“Let them grow up together”
You remain invited for workshop hospitality Wednesdays, 5-7pm. I’ll have pretzels and cold drinks. We can pray, visit, chat, or work on some project you may have in mind.
Here is a sermon I preached recently. (My preaching style is not linear, more a jostling of the imagination. I generally don’t tell people what to do. Nonetheless, I attempt to evoke real and practical local matters of life on earth, and preach the need to pray, to find the still place within, or ‘practice the presence of God’ if our everyday efforts for peace, justice and beauty are going to be worth much.)
A Homily Preached at Church of the Holy Spirit, Vashon Island
ailanthus
I went for a good walk back in June with some students and program fellows. The walk up through the urban park in the east end of Pittsburgh was a big part of the lesson that day. My main instruction to the students was to slow down for 30 minutes and let something find you. We noticed the beautiful smell of invasive honeysuckle, and the subtle blossoming of wild grape, hackberry trees, a variety of oaks, poison ivy, quiet, the stability and real presence of old trees, a strange and rolling land of hills, and more.
One of the program fellows noticed two trees growing side by side. At first he took them to be ailanthus, tree of heaven, an invasive tree there that harbors the destructive invasive spotted lanternfly. But he looked, and realized that what he was seeing was two different trees that look very similar. One was ailanthus, and one was black walnut, a native nut bearing tree. And by seeing and sharing this, he raised up the groups inner capacity to see, and distinguish realities out in this world. I was a happy teacher.
black walnut
It wasn’t ailanthus and black walnut that cropped up in this gospel, but something like it. Jesus tells a tale about a farmer who sowed wheat in his field, and while the people were sleeping, a hostile someone sowed weeds, more precisely darnel, a weedy wheatgrass into the field. This weed is a lot like quackgrass, whose creeping rhizomes, underground spreading stems that grow straight thru potatoes like a nail-You gardeners know well. Well, the people woke up one day and saw two plants where they thought there was only one. Suddenly the field, their lives, the world, their moral and ecological compass, were all more complicated. What were they to do under the pressure of this impending harvest failure, and the deep frustrations and deprivations it would bring? Weed it all out? No, says the farmer, let them grow together, and when the harvest comes, then separate them, and burn the weeds…they’ll make good, potash rich fertilizer too.
What the the farmer brings them is the patience of his presence, calmly communicating to their emotional being a similar patience and reduction of anxiety. The farmer gives them the gift of time to learn new ways. After all, they couldn’t tell the difference between the two plants when they were young, so what chance did they stand of distinguishing between the weeds and the wheat with hoes in hand, grubbing out one without the other. Instead the farmer gives them a time to watch, to watch, to become acquainted with these two plants. Next year they will know the little differences of form, they’ll know how to weed the field. And they will maybe also notice other things, indeed even gifts and graces that came in letting the two grow up together, the good and the bad, the native and the invasive.
weeds and wheat, Garfield Community Farm, “You are not your flaws”
The parable might be asking us to look at the world around us as the the climate changes, and ecosystem changes, and human and all creatures must move, adapt, and take part in the saving activity of God throughout creation, beginning near you. And it asks us to start and return each day to notice, to seeing what is real, to cultivating an inner watchfulness, an alertness. Patience when fear or despair lead us to precipitate and unseasonable action. Openness when our desire for easy answers, political tidiness and moral purity close us off to seeking and building deeper and more lasting relationships of peace and beauty and justice. Patience and openness and attention to real things, even and especially when we fear failure or experience overwhelming frustration. The whole creation groans and labors under frustration and futility says the Apostle Paul, so we join the whole creation in solidarity. So then, when we wake up to a reality more complex, and difficult than we had been equipped to face, we can face these experiences as invitations to grow in wisdom and love.
And prayer is our daily practice, our commitment to look again, and see those realities in God’s wisdom and love. How have you come to let yourself do so? Pausing to pray with psalms and scripture is one good way to stop and ask the farmer of the universe for wisdom, guidance, compassion. Or maybe you sketch, like with a pencil or crayon. You could draw your cat, or a bird out the window, or two trees by your door. What more do you ‘see’, in what ways does it expand your heart and imagination. Or, stop along the beach at low tide in wonder at all the different cockles and clams, the variety God has made all mixed up. You could look at their shells and say with Jacob “here is the gate of heaven and I didn’t know it!”
Or look out in the church garden and notice that those trees you thought were all one are actually douglas fir and sequoias, california redwoods and giant sequoias. Before some of us were even born, someone planted redwoods out there among the alder, maple, firs and cedars. And some people these days suggest there are three options, so far as planting trees and climate change goes west of the cascades: plant douglas firs and hope for the best, plant sequoias because climate change is a foregone outcome, or plant both, and let them grow up together. In time, following that option we might see an unexpected harvest, guided by the cooling wisdom and burning love of the One who tends the universe, with all the angels.
douglas fir
california redwood