The two garden plots outside the doors to the parish house are bursting with life. Each day as I come to work, I notice new plants blooming, or sending up shoots, or shedding petals or leaves. I also notice little green things sprouting up that look kind of ugly to me, but I don’t touch them. Pat Kuhlman, who knows these garden plots better than I do, assures me that some of the things that look like weeds are really wanted plants (and vice versa). It just goes to show what I know.
When it comes to people we’re even worse than we are with plants. We think we can tell, based on what we find lovely or repulsive, what kinds of life are good or bad. We are full of judgments, and we’d love nothing more than permission to get to work weeding. But, as in the gospel reading for this Sunday, God reminds us that we don’t know as much as we might think, and that the task of sorting is God’s alone.
If we want to spend time in God’s garden, we might focus less on weeding and more on watering. All life requires food and water, as do we, so we gather once more by the font and table and fill up our watering pots and seed bags before heading back out into the world.
In Christ,
Pastor Erik
By Proclamation 