Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka

Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Daniel 1:1-17; Luke 8:4-15

Here we are in the second week of the Season of Creation, and it seems appropriate to remember one of the reasons for the Season of Creation – it is critically important for us as people who take the Bible seriously to be people who are in relationship with the natural world. It has only been recently that more than half the world is living in or near cities – as this urbanization continues, natural images will be less and less effective as points of reference. Agricultural metaphors will be decreasingly meaningful. For example, there is an expression that probably every one of us here has heard often: a tough row to hoe. This example is drawing from agricultural or gardening imagery. It describes a row of plants that is (for whatever reason) difficult to hoe. The idiom describes a difficult challenge – although it appears that these days what’s difficult is to get the metaphor right. Again and again I hear people say something about a “tough road to hoe” – whatever that would mean. I heard it again this week from a gubernatorial candidate in another state – who really is having a challenge if she is trying to weed asphalt with a garden hoe.

The Bible is full of natural and agricultural imagery, and to the degree that we are out of touch with the natural world, or with agricultural examples, we will not understand the Bible in the same way as we do when the examples are familiar. When Jesus talks about the sower planting seeds – he is not intending to use an exotic example. It is important for us to remain grounded in a relationship to the Earth, pun intended, if we are to receive God’s Word to us in the Bible. And so, one of the reasons for the Season of Creation is to help us remain close to nature, and the earth, because our relationship with God’s creation is one of the texts from which the Bible repeatedly draws.

I really thought that as we celebrated the plant kingdom, I’d be talking with you about something like deforestation, or how genetically-modified-organisms are a threat to the God-given biodiversity that provides such richness to the world. And those things are important, but as I reflected all week on plants – ferns, flowers and trees, vegetables, fruits and grains, plants that grow in sun and shade and sand and sea, I found myself coming back again and again to some pretty simple commonalities across the biodiversity of the plant kingdom: plants grow…and they grow into what they already are, and the variety is important.

This morning’s stories really illustrate that growth is a natural process, that it is the normative process involving plants when things are as they should be. First, looking at the story of Daniel – this is really a story for our time, isn’t it?? The story of Daniel is written about the period of the exile, when Babylon had attacked the southern kingdom of Judah, and taken many of the Jewish people out of Judah to Babylon. The young men Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, asked to be excused from eating the rich foods that were customarily eaten in the King’s palace so that they could eat just vegetables and water. And at the end of ten days, these four looked healthier and more robust (as Eugene Peterson translates it) than the other young men in the court – eating the simple food of the earth created the conditions for healthy growth. In the other story, about the sower, Jesus tells the story of the man sowing seeds, and how when they land on rock they don’t grow, or when surrounded by weeds, or carried off by birds, but when landing in soil, they grow healthy and strong. He is using this example as a parable, and it works well as a parable, but my point about the nature examples in general is that they only work when we really are in tune with nature and farming ourselves. So I want to set aside the deeper point that Jesus is making, for today, and just look at the example. The point of the example is that when conditions are right, growth is normal. Plants grow.

It’s one of the essential attributes of plants – otherwise an expression such as “growing like a weed” wouldn’t make sense, or “bloom where you are planted” (because blooming is part of the growth cycle of flowering plants). The story Jack and the Beanstalk depends on our knowing that beans grow…but not as they have grown in the story. And plants grow to be what they are: as James writes in his letter, “Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs?” All we really expect of plants is that they do what they are: an apple tree should yield apples, a cornstalk should provide ears of corn, an oak tree should provide shade and acorns, a flowering cherry provides beautiful blossoms and a red-grained hardwood. Jesus cursed a fig tree that wasn’t bearing figs – a fig tree should bear figs. We are supposed to be who we are. But oddly enough, we humans, who think of ourselves usually as among the more sophisticated or advanced of God’s creations, we have the hardest time doing this simple thing: being who we are and growing into that. Plants can do it – we don’t always do it as well. Same thing with growing – what we see in the plant kingdom is that growth is normative. Plants grow. Growth is a part of life. But we resist it, often because growth is accompanied by change. What’s the saying? Aging is mandatory, growth is optional. But I think part of the problem for us is that we don’t know who we are, and so it’s hard to know what growth should look like.

One of my favorite plants is the Monotropa uniflora, also known as the ghost plant, or Indian pipes. Some people mistakenly think it is a fungus, but it is a plant in the same large family as cranberries, blueberries, azalea and rhododendron. What is most obviously unique about Indian pipes is that unlike most plants, they aren’t green. I’ve included a photo of them (in the sermon file) – as you can see, they are white, with some black flecks. Obviously, if an Indian Pipe were thinking about itself in comparison to other plants, it would probably define itself by what it is lacking: it has no chlorophyll. But there are positive attributes as well: it grows well in dark places where other plants have trouble growing, it has a unique appearance, it is beautiful. Why define it by what it’s not? It’s not an oak tree, it’s not a grapevine, and it’s not seaweed. But knowing that doesn’t necessarily give us a clear sense of what it is: it is a small plant that is a myco-heterotroph. It grows in a parasitic relationship with a fungus that in turn gets its energy from trees – so ultimately, the Indian Pipe does rely on chlorophyll to grow. It is a beautiful little plant that grows as part of a larger system in the forest.

