As Sweet as Summer Peaches

“That good for nothing, conniving, interfering bushytailed bigmouthed chatterbox!” “What on earth has got you so stoked?” Linda asked.

“It’s that stupid squirrel,” I said as I stormed into the house and headed past her directly for the biffey.

“Is Squirrelly not playing nice with you again, dear?” Linda smiled as I breezed by.

“Well, I mean really. He just creates more work for me every time I turn around. And I am not getting any younger, ya know,” I bellowed through the closed door. I punctuated this with a satisfying Archie Bunker flush and stomped back into the front room feeling somewhat better but every bit as ticked off.

“Remember all those prunings that I left on the ground last night from the birch tree? Well that idiot red squirrel of yours picked the whole lot of them up, packed them clear across the lawn and stuffed them in the attic of my lumber storage shed. It’s jam-packed with about three bushels of birch branches now. It’s going to take hours for me to clean that rat’s nest up.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Linda said, a tad dismissively I thought.

A few weeks later, Linda came storming into the house. “That bushytailed, fleabag rodent!”

“What’s the matter, hon?” I said, not looking up from my book.

“It’s that stupid red squirrel of yours,” she said. “I went to pull some sweet beets from the garden—some nice big ones, too. I have been waiting all summer to cook them up and he has eaten all the beets halfway through, right at the ground level. The green tops are all still intact and the taproot, too, but over half the beet is missing in the middle. I could murder that flea-bitten, loud-mouthed rodent!”

“Oh, that’s really too bad, hon,” I said. The door slammed before I could show more of my genuine, heartfelt concern.

A week or two later, early in the morning, the back door slammed and Linda hollered: “You gotta come and see this.” I threw back the covers and padded towards the kitchen. Linda was out on the veranda in her PJs pointing incredulously at the box of beautiful, big, ripe, sweet peaches that we had just picked up from the Okanogan the day before. The drive home to the Cariboo was about five hours long and we were dead tired when we arrived. We put the box of peaches on the veranda in the wrought iron swing chair until the next day when Linda was planning on firing up the canner and putting up several quarts of delicious peaches to sweeten our long, cold winter.

“Look what that squirrel did!” Linda said. “He has eaten at least a dozen of our peaches, taken a huge bite out of each one. I feed him nuts all winter and this is the thanks I get. That blighter. I really ought to cook his butt and tan his hide. And after that, you can shoot him.”

“You know, I don’t think it is the squirrel,” I said. “It just turned daylight and we didn’t get home until late last night. Red squirrels aren’t noted for nocturnal activity. I think it’s something else. And look at the size of the teeth marks left in the peaches. It’s something way bigger than a red squirrel.”
That night, after canning peaches all day, Linda put the remnant of the half-eaten peaches back on the swing chair. In the middle of the night she tiptoed out to the veranda and ambushed the perpetrator with her flashlight. “You dirty rat!” she said, just like James Cagney.

And that’s what it was: a huge pack rat, almost three times the size of our red squirrel. In fact, it was almost as big as our neighbour’s fat cat, who apparently has an aversion to hunting rats. When I went down to my storage shed, which I still hadn’t cleaned out, I could smell the putrid stench of rat spray all over the place. The bunch of birch branches bundled into the attic really was a rat’s nest. And there was more than one rat, too; our traps later proved that.

It turns out that “dirty rats” are attracted by sweet summer peaches, and sweet beets, and as we later found out, sweet onions, too. Put something as sweet as summer peaches out where there are rats and you are going to get rats. And it seems to me that this is the first lesson of Christian evangelism.

There is sweetness in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Some of us can confess to knowing this sweetness first-hand, for we are all too aware of having come to Christ from the nest of “dirty rats.” As rat sinners, we know first-hand what separation from God is like. We know the stink and desperation and death that’s in our sin. It’s a very personal thing for us, a very sweet and personal thing, this gospel of Jesus Christ. Martin Luther is quoted as saying: “The sweetness of the gospel lies mostly in pronouns, as me, my, thy. ‘Who loved me, and gave Himself for me.’ ‘Christ Jesus my Lord.’ ‘Son, be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee.'” For the self-aware sinner, the gospel of Jesus is deeply personal and as sweet as summer peaches.

And that’s how the gospel must be proclaimed if it is going to attract rat sinners—the likes of me. Trapped in my sin, I needed someone who knew the sweetness of the gospel first-hand to bring it to me. Rat sinners like me hardly ever get into church to hear about it. You have to take the sweetness of the gospel to where the rats live. You have to get it out there. When I reflect upon it, the fact that I came to know the sweetness of God’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ at all seems a miracle. I would never have gone to church to find it. And there wasn’t a whole lot of churchgoers coming to me with it. The miracle was that I got sick with cancer and a faithful old Presbyterian catechist preacher, who was also a cancer survivor, found me out and sought me out. He came to me with his love and concern and the sweet good news of God’s love and forgiveness, freely given in Jesus. Incarnate in him, the gospel was as sweet as summer peaches. And rat that I was … well I am telling you this story, so I guess the conclusion is forgone.