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.