"Linguistic Incarnation", Or, "Jenn Geeks Out on Story, Metaphor, and Sallie McFague"

You Guessed It! Go here first! Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

One of my many, many parenting mistakes is that I made a ritual out of bedtime. I mean, that’s what all the baby books said to do, so it’s not completely my fault. But if I had to do it over again, I’d go back and simplify. I’d read him one story, kiss him on the cheek, say goodnight and close the door. But Jonah wasn’t a great sleeper, and he loved being read to, and it just took him forever to slow down from the day, to unwind, and to settle himself down to sleep. So, somehow, through the process of time and trial and error, we ended up with a complicated series of distinctly contrived and coordinated choreographies that we would perform in order to get the child to finally nod off, and go to sleep. 

Almost eleven years later, we’re still dancing at bedtime. They need water. With ice cubes. They need their personal comfort objects. They need to be told, every. single. night. To brush their teeth and go to the bathroom. They need snuggles. They need me to tuck them in, turn out their light, and say, “Goodnight. I love you. Have a good sleep.” In that order. Jonah, if I’m lucky, will grunt back, and then I’ll know it’s ok to close his door. Levi will respond, “Good night, mama, I love you too, have a good sleep,” and then I know that the day is done, the work is over, time for a beer and my favorite Netflix sitcom. 

But most of all, they need their stories. We started off with a reasonable three. A “Goodnight Moon,” a “Where the Wild Things Are,” a “Corderoy,” or “The Snowy Day” and we were good to go. But then they got longer. Three Berenstain Bears. Then four. Then chapter books: Charlotte’s Web and Winnie the Pooh and Harry Potter. Now we’re on page 247 of the Lord of The Rings Trilogy. Try to put them to bed before the story, even after a full day of stories, of Minecraft and National Geographic Specials and Lego battles and Star Wars and How to Train Your Dragon, they still need one more, just one more story, before they can settle in, close their eyes, and enter their own dream worlds of story and image, of symbol and process, connection and disconnection. 

The other night, I was lamenting to Dan about the tediousness that bedtime can be. It’s the same story - the same ritual - every night, the same repeated requests, the same instructions, the same reminders and the same battles. Even after eleven years of the same process, night after night, the story stays the same. The ritual repeats itself. I asked Dan when this process would finally be over. When will these kids finally be able to put themselves to sleep. When will we be able to simply let them decide when it’s time for bed, let them be responsible for their own dental health, when will they be able to read stories on their own, settle down, settle in, and nod off to sleep? 

Dan simply responded, “Well, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.” Which is so very true. And Levi, our master snuggler, overhearing our conversation, came in to the room and said, “Never. You’ll be reading me stories until I’m seventeen.” 

And so goes the story of our lives. Lots of tedium. Lots of repetition. Lots of trying again and “I’m sorries” and stories within the stories. Stories of lost Lego guys and found favorite stuffies. Stories that start out with giggles and harmless wrestling and end up with tears and bruises and broken picture frames. Stories of a little boy’s first cucumber, grown in the back yard, eaten whole, straight off the vine. Stories of boredom and grocery shopping and cleaning and re-cleaning the bathrooms. 

Lots of parables told with forgotten storylines only to be picked up again in a new train of thought. Lots of worry. Lots of concern. Lots of comparing others’ stories to my own. Lots of stories with unknown endings, stories we’re still living out, fretting about, writing and rewriting, stories erased and tried again. Stories of endings. Stories of new beginnings. 

There was a time when I thought my stories weren’t good enough. They weren’t dramatic enough. They didn’t have enough action and suspense, they were tedious and repetitive, mundane and boring. My stories contained within them a couple of minor regrets, so I thought they were all wrong. So I left. I left my stories and pursued new ones. Well, that made a mess. 

That caused some heartbreak. And now I have to live with all that mess and all that heartbreak being a part of my story as well.

  But why all this talk about “story?” Why am I rambling on and on about the stories we live and read and tell and write? 

