, it was giving me beans and tomatoes and onions and such, yet I kept insisting on planting what my garden was trying to tell me would not grow. It is a parable about the soil, and in this instance at least, the sower wasn’t listening to the soil at all.
The same thing sometimes happens to a church. Some things will grow, and some things will not, and we need to listen to the garden before we start planting seeds indiscriminately. I think this is something our Vision process did for us; it taught us to listen to each other, learning what kinds of things would make for fertile soil and fruitful growth, instead of just latching on to the latest church growth strategies and assuming that what works for another church would work for us. The Right Reverend Kirk Smith is Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, and six or so months ago he wrote a great reflection on the things that really make a difference in healthy, vital churches; here is some of what he said:
Be genuine. Do not under any circumstances try to be trendy or hip, unless you are already intrinsically trendy or hip. If you are a group of ninety year olds who like crocheting and Beethoven, by God be proud of it.
Actually read the Bible. Start with Genesis, it’s pretty cool, and don’t worry, it’s OK to skip the boring parts.
Start worrying about extreme poverty, violence against women, racism and consumerism.
Stop worrying about getting young people into the church. Stop worrying about marketing strategies. Take a deep breath. If there is a God, that God is not going to die even if there are no more Christians at all. Don’t forget, it’s not all about you; it’s all about God.
Figure out who is suffering in your community. Go be with them. Learn how to sit with people who are dying.
Listen to God, listen to Wisdom, listen to Love, more than you speak your opinions.
These are the kinds of general things that prepare the soil, if you will, that will make the conditions ripe for growing. How often though the church is tempted to go out and buy the magic beans that promise to grow the stalk that reaches into the clouds. “Let’s get a Christian rock band; let’s replace the entire front of the church with a projection screen; let’s meet on Saturday nights instead of Sunday morning.” These are things that might work for some, but I think what Smith is saying is that there are some things that are appropriate for the church as a whole, and there are some things that are appropriate only for particular churches. Listen to your garden; it will reveal what it needs to grow.
This is the lesson of Revelation. I was a little reluctant to choose a reading from Revelation so soon after the rapture failed to materialize, since so much of that conversation grew out of a gross misappropriation of the last book of the Bible. But now that the Bruins have won the Stanley Cup, the rapture can come any time it wants, and we are free to understand that this morning’s New Testament lesson is actually a key to understanding both the book of Revelation, and to what we are saying about the church this morning. Revelation is a letter, a general letter written by John, addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor. Chapter 1 and chapters 4-22 are written to everyone in all the churches. They are words of warning and words of encouragement to those churches; they are not a prediction of the future, but rather a word of guidance to the present church of John’s day. Words, as I said, meant for everyone. Chapters 2 and 3, however, contain words of advice addressed specifically and individually to each of the seven local churches that John names in the first chapter. There is a specific message for the church in Ephesus, there is a specific message for the church in Smyrna, there is a specific message for the church in Pergamum, and so on for the churches in Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea – because each individual church also needed to hear something different. John’s words in Revelation are not one-size-fits all: what works in Ephesus may not work in Philadelphia. Rather, John understood what each church needed to hear, and so he provided it, first to each, then to all.
Listen to your garden. Understand what the soil will bear. Don’t try to plant zucchini in a tomato garden, even if all your neighbors have such an abundant crop of zucchini that they are giving it away to friends and strangers alike. Heck, do them a favor and take some off their hands! When we listened to our garden here at Second Church, we discovered the fruit it would bear. We became an Open and Affirming congregation of the United Church of Christ. We are sending a mission team to Washington, D.C. in July. We have just hired an Assistant for Electronic Communication. We are exploring more creative models of church organization. We are expanding our local mission, and we heard last week about one of our newest partnerships, with Recovery High School. This is just some of the fruit of our Vision. What works for us may or may not work for others, and what works for others may or may not work for us. But if we listen to our gardens, and understand that growth is more about the soil – about us - than about what gets planted in it, then the harvest will be a rich one, and God will be known, and this, God’s garden, will be blessed.
Let us pray.
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