Good Soil

(Scriptures:  I Samuel 16:1-13, 2 Corinthians 5:1-23 Mark 4:1-34)

Today’s Gospel reading gives us three parables about agriculture – about raising crops or, on a smaller scale, about gardening. I have to admit, I have struggled at times with preaching on these agricultural parables – because I’m not a farmer and it’s hard to preach on something outside my daily experience. I grew up in rural Berks County, in a small town surrounded by cornfields on all sides – this was years before Cabellas put Hamburg, Pennsylvania on the map for sporting enthusiasts. But while I had some exposure to farms when I was young, I’ve been living and working in the Philadelphia area now for more than 20 years. So my memories of farms and farmers have faded with the passing of the years.


This has changed recently, as an offshoot of the Occupy movement – Occupy Vacant Lots – has been reclaiming abandoned lots, with the city’s blessing, for small urban gardens. Feeling a bit nostalgic about getting my hands dirty, perhaps, I’ve hung out the with group as they worked on a lot on North 24th Street just below Cecil B Moore Ave and a series of small plots near 10th & Indiana, surrounding the Fair Hill Cemetery. Both plots are near public housing projects, and for me one of the unexpected blessings of the experience was watching the interactions between the Occupy folks and the folks from the projects. The hope – fulfilled in part – was that some of the project folk might get involved in the gardening – and enjoy the eating that came at the end. Because, really, the point of the garden is not just to raise food, but to create community where there was none.

This work had been going on for a number of weeks before I wandered onto the scene, and so much of the ground had already been cleared of debris; some had already been broken up to some extent. I was also told that the ground had been tested for hazardous materials – while the soil in these former industrial neighborhoods wasn’t exactly pure as the driven snow, it was deemed acceptable for gardening - and the gardens were being raised without fertilizer or pesticide or such. There were lots of different small plants being put in the garden – peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, eggplants – and I was grateful for the patience of those who were there, as I couldn’t always tell, for example, the difference between baby pepper plants from baby eggplant plants. While we pulled a lot of weeds, I also learned that some of what I had assumed were weeds to be pulled, were in fact edible and could be boiled for greens. We did pull lots of dandelions, but one of the folks wanted to take them home and boil up a mess of dandelion greens. I handed him my pile of pulled dandelions and said, “Bon appetite!” This gave me a bit of fresh insight into Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds – a parable about, among other things, the mixed state of the church - in which the landowner cautioned against yanking out plants willy-nilly, because it was easy to mistake edible plants for weeds – or by application to the church, it’s easy to reject people whom God is calling to discipleship, but who may not fit the profile of “good church folk”. Certainly there were edible plants in the garden that didn’t fit the profile of the kind of veggies you’d find at Acme, but were good to have around all the same.

Jesus’ parable speaks of seed that fell on the path, on shallow soil, among thorns, and in good soil – and of course, the seed that fell among the good soil bore a bumper crop. One insight from my vacant lot adventures is – good soil doesn’t just happen. It’s hard work! The plots of land that are being turned into gardens, before the work began, had hard-trodden ground, rocks, thorn bushes, along with other delights - the occasional empty beer can or broken bottle or discarded tire, and so on and so on. You know how quickly beer bottles and such can build up in our cemetery, so you can imagine what these lots were like before the Occupy people arrived - nobody had been picking up trash from these vacant lots for quite some time. Good soil is what you hope to be left with after you’ve broken up downtrodden soil, removed the rocks, uprooted the thorns, and otherwise prepared the soil. And in the kingdom of heaven, people with hearts prepared for the gospel may sometimes just happen along, but more often God has to uproot the rocks and thorns – those things in our lives that block the growth of God’s word. When we are facing difficult changes and decisions in our lives, it doesn’t mean that God has abandoned us. Perhaps it just means that God is digging into our lives so he can pull some weeds out by the roots.

Perhaps the main lesson I learned from Occupy is that good soil can occur in unexpected places. You would expect to find good soil in the farm country of Berks County, where I grew up. In Brewerytown, in Fair Hill, in other parts of North Philadelphia, near housing projects – not so much. And yet, some hard work, some preparation, and Jesus’ parable re-enacts itself – “The seed sprouts and grows, we know not how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head” – or in the case of the lot gardens, instead of grain, tomatoes or peppers or such.“ In neighborhoods that many have left for dead, life blossoms amid the ruins.

