Message for worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 22nd of Ninth Month, 2024
Speaker: Brian Young
( Wildflower or Weed? Charlotte Allen 2020)
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He also said, "with what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."
It has been hot and dry here in Richmond, at the end of the summer; I’m not sure when we last had rain, but I think it’s been at least three weeks. As I drove back from the New Association gathering in New Castle yesterday, it seemed like most of the corn in the fields was brown and dead (maybe the good green stuff has already been harvested, I don’t know). In our garden here, most of the midsummer flowers—the coreopsis, purple coneflower, and black-eyed Susans—are dry and shriveled up. But there is still life there.
In the last few weeks, actually perhaps since the dry spell began, the asters and the goldenrod have come into bloom. These are the last glories of our growing season. The asters are the ones with hundreds of little blooms, what are called disk flowers; most of the ones in our yard have yellow central disks and white rays, though we have one variety, called wood aster, which has pale purple rays—really lovely. And if you’re here in Richmond and you’ve been by the meeting’s perennial garden outside the west doors to the meetinghouse recently, you have seen the truly spectacular ones that are bright purple and pink—these are New York and New England asters, planted years ago by Chris Nicholson and others.
We have goldenrod also, in the WRF garden, and at home. Goldenrod is of course an appropriate name, with tiny, bright yellow flowers on top of high stalks, or in some of the many species, growing in whorls along the stems. The poet Mary Oliver has a poem about goldenrod, that concludes thusly:
All day
on their airy backbones
they toss in the wind,
they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
they rise in a stiff sweetness,
in the pure peace of giving
one’s gold away.
If you didn’t know which plant I am describing, perhaps now you do.
Now, Chris and any of the rest of you who are gardeners know that asters and goldenrod are both kind of unruly. Before I learned much about them, I would have just called them weeds, and if I were feeling particularly ambitious as I was mowing the lawn, I would have pulled them out of the verges where they grew and thrown their stalks on the brush pile. Goldenrod has been has been for a long time derided as a source of allergens (“giving one’s gold away”), but as I understand it, goldenrod pollen is spread by insects, not by the wind; it’s the wind-pollinated plants like giant ragweed that are the real culprits (ragweed is one plant that I will always pull out).
So as Stephanie and I have learned more about native plants in recent years, we’ve changed the way that we care for our garden, particularly for asters and goldenrod. These plants are particularly important for our native pollinators (and non-native honeybees), especially now. In this part of the year, when some insect species are preparing for migration and others are laying eggs for the next generation, the nectar of these two types of flowers is vital. What I previously thought of as weeds are now wildflowers, important companions in the natural system of our corner of the world.
And this distinction—wildflower or weed?—is the question posed by the painting on the cover of today’s bulletin. This is one of the “Quaker Mandalas” created by our friend from the UK, Charlotte Allen. If you heard Charlotte’s Sunday School presentation a few weeks ago, you know that she didn’t talk about this one in particular, but you may have noticed it in the collection that she shared with us. Charlotte focuses on the dandelion in her work, inspired by a poem written by a friend. If you got a copy of her collection, I encourage you to read that background.
Charlotte points out that the term “weed” is a pretty subjective one. We apply it to any plant we don’t like, really, any plant that is growing somewhere we don’t want it to, or that looks unruly. In all of God’s creation, she asks, “did God set out to design weeds?” Charlotte’s query put me in mind of the ways that the Bible uses plants as analogies for the hope of God’s reign, what some call the kingdom of heaven. Sometimes, we read of lofty cedars, truly magnificent and beautiful trees. But other times, as in our reading from Mark, we’re hearing about a scraggly mustard plant, that somehow grows from a tiny seed into an ungovernable shrub, large enough to offer the birds its branches for their nests. And in the reading from Isaiah, we hear about a stump—an ex-plant, really, a tree that has been cut off, nothing lofty or majestic at all—but nonetheless giving rise to a little shoot growing up, hope in the face of destruction and despair.
So when I consider these Biblical analogies, it feels to me like it’s also appropriate to think of the reign of God as a plant growing up through a crack in the cement: persistent in its growth, continually striving towards light and air and rain. Some people might call it a weed rather than a wildflower. But it’s a potent symbol of hope regardless.
Going back to the garden for a little bit, there’s another distinction that I’ve learned about that I think is important—rather than weed vs. wildflower, it’s native vs. invasive. These days, when I pull plants from our garden, I most often am trying to get rid of plants that didn’t originate in our part of North America. “Invasive” plants are ones that do well in our ecosystem, and do so well that they crowd out others, ones that have been here for many thousands of years and to which our native pollinators are best adapted.
