Sermon by Stuart Pike

Photo Credit: Dave Gunn on Flickr.com

Sermon Text:

Today we are celebrating as Harvest Thanksgiving Sunday. What was your first clue? I cannot see a collection of such vegetables and fruits without thinking of the many vegetable gardens which I have seen. Some of them I've even worked in! Not that I'm much of a gardener myself. My experience at gardening usually has to do with trying my best to follow the gardener's instructions.

I like being in a garden. There's something about being in a garden which can be soothing to the soul. Perhaps it is the signs of life which are all around you. The smell of freshness, the colours, the feel of the earth bring you into contact with creation. They remind us that God is still engaged in creation. That means that God is still involved with us. Somewhere there is in us the essence of life which can resonate with such life in growing things. And in this connection we remember at a level deeper than our intellect, that God is the creator and this creator is in control. If you’re feeling any anxiety, a garden is the place to go to find your centre again.

One of the most important gardens that I remember being in was in another hemisphere of this world. Some of you know that when I was studying for my Master of Divinity degree, I spent four months in Uruguay in S. America. Uruguay is a very small costal country nestled between its two large neighbours, Argentina and Brazil. It has a population of 3 million, half of which live in its capital city, Montivideo. One of things which I did during that four months was to spend some time working in a vegetable garden, which we called “la huerta”, in one of the shanty towns called a Cantegril in which lived the poorest of the poor.

The people eked out an existence by collecting garbage and then sorting out what was recyclable out of it and selling it to scrap dealers. The place often looked like a war zone. Between huge mountains of garbage were sorted piles of plastic, metal and paper. That which could not be salvaged was usually burned. The small river of filthy water would sometimes be so choked with garbage that they would occasionally set it alight.

In this community full of men, women and children, full of noise and squalor and life and death, lived a missionary with the Lutheran Church of Germany, a deaconess named Traute who decided that there could be found a small area perhaps forty feet by sixty, and that with the help of many volunteers, the ground could be cleared and tilled and some vegetables could be planted.

At first the people who lived there seemed dubious ..... this was definitely outside of their experience. Could they really grow vegetables in the midst of the noise and filth of the Cantegril? There were very few people who started the work. Many doubted that anything would come of it. I spent some considerable time helping to clear the land, with the help of some orphaned boys who lived with the Roman Catholic priest who lived in the midst of the Cantegril.

Traute was definitely the one in charge of the planting, and she directed us to make the rows and the hills and all that we needed to plant potatoes, beans, carrots, squash and many other vegetables. We watered by hand with buckets, walking back and forth to a stand-pipe at the corner of the block.

The people of the Cantegril would wander by with curious looks at first. But when the first of the vegetables started to poke out of the ground, a transformation happened in the Cantegril. The number of volunteer gardeners probably quadrupled. They could see that even in the midst of this squalor, they could do valuable work that could really make a difference to them and their families.

in the midst of this seemingly hellish place, was a place of living growing things. Vegetables which would provide life, in turn, to the people