The Question of Fruitfulness

Gardens are supposed to produce fruit.  Fruit for the summer, but also fruit for the rest of the year.  Homegrown tomatoes on a burger in August are amazing, but so is homemade spaghetti sauce in the middle of February.  Many of my neighbors, who have been gardening a lifetime longer than I have, store their own jams, applesauce, peaches, plums, pickles, salsa, onions, peppers, and potatoes. The cellar is still very much a thing in Southwest Minnesota.  The produce in your cellar could keep you alive through the winter, especially if a blizzard keeps you from getting to the grocery store.  

And gardens are also supposed to produce fruit so that there will be plants next year.  While you probably can’t grow a plant from the average grocery store tomato (I’ve tried.), seeds come from fruit.  No fruit, no seeds.  No seeds, no next generation of plants.  No next generation of plants, no food in the future.  

People who garden depend on the growth and production of their plants.  Either the garden produces,

Weeds ousting my peas.  

or you go to the grocery store and pay for that food a second time (since you paid for the garden already).  Any number of things can go wrong in a garden.  This year is an exceptionally dry year across much of the United States.  In the Midwest, where the fields and gardens depend on the rain for their water, many gardens are constantly on the verge of wilting at that key moment or producing bitter fruit because it couldn’t produce the necessary sugars.    

Weeds are also constantly attracted to the open, fertilized soil, and they always seem to spring up earlier and faster than the plants that you want to grow.  Without constant attention, dandelions will take the space you saved for spinach (I don’t care if dandelions are edible.  They taste awful.)  

And garden pests come in many forms.  In my history of growing plants, I have had to trap ground squirrels, salt slugs, spray grasshoppers and dispose of skunks.  I have seen deer jump over 6’ fences to get at a row of beans and had rodents burrow under my shed to get at my cucumber vines.  Gardeners have a wide array of expensive gadgets to keep their produce for themselves.  Our solution is a dog, and she is worth every penny.  

Popular opinion often regards God as some sort of magician.  After all, he speaks, and things happen. But God is no stranger to hard work.  The exquisite balance of the physical creation is evidence of his great attention to detail, but our spiritual states receive no less attention from him.  From the very beginning, God has worked hard to set up an environment where his people could grow and flourish and bear the kind of fruit that God is looking for (Genesis 1: 28), namely life.   The prophets and the gospels are full of references to God looking for wisdom, righteousness, peace and justice because with these things, new plants are planted and new fruit is made, and life flourishes in the world.  

But, just as in our little gardens a lot of hard work may not result in a bountiful harvest, so in God’s great garden of humanity, the harvest can be disappointing too.  Isaiah 5 sets the tone:

I will sing for the one I love,

A song about his vineyard.

My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside.

He dug it up and cleared it of stones

And planted it with the choicest vines. 

Imagine the backbreaking work of pulling stones out of a hillside.  Around here, rock picking is an annual event.  Whole families will go out and run behind a tractor, picking up rocks and tossing them into a bin on the back before a field is ready to plant.     

He built a watchtower in it

And cut out a winepress as well.  

That’s a considerable expense, and it shows that this is an investment that will pay off over a lifetime. This vineyard owner expects to press some wine (and wine wasn't just for getting drunk. It was also used for medicines and daily consumption with meals).  

Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, 

But it yielded only bad fruit.   (Is. 5:1-2) 

Ouch.  Expectation denied.  Effort wasted.  Disappointment.  Plan B, anybody?  

In this poem, the vineyard is the nations of Judah and Israel.  God put them in a fruitful land, gave them (mostly) diligent leaders, and most importantly gave them his law.  In return, he was looking for justice and righteousness not only for the people in Israel but also as a model for the world and future generations.  What he saw was bloodshed and distress (Is. 5:7).

So, what went wrong?  Well, if you read the rest of Isaiah 5, it seems that God’s people had gotten rich and arrogant, creating huge estates by kicking poor off their hereditary land, throwing lavish all day entertainments and making an art of getting drunk while at the same time distorting justice, philosophy and religion to support their decadent lifestyles (a recurring human pattern).  God was so disappointed that he ripped up his garden for a couple of generations to let the soil rest so he could reset his plan A.  

