Another Try - a wonderful sermon from GIPL Intern, Kate Buckley

Not so long ago, dirt used to be little more to me than something to be washed out of the knees of toddler pants. The sprays of mud that are caked on the side of the car just above the wheels require a little more scrubbing. Dirt is a sneaky nuisance: it hides in the halfmoons of fingernails, dusts the top of front porch steps, creeps onto the kitchen floor in faint traces of shoeprints.Dirt-removal practices are what society molded me to prioritize. I am the schoolgirl with bows in her hair, the one who embarrassingly practiced my cursive handwriting when no homework had even been assigned. I like to color inside the lines. I like cohesive room décor. It is important to me to be washed up, to write my thank-you notes, and to be liked by most everyone I meet.Three months ago, I’m not sure exactly what changed in me. But I think it had a little to do with the Maymester course on Ecology and the church and a lot to do with the Holy Spirit. I let myself be re-molded, it seems. Three months ago, I made a choice. And now my hands are a little dirtier, my vision a little clearer, my heart a little fuller, and my smile a little wider. I made the decision to plant seeds. Really little ones, like a mustard seed. The hilarious thing is that I know absolutely nothing about seeds or dirt or weeds or vines or rain or shine or ANY of it. And I have this deep and abiding feeling that God is going to show up in the waiting and in the tending and in the watering. As a result, there are more dirty footprints in our kitchen, the laundry pile is higher, mud streams down our sink basin when we rinse our backyard lettuce, and let’s not even start on the fingernail problem. But what an absolutely glorious lifestyle change: I have found that getting down and dirty does not come naturally to me. And yet, in a very funny way, it kind of does.It was seed-planting day, the first day of October. I held a tiny packet of teeny white specks. I’d never planted seeds before. Only those potted plants that someone with experience would fertilize and nourish from seed to seedling. I’m a gardening novice – I needed the headstart.But today Robin from Global Growers Network showed me how to “broadcast” the seeds into shallow tunnels. We planted three rows to a bed – arugula, spinach, and radishes. I was feeling a bit insecure as it was a first for me. I watched carefully and somewhat tensely as she demonstrated the technique of sowing so I could try my hand on the other seedbeds. In the midst of my amateur angst, she made me put down my seeds as she picked up a handful of soil.“This is good soil.” Her face was shining. “Feel it.”I put down my seeds and pushed my hands into the earth. It was silky and dark. It sure did feel good, although I didn’t have much to compare it to.“What makes it so soft?”“Season after season of crops. This is farming from the last 6 years. All in this gorgeous dirt.”This was rich soil because it had nourished life, and taken the decayed roots of bygone crops back into its depths. Over and over again. And that’s what makes for really good soil, I learned that day.I was thrilled when I read Wendell Berry soon after - I had experienced his words with my own fingertips. Listen to his proclamation that topsoil is in fact Christ-like: “It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future.”God, in Genesis 2, sculpts adam from the adamah, the dirt of the ground. God formed adam and breathed into him the breath of life. From the earth that enables the springing forth of vegetation, that houses nutrients and pushes up life, God breathes spirit and life into a human. A human made from the dirt. Provoked by a lesson on God’s creation of Adam and prompted by a question of how we visualize this scene, I had this new picture of God the creator.God has slick Georgia red clay dripping down his forearms, a ring of mud around her mouth from kissing Adam’s nostrils. Our creator was not afraid to get dirty even in the beginning. Being close to humankind has always been messy even at the very start. Our creator is not the least bit squeamish about this kind of intimacy. I imagine she didn’t worry about the squooshy residue covering her, just like a father doesn’t mind wiping runny noses with his hand, just like a mother doesn’t even blink at wearing baby spit-up on her shirt. God cupped the topsoil, watered it into a sacred soup, formed it into a human, breathed into his nostrils, and gave life.The very next chapter we ate the forbidden fruit.Our food choices, in the very beginning, were what got the human race into serious trouble. Some theologians claim this act of disobedience is an outward sign of our pride. This could be true. Out of pride, we ate that tempting low-hanging fruit from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We wanted to know all that God knows, to be little gods. It seems to me that perhaps the enticing, low-hanging fruit for our time is the desire not to know, but to not know.In the face of a farming industry that is dominated by very few large companies, and where food is treated as little more than a commodity to be genetically engineered, chemically altered, and grown, packaged, and distributed at the lowest cost possible – perhaps we would rather not know about our food. The majority