The Lord is My Gardener

For decades I had a vegetable garden. There is nothing like fresh vegetables prepared while they are still warm from the sun. In recent years a friend kindly let me use a plot at his farm for a vegetable garden. But the last few years my arthritic shoulder has become so painful that I can no longer do the digging, hoeing and weeding. A surgeon wants me to get a shoulder replacement, but for the time being I am insisting on keeping my original parts.

I can’t do the vegetable gardening, but I can do some flower gardening around my house. I am not an expert on flowers. I could not tell you the names of most of them without looking at the little nametags I place in the ground next to them. Truth be told I don’t really care what they are called. It is their beauty I am interested in.

For that reason I often let weeds grow around my house without any feeling of guilt. Weeds have flowers too – blue, yellow, pink, purple. They are beautiful, when you get past the label. I enjoy seeing flowering weeds poking through the gravel around my front door as much as the flowers planted in flower beds. They remind me of the beauty of tenacity. Flowers remind me who I am. I sprang from the earth just like these blossoming plants.

I just started rereading Alan Watts’ book entitled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. I first read it over fifty years ago, and I find it just as insightful now. Very early in the book he says this: "We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As an ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”

The Bible teaches this same truth. Genesis says that Adam was made from the soil of Eden. The name Adam is both the Hebrew word for human and the masculine form of the feminine word for earth. We emerge from the earth like a baby comes from the womb. According to the biblical creation story God formed us from dirt and breathed into us the Breath of Life. Humans are a union of Divine breath and earthy matter.

We come from this planet; we are not strangers and sojourners on it. God says to the primordial Man, “dust you are and to dust you will return.” The wisdom teacher of Ecclesiastes agrees, saying at death “the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” We are earth enlivened by God’s Spirit.  

The apostle Paul goes so far as to say, “You are God's garden.” Genesis says that God planted humans in the Garden of Eden: “Now the Lord God planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.” God is a gardener. We are God’s plantings. The Lord is my Gardener, I shall not want.

We are like flowers. Yet people too often feel like weeds. People feel like intruders in Eden, hiding from God and one another. Consequently people act like thorns and thistles, not realizing that thorns and thistles are as much divine creations as roses and lilies.

In our ignorance we play the role of noxious weeds by undermining the ecosystem of earth. According to the Bureau of Land Management, “Legally, a noxious weed is any plant designated by a Federal, State or county government as injurious to public health, agriculture, recreation, wildlife or property.” 

That is how we act. We are spearheading a Sixth Extinction, destroying species at an alarming rate and quickly making the earth uninhabitable for our own species. We are orchestrating a climate Armageddon. All because we have forgotten who and what we are.

It is the job of the church to remind people who we are. We are spirit expressed through earth, priceless expressions of divine life. That is what it means to be made in the image of God. That is the good news of the gospel! Yet it seems like the church is proclaiming just the opposite. The church preaches that humans are like thorns and thistles deserving to be gathered up and burned in divine hellfire.

We are divine flowers, not noxious weeds.  Each person is a beautiful expression of God, regardless of the denigrating labels that people attach to others, inferring they are somehow lesser beings. In teaching us how to live, Jesus instructed us to “Consider the lilies of the field.”  One could do worse than meditate on flowers on a warm June day.