Our book group this week read a wonderful and enlightening chapter from Rachel Held Evans’ book, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again. In this particular chapter, she asks, “Why Christian?” Why are we still…Christian? After a violent history, after painful interpretations and deep canyons drawn in the sand, after divisions and misrepresentations and disagreements and schisms, why are we still Christians? 

It’s a good question. It’s a question we should all ask from time to time. Why are we still here? Why are we doing what we’re doing, proclaiming what we’re proclaiming? It’s a question we need to ask during this transition that our church is experiencing right now. Why Christian? 

Evans says, that for her, it’s because of the stories. She says, “The gospel means that every small story is part of a sweeping story, every ordinary life part of an extraordinary movement… the church is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the center.” 

She says, “When God was wrapped in flesh and walking among us, the single most occupying activity of the Creator of the universe, the Ultimate Reality, the Alpha and Omega and the great I AM of ages past and ages to come, was to tell stories.” Jesus walked the earth, telling stories, and then became The Story.

Because that’s what stories do. They connect us to the unknown. They are the bridge between the things that we know, deep in our heart’s core, things like seeds and water and weeds and bedtimes and quilts, and those things that we don’t know, those things we can’t fathom, things we don’t understand — the Other, the Kingdom, God, redemption and forgiveness. Love. Sacrifice. 

If you want to understand thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, calculus, mystical experiences, the miracle of birth and death, if you want to really understand it, listen to the stories. If you want to better understand racism, and classism and prejudice, listen to the stories of those who have suffered it. If you want to better understand who you are, listen to your own stories. If we want to know what life should look like, what life will look like, what life does look like when God’s realm is made known, look at Jesus. Look at the story of his life. Study the stories he tells. Let those stories mold your own. Live out your own story. Then tell about it. 

Sally McFague says that metaphors, which are simply the elements that make up our stories, are “the way human beings get from here to there, from … unbelief to believing. [It is] what theological reflection is about; it is not primarily about formulations and systems. Believing has a narrative quality, for it is a process, usually a slow process, which moves from the unsurprising to the surprising with the complexity and ambiguity, the stops and starts, the insights and setbacks of a story.” The stories are what get us from here to there, from mystery to understanding, from question to comprehension. The stories are the bridge. 

The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. The Kingdom of God is like leaven. It’s like treasure hidden in a field. It’s a merchant, a net thrown into the sea. The Kingdom of God, this unknown, amorphous, mysterious, scary, hopeful thing, is just like the stuff we encounter every day. It’s just like groceries and cucumbers and cups of ice water and the ritual of putting your kids to bed every night. The Kingdom of God, Jesus says, can be found in our everyday lives, in our everyday stories. Talitha J. Arnold says, “…the stories of God’s kingdom and that of heaven are down to earth, literally. They are common stories about ordinary people —a tenant farmer, a housewife, a fisherman — doing everyday things. … In his parables, Jesus puts that incarnational focus not on himself but on the world around him. 

“The kingdom of God is like” the most common things in human life. Like Jesus himself, this everyday world embodies the sacred meeting of divine and human, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. … For Jesus, God’s realm is not some esoteric kingdom in the sweet by and by, but as close as the next mustard bush or loaf of bread.” 

And Sallie McFague says, “The kingdom is never defined; it is spoken of in metaphorical language. … A parable is an extended metaphor — the metaphor is not in discrete images which allow for a flash of insight … but it is a way of believing and living that initially seems ordinary, yet is so dislocated and rent from its usual context that, if the parable ‘works,’ the spectators become participants, not because they want to necessarily or simply have ‘gotten the point’ but because they have, for the moment, ‘lost control.’ … 

The secure, familiar everydayness of the story of their own lives has been torn apart; they have seen another story — the story of a mundane life like their own moving by a different ‘logic,’ and they begin to understand (not just with their heads) that another way of believing and living — another context or frame for their lives — might be a possibility for them.”

These parables aren’t something we simply assent to. They aren’t meant to be fully logically comprehended. They aren’t simply illustrations of things that we already know. They aren’t simply teaching devices, allegories, or moral illustrations. 

