St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, September 25, 2011

Creation Time – Land

God of Dirt – Rev. David Mundy

Genesis 2:5-7, 16-20 Joel 2:21-27 Matthew 13:1-9

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There is an important tug of war going on right here in Durham Region over an important tract of land. Often when we hear about these disputes it has to do with development of property for industry or housing. We’re asked to decide between the good guys and the bad guys, with each side representing themselves as the good guys. Well, this time it is the good guys and gals, pitted against the good guys and gals.

Earlier this summer Canada’s newest national park was established in the Rouge River Valley, right along the highway 401 corridor in Scarborough. This is unusual in itself because we tend to think of national parks as rural and wilderness areas, but the Rouge River Park is a jewel in the midst of urban bustle. The park is not all that big though, and the proposal is that the parklands be extended to include the area to the north and west which was designated years ago for the Pickering Airport.

For years many action groups, including Oshawa Presbytery of the United Church have lobbied for these lands to be protected rather than turned into hectares of tarmac for aeroplane runways. The irony is that because it hasn’t been developed it is now one of the most pristine areas east of the city of Toronto, with clean-flowing streams and plenty of wildlife.

This may sound like a good idea, but here’s where it gets complicated. During the roughly forty years of protection much of this land has been farmed, usually by the farmers from whom it was expropriated in the first place. They leased it back from the federal government and now those farmers are arguing that this is some of the best farmland in Southern Ontario and they want to buy it back or continue to lease it. They say that rather than turning it into parkland it should continue to be the source of food in an area where farmland is disappearing at an alarming rate.

So what is the answer? Parkland or farmland? It doesn’t seem fair that this is the either/or, but it is a reminder that the land around us matters and some of our challenging choices don’t involve nasty people in black capes and twirled moustaches. Sometimes we choose between better and best.

Would keeping this land for agricultural use be the best choice? We now import about four billion dollars worth of food a year in Ontario, much of it from the state of California, on the other side of the continent. All the while the available farmland is shrinking and there doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy to ensure that farmers can make a living. Our provincial political party leaders were all “making hay while the sun shone” at the ploughing match earlier this week, touting the importance of farming and locally grown food while they were there. But we have to wonder what our commitment to the land is in a time when our culture has become so urbanized and most people are more concerned about the cost of their food rather than its source or who produces it.

This Sunday is Land Sunday in what is called Creation Time. We began with Forests and then Rivers last week. We had our own choice this week between wilderness and land and while they may sound like similar themes, they are different.

Today we listened to the scriptural reminders that our Creator God is a God of the land. You might even say that according to the earliest stories our God is a God of dirt, or soil and that as part of the created order we humans are earthy ourselves. In this second creation story in Genesis we are told that God chooses to be “down to earth” rather than up in the heavens. Old Testament scholar William Brown puts it this way: “Creation comes crashing down to Earth in Genesis. God exchanges the royal decree for a garden spade. The God from on high becomes the God on the ground, a down–and–dirty deity.”

This God creates a human, a man we know as Adam whose name which comes from the Hebrew, adamah, which means earth or ground. In fact we’re told that this is an intentional word play.

God shapes the man from the topsoil and breathes life into him. Eventually the groundling, Adam, and his groundling wife, Eve, become “too big for their britches” and get their eviction notice from the idyllic Garden of Eden. The man made from the earth is required to tend the earth and its crops in order to survive.

We really are groundlings, earth people, and we actually acknowledge this at the end of life. I have presided at roughly 400 funerals and memorials through the years and the majority of them included a committal in a cemetery and my role in saying the traditional words “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” which is an adaptation of verse nineteen in Genesis 3. At a committal earlier this summer the small group of family and friends got talking about how in some cultures each person contributes some earth to the grave. So the spontaneous decision was to invite anyone there to contribute a shovelful, which several people did. I found this a very meaningful gesture, even as we affirmed our resurrection hope.