of my family’s diet comes into our kitchen wrapped in mystery regarding the condition of the workers who grew it, the treatment of animals contained in it, and the many miles it was flown, shipped, trucked, and trained to reach us. The weight of this mystery and my complicity in injustice for neighbors and disregard for the earth has changed me. And gradually, it is changing our eating patterns, too.Michael Pollan, investigative food reporter, writes about the mirage of seeming abundance and variety in our grocery store aisles. He explores the many miles our food travels to sit on shelves in resplendent fluorescent lighting, in its superficial bounty. He writes about the staying agents most produce is sprayed with before it is shipped across the globe to reach us, about the wax used to make our cucumbers shine, about the many different chemical processes that result in brightly colored packages of High Fructose Corn Syrup. The process to trace food back to its source, back to the dirt where it originated, gets more complex if not impossible as you move from produce, to butcher counter, to cereal aisle. He called grocery shopping a “journey of forgetting.”Perhaps the further we get from the dirt of our creation, or for that matter, the dirt of our finitude, the more likely we are to forget who we are, whose we are, and what that means for living in community on this planet.It wouldn’t be right of me to gloss over the difficulties and sacrifices that come with intentional choices about our food. Getting down and dirty isn’t glamorous. In the last few months, I’ve harvested okra, which in case you didn’t know, is remarkably like cacti, covered with prickles. And it’s also teeming with ants. With my daughter’s help, we washed local quail, which meant not only handling up close and personal their tiny little protruding bones, but plucking some of the stray feathers that remained before sautéing them up. I’ve thrown an ear of corn clear across the kitchen (and shrieked) when it’s pesticide-free self had a big fat worm eating within its silky husk. We’ve tried about as many different ways of dicing, slicing, mixing, cooking, covering, and rearranging tomatoes during August and September as I possibly can. After our 8th straight week of tomato delivery in our CSA box of local produce, I started to understand the Hebrews plight in the wilderness. “Remember all that food we had back in Egypt? Cucumbers and onions and leeks and garlic? And now all we see is Manna. Nothing but manna.” I’m sure when I’m drowning in kale and collards next month, I will be dreaming about tomatoes, maybe even craving them. But Lord, if I see one more tomato… But amidst the frustrations that come with eating locally and seasonally, I’ve decided that when God provides Manna and quail, there is little else to do but buck up and figure out how to fix it for dinner. I really don’t think I could return to Egypt.Our God, caked with clay, has an intimate love for us, which continues to amaze, as we seem so limited in our ability to reciprocate. God granted us a responsibility, to care for the created world that we inhabit. But stewardship to our earthly and sinful ears sounded more like domination and control.Blessedly, our God who wears the muddiness of our creation and shares her very breath with us is the same God we find in the gospel of John who stoops low to rinse off the blistered feet of his betrayers. It is the same God who invites us to the Table, who becomes visible to our sight and recognizable to our beings in the very earthly act of breaking bread and drinking wine. The God who breathed into our nostrils is the one who sustains us with his very own body and blood. Jesus Christ is the ultimate model for “down and dirty” living. He is never afraid, against all social mores, to sit down and dine with sinners and tax collectors as well as the religious elite. He has little to no regard for purity laws that name some foods and some people unclean. He gets his reputation filthy with his table etiquette. For the sake of union with all people, our Almighty God not only choses to take on human DNA but lifts broken bread and proclaims his presence amidst our messiness and sin – all we have to do is practice remembering.Our God loves us enough to create despite our uncreating, to redeem despite our destructiveness, and to sustain despite our draining of life.Our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer uses the most earthy of elements to manifest glory. It is the Holy Spirit who works through the soil in our creation, through the waters of redemptive baptism, and through the bread and the wine of sustaining atonement. In James White’s words, “Our most spiritual act is also our most worldly.”God knows how to be in us – in the breath of life, in the waters of renewal, and in the bread and the wine. Our journeys of faith seek to return that indwelling. What better place to start than respecting the very physical modes of being neighbor and communing with God? It could get messy, but maybe risking the nitty gritty in our relationships with one another and with the world around us is the closest we ever come to reflecting the image of God imprinted in our hearts at the dawn of time. So come, all you who are weary and confused. Come to this Table, this bountiful feast. And dig in.