June 17, 2012
Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year B (Proper 6)
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
Well, there is nothing like a week
in Manhattan to make one appreciate the quiet of Eugene and the vast open
spaces of the American West.
Goodness. I was back East at an
amazing roundtable discussion convened by the Bishop of New York on the
intersection of food, farming and faith.
It was quite a gathering, a couple of prominent bishops, executive chef
of a fancy New York restaurant, three radical nuns (one Roman Catholic and two
of ours), a suite of academics working in bioethics, Christian social ethics
and theology, some folks from the national church and a couple of local
farmers. I was kind of in between the
academics, the farmers and the priests; definitely the coolest place to be. We did not really “do” anything. We produced no mission statement, no
next-steps, not even a next meeting is planned yet, but it was one of the most
productive days and a half I have had in recent memory. We talked about the state of agriculture, of
the uncertain future of family farms, and of rural communities. We spoke of food, and how we eat in this
country and why and how churches’ relationship with food are so potent. And we spoke about faith. How the creation is the first revelation of
God, how God calls us to serve and how religious communities can be a force for
truth and righteousness as well as a center of compassion and nurture. It was a good week. Thank you for the time to go and participate
in a national conversation like this. And it is great, that after spending a
few days thinking deeply about the earth and farming and the condition of the
Creation that we find ourselves in the midst of some of St. Mark’s seed
parables…
“The kingdom of God is as if someone
would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and
the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The Earth produces of itself, first the
stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes
in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”
These parables are so fabulous
because we can make so much meaning from them.
The traditional interpretation of this parable is that the development
and revelation of the kingdom of God is neither obvious nor controllable. Seeds are planted, they grow, we “know not
how,” and then it comes time for harvest.
The vocation of followers of Christ is sowing, propagating the Gospel,
the word and work of God, not, as one theologian writes, to “provoke the
harvest (for that happens ‘of itself).”
That is backed up by the parable that follows this one, the mustard
seed. Such a teeny-tiny seed, yet from
it such great things happen. It makes
for, “the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the
birds of the air can make nests in the shade.”
Our work, the little tiny bits of God’s work, the day in/day out
kindnesses, compassions, supports and loves we do, and the monumental
efforts, terrible risks and plain old martyrdoms we face striving for justice,
all of that works collectively we “know not how,” moving us ever closer to the
kingdom. Each act, no matter how small,
is at least a baby step towards the kingdom.
And that’s good. That’s the
Gospel, Amen.
But coming home from this conference
with my farmer hat not all the way hung up in the closet, that interpretation
bothers me slightly. I have yet to know
a plant that you can sow, and sleep and rise, night and day, go about your
business and one day, poof – it is ready to harvest. (The possible exception is tomatillos). It makes me think of the parable of talents
where the poorest of slaves tells the master that he reaps where he did not
sow, and gathers where he scattered no seed.
Yes, in the parable seeds are scattered but no effort is exerted. Does anyone have a garden like that? You plant and then a couple of months later
you harvest? No. Of course not. Gardens, farms do not work that way. It takes work, hard work to grow things,
right? Well, maybe…
One of the things we talked about at
the conference was this very issue. And
we spoke about it through the work of one of the most important
agriculturalists of the 20th century, a Japanese plant pathologist
names Masanobu Fukuoka. His book, The One-Straw Revolution, described what
he called “Do nothing” farming. In light
of Mark 4:26-34, we could call it parabolic farming. Fukuoka grew buckwheat, rice and Mandarin
oranges on his ancestral farm in Japan.
What he observed was that plants know what to do. A buckwheat plant is the only organism that
knows how to make buckwheat. A rice
plant rice, a Mandarin orange tree Mandarin oranges. And when left to their own devices they will
do just fine. The problem is, that a
Mandarin Orange tree’s idea of doing just fine might not agree with our desires
and needs, so we need to come to some compromise. So what Fukuoka spent his life doing was
trying to facilitate the conditions that these plants evolved to thrive in,
because if we honor the true nature of the tree and satisfy its needs, it will
produce beautifully, even though we “know not how.”
A metaphor that I use is that I
cannot make a tomato.
Don’t
get me wrong, Windy and I used to grow tomatoes. A lot of them. In our last season at the monastery farm we
had something like 200 heirloom tomato plants that produced 400ish lbs/week at
the height of August. We were pretty
good at heirloom tomatoes, growing big fat,
get-all-over-everything-in-the-kitchen juicy ones, Brandywine and Pruden’s
Purple. Fabulous. We were good at growing them but truthfully,
no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make a tomato. My body doesn’t work that way, my DNA does
not code those proteins. My will in not
divine enough. No one is that good at
chemistry to confect food from nothingness (we’ll just skip over the unnatural
nativity story of Twinkies). But,
following the wisdom of Fukuoka-san, what we can do is make things possible for
that tomato plant to be the best it can be, the most tomatoey it can be. We can create the conditions for those plants
to do the work they have been given to do by God with a bit of human encouragement,
which is of course to make tomatoes. How
does a tomato plant do it? We “know not
how,” but we do know what conditions tomato plants evolved to thrive in and
about that, there is quite a bit we can do.
We need to respect the treeness of
trees; the tomatoness of tomatoes. I
heard Joel Salatin speak a couple of years ago, he’s the famous farmer from Omnivore’s Dilemma, and he talked about
giant agribusiness’ lack of respect for life, particularly in regards to the
horrible conditions of commercial livestock production in CAFOs, (concentrated
animal feeding operations). And he
asked, “if Smithfield (the largest pork producer in the world) won’t respect
the pigness of a pig, why do we expect them to respect the Jimness of Jim or
the Maryness of Mary?” That is a good
question and the answer quite obviously is that they do not. They do not respect the nature of pigs and
nor do they respect the nature of people, be it their employees or neighbors,
nor us, the eaters of these animals.
This is where the whole idea of the path of least
resistance comes from. If we let things
be the way they are supposed to be, it is going to be OK, it is going to work
out. If we let pigs be like pigs, let
them live like pigs are supposed to live, we’ll have happy and healthy animals
who yield sustainable and nourishing pork or who just live good piggy
lives. If we let a tomato plant be a
tomato plant, we’ll have tomatoes.
Juicers. Mr. Fukuoka let his
Mandarin orange trees be Mandarin orange trees, lo and behold, he had massive
yields of what we would now call nutrient dense Mandarin oranges.
The same is true with the kingdom of
God. What is it, this Kingdom of
God? I don’t know, I guess it is like if
you scatter seed and then one day, Whoa!
Look at all this grain. You know
the kingdom is here because you know it when you see it. The kingdom of God is revealed when things
are as they are supposed to be. It is
the world when people are who they were born to be; where plants grow as they
evolved to grow; where love flourishes where it is meant to flourish, that is
in the being of every creaturely thing that was, is and is to come. We, human beings, are blessed with the
uncanny ability to do two things; we innately know, really know deep in our
hearts how things are supposed to be, how good food really tastes, what
meaningful work really is, what true love and genuine happiness really feels
like. And we also have the ability to
deceive ourselves, to convince ourselves that McDonald’s food tastes good and
doesn’t make us feel sick, when in fact it doesn’t and it does. We can convince ourselves that we are
satisfied with our jobs, when we are bored.
That we are healthy when we are sick, that we are happy when we are
miserable, that things are OK at home when they are not. Our charge is to recognize the world and our
place in it for what it is, and with fear and trembling be what we need to be
in relation to our God and our neighbor.
That is what the kingdom of God looks like. That and a garden full of tomatoes in August. AMEN
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment