I Think it Will Grow!

Some days ago, we went to my favorite store, the Agway, because Marie wanted a hanging basket for the back porch.  While there, I looked around at all sorts of DRY stuff:  little brown & white nuggets, some in packets, some loose.  There were even some dry sticks–twigs?–for sale.  People were actually buying these!  Getting into the spirit of the moment, I too bought what seemed to be paper-wads but were advertized as onions.  Were we all being had?  In Agway we Trust.

Readings for the upcoming weekend begin with a message from God through Ezekiel:  “I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar….I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain….in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar.” (17:22-23)   God’s planting will be a haven for all birds, and  “all the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord.”  We think of this as a message to the Babylonian Exiles–or any oppressed who may wonder where God is.  There’s something comforting about perennial plants:  despite the rockets, despite the rhetoric, they’re coming back, they’re still here.  “The one who has a garden has a future.” (St. Hallmark?)

To read the whole of the assigned Epistle is just too much.  I’d rather limit it to the few verses of II Corinthians 5:6-10.  Paul stridently affirms, “So we are always confident….for we walk by faith, not by sight.”  We think of our spiritual journey through the Cloud of Unknowing:  stepping forth  into a fog-bank from the cave where we had sheltered from the stormy night.  We cannot see the path.  All we can do is to tightly hold the hand of One who Loves Us

St. Mark remembers that Jesus said,  “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” (4:26-27)  No one does, really; and it’s nice to have a mystery!  We can describe the process, even draw a gene-map and manipulate the breeding–but when all’s said & done, the actual maturity of a plant is a holy occasion.   A few generations ago, our ancestors called it “rogation”, and there was a special Sunday in the fall to rejoice in these agrarian wonders.  “We plow the fields and scatter the good seed on the land.”  “God, Whose Farm is All Creation.”

This morning we had our first strawberries from Marie’s magnificent bed, big and red and sweet!  Roses are again blooming on shoots from stumps that surely seemed dead, earlier this spring.  And for the first time since our welcome rains, little green shoots are appearing in the plot where I buried those paper-wads…  I think they will grow!

“All good gifts around us Are sent from heaven above;                                                                       Then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord for all [God’s] love.    –Matthias Claudius

God Bless Us, Every One               Horace Brown King