Our other reading from the Hebrew scriptures is from one of the minor prophets, Joel. This book begins with a condemnation of the people of Israel for their unfaithfulness. “Wake up, you drunkards and weep and wail” is the stern way the prophet states God’s displeasure. Joel and the people assume that an infestation of locusts which destroy crops is a sign that God is not amused.

In chapter two there is a change of heart and a word of hope. God just can’t stay mad, and the promise is that abundance shall return. As you heard the passage begins “do not fear, O soil: be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things!” It is as though soil is a living thing, and we now realize that it is, filled with bacteria and other organisms which make the difference between productive and unproductive land.

Today we acknowledge that our earthiness is essential to who we are, and also that tending the earth which our God of Dirt has created is fundamental to life.

In recent months we have seen the terrible outcome of drought in a region where people can no longer grow the food necessary to sustain them. In the countries of the Horn of Africa the famine which is the outcome of the drought is killing thousands of people. While we have been invited to respond with humanitarian assistance, we know that this is not the long term solution. Food scarcity in many places of the world has resulted in roughly fifty million people who are what are called food refugees, those who have left their land and even their countries in search of food.

Another global challenge is the industrialization of food production. You have probably heard the term agribusiness, the large scale farming which is slowly but surely taking over the world. The result is that it is next to impossible for traditional farmers to sustain themselves and their families.

The subcontinent of India is a major exporter of food products yet we are told that thousands of small scale farmers in India are taking their own lives, dying by suicide, every year because they are being squeezed out by corporate farming. While they once could produce enough food for their own needs and sell the surplus, many of them are now destitute.

It is sobering to realize that there is no actual food shortage on our planet. Humans produce enough food for everyone on Earth, but the food distribution system means that millions are hungry while others are overfed.

The most recent issue of Walrus, a Canadian magazine has a cover article called The Farms Are Not All Right. The article points out that farming has become increasingly complex in this country, and even farmers who learn how to play the agribusiness game may not be able to make a living. There is huge pressure to employ practices which will leave the soil sterile and to grow crops which produce maximum yields but are simply not good for the long-term health of the land. And because farming has become so challenging, the average age for a Canadian farmer is 57. Young people don’t want to take the risk of growing food as their livelihood.

Each of these weeks in Creation Time we have come back to the importance of hope as people of the Creator and as followers of Christ. How can we live as Good News people, when the issues are complex and there are lots of grim facts and figures which are often hard to absorb?

Well, we might not grow our own food but it makes sense to “get the dirt” on the food we eat, to know where it comes from and how it is produced. There isn’t a farmer’s market in Bowmanville but in this area we are blessed with many opportunities to “buy local” in season. Even the grocery chains are including local produce sections because we as consumers want it. The irony of course is that local produce sometimes costs a bit more than what has been trucked across the continent from California, but we can make the conscious commitment to

We can also be mindful that while we sometimes grumble about high food costs, Canadians and Americans pay less for groceries as a percentage of income than any other country in the world. So those who till the land and grow our food deserve to make a decent living.

One fine day a couple of years ago I was driving along Taunton Road, not far north of Bowmanville, when I came up to a line of cars travelling well under the speed limit. I realized that we were all crawling along behind a tractor and hay wagon. Of course I was impatient because I am a very important person who must get everywhere in a hurry. My epiphany that day was that every time I end up behind a piece of farm equipment I should use the slowdown as a prayerful moment, an opportunity to thank God for the land around us and the farmers that produce it. It really has helped. You may have seen the signs which say Farmers Feed Cities and even in our urbanized culture, or especially because we are urbanized, we would do well to remember this.

Jesus was not a farmer, as far as we know, but on the basis of his teaching he probably had dirt under his fingernails. He told parables about seeds, and crops and farmers, because the people he spoke to lived on the land and off the land.

If Jesus was connected to the land, we can be too, in our own way. We can honour the God of Dirt, and do our part in allowing the land that feeds us to flourish.