Rooted and Grounded

July 27, 2003

Over the past several years, I have become a summer gardener. I don’t do much with houseplants, requiring, as they do, year-round attention to compensate for a space without much light. But in the summer, I have a porch garden. We start in late spring with pansies (if we have a spring that isn’t really late winter). Then we bring in petunias and geraniums, impatiens and caladiums. I say “we” because I am just the apprentice gardener. The actual planning and planting are done by my good friend and neighbor. Every year, she teaches me a little bit more about the art of plant care. This year, I planted a small herb garden and have been able, literally, to savor the basil, parsley and rosemary that have done quite well despite the pounding they have taken in the summer rains.

All of us city dwellers love this season of growing things: hanging baskets on lamp posts with petunias that cascade above our heads, planters along the city streets filled with impatiens and lilies and potato vine, the lush green of city parks. We who live in apartment buildings, who walk most of the time on asphalt or concrete—we crave the colors of growing things, signs of life amid the ever-present machines of the city. As my gardener friend says, “Sometimes you just need to get out and work in the dirt.”

In the letter to his friends in Ephesus, Paul prays that “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” It is an agricultural metaphor that compares the Christian life to the experience of planting, nurturing, and harvesting. Agriculture was far closer at hand for those believers than it is for most of us. And yet, even we who have never grown a real crop in our lives get the point. A tree or plant gets its nourishment (especially water) through its root system. In order for a tree or plant to survive and thrive, it must be securely anchored (or “planted”) in the soil. To live, it must have roots.

Ever since Alex Haley’s magnificent book and TV drama, we have come to appreciate this metaphor of “roots” in an even deeper way. Haley set out, as you will recall, to reconstruct the history of an African-American family, to trace their story to a particular person who came from a particular village and people in Africa. For a people viciously and brutally uprooted from their ancestral homes, sold by enemies (or even by family) into slavery, brought to a new continent and transplanted into a system that sought to erase all aspects of language, culture, and religion (that is to say, all that gave these people identity): for this part of our American community to discover their “roots” was a revolutionary thing for all Americans.

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” Simone Weil wrote. And she continued, “Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one.” Those who are truly uprooted, she says, either fall into a “spiritual lethargy resembling death,” or they set out, often by violent means, to uproot those not yet uprooted. To be rooted … to have a strong and dependable system that provides nourishment, to be grounded, sure of who you are and what your life is about: this is indeed one of the most important needs of the human soul.

“I pray … that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” Rooted and grounded in love. The phrase itself is part of the Christian rhetoric on which I was raised. I heard it regularly in preaching whether the sermon was centered in this text or not. It is a beautiful phrase … rich in possibility. But it is also a dangerous phrase because it would be so easy to talk about “love” as an abstract idea: to discuss philosophical concepts or ethical principles.

But to do that would not be true to Christian faith. Even though Christians have used the tools of philosophy and ethical reasoning, Christianity is not first of all either a philosophy of life or a system of ethics. Christianity is first of all a story. It is, in particular, the story of one particular man: how he lived, what he taught, how he died, and especially how he was raised from the dead. Those who followed Jesus, those like Paul, believed that his story was a window into the mystery of God, that the death and resurrection of Jesus showed them the heart of God, that God’s love was uniquely and completely on display in the life and death of Jesus.

And that, my friends, is what you and I come here week after week to hear: this story, told and re-told, theme and variations, like holding a crystal to the light so that the light is refracted in new ways, each of them shining light into our own lives. We come here to hear that story so that we can find our own stories within it.

In a very real sense, we are the stories we tell … about ourselves, about our families, about our community, about our nation. Or to return to Paul’s metaphor, what a root system is to a plant, story is to the human being. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur said, “We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated”.1 It is through story that our lives are linked with others. It is through story that the moments of our lives (even the painful and tragic) hang together and we are saved from the tyranny of random events. This is why we read novels and biographies; this why we go to movies: we crave the stories of others as we seek to create and make sense of our own story.

Yesterday I went to see the new movie, “Seabiscuit,” based on the best-selling biography of the champion racehorse. It is a captivating film and a powerful story with four characters, each of whom is broken in some way: a horse abused because it did not live up to the expectations its owners had for it, a wealthy car salesman broken by the tragic death of his young son, a horse trainer whom we meet riding the rails in Depression-era America, and a young boy abandoned by his family in that same Depression migration because he could get a job riding horses. The movie turns around a comment made early on by the horse trainer. When asked why he nursed an injured horse that had no future in racing back to health, he replied: “You don’t give up on something just because it’s a little broken.” It is a powerful story of the grace and healing that can come with second chances.

We come here, week in and week out, to hear another story … the story (as the old hymn says) of Jesus and his love. Today’s gospel reading is a segment of that story which is unusually powerful. In fact, it is so important that it is told six times in four gospels. A few of the details change: where the bread comes from, who first notices the problem (large crowd, hungry and far from town), how many people ate (four thousand or five) and how much was left over (twelve baskets or seven). But the story is the same: the crowd was hungry (for bread, for life, for hope); Jesus took a loaf of bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to the disciples to feed the crowd; they ate and all had enough and there were leftovers.

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan points out that long before Christians portrayed Jesus on the cross and long before icons were made showing Christ in the robes and royal pose of the emperor, early Christians made images of Jesus doing two things: healing and eating … curing the sick and feeding the multitude. This, he argues, is the heart of the Jesus’ story.2 This, I suggest, is where love becomes concrete.

Rooted and grounded in love. For Christians, this is not an abstract principle, it is a story. Our roots are to be found in a man who broke bread so that hungry hearts were filled, a man who himself became known as the bread of life in whom ancient hungers are satisfied, a man who when breaking bread said, “This is my body given for you.” Love for Christians is never abstract. It is as concrete as a loaf of bread.

When you plant a summer garden, you are basically in the transplanting business. You buy small plants, perhaps already in bloom, take them home and re-plant them with potting soil in containers large enough for them to expand far beyond their nursery proportions. In fact, it is the very act of transplanting that lets roots become established so that the plants can thrive.

I said earlier that what a root system is to plants, stories are to human lives. But many of our lives are far from the “storybook” variety. Many of us grew up with broken stories: families where love was conditional at best or abusive at worst, religious traditions that were more about fear than they were about trust, disruption due to economic or social upheaval. All of our lives are or have been shaped by sadness and loss. All of us struggle to make sense of tragedy, to find meaning in the ordinary, to hear a call to something larger, lovelier, more meaningful. We who know what it is to be uprooted come in search of roots; we come longing to be transplanted into soil that will enable us to grow and thrive.

That is why we are here. To hear a story that puts our own story in the larger perspective of God’s amazing love for us and all creation. To put roots down in a way of seeing the world in which all of us are God’s beloved. Paul’s words are dynamic: being rooted and grounded in love. This implies that we are continuously being planted and re-planted in God, that hearing the story once isn’t enough, that we are on a life-long journey of finding our own story inside the story of God’s love.

When he was at table with his disciples, he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, and their eyes were opened and they recognized him. The Emmaus Road, the Upper Room, the feeding of the five thousand: the words and the actions are the identical. Which came first, one wonders? Or is the formula the same because they are the same story? Bread is blessed, and the window opens. Bread is broken, and we are fed. Bread is shared, and God is in our midst. This is our story. These are our roots. This is where we are grounded. Thanks be to God.

Notes:

1. Philip Sheldrake in Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory and Identity, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. 19.

2. See John Dominic Crossan, The Original Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images, Edison, New Jersey, Castle Books, 1998.