"Touch Grass" | Liz Harlan-Ferlo | March 23, 2025

Unlike my fellow canons, I have never stood for hours in hip waders fishing for salmon or hiked the Skyline Trail at Glacier National Park or backpacked for many days on Mount Rainier.

I am a deeply urban person. I am not, nor will ever truly be, outdoorsy by Pacific Northwest standards.

This was particularly clear to me when I was trying to date. After a while, I began just skipping over people who had a grinning selfie featuring a kayak or a dirt bike, or said, "Hey, some weekend let's climb Angel's Rest, or Dog Mountain, or South Sister."

The true acceptance of this part of me came to me the last time I was on the Eagle Creek Trail in the Columbia Gorge. I held on to the thick, twisted cord that is bolted into the side of the cliff and tried not to look down at the tops of trees all the way to the bottom.

I attempted to focus on the future, which would be diving into Punch Bowl Falls at the end of the hike. But meanwhile, everything in my body screamed, What are you doing? You are going to die here.

Now, don't get me wrong— I do love being out in western Oregon's tree limbs, sleeved in fluorescent moss, and wading in jangling snow-melt rivers. But there better be a cozy lodge, preferably with a hot tub, within stumbling distance.

I don't think that I would have done very well wandering in the desert.

When I put down roots in Portland, I chose a house with a big yard, thinking I would create a large garden. Camping, hiking, boating, and— God forbid— skiing are not in my blood.

But vegetable gardening is.

My great-grandparents farmed onions and cabbages and other vegetables in the rich, black soil in Upstate New York. My grandmother and my father both cleared some lawn at their respective houses to plant tomatoes.

My mother's mother, when she moved into assisted living, reserved a raised bed in the building's shared courtyard garden near Lake Michigan.

Portland is in a very forgiving climate for growing things, as you probably know. Really, you can stick something in the ground at almost any time of year and it will likely grow. Sometimes it will explode in growth, like the two-little-two-stick whip of a smoke bush that I used to break up my lawn in the front yard, and now my kids climb on it.

Now, raising children put a damper on my gardening endeavors for sure.

Any Oregon gardener has discovered the propensity of things to volunteer through wet ground and lives in surrender to moss that covers anything that the English ivy hasn't already gotten to. After a few years, I started marking Memorial Day weekend—usually the pinnacle of weed eruption—as the annual date of acquiescing to abundance.

But living here has taught me to call growing things by their names: euphorbia, sedum, curly willow, shannon pear, salal, spirea, Japanese maple, bearded iris.

All of this abundance—though the less said about Himalayan blackberry, the better.

I wanted my kids to feel more affinity with the natural world than I did growing up, but I felt woefully unprepared.

I did receive one piece of advice that stuck with me: take your children to the same place. Take them to the same place year after year, even week after week. A place where they can feel familiar. A place they learn and know and feel the pull of seasons— the way things are constantly changing, dying, and being born. The way that things are always the same.

Take your children to the same place.

Today, we heard from Exodus—the very beginning of the great story of liberation, the calling of Moses, the theophonic appearance of God into the world.

We know where this story is going: through the horror of barbaric servitude and destructive plagues, to the final flight into the desert after the night of the Passover and the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea.

We will hear that story in the darkness of our Easter Vigil. But before then, the Exodus story gives this commandment: tell this to your children.

More than once, the story tells the listener to pass it on. When you mark this Passover, tell this to your children.

The lectionary works like that too, right? We come to these same stories year after year, like a trail we've walked many times.

Sometimes there has been a great storm and we walk with caution and trepidation, grief for what has been destroyed.

Sometimes the sun cuts through and we see it all with lighted hearts.

Sometimes we are so preoccupied by our own angers that we barely notice the trail in front of us. We trip over the roots or we grow bored and wonder when we will get to go back to the car.

But we walk it again and again.

We read these stories again and again because they are places we know and trust, places we can learn from even though we have been there a million times.

Moving outside allows us to be fully present to time and place.