And the Indian Pipe does grow – but its growth is very unlike other plants – it never turns green. Growth can look different depending on what one is growing into.

So knowing who we are is key to appreciating and shaping our own growth. And as I said earlier, it seems to be a uniquely human problem. In the natural world, you don’t find a bluebird trying to be a goldfinch, or an apple tree trying to be a redwood. Each of us has gifts and passions, and understanding ourselves is essential to our own satisfaction in life, and our growing into the gifts we have.

I don’t mean to oversimplify this – I’m not saying something like, “God has a plan for your life, and the key to your happiness is discovering that plan” as if the plan is being a kindergarten teacher, or a chef, or a neurosurgeon. What I mean is more abstract than that – for example I remember hearing a colleague once acknowledge that they had real gifts in starting new projects, but that they weren’t the right person to manage the project once it was established. This colleague was an innovator, not a manager. And she knew that, which probably saved her projects, her congregation, and her own stress level from spiraling out of control.

We waste a lot of energy trying to be people that we’re not – we let our own gifts lie dormant while we are coveting the gifts of others – not a surprise there: our own gifts may not seem so special to us, after all, those are things that come easily to us. The person who thrives in a regular routine may envy the person whose gifts flourish in a crisis, and vice-versa, but both abilities are important. Now, that doesn’t mean we never have to do the things that are weak areas for us – but we may find that we save our own self-esteem, and a lot of time, and that we spare others frustration when we realize that our weaknesses may be areas of strength for someone else, and that by working together everyone flourishes, the so does the community.

And as we think about this whole area of self-understanding, and identity, it demonstrates the importance of being in community– for a few reasons. One is that because we don’t always identify our own gifts accurately and the community can often help us to understand ourselves better. This is an essential part of Presbyterian practice – we recognize that others may see in us things that we do not see as well. And so when an individual has a sense of call, for example, that call needs to be confirmed by the community – this is why people aren’t ordained simply on the basis of preparing for ministry, or graduating from seminary. Ordination is dependent on receiving a call. Likewise, others might recognize in someone the gift of compassion, and so call upon them to serve as a deacon.

Another reason that we as humans function best in community is that no one has all the gifts that are needed in a community, so we need one another – no matter how beautiful a solo voice is, there is a richness and fullness in the harmony of a choir. We need each other, and so we need to learn to accept one another, too. For often someone’s unique gifts come with a shadow side that is less of a blessing. Most of us are a little like the fictional TV character Adrian Monk who was a detective who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. His ability to notice the smallest details was a huge gift in solving crime, but this same tendency to be bothered by the smallest change often rendered his life unmanageable. His gifts carried within them a shadow side. On his own he was a disaster, but as part of a team he was a genius. When Susan Barrett and I began to develop our Sunday School curriculum, we found that we were each missing some gifts that were essential to the process and that those gifts were present in the other. I have no talent for developing a lesson plan – but Susan is enormously gifted at this. She makes learning fun and easy. On the other hand, we found that I have a vision for the big picture, and am good at identifying what Bible stories should be included, and seeing how they fit together – which was something that she did not feel comfortable doing. Together, we developed a curriculum that was awarded a grant by our presbytery, and that our kids and teachers enjoy. But either of us on our own would never have completed the project.

Did you know that small family farms are more productive per acre than large single crop farms? The biodiversity creates conditions that allow each crop to develop to its best. As crops are rotated, one variety puts into the soil what another will need for its best growth. With a variety of plants, no single pest or disease runs rampant – together the variety of crops is more disease-resistant than a single-crop farm is. Just as in a farm, a community grows best with a variety of different people, with a variety of gifts and ideas.

Knowing ourselves and understanding our own gifts helps us to appreciate others in our community because a healthy community needs a variety of people with a variety of gifts. And when we stop envying other peoples’ gifts and start appreciating our own, we can develop our own gifts in a healthy and productive way, recognizing our own contribution to the community, and appreciating the contributions of others. Knowing ourselves also helps to prevent despair, because we are spared the frustration of trying to be something we aren’t. Growth is natural, but we grow best when we understand who we are, and aren’t trying to become someone else.

As Martin Luther King Jr., said when speaking to a junior high school in Philadelphia 6 month before his death, “Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance…. And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don't just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn't do it any better.

“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

“Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.”

Each of us is important, and all our lives we are growing into who we were born to be – and becoming our best selves may be a winding journey with a number of different adventures along the way. We were born to grow, and each of us will grow our own way, and each of is important to all of us, to God, and to the world that desperately needs all our gifts to solve the challenges that threaten the future. Amen.