But through this connection between familiarity and strangeness, through this unity of the known with the unknown, through this bridging between the everyday and the mysterious, we are transformed. We are different. We do differently. Parables are the stories that recalibrate our entire lives. Parables find kingdoms in seeds and untamable weeds, in unclean leaven used to make enough bread for a wedding feast, in treasure in fields and pearls and nets full of fish. 

And isn’t that what Jesus does for us? Jesus becomes the ultimate Parable, the one who bridges for us the known with the unknown, humanity and God, ourselves with the ultimate Other. 

Again, Sallie McFague says, “Jesus, as the parable of God, did not tell people about the kingdom but he was the kingdom; and the way his whole life brought people to the kingdom was through a juxtaposition of the ordinary within a startling new context.”

Stories require our participation. They require that we step inside of them, enter in to them, we take their strangeness, their otherness, and apply it to our own everyday lives. Jesus, as the ultimate storyteller and the ultimate Story, invites us into the story of our own lives, invites us to see the Kingdom in the everyday things we hadn’t thought to look into before. 

We receive the stories when we, as Sallie McFague says, “participate imaginatively,” when we “must so live in the story that insight into its strangeness and novelty come home to us. We are not told about the graciousness of God in a parable but are shown a situation of ordinary life which has been revolutionized by grace.” 

So yes. Obviously and mysteriously and evidently and strangely, the kingdom is in a mustard seed. It’s in yeast and in nets and in fields and in merchants. It’s in our daily bedtime rituals. It’s in the mundane stuff we think we’re too good for. It’s in the dishes and the dust bunnies in the corners. It’s in the oil changes and the Facebook statuses and the late July heat. It’s in the stories we share and in the stories that our lives become. 

Maybe it wasn’t such a big mistake to surround my kids with stories, even if it is way past their bedtime. 

The truth of a story, the heart of a metaphor, cannot be found by analyzation, through logical study or scrutinizing or examining or parsing or dissecting. It can only be lived. It can only be participated in. Read and then read again. And if you still don’t “get” it, read it again. And if you still don’t get it, well, then maybe you’ll discover that there’s nothing to “get.” It’s only to be experienced. The metaphors sewn together with our own lives, our ordinary, mundane, everyday lives, in order to bind the unknown to the known, that is incarnation. That is the story of God.

There’s nothing to “get.” There’s only the doing. The being. The presence.

Jesus is that Parable. Jesus is the one who bridges the unknown to the known. Jesus reveals to us a life revolutionized by grace. Jesus is the ultimate Storyteller who invites us, who shows us, to see the Kingdom of God in our own lives, in homegrown cucumbers and laundry and junk mail, and cans of cat food, and little boys resisting bedtime. Stories draw us in to an entirely different logic, a new way of seeing and understanding and participating in the world. So participate in the stories. Do the stories. Enter in. See anew. Be transformed. 

Jesus walked this earth telling stories. Jesus is the Story. 

Thanks be to God. 

Of Coffee and Rhubarb

Read me! Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

So one day, legend has it, this goat herder was out tending to his herd of goats. He lets them wander and discover, as goats are wont to do, and they begin nibbling at these bright red berries hanging from the limbs of a short shrub of a tree. They run and prance around for a bit, and then he leads them home, safe and sound, into their little goat pen, to bed for the night. Except the goats can’t seem to settle down. They can’t seem to get to sleep. They’re energetic and restless. Wild. The next day, the goat herder takes them back out to graze, they nibble those berries once again, and then the same thing happens: the goats are full of energy and can’t seem to settle down for the night. This goes on for a bit, and the herder recognizes the pattern. These goats are gaining energy from these berries. 

Fast forward a thousand years or so, and you can drive up to the nearest Starbucks and shell out five bucks for a triple grande one pump vanilla caramel macchiato. But so much had to happen for those goats nibbling berries in the mountain shade to turn in to Frappuccinos and Lattes and the daily necessity in order to drag ourselves out of bed in the morning. No cream or sugar. Just black for me to start out my day, thanks. I mean, think about the process, the discovery, the trial and error that had to come about in order for us to get to what we now know today as coffee? 

