All Saints’, Dorval
October 10, 2021
Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the LORD has done great things!
The book of the prophet Joel is short – three chapters – and its narrative outline is simple: it describes the coming, and then the departure, of a terrible plague of locusts upon the land. As is appropriate for Harvest Thanksgiving, the passage we hear today is part of the description of the departure: the plague has passed over, the Lord has saved the people; the famine and disaster that came in the wake of the locusts has ended, and once again the people can plant and harvest, can “eat in plenty and be satisfied.”
I don’t know whether there’s anywhere else in the Bible where a prophet directly addresses the soil, but it certainly struck me here. In consecutive verses, Joel declaims, “Do not fear, O soil”; “Do not fear, you animals of the field,” and “O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord!” The prophet could easily have simply addressed the people – “O children of Zion!” but instead he chose to begin with the soil, with the literal dirt under the people’s feet. He acknowledges the profound interconnection of the soil, the livestock, and the people’s survival and flourishing.
Joel is full of vivid images, both of the destruction brought by the locust plague and of the joy of the land’s restoration. “Be dismayed, you farmers,” the prophet writes in 1:11, “wail you vinedressers, over the wheat and the barley; … the vine withers, the fig tree droops. Pomegranate, palm, and apple – all the trees of the field are dried up; surely, joy withers away among the people.” And then, in 3:18, “In that day the mountains shall drip sweet wine, the hills shall flow with milk … Judah shall be inhabited forever, and Jerusalem to all generations.”
As you know if you’ve been tuning in to Jesse Zink’s series on “Reading Scripture in the Season of Creation,” it is hardly possible to separate the fates of the people and the land in the Hebrew Scriptures. When the people treat the land well, caring for it and nurturing it, they flourish. When, instead, they abuse it for their short-term greed, it ceases to nourish them, and when the situation gets bad enough, in the vivid words of Leviticus, the land will “vomit them out”.
For the people of ancient Israel, the soil is literally the ground of everything, and the right treatment of the land is intimately bound up with the right worship of God.
Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the LORD has done great things!
And for us, rooted in that tradition but also followers of the crucified and resurrected Christ, there is another level. Christ is crucified, buried, and resurrected; and there is nothing that so consistently exemplifies the truth of life out of death, than soil. Healthy soil is far more than mere dirt; it is an infinitely complex, living thing, full of microorganisms and mycorrhizae, in which dead organic matter is chewed up and made into food for new plants, and in which the roots of trees literally communicate through extraordinarily subtle chemical, hormonal and electrical signals. According to Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at UBC Vancouver, “One teaspoon of forest soil contains several miles of fungal filaments.” The banana peels and apple cores that we collect in the brown bins and put out on the street, can be reclaimed the following spring, dug into our gardens, and used to grow tomatoes. It is not stretching a point at all to say that our soil, and our gardens, are icons of Christ.
And yet, most of us might grow the occasional garden tomato, but most of our food comes off the shelves at Maxi or IGA. We desperately want to believe that the big banners in the grocery store displaying smiling farmers, happy cows, and perfect dew-spangled tomatoes represent the truth behind where our food comes from, but we suspect that the reality is much less appealing. When we drive half an hour outside the city and reach the open country with its fields and silos, everything seems green and lush – until we start learning how those perfect rows of soybeans and canola are achieved, and we realize that most of our food is growing in chemical-soaked dirt, not true soil.
Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the LORD has done great things!
Can we say these words with any kind of integrity in the developed West in 2021?
In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus invokes metaphors from the natural world – the birds of the air, the grass of the field – to tell his listeners they should not worry about what they will eat and wear. One wonders how these words landed to his original audience: did Jesus saying “do not worry” actually help them not to worry? Were they typically people who ate regularly, or were they accustomed to sometimes going without the necessities?
We worry about our next outfit or our next meal for any number of reasons, but most of them boil down to feeling vulnerable. We don’t like knowing that we have needs and not being sure whether they’ll be met. We don’t like knowing that other people probably have opinions about our food and clothing choices.
And when we’re anxious and uncertain, what we usually reach for is control. We try to set things up such that we know that we’ll always have what we need.
But that’s impossible – and Jesus knows it. The answer to vulnerability is not control, but community. It’s interdependence and caring for one another, however messy and difficult that may be.
Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the LORD has done great things!
When we try to control the soil, forcing it to yield past its capacity; when we prioritize beautiful, identical rows of corn over the natural processes that actually create life and health in the soil, we end up with a chemical-soaked horror. When we try to control our own lives, what we eat, and what we wear, we end up isolated in our anxiety and greed.
Jesus calls us to “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” And that is not just an abstract spiritual striving; it includes the words of Joel from hundreds of years earlier, inviting even the soil to rejoice and give thanks to God for the great things God has done.
This Thanksgiving weekend, take a moment to notice the soil beneath your feet. What would it take for that soil to be able to rejoice in what the Lord has done? How can we, together, nourish the soil that nourishes us in return, fulfilling God’s call to care for the land?
The answer to that question is global, and far larger than any one of us, or this particular congregation, but it begins at home, with this very specific ground beneath our feet. And Joel and Jesus this morning make it clear that it is absolutely our concern, as people who follow the God who created all things, who called Israel to care for its land, and who leads the way through death to new life.
The flourishing of the earth and the flourishing of the human community are inextricable from each other. How can we loosen the death grip of our attempts to control what we will eat and what we will wear, and assume instead a posture of vulnerable thanksgiving before the utter miracle that is God’s gift of the soil?
Our backyard tomatoes may not be enough to get all the way there, but they’re a very good place to start.
Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the LORD has done great things!
Amen.
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