The Offense of Wild Words

The abundant life that is hard to keep tidy | The Word in the Wild, Proper 16, Year B

John 6:56-69

“Many of his students who’d listened said, ‘This is rough talk. Who can stand to listen to it?’”

-John 6:60 (The Gospels: A New Translation by Sarah Ruden)

A suburban yard that is being converted to a prairie by Benjamin Vogt

The wild edges must be trimmed, the fields cultivated, the forests managed—there is a human tendency to control the world and tame it. Perhaps this is Adam in us, a twist of that original vocation to “serve and preserve the creation” (see Genesis 2:15). Adam, however, was at home in the wild. It was only after, only in the assertion of human judgement, that Adam rejects the wild in its givenness and begins to form it to his own ends. So begins the unraveling ambition that continues to find new tools and ever more powerful ways to remake the gift rather than receive it.

I do not mean to say that there is no room for management or trimming or cultivation, only that they must be disciplined by a kind of reception. What, in this place, will work toward the flourishing of the given world? That is the question I’m always asking. This is a different kind of question than the one, obviously at play down the street, where a lot was bulldozed and sod, mined from some far off place, was plopped down, square to square with a couple of ornamental trees dumped at wide intervals. My yard—a mess of over 50 species of native grasses, sedges, forbs and shrubs, all overshadowed with wild tangles of elderberry—is surely an offense to the sod lawn sensibility. Our aesthetics are guided by different ends, guided by a different ethic.

What, you may wonder, does this have to do with the Gospel? The common theme is offense and what we do with the gifts that God has given.

At the beginning of John’s gospel, we’re told an amazing thing—“the Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Teaching, the Logic, the Organizing Reality of Creation—all of these are part of the full sense of the Greek world logos, and all of them describe the strange reality that the Creator entered the frame and became a participant in the creation.

The landscape designer Benjamin Vogt suggests that it is better to use the term “reconciliation ecology” than “rewilding” to describe the kind of work I’m engaged in with my yard. I like that corrective, and it works well to describe what the Word becoming flesh was all about. The Incarnation is a reality, at its center, born from the hope of reconciliation. As Paul says in Colossians, “…in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” Jesus is the one in whose body all things are brought together—creation and humanity, flesh and spirit, God and human. It is by participating in Christ’s life that we too can join in that reconciliation. It is through him that that we learn again to find our home with God in the given world of creation rather than twisting the gift to our lonely and impoverished ends.

And it is here, in the wild, weedy place of Christ’s body that we find the offense, drawing out the HOAs and Zoning boards of the landscapes of faith. The thing that the disciples find “hard” is that the Word became flesh, and that it is only by joining with that flesh and the Holy Breath that gives it life that we will find the healing we so long for. As David Ford, writes in his excellent commentary on the Gospel of John: “For readers of the prologue, and rereaders of the whole Gospel, to speak of the difficulty of this teaching (the Greek for teaching being logos, as in 1:1, 14) and then to speak of flesh is to acknowledge the difficulty of who Jesus is, the astonishing ‘teaching’ that he is ‘the Word of God’ who ‘became flesh and lived among us,’ and for the whole Gospel about him, above all his crucifixion and resurrection.”

If we do not now find the challenge of this reality difficult, it is not necessarily because we have learned to live in the wild places of the Word. Søren Kierkegaard, writing against the compromised, domesticated church of nineteenth century Denmark, says “that by being preached over and over again, the doctrine of the God-Man…has been taken in vain.” For Kierkegaard, the very idea that had given Jesus’ disciples offense was now being subsumed into a comfortable, speculative philosophy. Against this, Kierkegaard thought the only true hope of Christianity is one “which defends itself by means of offense.” By this Kierkegaard did not mean that we should make Christianity crass or brash, but rather that we should live in the paradoxical, strange reality of our faith, one that calls us into the dark places where Messiahs get crucified and the Creator empties himself in an act of self-giving love.

Like a yard dedicated to “reconciliation ecology” with its tangles of wild plants, a true faith will certainly offend some. This is not through any active work, but simply because it exists, standing in contrast to the neat, clean, manageable contours of an aesthetics of control. Our work is to continue to welcome life, receiving the gifts of abundance, however weedy they may look to the outside. With time, others may pause long enough to wonder at the Gulf Fritillary butterflies hovering beside the passion vines, or listen to the “sweet, sweet, sweet” of a Yellow Warbler picking caterpillars from the dense foliage of an elderberry. And in that beauty, what once was offense may incite a strange attraction, a hope for life abundant.