In Which We Are Turned Over

The spring and summer months found me in the garden many evenings. I pulled weeds, picked beans or tomatoes, or looked for new blossoms on the pumpkin vine. Of course, eating the produce of a garden is the goal, the joy of the work, yet I found that feeding the soil throughout the year is a new way for me to enjoy it all.

It started when I watched a YouTube video of a gardener burying all sorts of kitchen scraps to enrich the soil; naturally, I had to try it. Now I not only bury orange peels and eggshells, rotten spinach and celery stumps, but also various animal bones and shredded paper. The worms have thanked me.

In other words, my attention to the soil began in the spring instead of autumn, and when the growing season was over I was eager to work with the compost; usually, this is a time marked by a note of longing for summer produce -- and that didn't pass completely -- but that first weekend in November gave me a kind of thrill normally reserved for warmer months. My sons and I tilled the whole garden under, and over the course of that job, along with the joy of the work, I was gently reminded of a few spiritual matters.

Jesus told a parable about the sowing of the word, how different types of ground were able or unable to accept the seed of truth. And he also used the metaphor of God as gardener, the one who prunes us to bear fruit as we abide in Christ.

We are soil; we are branches.

When I'm in the midst of my own garden, it's easy for me to think on such things, especially when my plants produce good food to eat. It makes me want to be the good soil, the fruitful branch, so that when our Father comes for what is his, he will find wheat not chaff, grapes not bare branches.

I'm thankful for these reminders, but when my sons and I tilled the garden, my mind took its own turn toward what the early church experienced as recorded in the book of Acts.

The first few chapters tell how the church grew, how it functioned among the people with favor. It's not until chapter 8 that "all except the apostles were scattered" due to a large scale persecution set off by Stephen's testimony and death. And I wonder: What went through the apostles' minds then? Did they immediately recall their Lord's words, that the world would hate and harm them?

This was a painful change, no matter what they thought. How could it have been otherwise? The fellowship, the breaking of bread, the corporate worship, the Holy Spirit's acts of healing -- all suddenly scattered, ended.

As I watched my youngest struggle with the tiller, I said to him several times, "Let it dig!" The blades scraped and mixed soil and grass clippings and leaves, and by the time we were finished, our garden had been flattened. The hollyhocks no longer stood tall, the cilantro ceased to shudder in the breeze, and the height of our sunflowers was reduced to memory.

It would be a kind of tragedy if all these changes did not mean what they do. For it's all a promise of sorts, a promise of another garden come spring.

Yet it's still a painful change. The ground churned under hands, leaves and sticks and insects were displaced and buried. Painful change because the new garden will not be so fruitful or diverse without the removal or breaking down of the old garden.

In chapter 1 of Acts, Jesus tells his disciples that they will not only receive power through his Spirit, but that they "will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." As I wrote above, chapters 1-7 record a building up of the church in Jerusalem; chapter 8 marks the first tilling, the first turning over, of the body of Christ.

The faithful are pushed out, locked up, and many of them run -- where? "...throughout Judea and Samaria." And what about "to the ends of the earth?" Chapter 8 shows us how Philip is used first in Samaria and then at the side of an Ethiopian eunuch's chariot. This eunuch ends up a baptized member of the church, and he  presumably goes home with the gospel.

The rest of Acts, or most of it, is about Barnabas, Silas, and Saul taking God's word to Gentiles, the world. (Here is God's tool: He who meant evil for the church, even Saul, is taken up by Christ after he attempted to destroy what God was doing; he who meant to scatter those proclaiming Christ, this "first garden" of sorts, becomes the hand God uses to plant the churches to come. Saul turned over into Paul.)

And it is we -- Gentiles, those Paul describes in his letter to the Ephesians as "far off" but being called near to Christ -- who have benefitted from the painful churning of God's fruitful people. Years later, when Rome saw fit to flatten the temple, a deeper scattering took place, and yet we can see through tragedy to what God will bring about: The New Jerusalem, the final produce of Christ's work in us.

But what about now? Above I asked what the apostles might be thinking as they were scattered, and I still wonder. I wonder, too, what they experienced in their hearts when God's temple was destroyed. What complaints did they bring to God? What despair? What anguish? In all of human history, there is no other building, no other place of worship, that is rightfully called God's house. The horror of its destruction for all Jews, even those who confessed Christ, was very great.

And yet, the truth is that in Christ, God had already been busy establishing another temple for his glory to reside within.

So, again I ask, what about now? What are we to say for ourselves in light of all this?

My desire is to lean into the Holy Spirit. This is not always so when I am troubled, for I often turn to my own vision of how things ought to be -- and bitterness tastes good to me at times. But at this moment, now, as I write during the morning's silence, and now, as the church struggles through Covid-19 response, Christ's Spirit reminds me of two things: Jesus said to Nicodemus that the Spirit blows wherever it pleases, and Paul wrote that believers are a temple for that same Spirit.

"Wherever it pleases." If that phrase doesn't terrify us, we may be missing its import, its utter truth. We want a security we can predict and manipulate in our everyday lives, not to mention in our worship. I enjoy reading G.K. Chesterton like I enjoyed crawling into my grandfather's lap as a child, and he wrote about the great church buildings as symbols and fortresses of Christendom; in many ways I'm sure he's right. Those ancient cathedrals are still evidence of our faith. And yet -- and I ask as a grandson asks his looming figure of a grandfather -- I want to know just how far to take those structures: When do we do as they did in Acts? How do we know the Spirit will never take our buildings from us, let alone when or how?

This is not symbolic, but actual. I pray about these questions, and I wonder what the Spirit is doing.

Paul adds to the issue with his teaching on the believer's body. He wrote these words to the church at Corinth: "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?" And: "The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body."

As Paul points out in the wider context of these verses (see 1 Cor. 6), these truths have deep implications for how Christians live sexually, and it seems to me that's been the church's main takeaway. The more I think and pray, however, the more I want to meditate on the truth behind these verses. They support and deepen the doctrine of imago Dei, yes, and each person is an image bearer, but they also show the limitless creativity of the Holy Spirit -- for "Wherever two or three are gathered, there I am with them."

Our God does not desire buildings, nor is his pleasure increased by large gatherings over small ones. God's pleasure is in his people, and he is pleased by their repentant, obedient hearts.

Another passage from Acts. When Christ appears to Saul in chapter 9, Saul is on a rampage against The Way -- those who are confessing Jesus as Messiah and God. Do you remember what Jesus asks him? "Why do you persecute me?" It's again shown to us: When we belong to Christ, the Holy Spirit makes us part of his Body.

Do we symbolize Christ? We do. But when I hold up those passages mentioned above, and I ask God, and I ask myself, what do they mean, well, I come away with more than symbolism.

This whole year has been very painful, but here's something that gives me reason to hope: In Acts 15, Paul and Barnabas are appointed to travel to Jerusalem to discuss a dispute about how Gentile believers are saved. Verse 3 reports that "The church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news made all the brothers very glad."

The early church was not turned over for nothing. Their pain, their questions, their losses -- God used all of it to bring gladness and joy, which is what we experience when his kingdom is enlarged and his glory is revealed.

So? What should we conclude, then? One thing is clear: We are being tilled under; we are being turned over. I can't help but come to that end when I look around me -- and not just when I'm searching the web. We feel it now just as we did in April or November. And my prayer is that we, again, would lean into the Holy Spirit, specifically that our imaginations as the Body of Christ would be fertilized and made ready for a harvest we have not grown with our own feeble hands.

Jesus has shown us how to suffer, and he is faithful and always with us. May our hope be in nothing else.