We’ve dug up (and down) to prepare our front yard to be a place for veggies, herbs, and flowers. It’s been a journey measured in shovelfuls, wrench twists, and gifted plants.
Last year I added a tag line to my emails: “Planting gardens in Babylon.” This line is part of God’s plea to a nation of captive people. They knew change would come – eventually. There would be more freedom. But passively they waited for their new exodus.
The overwhelming power of Babylon shook the foundations of their society. They felt a quiet gnawing powerlessness because appeasement didn’t lead to peace with the power hungry. As a community, they turned inward as their children became beguiled by the power, privilege, and position of this foreign value system. All of these layers of grief brought a collective acedia – a listless torpor characterized by a lack of care or concern for one’s position or condition (or so the Apple dictionary defines this ineffable listlessness).
God’s solution for the community was to call God’s people back to the memory of the very first covenant between God and people. Humanity was offered the bountiful table of the world. For their part humanity would be fruitful themselves and become master craftsmen of the earth.
Fruitful is such a vast word – it is creative and patient and uncertain. To become a master craftsman requires time, willingness to learn and adapt, and experience with failure and fortitude. God invites these people to remember who they were – creative, adaptable, familiar with fortitude, and patient. It turned them toward a universal hopefulness. Hopefulness nurtures a vision for an abundant, joy-filled community.
Our current American Christianity has a gnostic streak which values personal God time over listening to other’s lived experiences with a prayer oriented heart. It holds moralization over action and alternates between withdrawing from that which might taint to bending others to a moral vision through political power. In contrast, God’s call to the captive people is to be very present in practical not powerful ways, to live in spaces requiring nuance and a poster of learning and adaptation, and to look for the common good over moral power.
I never thought a year ago that Daniel and I would embrace our Gen X characteristics so much as to plant a literal garden in our front yard. But here we are offering what we can into the covenant God has with humanity. The full phrase from passage isI “Plant gardens and eat the food that grows there.” Farmers know such hope – the hope that food will grow.
As we shift the last half ton of mushroom compost to augment our sandy soil, our beings shift to the hopeful, expectancy. This hope isn’t the hopes-and-prayers kind of hope. It is the defiant, practical hope found in cupped holding precious, tiny, easily lost seeds. It is talking with neighbors about how to navigate the humidity, pests, and seasons. It is found in poking tiny seeds into soil in less than certain conditions.