I’ve been on a bit of a Michael Pollan kick lately. Enthused that his explorations of our food systems have helped make gardening hip (or, at least, have helped get Michelle and Barack to dig in), I keep going back for more. Since first reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, I have delighted that his work has given me conversation partners and a common vocabulary for speaking of ethical eating and real food security.
Stretching back to the backyard garden of my childhood — with ample space for experimentation and bountiful seeds from a relative’s hardware store — gardens have been places of great, hopeful possibility. Something about their demands on my patience, trust and wonder make gardening work worth doing on my days off; the delights of dinner picked from within feet of my door add delicious reward. Compelled by the ideas of gardening as a moral and theological statement, my vision has grown generous enough to see beauty in my front yard attempt at growing vegetables, even when others see disaster.
I don’t normally read sermon collections, having experienced them as peculiar, self-indulgent, and disjointed. In my mind, sermons are oral events that God brings to life somewhere and somehow in the space between the preacher, Scripture, and the congregation. I had relegated written sermons to be like my incredibly beautiful and yet unequivocally unphotogenic friend – breathtaking in person, not so much in print.