Strange bones-to-blood Ezekiel, fast-action Mark, exhortative II Corinthians. If pericopes were trading cards, I would call this a solid week. As we trade a few back and forth, let’s consider a few connections among the texts today if that’s all right with everyone. Goodness knows lectionary pairings are intentional if nothing else! Ezekiel’s vision of cedars, Mark’s description of kingdom shrubs, the epistle writer’s consideration of new creation, the Psalter’s praise of the righteous sprouting like palm trees. By the time you get through the texts, it feels like you’re in a garden…some kind of secret garden with strange Mediterranean shrubbery. Maybe it feels more like a tree nursery…where you pick up special exotic plants for your new landscaping backyard project that somehow you knew you should have never started. So much is growing, so much is happening beyond our line of vision, beyond even our sensory perception.

It’s like the Amazon or something. Speaking of the Amazon, I’m in Peru right now. I’ll be making several trips to “la selva”, the jungle in the coming weeks, and I can’t help but imagine what it’s like to see a place teeming with that much life. Will it seem more alive? More ? More consumed with the energy of the Creator? I don’t know. But the life inside all these shrubs and palms and cedars must be about something…

Mark, as he narrates the gutty teachings of Jesus, speaks of the kingdom of God like someone scattering seed on the ground…and vamoosh! Here appears LIFE. Jesus pushes a little further with a silly bit of irony. Take the smallest seed, plant it, and vamoosh! The biggest life in the shrub family (or genus or species…who knows?) comes out of the ground. The stuff that makes life. The stuff that made us. The kingdom of God is strange stuff that secretly…buried deep in the ground, where no one can see it…makes even stranger stuff just…vamoosh!

II Corinthians, in attempting to keep some precious but clearly confused church-goers from making flagrant errors against LIFE, calls these beloved a NEW CREATION…like the seed that bursts into a shrub… …like the city of exiles turned into noble cedars…like followers of the risen Christ feeling something happening inside of them, around them. NEW CREATION. Budding forth…breaking through concrete slabs and Roman principalities…and ethnic divisions. New creation…freeing them from slavery, from death…freeing ALL from slavery, from death, from themselves. NEW CREATION. The KINGDOM OF GOD. Shrubs and palms and cedars. For this impassioned letter writer, these Christians can’t go back now.

They’ve seen stuff grow. They’ve touched miracles…they’ve brushed shoulders with angels. They don’t know how it happens, but they know that mustard seeds turn into shrubs and God’s reign, made known in the healing hands of a carpenter, produces LIFE. How could they ever go back? How could they ever imagine being seedlings again? How could they have ever expected those seeds to un-package LIFE?

What is God doing in these metaphors…these images? Well, I suppose God is gardening… pruning…pulling out the sheers and gloves and hoes and rakes. Pulling out the wheelbarrow from the shed and caring for this extraordinary little garden.

Recently, I spent time with a woman who loves her garden as much as she does the idea of world peace (of course, these two are clearly connected for her)…she knew everything about her plot of land. The plants, their species, their origins, how they grow together. She knew them inwardly…not just their outward appearance…but their hearts. The hearts of her little plants…all nestled together, some overlapping others…a few struggling along…all of them in one way or another communicating something more than themselves.

And she seemed to know what they were communicating. THINGS GROW. Maybe not every year…maybe not in full bloom…but regardless, if you sit on the front porch or grab the pruning sheers in the backyard, you’ll observe, encounter, experience, touch, smell, real growth. And it really won’t be your doing. I suppose you’ll participate. But there’s something about this LIFE thing that goes way beyond our ability to produce it. It’s what got is in that whole mess the first time in a garden. We wanted to know how stuff grew…we wanted to know what LIFE was. We were little Frankensteins, shuffling about for electrical cords and gadgets, hoping to plug into that thing that makes it all happen.

It all comes to a screeching halt in II Corinthians with the writer describing these followers as a new creation…no longer bound by human thinking. No longer shuffling about for the electrical cords and forbidden fruit. No longer probing and poking to get some strong clutch on LIFE. No, no. These were a new creation. Who had seen the face of LIFE and who knew nothing would ever look the same again. For LIFE had conquered DEATH for ALL. Through the saving power of Jesus Christ, offered to us in the kingdom of God, the extraordinary little garden pushing LIFE through the ground, we become little Christs. With little desire for cords and gadgets and much desire for pruning sheers and rakes.

May we work. As we watch exiles come home, like strong cedars. As we ourselves, those exiles, journey back to the garden. May we keep our sheers handy and our hearts heavy with the weight of LIFE. May we listen well to the voice that calls us a NEW CREATION. May we learn to marvel at mustard-seeds-turned-into shrubs. May the kingdom of God be the vamoosh! that we feel every time we remember that LIFE was, is, and never will be our doing.

(from www.goodpreacher.com/blog/)