Hot House Flowers

In his masterful little book on the value of Christian community, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, “Human love breeds hot-house flowers; spiritual love creates the fruits that grow healthily in accord with God’s good will in the rain and storm and sunshine of God’s outdoors.” (page 37) That statement is in the midst of a discussion on the importance of having the courage to “be ready to leave him (the unbeliever) alone with this Word for a long time.” (page 36) That idea is, from Bonhoeffer’s perspective, the right alternative to taking “pleasure in pious, human fervor and excitement.”

Last spring, for some special occasion that slips my memory at the moment, I sent my wife a “hot-house” grown – in full bloom – hydrangea. It was beautiful and, I thought, the perfect flower to send, since I love hydrangeas and want as many different kinds as I can manage to plant in my yard. So, once the flowers began to fade, I planted it in a great spot for a hydrangea. I did all the necessary soil amenities required when you plant something in North Georgia red clay.

For a while, in the cool spring time days where plenty of rain showers kept it moist, the hydrangea looked pretty good. But as the days grew warmer and the rain showers grew less frequent, my poor little hydrangea suffered. Only because I kept it watered, put some mulch around it, and otherwise babied it along has it survived.

Not ten feet from that particular hydrangea, I planted one that wasn’t from a hot house – but to use Bonhoeffer’s language, was from “the rain and storm and sunshine of God’s outdoors.” It has grown to triple its original size – and I’ve seldom needed to water it. When it comes to plant life, apparently “the real world” does a better job than “the artificial world” of a hot house.

I think there is a lesson there for us, especially if we are interested in being a part of God’s work to renew and restore creation through the body of Christ. Rather than retreating to the safety of spiritual hot houses, we need to be willing to trust that the Word – in all its meaning – can and will transform us and the world around us. Raising my children in an artificial hot house of pseudo-spirituality is a formula for failure. Seeing the church as little more than a safe haven from the godless world around us is a guarantee that we won’t change that godless world. Failing to learn about the whole world – yes, even science and the liberal arts – means that we continue in our cute little individualism that reeks of the same hypocrisy modeled by the Pharisees and was so disgusting to Jesus.

The gospel – the good news that in Jesus of Nazareth God has kept His promise to renew and restore creation – isn’t a very good hot-house plant! But it thrives in the “rain and storm and sunshine of God’s outdoors.” But we have to be courageous enough to trust that it will do just that!

Reading through the first six chapters of Acts this week has reminded me again of just how true that is. It is a remarkable story of kingdom growth. The story starts out with 11 guys still unsure what the kingdom is all about and by the time you get to the end of section one (6:7), Luke can only describe it by saying “the Word of God continued to spread; the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.”  (NRSV)

Interestingly, there are a few occasions in this first section of Acts where “the world” is on the attach when it comes to the body of Christ. But when that happens, it only makes the church grow more rapidly and encourages it members to be more courageous in their witness. Only when there is an “internal, retreat mode” problem (Acts 5:1-12) do we see a bit of a bump on the road to advancing the Kingdom of God.  Using Bonhoeffer’s language, it was a “hot-house flower” moment.

If Paul could lay down the gauntlet to the Roman Emperor in the opening words of Romans by declaring “I am not ashamed of the gospel, it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also the Greek,” (Romans 1:16) it seems to me that we ought to have confidence in that Word to renew and restore creation to its God-intended purpose. 

That can’t happen in the hot-house world of retreat, but only in the courageous world of “the rain and storm and sunshine of God’s outdoors.”