First they took the leaves of the coffee tree and boil them up and drink the concoction, saying it had medicinal benefits. Then, they tried eating the berries. Then they took the seeds out of the berries. They dried the seeds in the sun. Then they roasted the seeds over a fire, slowly, rotating it constantly for an even roast. They discovered that light roasts had a bright, acidic taste, and the longer, dark roasts came out smooth and chocolatey. Then, they ground them up to just the right grind, boiled up some water, poured it over the grounds, let it steep, filtered out the grounds and the result is the delicious, necessary goodness we now call a cup of coffee. 

Hundreds of years of trial and error. Hundreds of years of observing and harvesting. Hundreds of years of sipping and tasting, of measuring and timing, of roasting and grinding, to make the perfect cup of steaming, black, deliciousness that has become a morning necessity for most of us. Coffee. Entire cultures have been formed over the enjoyment of the stuff. We spend so much time together appreciating it. We stand in line for it. We pay good money for it. We create community around it. We share it with each other as we tell the stories of our lives. But think about its transformation. It went from a random weed growing beneath the shade trees of an African jungle to a delicacy we’re now willing to pay a premium for. 

I think about all kinds of plants that have gone through this process. This transformation. How did people discover that dark cherries were so tasty to eat on their own but the lighter, tarter yellow/orange ones were best in pies? How long did it take for humans to discover the sublime deliciousness that is chocolate? And then how long did it take for them to marry it with peanut butter?  

And I wonder, especially, about rhubarb. What a weird plant. What a weird food. How long, after how much trial and error, after how much sickness, did it take for them to discover that the leaves are poisonous, the roots are inedible, but if you take the stalks, boil them up, add a ton of sugar and then mix it with some strawberries, it makes a pretty decent pie? 

What had to happen, what process had to take place, in order for this weed to become a food? 

I’m thinking, a lot. A lot had to happen. Trial and error. Time and cultivation. Observing and watching and tending and trying. Mistakes. Starting over. Trying again. Having a sour taste in our mouths, adjusting, spitting out, chewing up, enjoying, remembering, repeating, again and again and again. 

The weeds in our passage today are especially sinister. It is thought that Jesus is referring to a specific kind of weed, the “Lolium Temulentum,” commonly known as darnel, poison darnel, darnel ryegrass or cockle. It thrives in all the same places that wheat thrives, and, before its ears show up, it looks exactly like wheat. It’s not until it has matured, along with the wheat, that one can tell which is which. And the difficult, scary thing is, this weed, if eaten, if mistaken for wheat, will make you pretty sick. You can get drunk and nauseous from it, and it can be fatal. 

I guess not all weeds end up as neighborhood cafe mochas and blue ribbon winning strawberry rhubarb pies at the fairgrounds. 

But the point of Jesus’ parable is that we can’t tell the good from the bad. Only God can.

This passage is a doozy. And we don’t do well with these catastrophic apocalyptic texts. At least I don’t. We like nice Jesus. Not weeping and gnashing of teeth Jesus. So this parable of the wheat and the weeds is difficult for us to parse out in our post post-modern worldview. Then again, maybe this parable was just as difficult for the farmers and land workers who heard this parable straight from Jesus’ mouth. We all want this to clearly equal that. We all want to know who is in and who is out and what it is that we have to do to keep ourselves on the right side. We want to be able to clearly sort, label, plant and pull. 

Jesus is talking to a bunch of peasants in an agrarian society. They live and work and eat and drink and wear the land. They struggle with the land. They curse it when it doesn’t produce their needs. They bow in gratitude when it feeds their families. The land is all around them, stuck under the fingernails and staining their hems. It’s in their bones. It keeps them alive and it’s where their bones will rest when their lives are done. They take from the soil, and then they return to it, become it, feeding the next generation of weeds and wheat alike. 

