cultivating hope

Blessed be God who animates our lives and offers us the seeds of hope which are nurtured by God’s love and mercy always. amen

Hope must be rooted in concrete realities. The Christian Reality is God: mercy justice love and compassion are real and make up the soil in which hope takes root. The fruits or produce from this growth are: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. I always throw generosity and compassion in there! 

They are often improbable results in this world. Yet as improbable as they are God has the ability to cause them to flourish in the unlikeliest of circumstances.

In these difficult times of covid and racism run rampant we might be tempted to think there is no good soil to nurture hope and faith. We might turn away from the parable of the sower and soils as too depressing in our desperation. 

Today, however, the lectionary is like a nursery of nutrients to encourage us to till and sow, inch by inch, row by row, our interior gardens. AND a reminder that in our gardening we are never alone, never autonomous, we are always gardening with the Master Gardener, our Creator God. 

The poetic prophecy of Isaiah is filled with hope in the form of strong and vital tree metaphors. The cypress and the myrtle thrive in the realm of God’s salvation in spite of briar and thorn, themselves metaphors for sin and greed or separation from the Divine.

Moreover what is particularly striking for me in this week’s reading of Isaiah is the blessed assurance of the word “shall”.  Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle. Shall is used ten times in last two verses alone! There is no equivocation; no perhaps or maybe. By virtue of God’s promise and our covenant, seeds of hope will indeed come to fruition. The Garden will be restored, the Kingdom come.

We have but to “come to water”; turn to God; lean into and incline our hearts to the One for whom all is possible.

As I ponder Isaiah and the parable of the soils in Matthew I am reminded of one of the most striking features of the landscapes in New England: trees and shrubs growing out of huge massive rock structures. Full growth, full color, full life. Were we not in this strange time of protected in person worship I would be offering each of you a postcard image of this. We would practice visio divina and perhaps be drawn into the infinite possibilities of God’s creation. 

But in your mind’s eye try to picture an evergreen tree springing from a barely perceptible crack in a mountain or from massive rock on the coast of Maine or along the Housatonic. The irony which underlies our lives and our lectionary today is that growth, life, come from brokenness and cracks. Somehow fertile soil has accumulated in this opening and a green tree grows. Somehow seeds of hope have sprung in our very beings. 

Now imagine our souls. Imagine our interior gardens which we may have ignored tending as we were overcome and overwhelmed with anxiety. Imagine the seeds of hope entering the vulnerable places of our souls and growing, watered by prayer, sheltered by compassion, fed by womb like mercy.

The songs sung (or played) today by Isaiah, by the psalmist, by Matthew, and by Sherry point to a God for whom all things are possible, who makes all things new, and who is an amazing gardener. They point to a God who takes our brokenness and transfigures it into sites for healing and life. 

Again, these are not just dreams but pregnant hopes. These are assurances by virtue of our covenant with God. 

These songs are the harmonies of freedom and mercy and justice toward which we journey. These songs celebrate the fruits of sowing seeds of hope even in times of despair. These seeds are watered by God’s love and mercy and will grow to be the cedars and the myrtles, the prophets and the missioners and disciples, 

even amidst briars and thorns. 

Nothing can choke or injure once under God’s tender care.