(Based on Genesis 2:4b-15 & John 9:1-7)
It all started with soil…it ALL started with soil: every
plant, every flower, every tree, and every vegetable, right? Any gardener, any
farmer, any botanist or ecologist will tell you that it all starts with soil.
But it’s easy to forget that something else started with soil too…You and me
and ALL of humanity! According to Genesis two, we were made of the earth, of
the soil, from the dirt.
God has always been into dirt. As theologian Norman
Wirzba put it, “God fashioned the first human being by taking the dust of the
ground into his hands…and then animating it… God gave it life from within.”
For those of us who are farmers or who grew up with
farmer parents and grandparents, no one needs to tell us how vital and
miraculous soil is. Soil is amazing! It is the life source. Dirt is no dirty
word for people of the land. Kids know this intuitively. They are fascinated
with soil and dirt. They love to play in it, to rub themselves with it, and to
get it all over their bodies. And if we go back in time, before the Industrial
Revolution came along, from the late 1700’s to the mid 1800’s, we were all a
lot more into and in touch with the soil than we are today, right? As Diana
Butler Bass puts it, in the pre-industrial revolution days, “God, dirt, and
divinity were easy companions. Creator and creation were part of the same
theological ecosystem.” This is why, Butler Bass continues, “Jesus spun
agricultural tales for his hearers’ spiritual benefit.” But, Butler Bass
continues, “the Industrial Revolution transformed how we understood the
dirt…People became estranged from the land; the dirt became an it.”
Think about it! As we got more into machines and
technology, almost all our associations with dirt and soil went from positive
to negative. If your child or grandchild comes in from outside with soil on his
hand or pants, you say, “Don’t come in here! You’re filthy dirty!” If a joke is
off color and inappropriate, we call it a “dirty joke,” right? What’s another
word for a pornographic magazine? In America nowadays, people from cities
consider themselves superior and better educated than people from farms.
“Country people” are thought of as poor, uneducated, with dirt under their
fingernails. What about our language for sin? It’s the same thing, right? We
say that a sinner is dirty, soiled by sin, and needs to be washed clean in the
waters of baptism. It seems that dirt and soil are not things we appreciate
anymore; in fact, they are things we avoid.
It’s too bad, because God is in the dirt; God has always
been in the dirt. That may be why there are actually more people involved nowadays
in community gardens and in local farming efforts than there are in churches.
Think about that! Just a few generations ago, no one would have even questioned
the fact that God and dirt go hand in hand. As one man put it, “There’s no such
thing as a secular farmer! The seasons are spiritual; the soil is spiritual,
and so we farmers are a spiritual lot.”
One way of reading our origin stories in Genesis,
particularly the Garden of Eden, is that originally, we had a great
relationship with the soil and the earth. That relationship was part and parcel
of our relationship with God. But when Adam and Eve lost site of that
connection, that relationship, they were cast out of the garden, out of that
farming life, and began to wander the earth and take from it rather than nurture and give to it. So we really need to “get back to the garden” as Joni Mitchell
put it in a song that Rokko and I will sing for you in a few minutes.
This earth God lends us to protect and care for is a
miracle, an absolutely amazing creation. And it all starts with dirt, with
soil. The more in touch we are and connected we are with soil and with dirt,
the more in touch and connected we are with God. Conversely, the more removed
we are from the soil of the earth, the more detached and removed we are from
God. I think that is why I can so clearly see God’s hand in the huge movement that’s
going on right now toward both organic and local farming. More and more people
- and especially young people - are trying to get back in touch, into more
direct contact with the food they eat. They want to know where it comes from,
how it was grown, produced, and packaged. A lot of America’s brightest young
people are willing to spend more money buying and consuming vegetables that are
grown locally, as close to where they live as possible. They even want to
participate in growing it, if at all possible. So they join CSA’s – Community
Supported Agricultural Cooperatives. God is present in the movement toward
local food production and consumption.