I believe this is partly why so many Pacific Northwesterners think of the mountains and the coast and the forest as their church.

It's why so many of us had a deep spiritual grief when the Eagle Creek Trail—that trail that caused my own revelation—burned in a wildfire a few years back.

You cannot escape the presence of life that the natural world displays.

The generation that has grown up awash in the burning light of screens—they get it.

When confronting someone who has buried themselves in the wasteland of the internet, usually to the detriment of their spirit, Gen Z admonishes: go touch grass.

Now, touch grass kind of aligns with Jesus's response in the gospel this morning.

Jesus's followers are jinning him up with the equivalent of doom-scrolling:

"Hey Jesus, did you hear about those Galileans who Pilate slaughtered, mingling their own blood with their sacred sacrifices?"

"Did you hear about those 18 who were killed when the Tower of Siloam fell on them? They must have done something terrible to deserve that kind of death, right? Leave a comment below about what you think they did for God to punish them."

Jesus, like many of us, gets weary of this kind of anguish bait.

He certainly is no friend to the powerful and would not deny the frightening nature of suffering and death.

But Jesus is not interested in wallowing in the horrors of the oppressors or in a hierarchy of suffering meted out by a punishing God.

Jesus feels an urgency that transcends all that legality.

He wants them to know that there is no time to waste.

"I tell you," he says, "but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."

And then, instead of exhorting them to rise up against their oppressors or swimming with them in disgust and despair, Jesus offers a story about a tree.

A man had planted a fig tree in his vineyard, and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.

So he said to the gardener, "See here, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree and still I find none. Cut it down. Why should it be wasting the soil?"

He replied, "Sir, let it alone for one more year until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good. But if not, you can cut it down."

This fig tree—it has done nothing with its one wild and precious life. It is unproductive. It has one job.

But Jesus is not interested in an accounting. For him, the fig tree is not an analogue for sin, having done wrong, but apathy.

You can't ignore a garden—believe me, I have learned this.

Tell this story to your children. Take your children to the same places.

We would be appalled to hear talk like this about children—the way that this fig tree is talked about.

Something is wrong with it, so just pull it out?

The child's and the plant's very nature is to grow. And if something is hindering this, we—the gardeners—must humble ourselves to work.

We must attend to it, to nurture it, the way that it can respond to the soil it is in.

A garden is not a transactional exchange. It is a site of grace.

It requires humility—requires us to accept that flourishing is not a straight line.

That God's grace can move and shift and change, even when we don't expect it to, even when it feels like it hasn't for many, many years.

We must humble ourselves to get down on our knees—to fertilize the soil, to water more or less.

We should pay attention differently.

And a garden teaches us that such work cannot go on forever.

The urgency of God's judgment will meet all people, Jesus says.

But the judgment of God is hand in hand with God's mercy.

In the name of mercy, God will break the rules.

We try again to tend the tree, says Jesus.

But we should also value the ground enough to know when it is time to let go.

Everything living will die.

It's Lent and it's spring—no time like the present for repentance.

It's Lent and it's spring.

And this time of year, I pull back the curtain in my bedroom and I am shocked every morning by the audacity of the forsythia.

I planted it in the corner of the backyard where nothing else would grow, and it is thriving.

Its branches are studded with small yellow trumpets, spiraling up and out and even through the chain-link fence, interweaving with its rhododendron neighbor.

It's a whisper of what Moses must have seen that day on Mount Sinai—the sight that made him take off his shoes and hide his face.

Seeing God's presence right in the moment is only temporary.

Moses has a lot of work ahead of him.

And the miraculous flowers—they too don't last.

No sooner do we cut and arrange them, then they will begin to wilt.

No sooner does the forsythia explode in hope, then the blossoms begin to fall.

In Kempton Hall today were portraits of blossoms blown open like fireworks.

We can hold on to that moment a little longer.

Those flowers draw us to them like the force of God's great mercy—inviting our attention to the great and holy mystery of the temporary world.

Amen.