Sunflower seed faith

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OSIJEK, CROATIA — The sunflowers here hide a deadly secret.

I didn’t realize it at the time. As part of my visit to the Balkans for our “In Search of Shalom” series, I wanted to visit Vukovar, a city on the Serbian border that endured a monthslong siege during Croatia’s war for independence. Osijek has the closest airport, so I booked a flight on Croatia Airlines from the capital, Zagreb. 

I was one of six people on the small prop plane. When we touched down, minister Goran Kumrić was waiting for me. As we headed to Vukovar, we drove past field after field of bright yellow sunflowers. I thought about my friends in Ukraine who inspired the “Shalom” series. The sunflower is their national symbol. 

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Related: In Search of Shalom — the struggle for divine reconciliation

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As I prepared to launch the series, I took a six-week online course through the nonprofit Peace Catalyst International, “Introduction to Christian Peacebuilding For Church Leaders.” The participants Zoomed in from locales around the globe and represented a diversity of faith traditions. Phil Gazley, a minister in Norwich, England, led the discussions.

Among the course materials were videos by Lisa Sharon Harper, founder and president of FreedomRoad.us. I downloaded an audio copy of her book, “The Very Good Gospel,” which she narrates herself.

I was surprised to learn that Harper had visited Osijek back in 2004 as part of a Balkan Pilgrimage for Reconciliation. She and her fellow sojourners saw the fields of sunflowers and broke into song, praising God. 

Later, they spoke with farmers who survived the wars of the 1990s. In a conference room in Osijek, “we shared with the director of a community development organization that we were overwhelmed by the beauty of the sunflowers,” Harper writes. 

The director’s response: “Yes. The sunflowers are so tall and plentiful because no one can go into the fields to plow them. The fields are full of mines.”

Harper also took part in a pilgrimage to 10 U.S. states, retracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the African American experience from slavery to civil rights. 

“I realized that my understanding of the Gospel was mute in the face of this evil, it had nothing to say,” she said in a video interview. “That was a frightening thought.” It also was the beginning of a 13-year journey of prayer and Bible study as she wrote “The Very Good Gospel.”

“I believe that the Good News that Jesus himself proclaimed was that, in following the Jesus way, in following the way of Good News, then this world could be healed,” Harper said.

The book dives deep into Scripture, particularly the first three chapters of Genesis and the repeated phrase, “God saw that it was good.” It’s easy to read right past that without recognizing how good God’s goodness is. God declared shalom — a peace of wholeness, a just peace, a peace that theologian Neal Plantinga Jr. calls “the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment and delight.” 

That’s a lot better than “good.”

I got to spend a few minutes with Harper recently, and I asked her how the pilgrimages she undertook helped to shape the vision of shalom she presents in her book. How can people who have endured brutal attacks from each other move toward shalom?

Recognizing mutual needs, and how cooperation can meet those needs, is key, Harper said. In Osijek, farmers told the story of how one family that had property free of land mines opened it up for the community to grow crops. That was a tiny step toward reconciliation. 

Harper also visited Sarajevo, where a priest had assembled a choir of Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. They sang each other’s sacred music.

“They’re not getting together in a room and working out things diplomatically,” Harper said. “but what they’ve done is built relationship and rebuilt trust from the very smallest unit of trust that they could muster, which is common need.”

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Related: Baptized in the Black Sea

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I think back to 2011 when I attended a Bible conference on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and witnessed baptisms in the Black Sea. Christian composer Konstantin Zhugulin, a Russian, led worship and introduced the crowd to some of his own, beautiful compositions in his language. Such exchanges seem unthinkable now, but perhaps someday music will once again be a tool God uses to restore shalom among our brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. 

This principle doesn’t just apply to Croats and Serbs or Ukrainians and Russians, Harper said. It can work in places like New York City or Minneapolis to bring healing among people in tension. Focusing on problems like poverty can build bridges among people of multiple, divergent faiths.

When people stop seeing each other as “other” and work toward a common goal, they can actually help heal the earth. Look no further than the sunflower. 

After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 in Ukraine, the Soviet Union began massive containment and cleanup operations that ultimately cost thousands of lives. Soldiers roamed the abandoned streets of the industrial town of Pripyat shooting housepets that were infected by radiation. Grim.

The Soviets also planted vast fields of sunflowers in the lands around Chernobyl. It turns out that Ukraine’s national symbol is a hyperaccumulator of dangerous heavy metals, including the cesium-137 and strontium-90 found in the soil near the reactor. 

“Planting sunflowers will not suddenly solve all of your nuclear nightmares,” writes Max Barnhart, a researcher at the University of Georgia, “but the flowers do something pretty cool to help clean up the environment.”

In the search for shalom, it’s all about the “pretty cool,” the tiny steps, the “very smallest unit of trust,” as Harper put it. 

May we all have faith as small as a sunflower seed.

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ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact [email protected].

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Filed under: Christianity in the Balkans Croatia In Search of Shalom Insight International National Opinion Peacemakers peacemaking Shalom Top Stories Vukovar