Loading...This evening, we are gathered here at Grace Episcopal to celebrate. There is a new Rector, April. There is a great sense of completion and job well done by the Rector Search Committee and Vestry. And, as we have heard echoed from Holy Scripture this evening, both the people of Grace and April and Drew understand the significance of preparing long before the time that is before us now.
All the readings from Holy Scripture this evening speak of land and planting and preparing and proper cultivation and a long haul approach to living in right relationship with creation. When God makes covenant, it is never simply a Me and Jesus, human and divine agreement. The land, and its proper care, also has a say in that covenant. And you and I are to be that voice for the land.
If the idea that our caring of land possesses a spiritual value to it is a radical idea, then it shows just how poorly we have read Scripture and interpreted the life of Christian discipleship. Ellen Davis, in her book, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, patiently takes the reader through a close reading of numerous Biblical texts and shows convincingly that when people live rightly with land, God is pleased and life for all flourishes. The healthy land is a sign of a spiritual health, too. The opposite is also true—when we abuse land, spoil it, taking more than it can give, then God is displeased, and our communal future is in jeopardy.
You may have seen the bumper sticker before that says, with typically emphatic font, GET RIGHT WITH GOD. I believe Ellen Davis would suggest amending the bumper sticker to GET RIGHT WITH GOD…BECOME A GARDENER.
People of Grace, I am pleased to know your new Rector is a gardener, both a real, hands in the soil, seed catalog carrying gardener and a theological and pastoral one, too. That means your new priest understands the covenant of God and people and place. And it means April understands the long haul approach to life and life together and a common life that can grow deep roots.
A wise gardener does not simply grow a crop. They know the real work is to feed the soil.
We live in a season when many people prefer to grow a quick crop, to produce a hurried outcome, regardless of what it does to the soil. So, the CEO makes short term decisions that benefits the stock price but does not benefit the true long-term health of the company and the workers.
Or, in the Church, we too sometimes focus on the quick payoff of a rushed crop at the expense of the soil’s health. For every apostle Paul, who understood that a community needs to be rooted in grace and mercy and joy and forgiveness and love, there have been more than a few in the Elmer Gantry mold who sought to bedazzle and mislead and hurt the believing innocent. The impressive crop at the expense of a now dead land is never worth it.
It requires all of us to experience a daily conversion to the belief that feeding the soil is more essential than rushing the crop. It is not simply our children who are impatient and want it now. You and I, no matter how we dress it up, can also give in to the desire for now, for self, for flash and color and new.
Your Rector is new but she is not new to the work of priesthood or gardening. April comes from a family of gardeners and so knows the work in an intuitive sense. For her, it is less a hobby, more simply how you are to live in God’s world.
I also find it instructive that April was ordained to the priesthood on the feast day of Mary Magdalene. You may recall Mary Magdalene first encounters the Resurrected Jesus in a garden. At first, she believes him to be the gardener.
Now, I don’t take that to mean Mary Magdalene lacked faith. I take it that Mary Magdalene knew where she was. She was standing in a garden. So, if you are guessing the identity of a stranger, and you are standing in a garden, then a gardener is a good guess.
But when Jesus calls her by name, she knows it is Jesus. However, I believe Mary Magdalene was not all wrong on her first guess. Our life with Jesus is a life forever, not simply one hothouse season. Jesus came to us in order to feed us good things, real things, food that would satisfy. So, it is fitting to discover the Resurrection in a garden.
So, your new Rector knows how to feed soil. When it comes to the feeding of the soil of a parish church, that means there are many things April will do that will appear to look as if she isn’t doing much. Like listening to you--when you are really listening, the one listening can appear to be quite passive. But I’ve heard April say and I would agree that real listening to each other’s stories is a counter-cultural act.
We live in a social media age when there is much communicating but I am less sure about how much listening we are doing. My new favorite New Yorker cartoon has a young man and a young man seated at a table. The young woman is reading her laptop screen while the young man is wearing earbuds. The young woman says, “I feel as if everybody is podcasting but nobody’s podlistening.” There are lots of stories, but who will listen?
I believe your new Rector will listen because she knows how to tend soil, how to grow good things over time. Real health and real life together can’t be rushed.
That also means this season is an invitation for you all to listen to April and her stories, too. They are stories about place, stories about grief and the loss of parents much too young. They are stories about mutual love and care that April and Drew practice in their vocations and in their life together. Listen to April as she will listen to you. Feed the soil of each other.
Just like April has been preparing for this time, the same is true for Grace Church. You all for many years have cared for land and place and have fed soil and shared food, not simply to be hospitable but as an act of faith, an embodiment of the belief that Grace Church is situated in a place and time, in a neighborhood were people hunger, both for good food and for God’s unmerited grace. For some time, it has been known that Grace feeds people. So, continue in the way and the work you have already undertaken.
In feeding people, you have fed others who have known bitter fruit shared in other houses of worship. For some time, Grace has been a place where many people have been able to experience the God who seeks to make covenant with all of creation, including all the people God has created.
Grace has been a parish that knows the altar extends beyond the sanctuary out into the soil where food can grow and all can be fed. And you have called a Rector who believes that, too. So, while your work together will be new, it is a work that you both have been practicing for some time.
In Jeremiah, the prophet uses an image of a tree planted wisely near water to suggest what it looks like when we learn to trust God and when our assurance is in God’s life. Even if the tree is planted wisely near the water so that roots can grow close to the stream, seasons of drought will still come at some time. But when the drought comes, the tree will be prepared for the dry time well before the time is dry.
Tonight, we celebrate that a good gardener and a good garden have found each other. Tonight is like a season of rain falling at just the right time and when the sun comes the next day but not in an oppressive way.
But we also acknowledge tonight our belief in the future of Grace and April. In days to come, when a drought appears, if you all have planted well and patiently together, if you have learned together to grow for the long haul, then the drought will not overwhelm you. Instead, it will be a time to give thanks for all the work you did before the drought appeared.
Click here to watch the service.
As Ephesians reminds us, it will be a season to give thanks that the crops being grown here at Grace will have been rooted and grounded in love. Love is a healthy and living soil. Such love is both divine and human. It is divine because the first source of such love is God. And it is human because our love is also added to the foundation of God’s love. Our love, because it is always imperfect, is a kind of compost. Taken together over time, however, with nothing thrown away as insignificant or unimportant, our love matures and grows more deeply into God’s love, into God’s life.
The Resurrection was first recognized in a garden. And our ability to grasp the wonder of God’s grace is most easily recognized when our imperfect work is added to God’s perfect work and we are invited to eat the miracle of bread and wine, to share the produce from this soil and God’s blessing.
People of Grace, April, all of us gathered here tonight with you look forward to see what you all will grow together.
