July 13, 2025

Waiting for Tomatoes

Dadgie has always been the gardener at our house.  Every year, she creates a beautiful garden array of flowers in our raised garden bed planter boxes on the deck.  She used to start everything from seed in the late winter or early spring indoors under lights, but now she starts very few things from seed.  But she has hunted around for the very best plants, and when she found dependable growers, she stuck with them.  Me – I’m lucky if I can tell the difference between a petunia and a pepper plant.

But this year, just a matter of days ago, we bought a tomato plant and put it in one of our deck planters with the flowers.  It’s an Early Girl tomato plant and we have it where we can readily see it from the dining table.  We’re a little impatient, but we can’t help watching and waiting for tomatoes.  At this time of year, I guess a lot of us are waiting for tomatoes.  There’s nothing like a tomato fresh from the garden.

This all came to mind as I was reading from today’s old testament lesson in the book of Amos.  I picked up my Bible and encountered this odd exchange between the Lord and Amos – that’s what got me thinking about tomatoes.  The Almighty showed Amos a basket of summer fruit (I think, of course, of tomatoes – which are actually a fruit, by the way, not a vegetable).  And the Lord says, “Amos, what do you see?” And Amos says, “A basket of summer fruit.”  And then, out of the blue, the Lord Almighty takes off on this harangue about “the end” coming upon the people of Israel.”  And then says, “I will never again pass them by.  The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day . . . the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place.”  And I’m sitting there scratching my head, wondering, “whatever became of the basket of tomatoes?”

Well, a little research solved the riddle.  It’s actually a pun.  The text was originally written in Hebrew, of course, and the Hebrew word for summer fruit is ץ ‚ַק (qayits), and the word for end (as in, “The end has come upon my people Israel”) is ץַק (qats).  So, when Amos says, “I see a basket of summer fruit (qayits), the Lord says, “The end (qats) has come.”  Amos, or the God of the Old Testament, or someone, is just having a little fun with us.

But I couldn’t get my mind off the tomatoes.  I put down my Bible and glanced out the window at the garden.  Visions danced in my head of ripe, juicy, red tomato slices on a little plate with a dash of salt or some fresh basil.  I knew it was the waiting time.  I sighed, picked the Bible up again and read on.

It’s a pretty bleak picture, this basket of tomatoes/end that the Lord has in mind, with the land trembling, and everyone mourning, and the sun going down at noon, and feasts being turned into mourning, and songs into lamentation, and sackcloth on all the loins, and baldness on every head (I kind of resent that last one).

So, what’s all the fuss about?  Why all the trembling and wailing, and mourning and lamentation?  Well, when you get to the climax of the story, you find out what all the crying’s about.  It reads: “The time is surely coming, says the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.  They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.”

So, what is it that brings on this predicament?  Why won’t they be able to find the word of the Lord?  The Lord says it’s because of those who “trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor.”  Losing track of the word of the Lord is the punishment for failing to live by the Lord’s laws of justice and mercy.

I set my Bible down again and scratched my head – still thinking about tomatoes, by the way.

The punishment for not following Divine law – that is, the “word of the Lord” – is that you will no longer be able to find the “word of the Lord.”  And it occurred to me, why should someone care?  If they don’t care about justice and righteousness and mercy anyway, why should they care about not finding justice and righteousness and mercy?  Well, that’s what got my mind off tomatoes for a minute.  Instead, I began to think about The cryptocurrency trading platform FTX that is the latest high-profile financial fraud case laid bare by American regulators. The company was led by Sam Bankman-Fried, who now resides in a U.S. prison after being found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.  And I thought of a company named Theranos, the founders of which were found guilty a couple of years ago and sentenced to 11 and 12 years in prison. They were ordered to pay restitution of 452 million dollars to fraud victims.  And I thought, the punishment for being cheap is losing a lot of money, and the punishment for not doing your job is losing your job, the punishment for a lack of care is precisely the fruits of carelessness.

Could it be that the Lord is saying here something as simple as: what goes around comes around, that thunderbolts from heaven and fire and brimstone are not the punishment for doing evil, but that we create our own hell by how we live?  Could it be that being ugly towards people just makes a person ugly, or that being miserable consigns one to a life of misery, or that failure to live by the law of love leaves one loveless?

If so, then I suspect the inverse is also true.  After all, Amos wouldn’t have bothered to tell people about his little talk with the Lord and the curse upon the people of Israel if, indeed, there were no hope of redemption – no good news.  Could it be that compassion breeds a gentler and less victimized life, that honesty makes for a life lived closer to truth, and that striving to follow the path of goodness puts one on a very good road?

The Apostle Paul spoke of that kind of good news when he declared that the Gospel of Christ was not only for the Jews but for those who had been considered outside the circle of redemption: the gentiles.  He wrote: “To them God chose to make known how great among the gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”  Paul knew it; excluding people from the hope of redemption only leads to more exclusion, and less hope and less redemption.

I love the story about our grandson, a tall, gifted young man named Alexander.  It happened about twenty years ago, when he was in the first grade.  Back then, Pokemon cards were the big thing, and Alexander had a big and cherished collection of them.  He took some of his prized cards with him to school one day to show to his schoolmates.  On the bus to school, he took them out and displayed them for the kid sitting next to him – not a close friend, just a kid who happened to be there.  They went through the cards one at a time, sharing each treasure with the kind of joy that only a six-year-old can muster.  When the bus came to the next stop, an older kid sitting behind them got up, grabbed the cards from their hands, and tore them all into little pieces with the kind of pleasure in someone else’s misery that often times only an eight-year-old can muster.  A number of other children around the older boy laughed and took great delight in his coup.  Alexander was devastated.  His little heart was broken as he looked through his tears at all the torn pieces of beloved Pokemon cards on the floor of the school bus.

The little boy sitting next to Alexander waited until everyone else got off the bus.  He picked up all the torn pieces of Pokemon cards and stuffed them in his pocket.  The rest of what he did we only learned later from his mother.  She said that, on arriving home that day, he said not a word but ran upstairs to his bedroom where he spent most of the rest of that evening doing something.  We found out later that he was sorting through the puzzle of torn card pieces, meticulously taping them together.  The next day on the same school bus, he presented the taped up cards to Alexander.  This time, several of the children around leaned in to see the cards themselves and admired his handiwork.  The older boy who had torn up the cards was now the odd one out – left to stew in his ugly mood and isolation.

Not the sort of incident that changes the world, perhaps.  But one that changes lives – somewhere down the road.  Ugly behavior just makes a person ugly, and caring just leads to caring relationships.

Well, I closed up the Bible and looked out the window again.  When Dadgie plants Early Girl tomatoes, I thought, she doesn’t get petunias.  In the end, you plant tomatoes, you get tomatoes – and that’s not a bad end.