What We Planted

Today was a full day. I spent the morning working alongside a wonderful cadre of volunteers building the raised beds that will more than double the size of our church vegetable garden. It's our first season as official partners with "Share the Harvest," a local garden ministry that helps churches build gardens and then distributes the bounty to local food pantries. As a congregation that had a garden before we knew about this ministry, we are thrilled! It was a morning full of hard, dirty work, as we framed the beds, mixed the soiless mixture on a huge blue tarp, and pounded in rebar for the trellises. After the beds were built, we had just enough time and plants to fill one. We'd gotten these seedlings for free; they were the unwanted leftovers from cell packs, left behind when folks wanted only two or three peppers, not all four in the pack. The garden store gladly donated the plants -- but they came without tags. So we called this first bed our "mystery garden." We knew that we had tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and the like, but we weren't sure just what kinds of tomatoes and peppers they would be. One thing we do know is that the fruits of these once buried seeds will feed our neighbors and, as they do, we are quite sure they will also feed our own souls.

After the planting was done, I scurried home to get cleaned up in time to get to another garden -- one of the local cemeteries. I was doing the funeral of a non-member; a man who hadn't lived in Chicago since his childhood, but was being buried in his family plot. There had not yet been a funeral, so in the old cemetery chapel we did a full funeral for this man I had never met and then we went out to stand under a tree to speak and hear those familiar words, "in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, we commend our brother to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and buried his ashes deep in the ground, next to the bones of his ancestors. While the family said their final good-byes, I looked around and thought that this is the true mystery garden. We come here to plant our loved ones in the ground, knowing something about the one we bury, but not knowing exactly what these bodies will look like in the resurrection. This much we do know --Jesus, the first fruits of the dead, has promised that just as he has risen, we too will rise. And we know that the fruits of resurrection will create a new heaven and a new earth in which there will be no hunger or thirst or grief or death.

We may not know exactly what or who we planted today; but this much we do know.

Today we planted hope.