Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD June 5, 1983
No matter how sophisticated we may become, something in us reaches out for the soil, reaches out for our roots and stirs within us to claim a simpler, more basic way of life. I would just about bet that most of us here do not think of the city as our home, not this city or any other city. We think, many of us, at least, of small towns or the countryside, we think of places with quaint names and country stores and main streets one building deep. Despite the tremendous growth of urban life in this nation, a whole host of Americans think of themselves as essentially rural people who have just become a little citified.
And because we have become citified, because we have come to the city to earn our living and to pitch our tents, at least for a while, there stirs within us that longing for the soil, that hunger to breathe clean air and to know the tastes and the smalls and the sounds of country life.
In fact, it's always been that way. In the 18th century French nobles sought to have the best of both worlds and built for themselves pretentious chateaux, but not in the city. Not in Paris where life was supposed to be dirty and complicated and mean, but out in the countryside, where they could pretend to be just simple farm folk, close to the soil.
Farther back than that, in the middle ages, when the monks built their monasteries, trying as best they knew how to recreate the style of holy simplicity to which they believed God had called, they went to the byways, to the lonely places, and built not only houses of prayer but also vast farms. More than that, they worked those farms themselves, they gave themselves to prayer, to works of charity, and to a relationship of labor and of love to the earth. It was their purpose to be in touch with earth.
Indeed, you can go back even farther than that, much farther; you can go back to Old Testament times, to that period in Israel's early history when she was on her way to becoming a settled nation. And you can see how some of the earliest of the prophets -- Samuel, for instance, or Elijah – how they worried that as Israel settled into cities and concentrated her attention to urban life rather than tilling the soil and tending the flocks, then maybe she would forget her God. Maybe she would not remember that it was the Lord her God who had led her forth as a wandering, rural people, with no fixed home. The concern of the prophets, in a sense, was that Israel might no longer be in touch with earth.
And so it comes as no surprise to us that we moderns also feel that need to be in touch with earth. We do a great deal to express that need. For example, we twentieth century Americans have created that strange new thing known as a suburb. In the suburb the goal of it all is to create, on a small scale, something of country life, something of being in touch with earth. And so we while away our Saturdays either coaxing that grass to grow, or, when it does, cutting it down. And planting flowers here and tomatoes there and cucumbers somewhere else – why? Not just to kill time, surely, because we often complain we don’t have enough time. Not even just to create status symbols, the greenest grass, the flossiest flower bed, because, after all, that would wear thin after a while. I think it is because we want, we need to be in touch with earth. We need to go back, even if it is only in our imaginations, to the basics of human existence: to the soil, to the sources of meaning, to the foundations of life itself. We need to be in touch with earth because it means we can be in touch with ourselves and with our God.
Why else, for example, would anybody uproot scores of Kentucky born and bred wild flowers, perfectly happy where they grew up, as anybody born and bred in Kentucky would be, and then transplant them to the unlikely garbage fill of Silver Spring? That’s what my wife did when we moved here years ago … because, and I do mean this quite seriously, to be in touch with those flowers, to be in touch with earth, was to be in touch with a part of herself. It’s important.
Why else would I be able to look up at a New York skyscraper and discover up there, forty stories up, a penthouse apartment, complete with shrubs and trees hanging out over the edge of the building? Because even in that rarified atmosphere, even there where everything is concrete and steel and city life, someone has an urge to be in touch with another style, another aspect of life, to be in touch with earth.
In the book of our origins, the book of Genesis, there are some clues about this reality. There is something said in this ancient document that not only points to this dimension of our personalities, but even gives it an interpretation. In other words, in the mind and plan of God it is no accident that we need to be, want to be in touch with earth. It is no accident that you and I feel just a little out of touch with the basics unless on occasion we dig our fingers into the soil of earth or run barefoot through a field or tramp through the forest. It is no accident, for our God has created us with a kinship to all of that, and with more than a kinship too, he has created us with a responsibility for it all. Listen:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the airs, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth … Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion.”
The story of our creation in Genesis is saying to us that we have a responsibility to earth, that it is given to us to have dominion over the earth, that in effect we have separated ourselves from something very basic to ourselves if we neglect the care of the earth. It's put in a picturesque way in the other creation story in Genesis 2 (if you did not know that there were two creation stories, we’ll need to talk about that) … in the other creation story in Genesis 2 it is said that the Lord God formed us of the dust of the earth and breathed into our nostrils the breath of life. Dust of the earth we are, a part of the material, the stuff of creation, and unless we recognize that we have missed something in God’s plan for us.
Now if you read this creation story carefully you will discover that what it says is that we are both material beings and spiritual beings. Both material physical, stuff, beings, and spiritual beings. It speaks of men and women who are to have dominion over all the earth, who are themselves formed from the earth; but it also paints our portraits as having been made in the image and likeness of the creator himself. Spiritual. But both physical and spiritual.
The problem is, you see, that it is so easy to lose track of either one side or the other of this equation. So easy to forget that we are both physical and spiritual. The secularists, the folks we encounter on the street every day, they are the ones who imagine that we are only physical and are not spiritual. They are concerned with satisfying the needs of the body, with feeding good old No.1. They have no trouble with the idea that we are of the earth; they have forgotten, however that there is in us that image of the divine, that we are spiritual
But there is another side, and it is equally shortsighted. There is a kind of Christian piety which thinks only in terms of being spiritual, and wants to erase the reality of our physical, or our earthy natures. There is the kind of piety which talks only about heaven, way out there in the ethereal somewhere, but cannot see that as a Christian I have some responsibility for the way life is lived in the here and now. There is the kind of religion which claims that I do not have to take seriously what is going on in politics or economics or cultural life or anything else that is earthly, that that is all just corruption anyway, and that what God calls us to is the sweet by and by when we shall meet on that beautiful but altogether unearthly shore.
But do you see that if you read Genesis carefully you have to understand that we are both spiritual and physical, that we are in the image of God but we are also of the earth, and that therefore our God calls us to be responsible for the earth, he calls us to be in touch with earth.
Now this morning you and I are called to gather around this table. And on this table, which of course speaks to us of profound spiritual realities, you find physical things, material things, things which are of the earth. Bread: some call it the staff of life, bread made of grain born of the earth. The most basic of human foods from practically the beginning of time. Of the earth.
And wine, the fruit of the vine, again of the earth. Taken from that which the Lord God gave to man in the very beginning and said “I have given you every plant, every tree for food.” Bread and wine, to bring us in touch with earth.
And if we see the Lord's Supper as a spiritual meal, all right, so it is. It is a symbolic meal which reminds of the deep things of the spirit, of a life poured out and of a price paid for our sin. That's true enough.
But it also points to the relationship the Lord has given us to the things of earth. It reminds us that however spiritual we are or become, we are never far from this life and from our responsibility for it.
And so I cannot, you see, come to this heavenly feast and forget that there are those for whom I am responsible who have not enough to eat at their earthly tables.
And I cannot arrive here at this table spread by the Lord who made me in his image and forget that he also made me responsible, made me steward over the things of this world, my resources, my material goods. The bread, .the wine, they teach me that.
Nor can I suppose, as I come here, that our God is aloof from it all, that he is not involved, that He somehow concerns Himself only with the timeless and the eternal, for at the table I know again that God was in Christ, in human flesh, of the earth, earthy. And he cares. He cares about all that we are.
No, I come here to this table and to these elements. I see them, I smell them. I handle them, I taste them. And I know again that I am in touch with earth and am therefore in touch with the Living God, my creator, who made me in his image, but who made me also his representative, his caretaker, in the earth.
