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.