God loves soil: humility and reverence before the world

The Sixth Sunday after Trinity,16 July 2023, Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth

God loves soil, says the writer Norman Wirzba. When we first meet God in the garden, God is focused on, and busy with, dirt. God is on God’s knees, hands in the dirt, holding soil so close as to breathe into it the warm, loving, divine breath of life. And not just human life. Plants and animals and birds come out of the same ground. Through earthy soil God gardens life into vibrant, beautiful, and delectable reality. God is the first, best, and essential gardener of the world. [1]

God even named the first human after soil. The Hebrew word for soil is adamah. Adam’s name is inseparable from the soil from which he lives; as is his vocation in life: “The Lord God took adam and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it”. We daughters and sons of adam come from soil, and depend on it for all the fundamentals of life: and soil also depends on us for its health and well-being, and we have responsibilities to it. When soil is healthy, creatures and communities have the best chance to flourish. [2]

We’ll come back to that in a minute. But now, picture the resurrected Jesus, first seen by Mary Magdalene: in a garden, who Mary took to be the gardener. This Jesus had been there with The Father labouring at creation; and when Paul describes him in Colossians he makes him sound like a gardener, at work in the soil: “All things have been created through him and for him,” Paul wrote; and, “in him all things hold together”. [3]

Alongside the writer of Genesis 2, historians and ecologists and agronomists have confirmed that:

… organic soil is the indispensable, life-nurturing stuff through which so much of our living is made possible. It is a placenta of sorts. Good, healthy soil is not dead but teeming with life. Things die and decay into it and this all reemerges as new life, all because of the astoundingly complex and mostly invisible work of billions of bacteria and microorganisms. Without their work our world would be overwhelmed by the corpses and stench of death. Soil is a marvel and a mystery that we have not yet even begun to comprehend. [4]

The Kentucky farmer and nature writer Wendell Berry describes soil in spiritual, poetic terms as being:

“… very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. 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.” [5]

All of this sets the context for Jesus in Galilee teaching his disciples and the crowds this Parable about a Sower, the Seed and the Soil.

Now we know The Parable of the Sower very well. Is this a parable about the soil, or our souls? Or both? Do we understand The Parable of the Sower in purely spiritualised terms, as an invitation us to focus on our inner life; to think of good soil or as rocky, thorny ground as metaphors for our spirituality? Might we also see it as a direct description of the soil and the seed, the earth and the way we use it? A straightforward story about soil and how it is best cared for?

I suggest neither… and both. I think that Jesus is inviting us to regard the soil and our souls as being more deeply intertwined than we might have imagined. The parable prompts us to consider how our better contributions to our natural environment will deepen our spiritual well-being; how our working to turn bad earth into good soil will enrich the entirety of our lives.

Wendell Berry wrote, “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” [6]

Is Jesus trying to teach that the well-being of the outer soil and our inner well-being, depend deeply on each other? Is the Parable of the Sower a meditation on the well-being of our entire community – human and non-human together?

The piece of land he describes is like our own land, a mixture of good and bad earth, some of it well-tended and thriving, and other parts poisoned or neglected, thus overrun or scorched.

And his parable prompts us to consider our complex relationships within the ecology of life. In a broken physical world many of us are troubled that we unwittingly find ourselves in the same situation as Esau, that ‘man of the field’ who, because he grasped after more for himself, ‘despised his birthright’. [7]

So as Christians we keep looking to Jesus for the way we should live in relation to God’s good earth. St Paul tells us that, through Jesus, God is reconciling all things in heaven and on earth. We sense our alienation not only from one another, but also from the land that sustains us. And at the same time as we realise how damaged are our ecosystems, and our human bodies too, we also hold faith that God’s work in Christ is to reconcile all bodies into a peaceful, life-promoting relationship with one another. [8]

This is God’s everyday work; God is the Sower who just keeps on sowing – indiscriminately – on good soil and broken soil, constantly scattering the good seed of his good news on this good earth, in pure generosity and love.

Humankind has long assumed that what is good for us is also good for the world; but where pride and greed are the primary measures of what is good, this assumption leads to disaster. [9] God longs for us to put soil and soul together. He longs for us to live “by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. The Good and Generous Sower longs for us to make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. To co-operate in its processes, and to yield to its limits.” [10]

Wendell Berry says that rural people “see all around them, every day, the marks and scars of an exploitive national economy”. But, he says, “They still have the remnants of local memory and local community” which can be the seeds of our renewal. We can reconcile soil and soul, we can restore the well-being of our communities, he says, “by the ancient rule of neighbourliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home”. [11]

Notes

Previously preached as Alongside The Sower, getting busy with dirt in Somerset, 2017.

Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary Notes (Proper 10A) directed me towards Wirzba and Berry.

[1] Norman Wirzba, Dramas of Love and Dirt: Soil and the Salvation of the Earth. The Cresset, Lent 2014 (Vol LXXVII, No. 3, pp 6-15).

[2] Wirzba.

[3] Colossians 1.16, 17.

[4] Attributed to Norman Wirzba in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary Notes (Proper 10A).

[5] Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Quoted in Wirzba.

[6] Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

[7] Genesis 25.27, 34.

[8] Fred Bahnson and Norman Wirzba, Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation.

[9] Wirzba, Dramas of Love and Dirt: Soil and the Salvation of the Earth.