And this is a difficult life, mostly subsistence farming, producing just enough to survive one more season. It's a delicate balance of immense work, trust, and a little luck that the weather holds out. And it is also cultural. These folks have designed their calendar, the rhythm of their days, their festivals, their dowries, their family structure, all around the land. 

And here is Jesus telling them to let it all grow.

To stop the struggle. 

To quit pulling the weeds. 

I wonder what they would say or think about what Jesus is telling them here - even just from an agricultural perspective.

Would they think: 

• “youre crazy. That would never work. The weeds and the wheat will be fighting over resources. They'll fight over sun and soil and room and water and nutrients. They’ll choke each other out. And weeds are resilient and pervasive and stubborn. They’ll win out every time.” 

or

• “yes, of course, don’t pull them, you might pull out your crop,” just as Jesus says.

Or

• would they consider themselves experts enough to know the difference between a germinating wheat sprout and darnel ryegrass? 

• Would they wonder if it is “easier’ to separate the weeds and the wheat before or after the harvest? If you do it early, there aren’t any stubborn roots. And any of us who has tried to pull a dandelion out by the roots can attest to that stubbornness. And if they’re small, they won’t germinate and spread their seed even further, making an even greater mess. But if you wait, you know which is which and you can pull with confidence. Your crop will have strong roots to withstand the upheaval. Everything is clearly labelled “wheat” and “weed.” But then again you might have yielded a bigger crop if you hadn’t let the weeds take all those resources. All that soil and room and sun and rain. 

There’s risk either way. Risk if you pull them out. Risk if you leave them in.

It’s a real sticky wicket…

But.

What if what we think are weeds aren’t weeds at all? Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” 

Think about the strange things we love to eat.

Rhubarb

Coffee

Chocolate

Sugar.

Edible flowers to decorate our cakes and logs of goat cheese. Syrups made of essence of nasturtium to mix in our cocktails. 

Even dandelion and clover leaves have ended up in my high end bistro salads from time to time. 

We eat a lot that was once considered a weed. The difference is simply that one was planted in rows, and the other has covered the land with a chaotic insistence on survival. We haven’t tamed weeds yet. 

So I wonder.

Who have we written off? Who do we label as “weeds” that might not be weeds at all?

What is growing, wild and free, that we wish we could tame and control because we don’t understand it yet. Or part of it hurt us. Or made us sick. 

What have we yet to discover about these “weeds” that could feed us, give us joy, nurture and sustain us? 

The sibling who has hurt us?

The broken marriage?

The boy in the hoody?

The guy on the other side of the political aisle?

The one wearing a hijab? 

The one who hurt us and refused to apologize?

Ourselves? 

Jesus says “wait.”

Share the resources. 

Let it all grow.

Give it time. 

That thing that you hate about yourself might be just the thing that saves someone else.

The broken relationship that you think will never be repaired might heal and make a new thing.

The assumptions we make about folks we are willing to label “evil” and “broken” might, someday, surprise us. 

This is redemption. This is resurrection. This is grace. 

What is labelled “weed” might not be a weed at all. It might be the precious dandelions and the clovers that the bees need to make honey or that your toddler collects in his tiny fists for you from your back yard. It might be rhubarb or chocolate or coffee or a new friendship with someone with whom you have nothing in common. 

What is labelled “weed” by some might end up being Alexander Hamilton, or Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, John Lewis, or the surgeon performing your emergency appendectomy. 

And when the time comes, if the time comes, and the harvest needs to be sorted out, well, Jesus tells us that that is not our job. That’s God’s job. God decides who is wheat and who is a “weed.” And I have a feeling that the creator of the universe, the one who made the lilies of the field and the birds of the air and the dandelion and the japanese knotweed will show us all that God doesn’t make “weeds.” 

God makes good. We’re the ones who label them as useless, annoying, greedy grabbers of resources, violent, hopeless. We’re the ones who do the labelling, and Jesus says, “wait,” cut it out with the labelling, because you don’t know what this will grow in to. You don’t know the power of God’s grace and transformation. 