Now, cheating other people or just taking more than is your due to maintain your own comfort is definitely one way to overrun your part of the garden and make it unfruitful.  But we can also just stop doing what’s good because it’s hard, which is like plants in poor soil or in a time of drought.  Or maybe we just want something outside the will of God, and we go get it like melons outside the fence.  Or maybe we just haven’t learned to recognize the hand of the gardener.  There are lots of ways to lose out on being fruitful.  All that said, there are some very stern warnings against being fruitless in Scripture.  The one I find most alarming is in John 15, when Jesus says that the Father prunes every branch that bears no fruit and throws them into the fire.  

The grace of this situation is that God keeps his garden, and God is the Master Gardener. He knows how to get fruit out of every plant and every soil. He is going to keep working his garden until we are fruitful, individually, collectively, and eternally.  He never abandons this patch of soil that is humanity, and he sees the good work forward until it is complete.  The resulting gardening is going to be painful, both for the gardener and the plants.  It may not seem fair in the moment when God prunes a personal tendency or removes a companion or uproots a people group.  But one, ten, or fifty generations in the future, God will bring about a great harvest through what he does today.  Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? 

 

I love working in my garden in the middle of summer.  The long waiting period after spring planting is over, and my little garden space is alive.  The beans are climbing.  The tomatoes are blooming.  And best of all, the strawberries are producing like crazy.  It’s all wonderfully alive.  But as I work among all the greenery every morning, I’ve been surprised by how much death goes into producing the life that I enjoy eating so much.  

Part of the death that I’m referring to comes from the mulch that I use to keep the weeds down.  Every autumn, I lay a thick layer of leaves, grass clippings, wood chips, and kitchen compost over the shells of my garden plants from the previous summer.  A lot of things were trimmed and uprooted to make that mulch.  But even in a living garden in the middle of July, I end up killing a lot of things to keep my garden going.  

See, nurturing a garden involves making a lot of decisions.  I have to decide which plants live and which plants die.  Plants like grass or clover, which can be very useful in other situations, take up space and nutrients in my garden patch that I would rather save for other plants.  On the other hand, thistles, which nobody loves as far as I know, spread like crazy and by every means a plant can. 
Volunteer tomatoes will overshadow my bean sprouts and attract dangerous pests if I let them.  And even the plants that I am actually cultivating send out runners or tendrils in the middle of their fellow plants in an effort to get as much soil, sun, and water as possible.  Then I, as the gardener, have to wade in with sheers, spade, and garden gloves and decide who gets what and also what stays and what goes.  

It’s a funny feeling, making those kinds of decisions.  With thistles, I feel no guilt at all.  Thistles are the enemy. I take great pleasure in pulling up a thistle all the way to the roots.  But clover is a pleasant little plant that makes pleasant little blossoms.   Pulling up clover makes me feel harsh and a little arbitrary, but I can’t harvest my spinach if it’s covered with clover.  The one that really gets me, however, is pulling up garden plants that are somehow out of place. What if that’s a really healthy tomato volunteer crowding in on my cantaloupe?  I don’t want to kill something good.  Still, I have to do it.  That’s my job as the gardener.  The point of a garden is to make enough fruit to supply my summer table and my winter pantry.  Weeds, thistles, and crowded plants all get in the way of the productivity of my garden.  

God is also a gardener.  From Genesis to Revelation, garden imagery dominates Scripture. The story begins in the Garden of Eden, and someday it will culminate in the Tree of Life.  Sometimes the garden is responsive, and sometimes it’s not, but still whenever God and his people are together in a place, we see a garden, a vineyard, a cultivated space arranged and tended to produce fruit.  And we, his people, being both his creation and his image, are both his garden and gardeners with him.  

We, like gardens, are intended to grow fruit, and God, as our gardener, cultivates us to grow it. The thought of having our lives pruned and weeded might be frightening, but as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, “Because I belong to him, Christ by his Holy Spirit assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready to live for him” (Q&A 1).  Or to paraphrase Paul’s letter to the Philippians, the one who started this good work in our lives will make sure it is completed (Phil. 1:6 NIV). But sometimes bringing the good work to completion involves more than we bargain for.  And in those times, it’s good to know in whose hands we rest.  So join me in these next few weeks as I ponder the idea of God as a gardener, and also the role that death plays in coming to life.