Community Garden: The Kingdom of God is like

The community garden down the hill has been a busy and interesting place this summer. This garden of twenty seven 6X1 size gardens has become a place of comfort and joy for Luther Seminary students turned-gardeners this summer as has been in many past summers. On this garden are planted many types of vegetables reflecting the multi-cultural character of Luther. Vegetables you may find include; kale, collard greens, spinach, risosa, egg plant, green beans, peas, squash, cucumber, squash, sesame, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, Kunde, Mchicha, Rinagu and many more.

For me, this community garden has become a sacred place to visit for reflection and relaxation. Here, high sense of commitment is exercised and faith is core for gardeners and visitors alike. Each day at five o’clock people from “everywhere” converge there, each with clear purpose; to tend, to water or to just visit with the personal garden in the community garden. The love with which the gardeners tend their gardens is unmistakable. Sometimes in silence and focus. Other times in spoken exchange between gardeners. This love is present even in the absence of individual gardeners. Therefore, being absent or away from the garden does not mean that the garden will go unattended. Instead, help to keep the garden alive is sought and found among the gardener community.

Children are not left out in this task of tending plants in the garden. Their little hands and feet, back and forth with little buckets helping with watering the plants or calling out how they might be of help. Pets are not left out either. They watch from the fence as gardeners work and excitedly wait for the owners to "return."

This evening ritual has become a time and place for Luther community to connect and share ideas on garden and other things. It is a time to meet those members of community you never get to see; especially the spouses. Therefore, the community garden has brought us together in time and space to share a recipe, a greeting, a smile, a thought, a question, a concern. And so, relationships become built round garden and plant talk. Often, these relationships go beyond talking to visiting one another and sharing the food at our homes.

Through this garden our core value of environmental protection is reflected in the planting of organic foods. Organic foods are produced according to certain production standards, meaning they are grown without the use of conventional pesticides, artificial fertilizers, human waste, or sewage sludge. For this reason members of the community garden have chosen to invest their time and energy on these precious gardens.

Other than planting from scratch, some interesting methods of planting are not scarce on our community garden. As we enjoy seeing plants grow from regular ground soil, we become more amazed at those plants growing upside down from hang containers as they search their way up in their upside down position. I was informed that this method of growing plants is called “topsy turvy.” In this very garden, are used support wires as well as sticks, for keeping such plants as tomatoes from falling. Whatever, the support material or system to contain the tomato plant, the desired result is the same: red ripe and juicy tomatoes to enjoy. It is so exciting to witness and experience the joy expressed and shared at the first harvest. Sharing one or more red ripe tomatoes with neighbor and friend is heartwarming. Stories have been shared on the recipes for cooking tomatoes and vegetables from different cultures. For me, this sharing of vegetables and knowledge reminds me of the beloved community where hospitality reigns supreme. It is, for me, the Kingdom of God where people come from everywhere to worship God in spirit and truth. In God's community subsistence living as in subsistence farming is the norm, neither quantity nor numbers seem to count; rather, crucial is the substance inherent in the community of “gardeners” that "while we were yet sinners God loved us" to help us love back in loving others.

So, in this community garden cultures and memories come alive. Family members are remembered and named as mentors and teachers to our gardeners from Africa, Korea, Europe and America. In a moment we become connected with our loved ones from far and near, now and later, yesterday and today.

In another moment unknown cross cultural discoveries of vegetable recipes become known among Luther community garden members. It is no wonder then that excitement and joy become no strangers to the gardener who discovers his or her native vegetable and grows them for use.

I am glad to be a member of Luther’s community garden. You, too, are welcome!

Blogging off

Folks, after two years at Luther Seminary, I start my internship tomorrow. And with that challenging change of pace before me, I conclude my two years as a Life at Luther blogger.

I'm told that a great big crew of Luther Seminary students will be taking the reins of this site very shortly, and this gives me a chance to fade out just a little further and officially retire to a blog-free life. But it's likely that one year from now, when my internship is over and I return for my final year of classes at Luther, I'll come out of retirement and seek to rejoin the team.