Now, you didn’t come here today for a botany lesson, and some of you know a lot more about invasive plants than I. Dick Smith and David Edinger and maybe others of you have been in the trenches waging war against bush honeysuckle and autumn olive and burning bush for years and years. So I don’t need to say much more about native plants and how important they are. The rest of this message is meant to be pointed at another kind of “native vs. invasive” line of thought.
For there is a danger in my enthusiasm for native plants, if I allow it to overflow into other kinds of nativism. If I extend this attitude to my fellow humans, the results are predictably woeful. The latest instance of this, of course, is the tremendous amount of abuse heaped on the Haitian-American community living in Springfield, Ohio. This began with a a baseless rumor on social media that one of our presidential candidates amplified in the debate a few weeks ago. It has resulted in multiple bomb threats, and intimidation by right-wing extremist groups marching in the streets of Springfield. And despite the lack of evidence from any verifiable source in the town, loud voices in our national discourse continue to present this false narrative as truth.
Springfield is a lot like Richmond: a Midwestern rustbelt city that suffered from the decline of manufacturing in the late 20th century. It’s also a county seat, also home to a church-affiliated liberal arts college, and also on Interstate 70, less than two hours east of here. It is a bigger city than Richmond, however, about half again larger in population, and it turns out that Springfield has been more successful than our city in attracting new manufacturing and warehousing jobs in recent years. Those opportunities, of course, have brought immigrants looking for work, many of them Haitians fleeing the difficult conditions that currently prevail in their nation. There have been big challenges in absorbing a large number of new people, in proportion to the folks already present, which has stretched Springfield’s public institutions to their limits. So the situation was already tender, and now it has been made into a tinderbox.
As someone who has played a small role in welcoming immigrants to Richmond, I have to ask: could something like what’s happening in Springfield happen in this town? The Cuban Quaker families who have come here in the past year have been able to come under the same program that many of Springfield’s new Haitian arrivals have, what the government calls “humanitarian parole,” and they have the same legal status here. The Cubans have also left their nation, their homes, their churches and some of their loved ones, to come to a strange place in search of safety and opportunity. Like Springfield’s Haitians, they have come with a willingness to work hard and achieve financial self-reliance as soon as they were legally allowed to.
Now, again, Richmond is not Springfield; as far as I know, our Cuban Friends have been treated well here. But I fear that all of that could change, with just one irresponsible social media post tossed into the whirlwind of our political climate. If the woes of Springfield’s Haitian-Americans were also visited on our immigrant community, what would we do?
The witness of the Bible is that the people of God are to protect and provide for the stranger, the foreigner, and the immigrant. For the tribes of Israel, the admonishment was, “remember that you were slaves in Egypt” (Deut. 24:17ff); remember that you, too, came from another place, escaping oppression, and so you also were once strangers in the land.
In the passage from Mark, Jesus says that the reign of heaven is like unto an unruly plant that grows from the smallest seed, to be large enough “that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (Mark 4:32). To me, it seems that we’re probably meant to think of multiple kinds of birds on those branches, not just one type. As a birder, I want to know specifically what species these are, but of course Jesus doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. But symbolically, we can think of these various birds as the nations of the earth that will come to live under God’s reign when it is fully established. It’s not just one chosen species of bird that will come—it’s winged creatures of every kind, meaning all peoples, every tribe and nation and tongue. Now, our nation is not the reign of God, and it’s perilous to confuse the two. But if we live not just in the USA, but also in God’s come and coming reign, then the welcome we offer to others should be at least as wide as the spreading branches of the mustard plant.
The Israelites were once strangers in the land that became theirs. For almost all of us here today, unless we are part of one of the First Nations of North America, we all came from somewhere else. Even if we and our parents and grandparents (and however many previous generations) were born here, those of us who are part of the majority white culture have European ancestors who were not originally native. And of course, any of us whose ancestry goes back to Africa originally came here forcibly; not by choice, but because your ancestors were enslaved. With that understanding, how can we bar the way for those who come today, or next month, or next year?
With that understanding, we are all weeds. The seeds that gave rise to us were blown in the wind from elsewhere, or ripped from their native places and brought under duress. Most of us have done well here, in soil that was originally foreign to us. So both the witness of Scripture, and an honest assessment of our personal and national histories, say to us that we are to continue welcoming and providing for and protecting any of those who have come to be planted in this soil more recently. We are to continue in this work, even if—especially if—the going gets tough.
In that work, we must keep in front of us the hope of the prophet Isaiah, of the shoot growing out of the stump, a tree that was thought dead. We must fix in our minds and our hearts the mustard seed of the Gospel of Mark—small and insignificant, but growing by leaps and bounds into a place of hospitality for all of the birds of the air.
And we must remember that we are all weeds.
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