Compost:
Creating nutritious soil
Back in April, for Earth Day, I
decided it was time to really get serious about composting. This was going to be a spiritual practice for
me, a way in which to be a good steward of God’s Creation. As we have journeyed through the summer,
learning more about what it means to be a New Creation in Christ, this was for
me, a practice of being a part of the New Creation.
Compost can be seen as a parable or
metaphor for the new creation, for the old is gone and is made new. Jesus used every day images as he taught
people more about God and the Kingdom of Heaven. Being a part of the New Creation in Christ is
like compost. As you use your summer
produce, take the scraps, take the parts that you don’t want to eat, take the
wilted leaves and the used coffee grinds, take the bread that has started to
mold, and place it together in a compost bin.
Allow it to rest, allow nature to do its part, allow it to be stirred
once in a while, allow it to decompose and out of something that was seen as unusable,
comes an incredibly rich soil.
I found this quotation that I felt
connected to being a New Creation in Christ, where the old is gone and all is
made new - "If a healthy soil is full of
death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds
... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very
long."
- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977
- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977
In
Christ, the old is gone and all is made new.
Nothing that dies is dead for very long.
We allow the parts of us that pull us away from God to die, but that
does not mean that we die. In letting go
of what pulls us down, what causes stress, what might even cause hurt and pain
to ourselves, we will find new life.
Compost is such an amazing example of this. No longer can I see the tomatoes that I just
didn’t get to eat or the cucumber skins or the strawberry stems, they are no
longer detectable, but instead, together, they have become transformed into
incredibly rich nutrients for new life to grow.
I’ve never thought about the parable
of the dinner as related to compost until now.
But if you think about it, when read, it seems as if the right people
were invited to the banquet. It would be
like making a yummy summer salad with all kinds of fresh produce right out of
the garden. But something goes awry and
it seems that all the right people are too busy with other activities to be
able to attend. So the master asks his
servants to go out and invite in what seems to be the least of these: the poor and lame. It seems like the things I would throw into
the compost, the cucumber skins, the strawberry stems, the coffee grinds and
the molded bread are what are being served.
Ugh, who would want to be a part of that banquet?
That’s how people in the day and age of Jesus
would have responded to this parable – this request to invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the
lame. Ugh, who would want to
attend that kind of banquet. These are
unclean people and not to be associated with.
And yet, that is who is invited.
And just like my scraps in my compost, when mixed together, when allowed
to do what nature does, those scraps are transformed into something incredibly
nutritious. God’s people too, no matter
what we think of others or ourselves, when brought together into God’s family,
into God’s banquet, become this rich soil.
The old is gone and all is made new.
Is there something in
your own life that you might need to symbolically compost? Something that you might be able to allow to
let fallow, and from it new life be given?
Compost takes time, it takes both rest and movement. I purchased a tumbler, so that I can mix it
up once in awhile, but I can’t just put my scraps in the bin and pull out soil
in a few days, it takes months. We too
in our spiritual lives need time to rest, need time to fallow, need time to
rejuvenate. Today, I chose two passages
about Sabbath rest. God knows how important
rest is for this created world. Humans
need sleep, but we also need Sabbath, we need time to rest spiritually, to
focus on the various ingredients of being this new creation. To dig ourselves into the rich soil, bask in
the sun, and drink the living water. Without
these ingredients, and without the time to rest, the fruit we bare will not be
the spiritual fruit that God calls us to produce.
In the ancient laws
of the Israelite people, there was great wisdom in the practice of
Sabbath. It did not just pertain to
people, but also to the soil, to the fields, to understanding that in order to
gain a great harvest, the ground too needed time to rest. Plant your field for six years, but on the
seventh, let it rest. We know this to be
true, it is important to rotate crops and not drain the soil of the nutrients,
but why don’t we believe it is true with our own spiritual beings? Sabbath keeping is essential to keeping our
inner souls, our spiritual selves vibrant in God, and God continues to mix
nutrients into our symbolic soil by calling us together to worship and to
celebrate the sacrament of communion. As
we break bread today, we understand that nothing that dies stays dead for very
long. The gift of communion is not just
Jesus sharing of his death, but that he will not stay dead for very long. Out of death comes new life, it is the gift
of Easter, it is the gift of creation, it is the gift of God seeking to
permeate every corner of our lives and our souls. Amen
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