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| Lasagna Gardening Today’s topic is gardening — random thoughts from my notebook. I’m one of those people who loves the idea of gardening, but not gardening itself. For me, working in a garden’s like signing on for Fear Factor. Not going to happen. But the image of the garden pops up frequently in Scripture, and in Palestine, the notion of seed falling on stony or rocky ground was perfectly comprehensible. Indeed, the ground was so rocky that part of the gardening experience was to remove the rocks and prepare the soil for seed. Vineyards then, as now,don’t look like the vineyards we see in the Napa Valley or that you saw in the movie Sideways— where Miles and Jack,in search of wine and women, respectively, spend a third of the movie with a wine glass or a woman — respectively,treating both wine and women the same: sniff, swirl, sip and spit. In Israel and the West Bank, you can’t pound posts into the soil. Once, outside Bethlehem, I saw this vineyard, and all the vines were lying on the ground. That’s all that can be done there.The vineyard worker-person, of course, has to take care of these vines differently than here or in France, let’s say. He lifts the vine up, away from the soil, and cleans and dresses the vine. Which totally explains what Jesus was getting at in John 15. Ever notice how harsh the metaphor is in John 15:2? The first verse says that God is the“gardener” (NIV). Next verse. Boom! “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes.” Ouch. But Jesus says, “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you”(15:3). So the image of God as Gardener is not a benign one. He seems more interested in clearing out dead wood and coming after me with some pruning shears. But Jesus lifts me up, holds me steady, offers me his word, gives me a chance for healing and wholeness. Perhaps that’s why an unknown blogger writes: Was God cut out to be a gardener? Sometimes too hot with the sun, plagues of locusts, or the watering a bit overdone. The word “garden” comes to us via Germanic sources via Romance sources. In the Latin, the word gardinus means “enclosure,” while hortus gardinus is an “enclosed garden.” Eventually the phrase was shortened to simply gardinus for garden. Technically, then, you could say that a garden is an enclosed, or protected plot where one grows things. This is the metaphor which we’ve adopted for the church. An enclosed place in a specific location that exists for the purpose of growing something beautiful or useful — edible. We as pastors, following the lead of 1 Corinthians3:6, see ourselves as the Gardeners. We work feverishly in our enclosed gardens. We go nuts. First, we want a bigger garden with enclosures of Brobdingnagian proportions. And then we create all sorts of rules and creeds. The First Flora Garden must protect itself from the pernicious horticultural heresies of the United Vegetarians down the street. Every garden belongs to a larger farm system.The Evangelical farm, for example, known for its varieties, where they grow charismatics — needs a lot of sun; Baptists — need a lot of water; megachurches — need a lot of land. Purpose driven gardens — need a lot of cultivation. This is perhaps the biggest farm system: great for show, hearty, colorful, propagates rapidly— Rick Warren is the Gardener here, according to Time magazine, February 7, 2005. The Mainline farm system is small by comparison,root-bound, in decline, but still offering larger yield per acre than any of the other gardens. And there is the Emergent garden, also small,growing in patches, but resilient. Truth be told, the best gardeners are actually Transplanters — they appeal to sensitive flora in other gardens who uproot and dig in for a time in new surroundings, where they flourish until they— again — tire of the humdrum, or the gardener, or they wilt, being offended, and go off in search of yet another garden. Of course, we’re always on the lookout for seeker-weeds that would like to be fl owers.Some argue that our gardens should be multicultural explosions of all varieties: vegetables,bushes, perennials, annuals, everything from pansies to rhubarb — all in one enclosure.So you’re the Gardener and you’re under a lot of pressure to make sure your garden is productive.What do you do? You might consider lasagna gardening. It’s a layering approach based on the notion that the best gardens are those that grow in the best soil. Lasagna gardens are small. You want to be able to reach and approach all areas of the garden. You don’t dig up the soil, plow through it, rip it apart, or turn it over. Instead, you start with the existing soil and build from the ground up, beginning with thick layers of newspapers — the word — and then add to that 2-3 inches of peat moss, and to that4-8 inches of compost, and to that 4-8 inches of grass clippings, and to that 4-8 inches of chopped leaves, and to that 2-3 inches of wood ashes. Choose your metaphor. It’s a litany that resonates with 2 Peter 1:5-8where the writer concludes, saying, “For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive.” Too many gardeners think that they make plants grow! That’s not the role of the gardener. Every plant has its own God-given DNA that results in growth. It’s God who gives life; the gardener is all about soil. Making sure it’s the right soil, nutritious soil, soil that is wet enough, or dry enough,soil that has the right kind of drainage and so on. Gardeners are about the soil plants grow in.We’re called to get down and dirty. That’s it. Nothing else. “Neither the planter nor the waterer matters; only God, who makes things grow”(1 Corinthians 3:7 JB, emphasis added). Lasagna gardeners. That’s who we are.
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