Sure. This absolutely doesn’t absolve us from our failures and hurts and sins and violence. But it does leave room for change. Because if we pull them all out now, they’ll never have a chance to change, and that’s not our decision. If we pull them out now, we’ll never discover the potential that lies within them. 

Let’s let God sort out who’s a weed and who’s a wheat. I think we’ll be surprised. I think we’ll discover that there’s a whole lot of weeds - maybe even in ourselves - where we thought there was wheat, and we’ll discover that there’s a whole lot of wheat where we thought there were weeds.  We just need to give it time. And let God do that work. 

Some weeds, yes, will do us harm. Some weeds will make us sick and nauseous and drunk and might even kill us. It’s a dangerous world out there. 

But Jesus’ point is that we, as humans, can’t tell the difference. What we pull up now might have the potential to become a dark chocolate stout tart drizzled with cherry compote, or a rhubarb galette with a buckwheat crust, or that warm cup of strong black coffee that you need to get yourself out of bed in the morning. If we start labelling and pulling all the weeds, just think about what we’ll miss. 

Thanks be to coffee.

Thanks be to rhubarb.

Thanks be to God. 

Holy Compost

HERE!:  Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Jesus says that the seeds are snatched by birds from the ground when thrown upon the worn path.

Others are thrown into rocks where the soil is thin and the seeds grow too quickly and dry out, never having a chance to take root.

And some seeds land in the thorns that choke them as they begin to sprout. 

And some, yes, some actually do land in good soil.

Seems like the farmer in this parable has an awful lot of seeds to just be throwing around, willy nilly. 

He doesn’t even prepare the soil beforehand. He doesn’t turn the ground with his hoe or plow fine straight lines with his ox. He has so much seed, so much Good News, that he knows, eventually, it’s all going to land, it’s all going to find its place, it’s all going to be planted in what will be, eventually, if given enough time, good soil. 

Many times, when we hear this passage, we think, “Ok, so what do I have to do to “be” the good soil? Or, what do I have to do to share God’s message to the “right” people. 

What are my thorns? Where are my rocks? What are my birds who’ve come to snatch the word away from me? 

We try to find ourselves in this parable, whether to pat ourselves on the back for being such good disciples, or to drag ourselves into the mud for failing Christ’s call yet again. What am I supposed to “do" to get it right? To receive the word “right.” To avoid doing it “wrong”? Being “wrong”?

Or worse, we use this parable to justify ourselves, to say that if others reject “our” good news, it isn’t our fault, it’s the fault of the ones with the “bad soil.” We use it as a parable of judgment. 

But here’s the thing. If we’re looking for ourselves in this passage, I think we can find ourselves in all of these landscapes. Sometimes all at the same time. We aren't just one kind of ground. We carry birds and rocks and soil around with us all the time. And it’s not just us. It’s even in the best of those whom God has chosen. Look at all the major characters of the bible and you’ll see that they don’t even try to hide their birds or rocks or thorns. And you’ll see, too, that, sometimes, in spite of all that, they still find their way to some rich, fruitful soil.

We can see this, for example, in the life of Peter, the always naive, earnest, and overenthusiastic of all of Jesus’ disciples. What kind of landscape is he? He is all of them:

He’s been snatched by the evil one when he forbids that Jesus suffer, and Jesus responds, “get behind me satan!” 

The one who is called “The Rock” is withered because he sprouts too quickly. He was too exuberant, too thoughtless, impulsive, and rootless when he tells Jesus to call him out so that he can walk on water too, and then, when he tries, he begins to sink. 

He is choked by the thorns of fear when the villagers ask him if he is a follower of Jesus, and he replies, “I do not know the man.” He’s choked three times by those thorns. 

And he’s the good soil, too. The one upon whom Jesus builds his church. Sometimes, he gets it right, amazingly, gloriously, right. “You are the Messiah. The holy one of God.” 

He’s all the things. He is the trodden path and he is snatched by the birds. He’s the rocky rootless soil. He is choked by the thorns of fear. And yes, he’s the good soil, too — the one who goes out into the world proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is finally here. 

