I first heard the words of today’s sermon title when I was a teenager. They came over the radio in a country and western song. The words: “I beg your pardon; I never promised you a rose garden.”

I encountered those words again a few years ago when they appeared as the unofficial slogan of the emerging nation of Israel. When Jews migrated to Israel and were asked to settle in “kibbutzim” in parched desert frontiers, they were reminded of the arduous task ahead by the signs posted all around the settlements. The signs read: “We never promised you a rose garden.”

More recently I have seen the words again as the title of a book and a movie made from it. The book, a novel by Hannah Green, is about a girl who struggles with the help of a psychiatrist to emerge from an imaginary world and to ent…