Like Brett Favre. Ugh. I'm sorry. But I wanted to offer a few final updates, and you know I had to mention FavreGate. As you have surely heard, my football hero has joined up with the New York Jets. So have I. The photo above probably gave you a clue (or maybe you didn't notice—the jersey is still green). The truth is that the whole thing stinks. But as I have mentioned before, it has become clear to my dad and me over the past few years that the Green Bay Packers management just didn't want to keep Favre on the team, apparently so that the management could establish its own regime and receive the credit that Favre has earned for the past 16 years. My dad got so fed up with this two years ago that he became a Houston Texans fan and only followed his hometown Packers for Favre's sake.

Given the ridiculous events of the past month (with Favre admittedly to blame for some of the ridiculousness), I've finally decided that my dad was on the right track, and I, too, have turned my back on the Pack. I'm not happy about it (look at the picture). But I've got a lot more love for Favre than for anyone else on the Packers (save good old Donald Driver), especially when the team's leaders have disregarded so badly what's best for the team. And so I'll be spending at least one year as a Jets fan (luckily, my jersey collection has already equipped me for this).

Among other revelations, I have successfully completed Clinical Pastoral Education. And I continued to enjoy it, right through to the end. It helped me better understand my role in God's work, and it has helped me to be a much less nervous person (Tracy is admittedly the more nervous person in our family now, which is crazy). In fact, I'd be way more nervous about being fewer than 24 hours away from internship if it weren't for CPE. So the bottom line is, for those of you prospective or current seminarians who fear CPE as much as I did, there is hope.

Aside from CPE itself, this has continued to be a very, very good summer. First of all, Tracy and I saw a lot of good movies. We were pleasantly surprised by "Iron Man," although "The Dark Knight," which we saw at the drive-in with my uncle and aunt from Texas and their church's youth group, really set a new standard among comic book movies. (Seriously, though, why does Batman now talk through grunts like he's giving Bat-birth to a Bat-baby?) "WALL-E" was hands down our favorite movie of the summer ... if not of all time. I'd have to put the little lovesick robot right up there with Babe the pig at the top of my list of favorite film characters. And although so many people hated it, we really liked "The X-Files: I Want to Believe." Not only did we find it to be worth our years of waiting, but I also found it to be everything the new "Indiana Jones" movie failed to be—a solid love story about heroes who have moved on with their lives (also, it's not about aliens).

As for real-world highlights of this summer, we managed to make a couple weekend trips to Wisconsin. On one, we took nearly all 30 members of Tracy's maternal family, the Barelmanns, to the Milwaukee Brewers' Barrel Man bobble-head giveaway game on July 6 (later that day, the Brewers picked up rock-star pitcher CC Sabathia in a trade that has kept the Brew Crew in the hunt for the playoffs). Then, a couple weeks ago, we visited Green Bay and saw my grandparents—my Grandpa Don's memory still isn't what it used to be, but his sense of humor is still pretty extraordinary. And there's one more big family gathering coming up this weekend in the Twin Cities. My wonderful Grandma Alice is celebrating her 90th birthday at the country church she has attended her entire life.

Now, Tracy and I are waiting for her final marathon day at the Dakota County Fair to end. Each day of my tragically timed week off, she has put in 13 hours or more at her historic village and museum, which adjoin the fairgrounds. Today she only has to put in nine hours, so we'll get three or four solid hours of vacation before my internship starts. As I talked about last year, though, a county fair isn't a bad place to hang around, so it was a fairly nice break.

That's about all you could possibly want to know about where things stand for me at this phase in my seminary life. (I haven't been on the Luther Seminary campus for three months, so any attempt to describe actual "life at Luther" right now is pointless.) Thanks a ton to all you folks who have read this blog over the past two years, and thanks especially to those of you who have posted some feedback along the way. I'm really sorry that I peaked so early and was never able to eclipse the splendor of my alphabetical entry from last October. If any of you are so inclined, you can follow me (or at least my sermon-writing) at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church (Minneapolis) Web site, www.bethlehem-church.org.

God's peace to you all. I pray that the Lord in the next year will bless each of you with strength and focus to continually minister to others, in whatever capacity or career that might come. I leave you with an image from the county fair: a pair of monkeys on border collies after successfully corralling a group of rams. I think it's an image that carries a proper, Lutheran message about law and gospel, vocation and service to the neighbor. Also, it involves monkeys riding dogs.