Parable of the Crazy Gardener

How many of you have ever planted a garden?  Tucking the seeds in the ground, watering them, watching them sprout, trying to figure out if the leaves poking out of the soil are weeds or what you hoped you grew?  And it’s one thing to bury a few pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds, it’s another thing to depend on a harvest for income.  Jesus was preaching to people who planted crops that was their only source of income.  So why did this parable feature a gardener that any farmer with common sense would see as either ridiculous or downright crazy?

We are not crazy gardeners.  Oh, sure we might have spent $2 for a packet of zucchini seeds and planted every single seed in that packet.  Most gardeners have made that mistake at least once.  But none of us, experienced or inexperienced, would throw a bunch of seed on the highway or on the sidewalk or in the ditch like Jesus had his crazy gardener do.  What a waste! Most of those seeds fell in ridiculous places where they had no hope of growing. Crazy! Where is the good news of this parable?  How does it speak to Alberta in 2026?

On the face of it, the parable is about sharing the good news of God’s heavenly realm, the yoke that is easy and the burden that is light.  It is comforting to know that even the best preaching by Jesus himself was described as a disaster.  Think about it, if the seed was shared equally amongst the birds, the rocks, the thorns and the good soil, only 25% of the seed fell on fertile ground.  That’s a terrible rate of return.  But from the point of view of talking about our faith, it’s probably accurate. 

Talking about our faith is something United Church folks struggle with.  We don’t want to come across as pushy or judgmental or hypocritical.  We don’t want to push a fear-based Christianity either, the kind that intimidates people into coming to church so they may be saved from eternal damnation and hellfire.  That’s not who we are.  But we too have a blind spot.  We might assume people will figure out how much better we are than other denominations and naturally be drawn to us.  After all, we were the first to ordain women, coming up on 90 years ago.  First to apologize to residential school students, first to ordain members of the 2sLGTBQ+ community, first to have women and indigenous people as our national leaders in the Moderator roll, first to arrive to the protest rallies, last to leave, first to write letters for justice and so on.  But that isn’t enough in this day and age.  As someone said to our moderator once, “Your church is so proud of being progressive that it has forgotten how to be Christian.”  We may have fixated on Daring Justice so much that we’ve let the ideas of deep spirituality and bold discipleship take a back seat.  Other denominations might be better at that.

We may think that we don’t have the skills to talk about our faith.  That’s the minister’s job, or the worship leader’s job.  Actually, it’s everyone’s job.  That takes deep spirituality and bold discipleship.  That takes asking ourselves, how do we experience God, and how does it help us live better lives?  If we don’t take the time to ask these deep bold questions, we won’t have the daring courage to share our stories.  And our world needs our stories more than ever before.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II wrote in an article about white poverty and the battle for democracy that:

When the prophets [denounce] the evils of political leaders and cultural systems… they always tell the people that God doesn’t need everyone to stand up against injustice. God needs a remnant, just a small number. If a community will come together to declare that another way is possible, they can change the conversation in a society. If even a small group bears witness to the fact that the way things are is not the way things have to be, then everyone who is dissatisfied and questioning their circumstances has somewhere to look for an alternative.
Harvard University’s Erica Chenoweth calls this phenomenon the “3.5 percent rule.” After studying people’s movements across the globe in different cultural contexts and at different moments in history, Chenoweth has concluded that a social movement that wins the active support of around 3.5 percent of a society’s population wins its demands.

3.5% of the population.  That’s how many people in Athabasca?  96 people.  That’s not that many.  If we think of how many people each of us know in this place, through work or church or organizations, 3.5% is a tiny number.  And yet, if we can get 3.5 percent of our town to care about human rights or food security or helping people on AISH or ADAP, or seniors or visible minorities, that’s all that’s needed.  And chances are we don’t need to get these people to care, they already do.  We just need to help them find each other and know that they are not alone.  We need to listen with compassion and understanding and prayer.  We are the soil that Jesus plants seeds in.  When we practise deep spirituality, praying, worshiping, learning hymns and bible verses that sustain us, it’s like we are fertilizing ourselves.  When we think about our faith, try to put into words who or what God is for us, read inspiring words, that’s discipleship.  That’s the weeding of our soil.  And then Jesus said, when we have good, weed-free soil, the abundance of harvest will surprise us!  Oh God, help us to fertilize and to weed like wise gardeners so we may help in your amazing harvest.  Help us be the 3.5% that will change the world.  Help us have the courage to share our stories to the rocks and the road and the birds and the thistles so that we don’t miss the good soil by accident.  And help us to remember that no seed that we plant is truly wasted, your world needs our abundant and wasteful crazy gardening.  Amen.