Tending God's Garden (sermon, August 30, 2009)

Song of Solomon 2:18-23
James 1:17-27


While I was on study leave, I had three goals: to read a book of theology, to read a book for pleasure, and to attend as many worship services and lectures as possible during our week at the Chautauqua Institution. I was ready to receive, to be spiritually fed and nurtured.

During our week at Chautauqua, Tony Campolo, a well-known evangelical preacher delivered a sermon each day in worship. The first day, I showed up eager to be comforted by a good sermon...and to my dismay, right off the bat, Campolo made it quite clear that he was not there to make us feel good. He was not there to make us comfortable. He was there to get the message across that if your faith is just about your personal relationship with Jesus, then you are missing the mark, because Jesus was all about helping others, especially the poor. He told story after story of visiting impoverished inner cities and developing countries and getting personally involved in the lives of the world’s neediest people. One of these stories continues to haunt me. One morning, he told us, he rode on the back of a truck through the streets of Haiti. The men he was with would stop whenever they saw a group of children sleeping on the streets; not an unusual sight in this poor country. They got off the truck and shook the children awake. If a child did not wake up, they picked up the lifeless body and put it on the truck. When they returned to the starting point they threw the corpses onto a bonfire and burned up the bodies of these children who had died during the night from hunger and exposure.

Hoping to balance Campolo’s proclamation with a word of homp, I turned to my book of theology. The book, Saving Jesus from the Church by Robin Meyers, offers an explanation why, in a world with so many people who claim to believe in Jesus, a man who constantly reached out to help the poor and marginalized, why there are so many Christians and yet still so much poverty and suffering in the world. Meyers says it’s because we Christians have become more concerned with theology, with who Jesus is and what we believe, than with following Jesus. He says we’ve become more concerned with believing in Jesus than with imitating his actions, actions that poured out God’s love for others, especially those rejected by mainstream society.

Fortunately, my pleasure reading was a wonderful book of nonfiction called Three Cups of Tea, co-authored by Greg Mortenson. The book tells the story of Mortenson’s promise to build a school in a tiny, impoverished village high in the mountains of Pakistan and how that promise grew into a non-profit foundation that has now built hundreds of schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, seeking to bring peace and prosperity to that region by ensuring quality education for its children and especially its girls.

But by the time I finished this book, I was more disheartened than ever. Here was a man who, although raised by Christian missionaries in Africa, didn’t ever talk about his faith. Instead Mortenson works tirelessly, sacrificing material comforts, time with his family, and often his own life, to bring the gift of education to Central Asia’s poorest and remotest regions. Apart from describing Mortenson’s missionary parents, the book says nothing about Jesus, and yet here is a man who lives a more faithful Christian life than many of us who attend church every Sunday and who claim that our identity as children of God and followers of Jesus is the most important part of who we are.

Then, after all that, I read the lectionary passage for this week from James: “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” Then this: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

That’s when I decided I’d had enough. I just didn’t think I could stand here before you and tell you to live up to these words. I mean, we’re in a recession, we’re all doing the best we can to get through the day, to take care of our loved ones and pay the mortgage. And, of course, in ways big and small, we do act out our faith here at Firestone Park Presbyterian -- we run a food pantry, contribute to Good Neighbors, reach out ot our local elementary school, and contribute to global mission organizations. Can we really be expected to do more right now? I don’t know about you, but for me, going to Haiti or Pakistan or Africa just isn’t an option at this point, even though I really do care, even though I sincerely believe that following Jesus means that we have to care for the poor and marginalized, the widows and orphans of the world.

There’s an old Calvin and Hobbes comic in which Calvin says to Hobbes, “Do you think our morality is defined by our actions or by what’s in our hearts?” Hobbes replies, “I think our actions show what’s in our hearts.” In the next frame, Calvin stares ahead blankly and says, “I resent that.”

Well, just when I decided I resented all this talk about not just believing but living out our beliefs among the poor and needy and marginalized, I read the Old Testament lectionary passage from Song of Songs, the one time in the three-year lectionary cycle this book appears. Yes! I thought. I’m off the hook. I don’t have to preach about Jesus’ command to serve the poor. I don’t have to tell people that the only way they can truly express their identity as followers of Jesus is to reach out, literally, to the needy, unsavory, rejected members of our community. I can just preach a sermon about sex!

*****

There’s really no way of getting around it, even though plenty of scholars have tried. The Song of Songs is a book about love, the mutual, carnal love between two human beings. Yes, it’s a book about sex, but not the kind of sex we usually see in our culture -- sex sought after and craved simply for the physical satisfaction it offers.

