soil

We have been gardening for about three years now. We have a tilled plot of about 600 square feet in the back corner of our property.  The trouble is our soil is terrible.  We have no topsoil, only rocky ground.  I suspect that the builder/ developer sold the topsoil when they cleared the land for this development, leaving some homeowners with a problem.   I spent a couple of days last week amending the soil in my garden. The area was overgrown with weeds, leaves, and rocky debris.   Topsoil is so essential in plant growth. We can’t even grow grass in our rocky soil.  When the sun heats the ground, the grass withers and browns.  On the plus side, I don’t have to mow my lawn from late June until late September.  (Thanks to a warm winter, however, I stopped mowing in December and started mowing in early March this year).   So, in order to grow a better garden this spring, I trucked in a load of topsoil to cover the entire area.  I pulled all the weeds, tilled the ground, and raked out the rocks.  Adding a layer of topsoil, along with the compost we made all winter, has restored the garden.  It looks like the rest of the farmland in Lancaster County---dark brown, fertile soil ready for planting.  I know that this good soil will receive seeds and foster wonderful vegetation that will yield good vegetables for our consumption this coming season.  This soil will give us tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, squash, cucumbers, green beans, sweet corn, and a few other vegetables and herbs.  Growing up on the farm taught me the importance of soil and the proper care for it.  I spent a lot of time in fields as a kid.  Dirt is in my blood.  I know that some of you love gardening, grew up on farms, and appreciate good soil too. 

There is a hymn called “Lord let my heart be good soil”. The text is: “Lord let my heart be good soil, open to the seed of your word.  Lord, let my heart be good soil, where love can grow and peace is understood.  When my heart is hard, break the stone away.  When my heart is cold, warm it with the day. When my heart is lost, lead me on your way.  Lord, let my heart, Lord, let me heart, Lord let my heart, be good soil.”  The soil analogy works for people who know the difference between good and bad soil.  Jesus’ knew the difference and so should we.  Christians ought to have a connection with the land, because it teaches us about God, growth, and grace. 

Jesus’ parable of the sower in Mark 4:  “He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: 3 “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”  Good soil is essential to crop production.  Eroded soil, rocky soil, and thorny ground all prevent plant growth.  In Jesus’ interpretation  of this story, Jesus compares the way people receive God’s Word with the way the four different soil types receive the seed.    How do you receive God’s Word?  Are you open to God’s voice, God’s commandments, God’s promises?  I suspect many of us are like the seed that fell among the thorns.  The worries and changes of life choke out the word, like weeds in the garden.  And so no fruit grows.  God wants His people to be receptive to His Word because God’s Word produces fruit in our lives.  God’s Word produces peace, joy, love, faith, compassion toward others, generosity, gentleness, kindness, and self-discipline.   God’s Word produces Christ-like behavior and an attitude of grace and thanksgiving.  But, our hearts can be hard or full of weeds. When the soil becomes too dry and sun scorched, nothing grows.  Spiritual dehydration occurs when we ignore the promise of Baptism over our lives, failing to identify with Christ and the church.  Many people have ignored the work of spiritual cultivation and find themselves facing stones and weeds where little vegetation grows.   How does one amend the soil of the heart?

Weekly worship, prayer, and serving others cultivate and nourish the soil of the Spirit.  When we are rooted in the Word and Sacrament community, the soil of our hearts becomes a place where God can grow His love, His peace, His joy.   If the soil of your heart needs amended, come to the master gardener’s workshop.  He’s available anytime, but the soil workshop is in session on Sundays at 9:30 am. 

Hope to see you there.  May God’s garden, the church, grow and produce the fruit of life this season.  

    

transcendence

When was the last time you experienced a moment of transcendence?  You know, some awe-inspiring experience that made you affirm your belief in God.  Maybe it was something beautiful—music or the natural world do that for me.  Or maybe it was an experience with someone else.  Love, friendship, joy.  Transcendence cannot be created, it is not man made.  It happens to us.  It captures us.  Excites us or gives us a deep sense of peace.  It sometimes surprises us.  When it happens you may tear up or laugh or become silent.  You may shout aloud as when the Phillies win, which this year may require transcendence.  If you cannot recall a transcendent moment or if you are not sure if you have had on before, I am sorry.  Again, they are not contrived or man made.  They happen. Like a beautiful sunset when you are in the right place at the right time.  Transcendence is hard to describe to someone else because they just had to be there.  The feeling that it creates cannot be easily reproduced in the telling of the thing. And so telling someone else about it is often counterproductive because, as much as you’d like the other to share the experience, they cannot.  And so the telling can become a downer for both you and the hearer.  Nevertheless, transcendence happens.  I read a story just this week...

