Food Sovereignty, Church Gardens, and the Bible: A Presentation for the 2022 Urban Food Sovereignty Summit of the University of South Florida Good evening, and thanks to all of you who made this event happen, especially Dell [deChant], Will [Schanbacher], the Food Sovereignty Group, the USF College of Arts and Sciences, all our local food producers, and all of you for being here tonight. I want to briefly describe the church garden we had at my former congregation, Faith Lutheran Church, and then I want to explore why gardens like this are essential to the mission of religious communities, speaking primarily from my own faith tradition. For about six years at Faith Lutheran, we had a simple but beautiful garden producing a modest amount of produce for ourselves and the wider community. David Whitwam was contracted with us for several years to get it going. He is extremely knowledgeable, and I would highly recommend him to help you get a garden started. With over twenty beds at our peak, we grew everything from popular staples like tomatoes and collards, to broccoli, kale, mustard, green beans, snow peas, potatoes, strawberries, papaya, you name it. The produce would be used in our Kinship Market food pantries, which we offer twice a month in partnership with Jon, Dhalia, and others over at the Well, who you’ll also hear from tonight. Our volunteers ranged from congregation members to students and other local community members. Our main challenge was that we did not have clarity early on about whether we wanted to be a food production hub or a community/education hub; if you try to take on too much production without a professional farmer to run it, you run the risk of burning out your volunteers, so be careful on that. But you don’t need a large-scale production hub to make an impact, since food sovereignty is really about everyone growing their own food anyway. We hosted educational events (IFAS), and we were once honored to host Dell for an outstanding lecture. Then, with sadness but in good courage, Faith Lutheran had to close its doors earlier this year due to many of the same challenges faced by other small congregations today. We remain committed to starting a garden at St Paul, which I continue to lead and to which most of Faith’s members have now transferred. This means of course that I am mindful, in a spirit of humility, that I share the good news of gardens from the perspective of having had to close one. Nevertheless, we must persist. Imagine for a moment that self-driving technology in the future (Tesla or otherwise) becomes so successful that people are no longer required to learn driver’s ed. If merely a radar were to malfunction, then such a person could become stranded. Wouldn’t we consider such helplessness to be pitiful, even perilous? Dell is surely right to quote the environmental activist and poet Wendell Berry who says that this describes not some future people, but us today, and it describes our relationship with something far more essential to our lives: the production of our food. We have indulged in the perilous luxury of forgetting how to grow our own food. When we also consider that most of our food today must travel great distances to reach us, so much so that food waste globally now produces carbon emissions roughly equivalent to the entire country of India, we must ask ourselves: What future are we heading for? I am currently reading a new book out this year titled What We Owe the Future by the Oxford philosopher William MacAskill. This book summarizes a new and growing philosophical movement, which argues that we have a profound impact on and moral obligation to future humanity, which we must no longer ignore. For example, according to the 2021 report from the IPCC, future humanity 2k years from now will have to deal with 6-18ft of sea level rise based on carbon emissions we have already emitted, let alone what we continue to emit day after day (SPM, B.5.4). We greatly underestimate our impact upon and our moral duty to future humanity. Now, contrary to popular belief, Christianity is a futurist faith. It proclaims the arrival of God’s future kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Now this isn’t good news to everyone, since it necessarily raises the specter of apocalyptic texts. I am aware that tremendous amounts of energy, and fighting, have been expended upon the interpretation of such texts, often futile and resulting in harm. Yet one essential aspect that is often neglected is the imagery of gardens and streams of water as healing visions for the future to which God is bringing humanity. Perhaps the most important example is from the final vision in Rev 22:1-2, which reads, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” This hearkens back to the imagery of the garden of Eden, which humanity was tasked to “till and keep” (Gen 2:15). The very architecture of the Temple in Jerusalem likewise evoked this imagery of the garden of Eden, such as by the palms visually decorating its interior walls. In fact, this theme of gardens