I think that if we look closely at our lives, we’ll see all those kinds of landscapes. We’re the rocky soil, the trodden path, the thorns, and maybe even the birds that snatch the seeds from others. And I think we’ll also see that we’ve been some pretty good soil from time to time as well. 

I wonder if the point is not to get rid of the snatching, the withering, the choking, or the burying, but to trust that, eventually, it all turns to good soil, if given enough time. The birds will return to dust. The rocks will wear down to earth. The thorns will decompose into soil.

It all comes back to dirt. Given enough time, and enough grace to see it.

It comes down to Mud. Worm poop. Decaying earth. The ground upon which we stand. Everything is made from dust and to dust it all shall return.

Even us. Calvin calls us worms, he calls us rotten. He says, “And what can man do, man who is but rottenness and a worm?” He had quite the low opinion of humanity. And that’s hard to wrestle with. 

But maybe he’s more right than he realizes. Maybe we are dirt. Mud. Silt and sand. But think about it a minute. Think about what God can do with all these supposed lowly, miserable, wormy things? What can man do? Not much. But God…

Maybe we’re the compost that will feed growth and create heat. Maybe we’re worms who transform rottenness into rich soil. Maybe we’re even as low as the castings from the worms. Castings, that you can buy, by the way, at your nearest hardware store or plant nursery for about 3 bucks a pound. “Black gold” they call it.

Yes, I’m enough of a Calvinist to say that we are truly, “totally depraved.” We can go low. We can go so low. We, humanity as a whole, have killed and oppressed and violated and humiliated. We have tortured and conquered and rewritten history to fit our own agendas. We’ve hurt and betrayed the very ones we love the most. We’ve gone so low. Down into the depths with the worms. 

But then, I ask, what does God do with worms? What does God do with rotting banana peels and leftover vermicelli noodles and discarded apple cores? What does God do with broken, flailing, hurtful, hateful people? I think, I hope, that with enough time, with the right acidity and combination of carbons and nutrients and heat, and then with even more time, we’re all broken down, eventually. We’re all made into holy compost. We all become the soil that welcomes the seed of the Good News of the coming of the Kingdom of God. 

What can man do, man who is but rottenness and a worm? We can help things grow. We can nurture seeds. We can create and transform and feed and hold. With enough time, with the Grace of God, with heat and the help of others, we can be holy compost that nurtures the seeds of justice and peace and love and forgiveness and even more grace. We can be added to the soil to make it richer, more life-giving, more transforming, more welcoming for growth the come.

But there are also some things we can do to expedite the soil-making process. To see the good soil when we come across it. To encourage it to become richer, darker, more life-giving. 

When I was living in a house with a big backyard in Stanton Heights in Pittsburgh, I pursued the hobby of vermiculture. Do y'all know what this is? In an effort to keep things out of the landfill, where nothing decomposes, you can go to unclejimswormfarm.com and buy yourself a big ball of red wigglers. They’ll come right to your mailbox. Throw those in a big plastic bin with some holes drilled in, add some soil, and then dump in your kitchen scraps. A few weeks later, you’ll have some of the richest, darkest soil you’ve ever seen, a ready mix of earth and bacteria and minerals, a veritable Flintstones vitamin for all your tomato and zucchini plants. It’s nothing fancy, and it’s pretty easy to maintain, and it’s amazing for your garden. 

But really, it’s just worm poop. A perfect mix of bacteria to break down the plant matter, some oxygen and heat, a little moisture and some worms, and you’re in business. Black gold right there in your backyard. Good for growing healthy plants. Good for germinating strong seeds with good roots.

That, and it keeps all those scraps from just hanging out in a landfill for the next fifty years. Useless. Never decaying. Never changing. 

