God’s Will and Soil and Fruit…oh, my!

I come from a family of farmers. My father was a tomato farmer. His father was a tomato farmer. His father was a tomato farmer. Three generations of tomatoes, grown in greenhouses, packed and shipped across central Pennsylvania. We sold from our own store, and it was always humming.

Yet most of our business was wholesale—crates of fresh tomatoes headed off to grocery stores in Harrisburg, Lancaster, Shamokin Dam, Tyrone, Williamsport. My mother drove the delivery truck, and I rode along—situated in my booster seat behind her, watching the state roll past in big green fields, steep mountains, the mighty Susquehanna, down to narrow alleys behind grocery store loading docks. Celebrity moment: Davy Jones from The Monkees bought tomatoes from us and paid by check. He had a home nearby in a neighboring town called Beavertown. My dad never cashed the check—he kept it as a Davy Jones autograph.

I grew up with vegetables. I had gardens nearly every year through my college years—at my dad’s house, at my grandma’s, and now here in Fitchburg, after about ten years of no garden because of my living situation, I finally have one again. Last October, Paul built me a raised bed at the parsonage. I’ve got tomatoes and peppers, potatoes and sunflowers, green beans, beets, cucumbers, butternut squash, watermelon—albeit, paltry there. I love watching things grow. I love tinkering with what’s planted where, seeing what thrives and what needs attention. 

But gardening—real gardening—isn’t just about the plants. It’s about planning. It’s about work you do when no one’s looking. It’s about what’s happening in the dark and the cold and the hidden spaces. 

If you want a good garden, you’ve also got to compost. Composting is holy, patient work. You take what’s broken down—what looks useless, what smells bad, what’s left over—and you let it transform. Scraps become soil. The dead feeds the living. It’s slow. It’s messy. But that’s how gardens work.

So why am I going on about all this? Because the church is a garden. But not the kind with tidy rows and perfect blooms for show. The church is a living plot of land—cultivated and cultivated again, growing strange and beautiful fruit through seasons of work and waiting.

And just like a real garden, church doesn’t flourish by hoarding the past. It flourishes by composting it. Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits.” Not by their polish. Not by their cleverness. Not by how loud they shout “Lord, Lord.” Not how precisely you bow at the altar, how closely you follow the parish constitution, how carefully you choose your Sunday outfit or vestments. You will know them by what grows. And you don’t get fruit without soil. And you don’t get soil without death and decomposition and the faithful labor of a patient people.

Emanuel, you have been faithful. 

This year, you sowed good seed and trusted it to grow. You wrapped children in coats in the bitter months. You gathered food when the pantry needed it most. You gathered clothes for children in crisis and laid them on the altar like first fruits. You stitched prayer shawls with your hands and your hearts. You showed up in kitchens and council meetings and care-filled worship to offer love in action. You supported the ministry of this place not out of guilt, but from grace. And in return, you have seen harvests. In the just reward of labour. In the help we give our neighbour. In the harvests we are sharing. The soil of Emanuel is good.

But here’s the thing: good soil only matters if we plant. And so we return to the garden. Not to build fences around it, but to sow again. Because discipleship isn’t something we did. It’s something we do. Week after week, season after season. And God calls us to keep going.

The whole Bible blooms in gardens. Eden, planted by God’s own hands. Solomon’s orchard, fragrant with pomegranate and myrrh, sealed for love. Gethsemane, where Jesus knelt in anguish and still whispered, “Not my will but yours be done.” The tomb, dug into a garden, where resurrection took root in silence and dawn.

We are people of the garden.

And God is still at work in us—for the ploughing, sowing, reaping, silent growth while we are sleeping, future needs in earth’s safekeeping.

This past year at Emanuel, we have not been idle. We welcomed our neighbors into concerts and holy days. We baptized the children of our own. We delved into the gospel of Luke and the book of James and taught the next generation of congregational leaders in confirmation about the different kinds of literature in the Bible, our clearest witness to God’s love for us across time and place. We turned strawberry jam into fellowship, and soup into shared learning. We tried things, and sometimes they worked—and sometimes we knew it was time to let them go.

That’s compost too.

Faithful compost.

For the fruit of all creation, we give thanks. But our calling is not just to admire the harvest. It’s to work the land.

So let us keep sowing.

Keep tending.

Keep trusting.

Because most of all that love has found us—and that is no small miracle. God’s love has found us. That’s better than a celebrity moment or autograph to brag about.

It’s God’s will is that we grow in and share from the garden we are given. It’s God’s will that we take part in tending the garden he has planted, not reaping tomatoes, but faith, hope, and love in a world that desperately, desperately is hungry for that harvest.

That’s God’s will.

So let us say: God’s will be done. Thanks be to God.