Here are two things: some soil from the community garden at the back of our church, and a communion wafer. Just reflect for a moment on what links there might be between them…..  Now, if I add a third thing, this loaf of bread, does that make a difference to how you might link the soil and the communion wafer? Just reflect for a moment on that….

Well, of course, bread is made from wheat which grows in the ground, and the communion wafer is a form of bread. That’s one obvious linkage, one obvious level of meaning. Though even on this level some urban children might find the link between soil and bread as difficult as they do the link between cows and milk; and also we seem to do our best to disguise the link between the bread we eat in the Eucharist and the bread we eat at home.

But linkage on this particular level of meaning is only the start.

Let’s reflect on each of these three separately.

Soil.
o It’s alive.
o It grows other life (as the waters and seas of this planet also do)
o In the creation story, Adam is formed from it. The word ‘adam’ comes from Hebrew adamah or earth, ground. Genesis 2:7 -Then the Lord God formed a man (Hebrew adam) from the dust of the earth (Hebrew adamah) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Thus the man became a living creature. . In this second creation story, ‘Adam’ is male, is a personal name, and ‘Eve’ comes from him. (In the first creation story the word ‘Adam’ is not a personal name; it refers to human beings as such, male and female.) But for our purposes this morning, let’s focus on the simple truth that we humans are given life by God who fashions our very being from the earth. From this stuff. We come from it; we are part of the web of life. And when we die our bodies go back to the earth – ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the cycle of life. Life on this planet is interdependent – an obvious, even banal statement.
o So soil is a symbol of our mortality, our creatureliness, our dependence on the rest of the God-given web of life. Within the providence of God, soil gives life to other living things and is itself alive, and we feed on those living things and depend on them for our life. Yet we’ve been living for centuries as though it’s not true, as though we can trash the planet and escape the consequences.

Now, bread.
o It comes from the soil, in the form of wheat (and some other soil-derived ingredients)
o It’s shaped by human labour and skill
o It’s a staple food, giving life to ‘Adam’, the creature made from the dust of the earth
o It becomes a symbol of the means of life: in the Lord’s Prayer we pray, ‘give us this day our daily bread’
Now, the Communion wafer
o It’s a form of bread
o Along with wine, it’s the outward and visible sign of the sacrament of the Eucharist we are gathered for today
o The inward and spiritual grace or gift of this sacrament is the body (and blood) of Christ, Jesus who became fully human
o Christ is the new Adam – human, and therefore He was as much dependent on bread and soil as you and I, and part of the web of life. But Christ is also the divine Word – and therefore at the root of the created soil’s very being. Christ is the ‘ground’ of the earth’s being, Christ is ‘immanent’ within His creation, including this living soil.
o Christ is the Bread of Life, giving us ‘eternal life’, the Life of the Age to come, beginning now.

So soil and bread and communion wafer seem to go together quite well. The Eucharist is, amongst many other things, a sort of weekly harvest festival, where we human creatures offer back to God through Christ what we have made of His gifts in creation, and He accepts them, and gives them back to us, and gives Himself along with them. So the altar amongst other things is a sort of ‘Table of Life’ around which we gather as a community.
 
But three questions to ponder about the soil:
1. Who owns it? Really?
2. What’s it for?
3. Is this soil inexhaustible? infinite?

And now for a change of gear.
We human beings were originally hunter-gatherers. Then we made a momentous shift, into agriculture, perhaps ten thousand years ago. (I’m using the term ‘agriculture’ broadly, to include pastoral farming as well as crop growing). Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, agriculture expanded, until now nearly all the productive land on this planet is exploited for agriculture. (What remains is either too steep, too wet, too dry, or too lacking in soil nutrients.) Along with this expansion of agriculture went a steady growth in human population until the beginning of the industrial age based on fossil fuels.  However, when coal and especially oil and gas came along, population shot up sharply. Why? Basically because this fossil fuel energy enabled the industrialisation of agriculture: fossil fuel-based fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation, and agricultural and processing machinery, and global transport of food products.

