Although I doubt our real grandmothers are trying to speak like surfers or pothead musicians, No. 65 does have a great deal of truth to it. It came on the inside of a bottle cap of a Mint & Honey Sweet Leaf Tea that I just opened. I bought the bottle on a whim before a good three hours worth of weeding that I just finished. No kidding. And considering that the crown jewel of my garden is one little English mint plant, the meaning of my day is more layered at 2:30 in the afternoon than most days ever get.
But when you spend three hours pulling weeds, cutting weeds, yanking up bamboo roots, and taking apart that unnecessary fencing that’s been there since you moved in as a leftover from the crazy landlord prior to the current crazy one, you get to thinking. You might think that gardening is where manliness meets gentility, which is, of course, true. Or perhaps if the Rev. Bill Boyd is your pastor, and you first came to his church when he wouldn’t shut up about gardening, when he was basically suggesting that if you weren’t a gardener you aren’t a good Christian, you get to thinking and theologizing.
Weeding and repentance have a number of things in common. A number of them are obvious, like how no one wants to do it, or they weed or repent out of guilt, or they weed or repent because they have to keep up appearances with the neighbors, etc. But there are a few more observations worth making.
Just as weeding is dirtier than ignoring your yard and garden, repentance is dirtier than sin (although it’s not cosmically dirtier). We can’t expect that the act of repentance, which takes us from one spiritual level to another, is going to be clean on the inside or the outside. In the first stage of repentance we acknowledge our own dirtiness before God. We recognize our sin and admit to ourselves that we are overrun and unmanageable. But repentance, at its core, doesn’t involve imagining a future better life, but is instead a turning towards God who will be the author of that life. This is perhaps the grittiest, dirtiest spiritual movement one can ever make. And, just like weeding, we need to make that movement a habit.
Weeding is not best understood as destruction or elimination, but rather as the first step in the process of cultivation. In light of the gospel and the indwelling of the Spirit, we don’t repent to simply level out to neutral. Weeding is best done, and most enthusiastically done, in preparation for the planting of a spring garden. Weeding has an objective. Good weeding has a telos toward which its action is oriented.
It’s a sly form of legalism that tempts us not to participate in the hard work of cultivating ourselves. In fears of legalism, some evangelicals shy away from anything that looks like work directed at the self. When that happens, legalism and antinomianism have both won. Such a Christian believes his scale is evened out and would turn grace into a new and twisted law, which, having had its effect, nullifies any call to action. Just like legalism cuts out the heart of the law which outlines the need of a Redeemer, this grace-legalism cuts out the opportunity to participate in our own redemption. This opportunity could be called the hands of grace, as Paul writes in Eph. 2:10:
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Next Saturday I’m going to be out in my yard again, weeding and mowing. I can’t decide if I want to plant a flower garden or plant tomatoes for a fried green feast in the summer, so leave your vote in the comment section. Be warned though; this isn’t an election. It’s a bill you’re voting on, and I’m the president.