What these sensual poems are about is the self-giving, self-sacrificial love between two people who love each other and who are passionately committed to each other. This is a love defined, not just by passion, but by faithfulness and mutuality. There is no hierarchy in this relationship; in fact, in the whole of the Song of Songs, the woman speaks more than the man. At one point she even reverses the punishment in the garden of Eden, when God tells Eve that “your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). In the Song of Songs, the woman declares, “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.”1

The very fact that this erotic poetry is in the Bible, even though God is never once mentioned, is a reminder to us that there is nothing in our lives that is outside of God’s creation. God created us with the capacity for physical pleasure through many means -- including eating, playing, exercising, and yes, having sex. Reading this book of the Bible reminds us that, as with any of God’s gifts, sex can be distorted and used in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others or it can be used in such a way that it is life-giving, satisfying, and deeply meaningful. Here we see a love in which two people are passionately committed to the welfare of the other -- and one of the ways they provide for each other’s welfare is by enjoying God’s gift of sexuality.

There is wonderful garden imagery in the Song of Songs -- in this passage we hear about flowers blooming, the fig tree putting forth fruit, and vines with fragrant blossoms. Of course, much of the greatest love poetry evokes the wonders and beauties of nature, because these things are so pleasing to us. But, like true love, nature has to be tended. A garden left untended will be overgrown by weeds just as a relationship left untended will be choked by all the other things in life that occupy our time -- work, daily chores, financial worries. Like gardens, relationships require commitment and hard work to produce the most beautiful flowers and the most delicious fruit.

Do you see what’s happened? Even preaching about sex isn’t getting me off the hook, because it turns out these passages from Song of Songs and from James actually point to the same thing -- the importance of hard work and commitment, not just in our relationships with the people we love most dearly but also in our relationship to God, the God who created us. The God who loves us passionately and unconditionally. The God who calls us to love each other passionately and unconditionally.

In fact, its not just the Song of Songs that uses gardening metaphors. Garden imagery crops up in James when the author writes that we must rid ourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness -- sure sounds like weeding to me -- and welcome the implanted word that has the power to save our souls.

Did you catch that? “The implanted word that has the power to save our souls.” As I studied this passage I learned that this is the only place in the entire New Testament where this word “implanted” is used.2 It means that something is inborn or innate. What the author is saying is that the ability to be followers of Jesus and not just people who talk about what we believe; to be, in James’ words, doers of the word, not just hearers, this ability is already in us because God created us with this ability. It’s not something we have to go out and find, it’s not something the church will give us in exchange for coming to worship every Sunday or writing the church a check; it’s something we already have. Not only that, but when we use this ability we actively participate in our salvation. This is not works-based righteousness. This is not earning our salvation. This is about the joy we experience when we follow Jesus by loving and serving others because that is what we were created to do. Just as exploring our sexuality in faithful, committed relationships brings us pleasure and satisfaction, so does using our innate ability to serve and love God by serving and loving others.

Tony Campolo now teaches at a Eastern University in Philadelphia. During one of his sermons at the Chautauqua he told another story about a student who, inspired by Campolo’s lectures, felt called to work with the people of inner city Philadelphia. Well, even though Eastern University is a Christian college and even though this student was raised in a Christian home, the student’s father was not happy about how his son was spending his free time. He was so upset about it, in fact, that he came to see Campolo in person, storming into his office in a rage, dragging his son with him.

“Campolo, what do you think you’re doing to my son?!” he bellowed. “You got him into all this with all your radical talk about helping the poor and now he’s out there on the streets giving away his money to pimps and whores and who knows what else. I gave him a good education and look what he’s doing with it. Don’t get me wrong, Campolo, I don’t mind being Christian...up to a point!”

The son looked up at his father and said, “Gee, Dad, could that point be the cross?”

God loves each of us unconditionally, no matter how we choose to live out our faith, but if our faith does not move us to find ways, however small, to help the poor and the marginalized, then it is little more than a mask we wear. As Hobbes put it, it is our actions that show what is in our hearts. So we have to do something. We have to find that point where being a Christian is no longer comfortable for us and we have to go past it...because that point is the cross Jesus said we all must bear. That means we must reach out to strangers who don’t look like us or smell like us or share our values. We have to put ourselves into situations that will make us uncomfortable, situations where we come face to face with the injustice and poverty in the world, like Tony Campolo did in Haiti as the pile of dead children in the back of the truck grew. And frankly, with the internet, there are plenty of ways to fight poverty and injustice without leaving our living rooms. There are many wonderful organizations -- World Vision, Care, the Central Asia Institute, to name a few -- that we can contribute to or volunteer for, especially if we aren’t able to travel to the world’s neediest places. We also must remember that we don’t have to travel far to find people in desperate need of help and of experiencing, in concrete ways, God’s love.

God has created us all to be great lovers -- and not just of the people we personally know and love. As Christians, we believe that every human being on this planet is a child of God, created by God, and so every human being should receive our love. And who among us would not want our loved ones to have -- at the very least! -- their most basic needs met: food, water, clothing, shelter, respect, and the opportunity to learn and to give back to this world. Love is not limited. God’s love is not limited and neither is ours. When we reach out to others with mercy and compassion and help them however we can, we tend the seed God planted within us, and we participate with Jesus in the sacred work of tending God’s garden, the world. May that garden someday be a place where all human beings can live in peace and safety and passionate, joyful, mutual love.