But there are two basic problems:
o What happens when this fossil fuel runs out (as we are assured will happen this century)? We’re now at what’s called ‘Peak Oil’ – discoveries of new oil and gas fields are tailing off while global demand keeps rising, along with human population.
o What has been happening to the soil in the meantime? We’ve broken the natural, closed life-cycle of soils. We’ve brought in ‘massive amounts of nutrients from outside’ of the local ecosystems, abusing it in the process. ‘Then we ship the products out of this ecosystem to be consumed by humans and ultimately to be disposed of in landfills and sewerage systems. Conventional agriculture’, globally viewed, is in fact ‘a gigantic through system that depletes our resources, exhausts our farmlands, and results in overwhelming mountains of garbage’ (from Eating Fossil Fuels, by Dale Allen Pfeiffer.) And in the same period, along with that loss of soil quality have gone great losses in actual soil quantity through erosion and desertification. Globally we are said to lose 75 billion tons of soil per year.

The so-called Green Revolution in agriculture is grinding to a halt, and industrial agriculture is heading for a cliff  The world is in effect eating fossil fuels, but they are about to become a diminishing resource. The food security of the world will therefore be increasingly under threat. For what happens when we humans no longer have fertilisers derived from fossil fuel, no longer have the oil to drive our farm machinery, no longer have the fuel to ship our food long distance? Where does that leave an urbanised world with an exploding population? (6.8 billion today, 9.5 billion in 40 years time.) And just as greed and bloodshed have often accompanied the expansion of agriculture, so they threaten to accompany its decline, and would certainly accompany its uncontrolled collapse. Genuinely sustainable agriculture is a matter of life and death.
A Christian journalist called Justin Fung writes pungently:
      ‘…here’s my take on the story of environmental stewardship, according to the Bible: God created the earth (Genesis 1:1); God created human beings (Genesis 1:26); God told human beings to look after the earth (Genesis 1:28); human beings screwed up (a large portion of the rest of the Bible.)  And that’s that. Or at least, that’s the (over-)simplified précis. A theology of ecology, a theology of creation care, is part of — and is consistent with — a grander biblical theology, woven through with themes that can be found throughout scripture.’
And he goes on to talk about these themes: about stewardship, about God’s appreciation of His creation, about the poor, about relationship and community, about children, and about justice.
Back to this particular soil with which I started. It’s not simply soil; it’s soil from a ‘community garden’, the one at the back of our church. Now community gardens have a range of legitimate purposes, though some people are confused about them. And they are popping up in many places around the Western urban world, including our prosperous and favoured New Zealand. Several weeks ago we had a meeting in Taita and identified at least twenty three ventures in the Hutt Valley we could call ‘community gardens’. Some are simply cooperative ventures, with the produce going to those who work them. Some meet genuine local need, the produce going into a local foodbank. Some meet need which is not so local, with the produce going into foodbanks further away. Some are therapeutic. Some are educational (teaching either adults or children how to produce food). Some are primarily seen as a means of building community – and they’re a great way of drawing people together. Some are seen as part of the strategy for reducing carbon in the atmosphere by reducing ‘food miles’ – the distance which food has to transported using fossil fuels. I think this is the origin of the community garden out the back.
All these various uses are valid. But the real importance of the handful of small community gardens existing now is that they are stepping stones to the future, when urban food production must become more and more the norm. Real change is on the way, if not in my lifetime, then in the lifetime of most of you, and certainly of your children and grandchildren. We human beings will have to grow our food closer and closer to where we consume it, and learn again how to grow it in a sustainable way – and to do it together.  The community garden on the other side of that sanctuary wall is profoundly related to this altar here, which I described earlier as a ‘Table of Life’ around which we gather as a community. How could the two not be related?
Wendell Berry, an American farmer, a radical Christian, and a writer and poet, is someone whose works I’m starting to appreciate and explore. Listen to some lines from his poem, The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of the Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union. (The Union is the American Union, not a trade union.)
‘From the union of power and money,                                                                      From the union of power and secrecy,
From the union of government and science,
From the union of government and art,
From the union of science and money,
From the union of ambition and ignorance,
From the union of genius and war,
From the union of outer space and inner vacuity,
The Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
Secede into care for one another
And for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.’
Or again (from Wendell Berry’s prose this time):
‘The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed, or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.’

Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he said ‘Blessed are the meek (the gentle, the humble), for they shall inherit the earth.’

Think about it.

A sermon preached in St Alban’s Anglican Church, Eastbourne, on 15 November 2009, by the Revd Canon Peter Stuart.

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