A garden lesson
Like a plant needs water to grow, we need God's living word to flourish.
A friend’s son recently wanted to know if a watermelon was alive, so he took out a stethoscope and listened for a heartbeat.
You can see the logic. The melon grew on a vine, and the vine was alive. It put down reaching roots, its leaves responded to the sun, and it needed water to grow. And, once cut, brought into the kitchen and set down on the counter, the melon didn’t look like a dead thing. It was a vivid green and strong with an almost pregnant heaviness. A sweet summer egg.
But no heartbeat. No movement. Not even if you watched carefully and waited a long time. Maybe there are different ways of being alive.
A ripe melon, cut from the vine, can’t grow, but it can make more melons. It holds life within.
Life abundant
One summer, we came back from a long vacation to find our garden running wild. That surprised me. I’d heard the weather had been dry and hot at home so I expected yellowed grass and wilted plants, but the clay soil must have held onto moisture despite the weather because the plants were thriving. The beans had over-run their trellis and discovered the sunflowers. The rose was heavy with bright blooms and hips. And then there was the zucchini.
The word itself is almost enough. Zucchini. You can see it, can’t you? Vast and sprawling, covering the lawn. There are bright yellow flowers trumpeting their victory, and wide, bristled leaves, spotted with traces of milky mildew but photosynthesizing to beat the band nevertheless. And, yes, one enormous green canoe.
Where I live in the UK, gardeners have a name for these zucchini left too long on the vine: marrow. And luckily, cooks have come up with plenty of marrow recipes. Marrow chutney, marrow curry, marrow soup, chocolate marrow cake, baked and stuffed marrow, and marrow-ginger jam. My enormous zucchini deliciously ended up in most of those. I chopped, skinned and shredded it, pureed, processed and put some in the freezer and some in jars. It fed us for a long time. And, though tough-skinned and weirdly shaped, it felt like life abundant. Oil at Hanukkah. Loaves and fishes. John’s strong word of Christ: “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly.”
Already among us
We talk about finding the Living Word when reading scripture. When I was studying theology, we explored the concept of God’s active presence in our reading and what it meant to encounter the Living Word in texts both ancient and new. What kind of life was it? How did it meet us? How could we respond together? Individually? Authentically?
Because there are times when God feels far away and when God’s absence is too loudly present among us. We become the unwatered garden. The ones who must reach and search.
But we do not need to search far. The writer of the gospel of Luke reminds us that the kingdom of God is here already among or within us. We might also press the stethoscope to our own hearts and listen, confident we will hear its continuing thrum.
