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Good morning. On Friday night, as we left the European Union, the Prime Minister vowed to use our regained sovereignty to build what he called ‘a moment of real national renewal and change’.

I was pondering his words on Sunday afternoon, when I had a long drive, and found myself listening to Gardeners’ Question Time. I am absolutely not a gardener but I’ve always found listening to questions and answers on something I know almost nothing about incredibly therapeutic. Yesterday a member of the audience was asking why his red cabbages had only grown to marble size when the rest of his brassicas were fine. Another was wondering whether powdery mildew had wrecked his fine grapes. I could listen to this sort of thing for hours.

So as I reflected on national renewal, I found agricultural metaphors inevitably came to mind. What do we want to plant in our newly sovereign soil? What are the seeds of aspiration, what are the plants of promise, the fruits and flowers we hope to see? Can we in fact generate a vision of our national garden that most of us can live with, or is it beyond us? And that question takes the garden metaphor to another level.

For real gardeners, at least those who bring their questions to the GQT panel it is not just a matter of what you plant – there’s the state of the soil too. For those of a certain age there is an abiding memory of Arthur Fallowfield on the long running radio series Beyond our Ken musing in response to every contentious issue – I won’t attempt the west country accent - ‘Well I think the answer lies in the soil…’

And he was right in a way. In a sense we are the soil in which national renewal happens or fails to happen. We can be trapped in the caricatures of the remoaning remoaner and the leaver draped in the union flag. Renewal is not automatic. It won’t happen just because we feel like it and it won’t happen if we look for it to be imposed from above. It’s a matter of the heart, much more testing than the weary clichés about us all coming together.

Renewal and change are big words. To a Christian like myself they echo the call of the Gospel to the renewal of a life turned towards God. In one of his most memorable parables Jesus spoke of the sower going forth to sow, scattering seed randomly on the ground. Whether the seed flourished depended where it happened to fall. There was good ground where it did well, but some seed missed the soil and was eaten by birds, some fell on stony ground, and withered, and some fell among thorns which choked it.

The thorns, the stones and the shallowness of our national conversation are still very obvious. But now if good things are to happen we need to find the good ground.

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