See the problem with a landfill is that nothing decomposes. Nothing. We’ve perfected the art of the landfill, if you’d like to call mountains of trash and tires and cell phone parts pushed around into giant mounds by bulldozers “art.” Landfills don’t smell. At least, not as much as these hills of trash should smell. Which means that nothing is happening. Nothing is changing. We simply dump water bottles and chicken bones and used motor oil, precariously balanced upon one another into hills of consumption. But nothing ever really breaks down in a landfill. We’ve designed them in such a way that the trash never goes anywhere, never does a thing, never mixes or changes or transforms anything.

What if we had all the stuff we needed, right here, given to us by God, to make good soil, and we’re just saving it, collecting it into hills pushed around by bulldozers and dumptrucks, just treating it like all the other trash, missing the transformational opportunities that organic matter can bring to us? What if we’re storing all the ingredients we need to make really good soil somewhere in a landfill? What are we throwing away instead of letting God transform? What, or who, are we ignoring, passing over, writing off, that God wants us to invest some time, some treasure, some energy, in? With God, nothing is ever wasted. Nothing is ever lost. If we think that, then maybe we’re just missing it.

And how do we work on our own soil? How do we make the good soil for our lives? How do we sift out what will make good soil from all the other clutter that engulfs our landscapes? 

What do we need to make good earth? 

Well, we need Organic matter - real stuff, stuff that is alive, full of carbon and bacteria and water. We need some oxygen, some room for all those carrot shavings and cantaloupe rinds and our kids’ bread crusts to stretch out and do their thing. We need heat so that chemicals can have reactions and things can break down and transform into new things. We need a variety of plant matter - a pile of grass cuttings and carrot tops and stale popcorn and pizza crusts to make the really good stuff. Diversity. And finally, we need Time. Time for nature to do its thing. 

We just need real stuff. We need room to breathe. Some heat. Some diversity. And time. 

We just need to encourage the right atmosphere that will produce the most and best soil for our lives. 

I think we need real stuff. We need the true Word of God in our lives. But not the stuff that comes at us in the form of stuffy righteousness, or theological maxims or pat inspirational memes, but the stuff that life is made out of. Babies and death and hurt and joy and potluck dinners and reconciliation and first cups of coffee. Relationships. Dreams. All the stuff of humanity. All the stuff that makes us messy, living, humans. 

We need oxygen. Grace. Room to breathe. Room to stretch out so that we can be who God created us to be. We need a willingness to change. 

We need heat. A kind of discomfort with the status quo. Some friction in the form of difficult relationships and hard work and goals and forgiveness.

We need variety. We need diversity. We can’t all be the same, or we’ll never be transformed into something new.

And we need time. Just time to sit and be and reflect and learn patience. Sometimes we need a moment or two throughout our day. Or a long vacation. Or a sabbatical. Or a Sunday afternoon. And for some of us, we’ll need years and years of waiting until our soil turns into anything rich and useful.

I put those worm castings and that compost on my garden the next Spring. And you know what happened? My zucchinis were more plentiful, my tomatoes were redder, my squash was big and round, sure. But also, new things began to grow, new things that I didn’t even realize I’d planted. They’re the seeds from the compost, planted in the ground to form new plants we call “volunteers.” 

At the end of that summer, I had a bright orange pumpkin and a yellow squash that I’d never meant to plant. From compost came surprises and new ways of being fed that I had never planned, never counted on, never considered before, but there they were, signs of God’s Grace sprouting out of the castoffs of things we thought we didn’t need, things thrown out, tossed away, and forgotten. Was it thirty? Sixty? A hundred times what was sown?

Maybe we are nothing but “rottenness and a worm.” But think of all the amazing things God does with rottenness and worms. God, who also made us “a little lower than the angels,” transforms us into holy compost.

Because the truth is, eventually, it all turns back into soil, if just given enough time. That’s the Gospel. That’s the transformation of all things. That’s the resurrection. That’s the story of God, who became organic matter, who came from dust to show us that all things can be rich soil. All things can carry within them the word of the Kingdom of God. God spreads the word, willy nilly, radically, recklessly, onto all kinds of soil, because, eventually, it all transforms, it all becomes good. 

Thanks be to God.