The Trouble with Gardening
Isaiah 5:1-7
Let me sing for my beloved my love-song
concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. 2He
dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a
watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it
to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.
3And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me
and my vineyard. 4What more was there to do for my vineyard that I
have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild
grapes?
5And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its
hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be
trampled down. 6I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or
hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the
clouds that they rain no rain upon it. 7For the vineyard of the Lord
of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant
planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a
cry!
The longest running show in musical theatre history is not
“Cats,” or “Phantom of the Opera,” or even “Les Miserables.” The longest running show in musical
theatre history is a charming off-Broadway piece that opened in 1960 and ran
for 42 years and 17,162 performances. That show is “The Fantasticks.” And unlike big budget Broadway productions I’ve mentioned,
“The Fantasticks,” has a simple set, only five main characters, sparse musical accompaniment (a piano, a harp and drums), but a
familiar, irresistible story line.
Boy meets girl. Boy and
girl fall in love. Boy loses
girl. Boy and girl get back together. “The Fantasticks” also launched the
career of Jerry Orbach from “Law and Order” fame, as well as the popular song,
“Try to Remember,” which is just about the most beautiful song ever written. Listen
to Jerry Orbach sing “Try to Remember” the original cast album, and you’ll
understand why the show lasted for 42 years.
But there’s a another song in The Fantasticks that came to
mind when I read today’s text from Isaiah. In the second act, when the boy loses the girl, the fathers
of the estranged couple try to think up a plan to reconcile the estranged lovers. As it happens, both fathers are
enthusiastic gardeners so they sing a song about how raising vegetables is a
far easier task than raising children.
They sing:
Plant a radish.
Get a radish.
Never any doubt.
That's why I love vegetables;
You know what you're about!
Plant a turnip.
Get a turnip.
Maybe you'll get two.
That's why I love vegetables;
You know that they'll come through!
They're dependable!
They're befriendable!
They're the best pal a parent's ever known!
While with children,
It's bewilderin'.
You don't know until the seed is nearly
grown
Just what you've
sown.
There’s the same sort of parental bewilderment
and disappointment in the song we hear today in Isaiah. This is a love song sung by gardener
who has put his heart and soul into his fledgling vineyard. He sings about how he painstakingly dug
up the soil to make it rich and fertile.
He sings about how he carefully picked out every rock. Once the ground was prepared, he planted
the choicest vines. He put in
hedges and walls to protect the vineyard from every kind of intruder and built
a high tower so he could keep constant watch over the vines as they grew. Anticipating a generous yield of wonderful fruit, the
gardener even prepared a big vat for the wine the grapes would produce. All of this pleasant planting and
careful tending would surely yield exceptionally delicious fruit. How could this vineyard possibly
fail?. The gardener did everything
right.
But like all those country songs about love gone wrong, this
song from Isaiah takes a sad, sorry turn.
The beautiful grapes the gardener anticipated never grow. For his trouble and toil, all the
gardener gets is a few wild grapes that are gross and bitter and utterly
useless.
At this point in the song, the gardener turns to his
audience and asks that sad, sad question, “What more could I have done?” We all know the answer – nothing. Nothing. There’s nothing more the gardener could have done to get the
good grapes.
And indeed, that’s how it goes sometimes. In gardening. In raising children.
In careers and relationships.
Sometimes, you do everything right and despite your very best effort,
you wake up one day to find yourself with a bunch of bad grapes on your hands.
This was supposed to be a love song, but it is a love song
without a happy ending. But the
love song quickly changes into something quite different because the gardener
doesn’t just walk away, but gets really ticked off. Angry.
Furious. He will rip down
the protective walls and hedges, plow the whole thing under and let the plot go
back to seed and weeds. That’s what
the gardener will do. It’s what
the vineyard deserves for letting him down.
The gardener finally commands the clouds to hold back rain
and it becomes clear this isn’t just a story about a good vineyard gone
bad. We know what Isaiah is
getting at in this text. Duh. This is not a song about an ordinary
gardener, but a song about YHWH.
And this is no ordinary vineyard but the beloved children of the LORD of
hosts, which is the house of Israel, and its vines are the people of Judah.
And YHWH expected more from them. YHWH had always expected more from these people. These were YHWH’s chosen ones, the
people YHWH had loved and tended for generations. YHWH expected mishpat (justice), but instead the people
produced mishpach (bloodshed).
YHWH sought expected a harvest of tsedaqah (righteousness) but the people
created tse’aqah (cries).
Anyone who has ever poured his or her heart and soul into a
relationship only to have it crumble into dust knows that punch in the gut
feeling . And sometimes it is a
healthy thing to do what the gardener is doing here -- just step back and let
things be, let the relationship lie fallow for a season or two, and try to
resist the temptation to try to change a situation that has yielded nothing but
bitterness.
But stepping away does not mean the end of love. I think God does sometimes leave us to
our own devices, to stew in our own juices a bit, as my grandmother used to
say. But God’s love does not
abandon us, nor does God’s love ever end. It is always there, beckoning us back to life. God’s love is as steadfast as God’s
longing to see us yield the kind of fruit we were meant to yield. Even in the darkest shadows of Isaiah, there
is always a time of soothing healing. After a time of desolation, there is always tender and
gentle consolation. And after the
deepest loss and darkest grief comes the light of hope. One small flicker at a
time. The light always comes. God’s love does not end even in exile.
It always helps me to remember to whom Isaiah is
speaking. These are the people of
Israel, more specifically the people in the south of the country, of the tribe
of Judah. And the history of
Israel is all about a God of possibilities who somehow saw great promise in a
group of people. That God would
choose the Hebrew people certainly proves Paul’s point that God loves to use
the weak, the lowly and the foolish things of this world.