And the same is true for the Reign of God. While God is present in places with stained glass windows and organ music, God also has a way of showing up in the most unlikely places, in the most unlikely faces. Situations that seem like a dead-end turn out to be unexpectedly life-giving. Persons who seem to have nothing of value to offer may come out with unexpected words of wisdom.

I’ve seen some of these seeds of God’s kingdom growing in some very unlikely places. Sr. Margaret McKenna runs a long-term recovery program at 20th & Norris Streets, bringing life and hope to an otherwise desolate neighborhood. Shane Claiborne’s Simple Way community in Kensington embraces what they call new monasticism to share in the life of their neighborhood, to live simply with their neighbors, that their neighbors may simply live.

How about here? Certainly Bridesburg does not seem to be the most promising place for God to do a new thing. Our congregation, the other congregations of the Bridesburg Council of Churches, find the spiritual soil of the neighborhood such that it’s a struggle to hang on, let alone blossom. Even All Saints, which would find the spiritual soil of this historically Roman Catholic neighborhood more favorable for growth, isn’t thriving as it once did. At first glance, it may seem that the spiritual soil in Bridesburg is as hard as a rock, overgrown with thorn bushes, perhaps depleted of nutrients for more delicate plants. To outsiders, a visit to Bridesburg can be one prickly experience.

And that’s where we, you and I, come in. I have to believe that God has put Emanuel Church here in Bridesburg for a reason, that we exist for some purpose of God beyond ourselves. And I mean that quite literally: I have to believe. I have to. After all, while I think Emanuel Church offers outstanding music – at least on the Sundays when Ralph is here, not so much when he’s away – and caring fellowship and good refreshments, and mercifully short sermons most of the time, is that reason enough to come here? As it happens, many of the pastors of the Council of Churches commute here – I come in from Conshohocken; Scott Bohr from the Presbyterian church comes in from Blue Bell; Tom Adams from the Baptist Church, God bless him, in his 80’s drives in every Sunday from Cape May, NJ. I assure you there are organ music and fellowship and dessert to be found in Conshohocken and Blue Bell and Cape May, NJ and any number of places in between. Any one of us can find outstanding organ music and good fellowship and tasty coffee and cake much closer to home. Why come to Bridesburg for all that? I come here, and the other pastors come here to their respective churches, because we believe in God and we believe in Bridesburg. I come because I have to believe that God calls our congregation together for worship each week here, in this place, for a reason – not to moan and groan about the hardness and overgrown and depleted state of the spiritual soil, but to change it, to do the hard work of pulling up thorn bushes and digging up rocks, to add mulch, to convert it to good soil that is receptive to the Gospel.

What might it look like to try some spiritual urban gardening here in Bridesburg? If our church is closed up most of the time, only open briefly on Sunday, we are like the hard ground of the path….there’s no way for folks to get in the door, no place for a seed to catch hold. So we need to find ways to have the doors open more often, and need to step outside our doors and take the Gospel to the neighborhood. If our church only welcomes certain kinds of people, or only welcomes them if they behave a certain way, we’re like the thin soil on rocky ground – newcomers might come and stay for a short time, but at some point in trying to integrate into the congregation, they feel like they’ve hit a brick wall, and stop coming. So we need to be a house of prayer for all kinds of people. If our lives outside the doors of the church don’t reflect the love of God, if our lives reflect the world’s priorities and not God’s priorities, if we are only out for ourselves and not for others, then the thorns have grown around our spiritual life and the fruit which God would have us bear, has been choked out. So in a culture full of idols such as money and privilege calling for our loyalty, we need to live in a countercultural way, so that our lives may bear fruit, that we may plant the seeds of the Gospel in the lives of others.

"Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” May God use our small congregation, Emanuel United Church of Christ, each of us here, to bring forth seeds of mercy and justice and lovingkindness, the seeds of the Gospel, the seeds of the Kingdom of God, seeds that will grow here in Bridesburg, in Philadelphia, and to the ends of the earth. Amen.