Ecojustice Commentary on the Revised Common Lectionary

Series C---2018-2019

by Amy Carr

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost in Year C

Isaiah 66:10-14

Psalm 66:1-9

Galatians 6:[1-6] 7-16

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Today’s readings are filled with images of nourishing and flourishing drawn from the natural world, as well as agricultural metaphors for divine judgment and demand. The former invite us to treasure creation as the very medium and means of God’s blessings for us, while the latter draw our attention to the very human means of promoting a good harvest of blessings for the earth and its inhabitants. God’s gifts, our labor: these appear in conjunction. In relationship to these scripture readings, I will suggest that one kind of creation care strategy involves sowing relationships that bridge urban and rural divides—relationships that might reap a richer possibility of forging just relations for both land and people.

We encounter earthy images of a God-given nourishing and flourishing in Isaiah and Psalm 66. Post-exilic Jerusalem is envisioned as a wet nurse who satisfies “from her consoling breast” (Isaiah 66:11). Because God is a “mother” who “comforts her child” (Isaiah 66:13), our “bodies shall flourish like the grass” (Isaiah 66:14), and God “will extend prosperity to [Jerusalem] like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream” (Isaiah 66:12). The healing and replenishment of our lives is utterly earthly in form and expression, yet divinely generated. As Luther put it in his Large Catechism commentary on the first commandment (“You shall have no gods”):

Creatures are only the hands, channels, and means through which God bestows all blessings. For example, he gives to the mother breasts and milk for her infant, and he gives grain and all kinds of fruits from the earth for man’s nourishment—things which no creature could produce by himself. . . . We must acknowledge everything as God’s gifts and thank him for them, as this commandment requires. Therefore, this way of receiving good through God’s creatures is not to be disdained, nor are we arrogantly to seek other ways and means than God has commanded, for that would not be receiving our blessings from God but seeking them from ourselves (Luther, Large Catechism, trans.Theodore Tappert, http://apostles-creed.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/luthers-large-catechism.pdf, p. 8).

The psalmist urges the planet itself to give thanks for the ways that God acts in and through blessings that take material form (like a sea parting to make way for the Hebrews to pass over on dry land): “Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth” (Psalm 66:1).

While the readings in Isaiah and Psalm 66 cast a vision of earthly well-being, in Galatians and Luke we encounter agricultural metaphors that bear a prophetic spirit of warning and admonition about threats to God’s harvest. Here the blessings spoken of in Isaiah are contingent not only upon our being open to receive what God provides through natural means, but also upon paying close attention to the shape of our human interactions and to whether or not we are discerning and heeding God’s call amid those interactions. Thus Paul commands the Galatians,

Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for your reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all. . .  (Galatians 6:7-10).

Paul associates sowing “to your own flesh” with his familiar theme of seeking justification by Jewish ritual works like circumcision (Galatians 6:12-15) instead of justification by faith in the “cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (6:14). But he associates sowing “to the Spirit’ with “doing what is right,” in order to reap “eternal life from the Spirit”—or what he calls “a new creation” (6:15).

In Luke 10, fields ripe for harvest symbolize cities and towns with people ready to hear and respond to the gospel news about the kingdom of God—a way of life together that promotes spiritual and physical healing for all. Here Jesus is like a farmer trying to gather together workers to do the reaping: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Luke 10:2). So Jesus sends out 70 people, working in pairs, to visit “every town and place where he himself intended to go” (Luke 10:2). Jesus does not harvest alone. Indeed, in this story, Jesus seems to act behind the scenes in a contemplative manner (rather, perhaps, as we might experience the risen and ascended Christ doing today), for while the 70 went about healing the sick, releasing people from their demons, and announcing the nearness of the kingdom of God, Jesus sat and perceived the spiritual fruits of their harvest: “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” (Luke 10:18).

If we hold in green imagination all the various natural and agricultural metaphors we find in today’s scripture readings, we might ask ourselves: where is the Spirit sending us forth as laborers for a ripe harvest that nourishes both humans and the world in which we dwell? What kind of sowing might we do to promote a ripe harvest that fosters what Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz calls the “kindom of God?”

As someone who lives in west central Illinois, one desire that keeps coming to mind in a Spirit-driven way is a hunger to connect farmers with urban or suburban dwellers who know nothing about farming or the agricultural industry. I began to have this thought one week when I witnessed two distinct expressions of youth leadership in my rural university town.

The first was a presentation at a Sunday luncheon at my Lutheran church by four high schoolers, all young women, about their participation in Future Farmers of America (FFA). I was amazed by how well FFA is preparing young people for a wide range of possible careers in agriculture, but also for leadership skills that include everything from taking responsibility for a self-designed agricultural project, to speech competitions, to knowledge of parliamentary procedure. At national conferences, they meet and stay in touch with fellow FFA members who hail from all 50 states and the US territories. Their clear enthusiasm left me confident about the future of agriculture, including a boldness about meetings its challenges.

The second presentation was a Saturday night fashion show, created largely by black university students who designed clothes and modeled them while telling a story. The woman who wrote the script for the modeling show is a Religious Studies minor from St. Louis who wants to work with people with disabilities, and maybe one day help them find creative self-expression through a fashion show of their own. Here, too, I witnessed initiative, drive, imagination, and leadership among young people.

While these two groups of young people may have quite different interests, I have found myself wondering how congregations can encourage meeting with and collaboration between people (young to old) who are deeply committed to their respective communities or fields, but share qualities like dedication and experience at organizing events. It is just the seed of a dream right now; and perhaps, like Jesus, I think it best for those in agriculture and in urban organizations to themselves go ahead to harvest the rich fields of possibility. Some of the fruits could be collaboration on public policy—from economic to environmental—that could be rooted in better mutual understanding between rural and urban or suburban communities.

“We reap what we sow.” What if we sowed the seeds of a genuine cultural exchange that doesn’t begin with the premise of privileged missioners helping those in need? A mission trip is not always the same thing as building cross-cultural connections among people who perceive one another as social equals. Whether they take one to the inner city, to disasters sites, to Appalachia, or to a Native American reservation, domestic mission trips are often premised on some sort of economic or class disparity. But what would happen instead if we cultivated rural-urban meet-ups between professionals, or people already active and experienced in organizations? Here the conversations have the potential to move beyond personal testimony, beyond direct service, into a mutual cultural understanding and respect that could bear fruit in the political arena. Instead of sowing ignorance and polarized jabs about rednecks or urban elites, instead of reaping a political culture that is sown in resentment of outsiders who fail to understand or respect “us,” perhaps we could sow mutual understanding and respect of different ways of life in relationship to land and to culture. There would still be arguments, still hard environmental and social problems to solve, but we would be better resourced for debating and imagining into their resolutions together.
 

If we send out harvesters adept at sowing bridge-building across the rural-urban divide, perhaps we can ultimately reap the flourishing of a new and renewed creation. We would be fostering the social capital for developing and supporting a public policy with regard to climate change that includes at the table those who work the land, as well as those who dwell in Jerusalem and other cities that need to be nourished by the fruits of that land.

Amy Carr     amyreneecarr@gmail.com