Only God could see the possibilities in a rag tag group of
people who began as a group of runaway slaves wandering around the desert, led
by a stuttering shepherd. Only God
would continue raining down manna and quail on a group of people who never
stopped whining and seldom said thank you for not being left on their own to
starve to death. Only God would
bring the Israelites back from the brink of what was often their self-inflicted disaster. Again and again and again.
Even after they reached the Promised Land, this group of refugees
never did become much of a super power. Instead, they often found themselves kicked around and
beaten up by a seemingly endless series of regional bullies. Oh they had their moments of triumph,
to be sure, and somehow these foreign nations never quite managed to absorb
Israel into their empires. The
story of God’s people is that they survived against all odds. In fact, I have Jewish friends who
begin every holiday dinner with this somewhat flip but wholly accurate
saying: “They tried to kill
us. It didn’t work. Let’s eat.”
In fact, it is safe to say that this little group of chosen
people had only one thing going for them -- that God saw something in them that
wasn’t at all apparent to anyone else.
God saw their potential – and sees our potential -- to become a people
of justice, of righteousness, a light to the world, a people of peace. In fact, God never has abandoned the
vineyard. In fact, God doubled down and entered into our overgrown, weedy garden in the human form of Jesus
Christ. And with that stroke of
divine optimism, we have been cut down and set free to blossom.
See, I believe that every person who is born holds holy
potential. You, me, all of us. Each one of us comes into the world as
God’s choice vines, planted in the rich and loomy soil of love. We need to stay connected to the
nurturing power of God’s care and attention to grow into something more than
our puny minds can imagine, We
need the nourishment that comes from our relationship to God and to one
another. We need to be fed with the
living bread that does not perish and the font of living water, which never
goes dry.
I can’t help but picture God as this wildly optimistic
gardener who goes overboard in lavishing care upon each one of us, fretting
over us, hoping for the best of us but never really knowing what might grow. And when we mess up – and yes, we do
mess up -- Jesus and the prophets tell us that there will be pruning and fire
and all sorts of trials that will be painful and all too real. God doesn’t
abandon us in those moments, but suffers with us. And when the smoke clears, God sees that there is always more
potential in us to keep growing.
This isn’t rosy, pie-in-the- sky optimism about suffering. This is the stuff of life. If you’re a gardener, you know the cycle
of creative joy and misery. You
plant. You prune. You dig up and move a plant that’s
failing in the hot sun and try it in a spot with a little more shade. You trim when a plant is
overgrown. Sometimes you let a
plot lay fallow to give it a chance to recover. God does the same with us…God keeps coaxing and challenging
and moving us forward.
I was reading this week about the wildfires that have plagued
the western states over the past several summers. On Colorado’s Front Range, near
Colorado Springs, a wildfire last year burned more than 116,000 acres of
forest, destroyed more than 600 homes and killed six people. It was a terrible, devastating event
that has, unfortunately, been repeated this summer in Colorado and other areas
of the country.[1]
But two months later, on the scorched forest floors of
Colorado’s Front Range, new aspen trees began sprouting up like crazy. This is extremely good news as aspen
trees in Colorado had been dying rapidly over the past ten years due to severe
drought which was at least partially responsible for uptick in forest fires. Aspens are an important part of healthy
forest because they are not as dense as pine trees and firs, and tend to open
up forests to light. And when
forests are more open, they are less likely to produce the sort of super fires
are difficult to control.
The cool thing about aspen trees is that their roots are
incredibly deep. Really, really
deep. So deep that even after a
super fire when the soil becomes too damaged to support other kinds of trees,
aspens are able to grow naturally once the fire is gone. Even in the midst of a totally burned
out forest of ashes and soot, brand new little aspen shoots just take off and
grow like crazy. All those
dormant aspen roots needed was a little space, a little light. It sounds terrible to us that it took a
crazy, awful wildfire to give those new trees what they needed to grow. But once they begin growing, those
little aspen trees will be the basis of a healthy, beautiful forest into the
future.
I think that is what we are to be as people and as a
church. Every life has dormant
times in which we lay low, waiting for the light to lead us into something
better. In those times, we are to
remain so deeply rooted in the love of God that we can withstand even the worst
wildfires of life that hurt like hell, yet somehow hold deep within the
potential for new beginning.
Toward the end of “The Fantasticks.” the narrator, played by Jerry Orbach, steps into the center of the stage. As a spotlight shines on him, he says simply:
“There is a curious paradox that no one can explain.
Who understands the secrets of the reaping of the grain?
Who understands why spring is born from winter's laboring
pain?
Or why we all must die a bit before we grow again?
I do not know the answer
I merely know it's true”
We do not know why bad things happen. We do not know why the fire comes or
why the harvest fails. We do not
know why our hard labors sometime result in precious little, or why we suddenly
find ourselves with blessings that seem to effortlessly fall into our laps.
But we do know that death is not the last word and never
will be. Resurrection is good news
for gardeners everywhere.
Resurrection is good news for parents and friends and lovers and
children. The reality of God’s love
is good news for all of us unlikely, ornery people that God has planted in this
time and this place, for the restoration of God’s whole garden, which is the
whole world. Thanks be to
God. Amen.
[1] “Sunlit
Sprouts Emerging from Colorado Burn Areas,” The Denver Post, accessed August
15, 2013. http://www.denverpost.com/environment/ci_21469126/sunlit-sprouts-emerging-from-colorado-burn-areas#
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