Plant the Garden
Just a warning before I begin, today’s sermon does contain spoilers for the novel Candide, but since Candide was written over 260 years ago, I can’t be blamed if you haven’t read it yet. Candide was written by Voltaire in the mid-eighteenth century as a piece of satire and a direct response to the philosophy of optimism. The story follows Candide, a young man from Germany who doesn’t have much of a personality and who is described as being quite simple. He is accompanied through the story by his mentor and tutor, Pangloss, who is the main advocate for this philosophy of optimism. It is Pangloss who repeats throughout the novel that everything that happens is for the best, and that they live in the best of all possible worlds. This might seem reasonable at first, as when we first meet Candide and Pangloss they are living in a castle and leading very sheltered lives. Neither of them wants for anything, they have food and warmth and entertainment. But as the characters move through the plot, these ideas that everything that happens is for the best and that we live in the best of all possible worlds sound more and more ridiculous.
Pretty quickly, Candide loses his home and is captured and forced into military service. After fighting in a significant battle, he escapes the military and travels to the Netherlands where he finds his old tutor again. He learns that the castle he had lived in had been destroyed and many of the people he had known were dead—we later find out that some survived, only to wind up in other situations that were also pretty horrible. Candide forms a ragtag group of travellers, and they make their way down towards Portugal and, eventually, over to the Americas. All the while, they encounter earthquakes, shipwrecks, disease, slavery, poverty, and a slew of other issues. All the while, even as their friends and companions die or meet their ruins in other ways, Pangloss maintains his insistence that everything that happens is for the best and that we live in the best of all possible worlds. I won’t bore you all with every little detail, but the story ends with Candide and his companions purchasing a farm for themselves and planting a garden, in order to fend off the evils of boredom, vice, and poverty. As they set about their work, Pangloss maintains that everything did, in fact, work out for the best, and that this was the best of all possible worlds. A more skeptical Candide sort of brushes him off and says, “sure, Pangloss. But now we must cultivate our garden.”
Odds are, no one is here for a lesson on eighteenth-century French literature. To be fair, I’m not either, and that’s not really my specialty. But ever since I first read Candide years ago, I have been struck by this last line: “we must cultivate our garden.” I especially appreciated how it stood in contrast to the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that everything that happens to us or around us eventually works out in our favor, just by happenstance. We live in a time, and have long lived in a time, in which nation rises up against nation. Earthquakes, illness, and famines abound. There is no shortage of pain and suffering, of despair, of loneliness. It doesn’t bring hope to my spirit if all the suffering in the world is just collateral damage in the midst of some larger scheme that would leave the world better just for the privileged survivors. Our suffering is not a necessity or a test. It is a reality to which we must respond.
This response to suffering and to tragedy is what I read in this part of the prophecy from Isaiah. Sure, this is an aspiration, a vision of the kingdom of God as it may look and function. But it is also a model of resilient community that is fundamentally different from what exists today. Last week we talked about what it means to rebuild, and what it means to build something new and radically different in the midst of destruction. This may as well be Isaiah’s pitch for what we can build in the place of the way that the world is now. And integral to this vision of a society in which babies don’t cry and people live for far too long, is the idea of planting. Sure, these could be metaphorical vineyards, an image that Jesus threw around a couple of times in describing his relationship to the disciples or in painting a picture of one who keeps trying, even when no fruit has been borne. But vineyards can also simply be vineyards, a place of organized growing that produces grapes—grapes that can be eaten or, perhaps more importantly, turned into wine. Vineyards provided nourishment, and still do. We’re not far, here, from the Finger Lakes, and it doesn’t take a local to know what goes on over there. Isaiah’s prophecy is a call to build a new community—and that new community cultivates a garden.
What I love about this stated need to cultivate our garden, both in Candide and in Isaiah, is that gardens don’t just happen. Gardens are intentional. I grew up around gardens, whether in the back yard of the parsonages I lived in or at the Smith Family farm over in Vermont. In seminary, I got my hands dirty helping out in our Theological Community Garden. It wasn’t until the seminary garden that I really understood all the planning that went into planting year after year. Different crops need different nutrients, prefer different amounts of sun, different levels of moisture. Rodents and white flies need to be thought of, and you also need to consider where the beans are going to grow and how the tomato plants will stay standing under the weight of their fruit. Timing is also important. You need to know when to harvest and when to plant, when to water and when to prune. There are few aspects of gardening that are passive. Most things don’t just happen, although potatoes and garlic both tend to be pretty low-maintenance in my experience. Cultivating gardens is a rejection of passivity, and an acknowledgement that, if we are to care for one another, build lasting communities, and truly transform the world, we need to take an active role in that change.
As we move closer to the season of Advent, the time of preparation for the arrival of the Christ-child once again, bear this apocalyptic message in your minds. The Christ who is coming will leave not a stone on stone. The song his mother sings praises the God of radical transformation, who fills the bellies of the poor and sends the rich away hungry. The season of Advent is not just a time of waiting passively for everything to work out for the best and for the best of all possible worlds to be realized. It is a time for us to remember our role in the story. It is a time for us to remember that we must cultivate our garden, so that all might be fed, so that the world might be transformed, and so that God’s kin-dom might be realized here on Earth.