the ending of the story

Have you ever gotten to the end of a good book or a good movie and said, “Really, that’s it?”  Some endings do not satisfy us.  We need closure.  Living in the middle of our own stories we may wonder how it’s going to turn out. In the first half of life you may wonder, will we win that soccer game?  Will I graduate, get into a good college, get a job, be successful, get married?  In the second half of life you may wonder, will I raise children well?  Will I be healthy, live a long life, enjoy meaningful work, retire, enjoy  time with the people I love?  IN the twilight, you may wonder, how will I die and what really happens then? Will I be remembered?  Will the ones I love be okay?  Along the way, we face many threats, stresses, and things that cause pain. When things are going tragically wrong in our lives, we may become very discouraged.   We hear the nightly news or read the daily paper and wonder if the world’s story unfolding before us is a good story or a bad one.  It’s certainly a messy one, where violence threatens, the vulnerable are exploited, the weak suffer, and the innocent starve.  And in our own lives, we experience losses, disappointments, pain, grief, frustrations, fatigue, and failure.  We feel powerless and defenseless, so we seek escape from reality through entertainment, vacations, and self-indulgences.  Rather than face and address the world’s problems we run and hide, afraid to deal with reality.  Sometimes I think sleep is a daily escape from reality, in which we might dream alternative stories. Like the women at the tomb we accept the world as a tragic story, in which we play a small and insignificant role in its unfolding. We, therefore, attend to our own self-interests.  And we go about our business every day.  We show up, we weep at our losses, we bury our dead, we try to move on.  Along the way, some good things happen to us, for us, because of us.  We may even be grateful for those moments.  But despite the good we are permitted to give and to receive, we are not all that optimistic.  We wait with expectancy for more bad news to come.  And it does. We become desensitized to it, so much so that we don’t even think about  the future very much.  It produces anxiety anyway.  The future is an enigma, a mystery we dare not speak about.  With live with deep uncertainty.  We have no imagination, no energy left to generate what we need the most.  A future colored with HOPE.  

The women fled the tomb and said nothing to no one for they were afraid.  The end.  Really?  That’s the best Mark could do with this story.  No resurrection appearances.  No sharing of the good news.  No rejoicing.  No lilies.  No majestic hymns like the one’s we sing today.  Easter is characterized by an empty tomb, the interpretation of a stranger, and a couple of frightened women running away.  Hardly credible testimony.  Mark leaves us not sure what to believe.  Of course Mark’s entire story from beginning to end is like this:  The people who should believe, don’t get Jesus. And the people who do get Jesus, are not credible witnesses.  A demon-possessed man and a Roman centurion offer the best testimony to Jesus’ identity.  Hardly believable.  His own disciples abandoned him, denied him, betrayed him.  They surely did not believe him when he said that he would suffer, die, and be raised.  They believed that their own failure was the end of their story.  They believed the building of the new Kingdom project failed on Friday afternoon, when the cross finished its work and Jesus’ breathed his last.  And so the gospel ends in failure.  Except…

There is one character in this story who may yet come to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead,  One character who may be bold enough to tell others that they believe it too.  There is one character who may stake their own lives on the validity of this story without evidence or credible testimony to back it up.  One character left, on whom the writer depend to keep this story alive and let it shape their lives and the future of the world.  There is a character who sees hope in this story about an empty tomb and the declaration of a nameless stranger.  Who?

You. What this world needs more than anything is a storyteller that creates the capacity to hope.  The capacity to imagine a world that is not just falling apart, not just drifting in space, not just overrun by evil, greed,  decay, suffering, and death.  What the world needs is people who believe that, if there is a GOD, and if that God is good, and if good will overcome evil, then this GOD must first make good on a promise by raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. Because if his life was truly a great life, an abundant life, a life worth imitating; then his violent death must not be the end of his story.  We need a story, a dream really,  that promotes the power of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation of broken relationships.  We need a story that encourages  non-violent solutions to major human strife, the possibility for real change of hearts and minds, and the strength of love to make a broken world new and whole again. We need to imagine a world after death, a world after suffering, a world after injustice. We need to envision an empty tomb and a promise that the crucified one is on the move, in the world, bringing resurrection life and hope to everyone and every thing he touches.  Because when your life has been touched by his, everything changes. Everything old is being made new, everything lost will be found, everyone who dies will be restored to life again.  The women in Mark's gospel said nothing to no one.  In response, this is our mission; Say Something to Someone today. Do not be afraid. Share the good news.  Alleluia! Christ is risen.  Amen.