as a symbol of heaven on earth persists throughout the entire Bible. That means if you want to understand the Bible, you really must get your hands dirty growing food. Let’s explore this a bit more. In an excellent book titled John: An Earth Bible Commentary, Margaret Daly-Denton shows that ancient near eastern kings were often known to have a “king’s garden,” as we see in Nehemiah 2:8. This symbolized the king’s providence for the life of the people as God’s representative. When Genesis says every human being is made in God’s image, it is saying not only that every person has this royal dignity, but that we are all little gardeners made in the image of the Great Gardener, the Creator of the universe. The prophet Jeremiah likewise wrote a crucial letter announcing comfort to the exiles in Babylon, 29:4-5, which states, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.” This was a word of blessing because gardens are symbols of Eden, symbols of the temple they lost, and symbols of God’s future life for them and for the world. This is not even to mention countless other examples like the Parable of the Sower (Mt 13:1-23), or the Parable of the Vineyard as told both by Isaiah and by Christ (Is 5:1-7; Mt 20:1-16). With such prominence, why then are many Christians surprised to find Paul saying in Romans 8[:19-21] that the creation itself will share in the redemption of God’s children? Will we also miss it, then, when in the Gospel of John it says that there was a garden near the place that he was crucified (19:41), and that after he was raised, Mary Magdalene, in a moment of beautiful irony, mistook Jesus to be the gardener (20:15)? Little did she know how right she was! These connections were not lost to early Christians, either. I will mention but one example, the Theological Orations of St Gregory of Nazianzus, who in soaring poetry describes the remarkable beauties and harmonies of the natural world—from the ingenious symmetries of flowers and leaves to spider webs and bee colonies—as reflections of the harmony of the divine life of the Trinity. Now I am aware that such connections are by no means unique to the Christian tradition. This is, rather, a nearly universal pattern in human religious experience. The same association between paradise and earthly gardens prevails in Islam, such as we see in Surah 13:35 of the Quran, which speaks of “The parable of the Garden which the righteous are promised! – beneath it flow rivers: perpetual is the enjoyment thereof and the shade therein: such is the End of the Righteous ...” [interpretation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali]. Similar associations between water, gardens, temple locations, and heaven on earth may be found in numerous other religious traditions, from Hinduism, to the Tao Te Ching, to many indigenous American nations and traditions. I have insisted upon digging deeper into the Christian Bible tonight not only because it is my own tradition, but because we western Christians appear to have missed this aspect of the story. Must we Christians not confess that we have allowed this aspect of the Bible to be hidden from us? Must we not admit that we have allowed our tradition to fall into a new Babylonian captivity to middle class life, which caters to the engineered environments of a consumer culture that promises to insulate us from ever having to get our hands dirty growing food in the garden of creation? Has this not robbed us of the beauty of being made in God’s image? I’ll leave you all with a passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that German pastor and theologian who was killed by the Nazis because of his resistance. I share this passage from his narrative fiction, which he wrote from prison during his final years, because it speaks to the challenges ahead of us not only for starting gardens, but for our larger moral duty to future humanity. He wrote, “Like nature, history also develops an extra measure of strength in order to reach a modest but necessary goal. Look at the thousands of chestnuts promised us by the blossoms on the trees around us. How many of them will reach their goal of growing into new chestnut trees? Hardly one. Nature is prodigal in order to be sure. Similarly, we think the end-results of the powerful movements of history, the great conflicts, revolutions, reformations, and wars, seem utterly disproportionate to the effort expended. History, too, is prodigal when it is concerned to preserve the human race. It expends the most uncanny effort to bring people to a single, necessary insight. Even though we see and bemoan the unfathomable disproportion between the seemingly meaningless, fruitless sacrifices and the very modest results, we must never underrate the importance of even the most modest result. It’s like the one of every thousand chestnut trees that unnoticeably takes root in the ground and in turn promises to bear fruit” (DBWE 7:169-70). So forget about the cost and the odds of success, and just plant that garden, ye images of God. Thank you. 3