I preached this sermon on the First Sunday in Lent, February 18, 2024, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 1:9-15.
I love quirky historical sites and stories and figures. So you won’t be too surprised to learn that back in 2019, when I was getting ready to move to Fort Wayne, Indiana to serve at my former parish, I was deeply excited to learn that the city is the final resting place of John Chapman, better known to the world as Johnny Appleseed.
Many of you know probably know who Johnny Appleseed is, but just in case you don’t recall, he was a real person in American history who has taken on a somewhat legendary status. He roamed the countryside in the early 1800s, starting in his native New England and moving westward, introducing and cultivating apple orchards in regions where apples were previously unknown, including much of the Midwest.
And after a lifetime spent wandering about with his bag of seeds, in 1845, while visiting Fort Wayne, he died unexpectedly. So you can visit his gravesite there, and there is also a Johnny Appleseed Park & campground and a Johnny Appleseed Festival and the local baseball team is the Tincaps, in honor of the tin pot that Johnny supposedly wore as a hat.
And I recently discovered that there are a number of towns in Ohio, too, associated with Johnny: the Johnny Appleseed Museum is up in Urbana, and the last surviving tree planted by him still grows on a farm in northern Ohio. So there are a couple more road trips my partner, Matt, doesn’t know he’s signed up for yet!
But hopefully he’ll be fine with it, because the very first picture that Matt and I ever took together, the first documentation of our relationship, right after we met, is a selfie of us sitting on a bench with a statue of Johnny Appleseed. So he has a very special place in our personal history, too!
And if you’re wondering why on earth I am going on about Johnny Appleseed on the First Sunday in Lent, well, one of the reasons I find him such fascinating figure–one worthy of our consideration here today–is that John Chapman, while unusual, was not just an eccentric driven purely by some strange obsession with apples.
No, it so happens that he was a missionary, too, and by most accounts a kind and gentle one. He was a member of the Swedenborgian Church, a small Christian denomination that still exists, and as he traveled, planting and raising up small nurseries of apple seedlings, Johnny also distributed information about his Church, which was, especially for his time, a remarkably progressive and inclusive expression of Christianity.
And these two things—his love of the land, his desire to carpet it with fruitful plantings; and his love of humanity, his desire to offer people a fruitful and life-giving message: these were all bound up together in his years of roaming the hills and valleys we now call home, and the sweet fragrance of his mission lingers even today.
But you know, long, long before John Chapman ever set out with his pamphlets and his seed bag, there was another man who set out on a similar sort of mission, out beyond his familiar homeland, out into the world, out into the wilderness, for purposes deemed strange by some at the time and yet which have left their own lingering sweetness.
Of course, I am talking about Jesus of Nazareth, whom we encounter in today’s Gospel, driven by the Spirit, driven by the mysterious designs of God, out from the river’s edge an into an unknown, untamed place. He did not wear a tin cap, but we can be assured that people still didn’t know what to make of this man on a mission, propelled by his unconventional, radical form of love, his vision of a harvest that nobody else could quite imagine.
But we might wonder—if Jesus was the Son of God, if he was already God in the flesh, why did he first go on this journey into temptation we hear about today? What was the point of these 40 days in the wild?
We could interpret it a number of ways, but it has not been lost on some observers that, especially in Mark’s version of Jesus’ trip into the wilderness, where he is tempted by Satan and is in the company of both wild beasts and ministering angels, that Jesus is, in some sense, not going somewhere new but going back somewhere that God knows very well. He is returning back to the Garden of Eden, where humanity first met the beasts and the angels and Satan, the one who tempts us away from our God-given place in creation.
Let’s do a little imagining together. In this unnamed wilderness we hear about today, a tangle of wild plants and harsh sunlight, we might imagine Jesus stepping back through the rusted, broken gate of that original garden, now long abandoned. We might imagine the cherubim guarding the lost portals of Eden, lowering their flaming swords in deference to the Son of God passing through.
We might imagine him walking amongst the derelict seed beds and the withered trees, meeting the wild beasts who no longer remember the names once given them by Adam.
And perhaps we might imagine, too, Jesus encountering that ripe fruit of the tree of knowledge on an old gnarled branch—the fruit once bitten by the children of God, when they did not know the price of their hunger.
And if this is so, if Jesus is, somehow, in the wilderness, also standing in the ruins of Eden and holding the fruit, bright and beguiling as a ripe apple, considering what to do with temptation,
perhaps this is the purpose of his journey: to discover what Adam and Eve did not—that the fruit of the sacred tree, the fruit of the mind of God, wasn’t meant to be consumed for ourselves—it was meant to be shared. It was meant to be broken open and given away. It was meant to be spread throughout the world. Its seeds were meant to be planted far and wide.
And so:
Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming (we might say sowing) the good news of God… “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Jesus is what John Chapman would become and what we are invited to be as well: planters of the seeds of God’s Kingdom. Our journey through Lent, our journey through life, isn’t meant to be one where we stay indoors and gorge ourselves on private spiritual insights, as if heaven were an apple pie baked for us to eat all by ourselves.
No, we, too, are participants in the planting of a future harvest. Following in Jesus’ footsteps, we are the propagators of the seeds of Eden, the seeds of a paradise that is no longer lost to us. We, too, are a people called to carpet the land with the fruitful plantings of love and truth and mercy and knowledge and care—day by day, step by step, seed by seed.
Now, I don’t imagine that most of us will take this Lent as an opportunity to put a tin cap on our heads and head out to roam the world as missionaries and seed-planters—though maybe the world would look a whole lot different if more of us did so in our own community.
But what Jesus and Johnny Appleseed can teach us today is that small, faithful choices have transformative impacts. So maybe this Lent you will volunteer at our burgeoning neighborhood Laundry Ministry. Or maybe you will attend a Thursday Eucharist or a Bible study.
Maybe you will write to your representatives and tell them to advocate for the poor, the hungry, the war-torn, the forgotten. Maybe you will call someone who is lonely or invite someone to church with you. Maybe you will simply tell someone that you love them, that you forgive them, that you see how hard they are trying, how far they have come. Maybe you will tell yourself these things.
Maybe you will prune the overgrown bushes of paradise.
Maybe you will teach the wild beasts their long-forgotten names.
Maybe you will remember your own long-forgotten name: beloved Child, disciple, seed-bearer of the Kingdom of God.
And maybe, come Easter, we will already see the green shoots of something new growing up from the earth, from our hearts and our souls. If so, it will have been a good and holy Lent.
…
You know, there is one more memorial to Johnny Appleseed, just down the road in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. There is a statue of him, holding an apple sprig up to the sky, as if seeking a blessing upon it from heaven. And carved into the stone, there is a fitting summary of all that he was. It says:
SAINTLY IN HIS DAILY LIFE. HE LOVED LIFE IN ALL ITS FORMS AND HAD A JOYOUS WILL TO HELP THE EARTH YIELD ITS FRUITS.
The same could be said about the seed-planter from Nazareth.
And someday, we pray, it might be said of us, too.
By Another Road 