Folks, I may be talking about this now. But I have to
confess that I never even thought about any of this when I was younger. I was a
city and suburban kid. We went to a grocery store and bought the cheapest best
deal we could find, without any regard for where it was produced, how it was
grown, how it had been packaged, or how many thousands of miles it may have
been transported to get to us. Not only did my “Christian” family and I not
think about that, we certainly saw no connection between those kinds of
ecological, environmental questions and following Jesus. We assumed that if we
went to church on Sunday, put some money in the collection plate, studied the
Bible, and treated others well, that that was all there was to following Jesus.
But then, over time, I started attending lectures back in
Indiana about why family farms were dying. I started watching documentaries
about how food is being mass-produced and chemically manufactured. I started
learning about GMO’s, pesticides, and the environmental damage that is done
every time we people in Michigan buy lettuce from California and apples from
Washington State.
Only in the last 8–10 years has it started to dawn on me
just how great the distance has become between the dirt and me. Without ever
intending to, I have lost touch with the earth, with the very dirt and soil out
of which I came. Scripture teaches that out of the dust and dirt I’ve come and
to it I shall return. Jesus was all about the dirt. Have you ever noticed that
95% of his parables used the earth and dirt to teach us about God? He was
always writing in the dirt with his fingers, sitting in it, leaning against a
tree, sleeping on the ground out under the stars. In the passage I shared from
John’s gospel a few moments ago, Jesus used dirt and spit to heal a man’s
blindness. Mudd…to heal! How great is that? Jesus lived his entire life
intimately connected to the ground.
I read one study that said more and more churches today
are building community gardens right on their property. Some are doing it to
raise healthy local food for charities, food pantries, and hungry families.
Others are doing it to supplement the church’s budget. Some are doing it as a
primary fellowship activity, and many are doing it just for fun. But they’re
all discovering that gardening is deepening their faith, reconnecting them with
God. I wonder if we could try that? Reverend Anna Woofenden goes so far as to
say that the church should be “a community where the church is the garden and
the garden is the church.” I like that.
Now, I’m no Luddite. I know that some technology is good,
and we can’t all be farmers. We can’t just wish away the concrete we’re
surrounded by concrete most of the time. But I do know that the closer I get to
the earth – to the ground and the dirt and the soil - the closer I feel to God.
I know that the more I consider where my food comes from, how it got from the
farm to my table, the healthier, the more in balance, and more spiritual my
life becomes. My faith has really changed and evolved over the years, and I
hope it continues to. I am so thankful that God can be found and experienced
just as powerfully in the dirt as in a beautiful building like this.
In my faith journey, I’ve found that it’s really helped
me to stop thinking about God as up there and out there in some distant and
heavenly place. In fact, I’ve come to think of the earth as God’s own body –
literally and physically. I think of the earth as God’s body rather than thinking
of it as some planet that God just looks down on from on high. I want Eloise to
grow up playing in the dirt and finding God in it. I want her to know that
we’re all connected, and what better way for her to learn that than to learn that
we all live on God’s body – the earth, the mother of us all. At school, just
this week, incidentally, Eloise learned about what it means to reduce, reuse,
and recycle. We take a lot of walks together, and she won’t walk by a piece of
trash without picking it up and lecturing me on why we need to take better care
of the earth. Kids get it. They really get it!
Originally, all humans came from the earth. Everything we
are, everything we eat, everything we need is in the ground, and that includes
God, who’s right in there too. Over the course of history, many and even most
humans in industrialized nations – without realizing or intending it - have
moved further and further away from the soil and the land. In the process, we’ve
inadvertently created a huge distance between ourselves and God, and I think
we’ve paid a pretty big cost because of it.
You know, it’s strange – we’ve come to talk about sin as
if it’s some sort of dirty thing, as if sin means that we have somehow become
soiled or unclean. But what if we’ve gotten it backwards or twisted around?
What if our big sin is NOT that we’re dirty, but that we’ve gotten too far away
from the dirt, that we’ve fled from our life source, from our origin, which IS
the dirt, which IS the soil.
Maybe Joni Mitchell was right? Maybe we’ve got to get
ourselves back to the garden…little by little, inch-by-inch, row-by-row. It’s
something to think about…
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