051709-Click-Here-to-Play
Preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, May 17.
Our first text comes from the “holiness code” of Leviticus. Holiness for Israel meant the life of godliness, or a life of imitating God. The over arching command for all these is that they love all persons (19: 18), including foreigners.
Leviticus 19:9-10 – When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
The second text follows the Ten Commandments in a section known as the “Book of the Covenant,” regarded as the oldest legislation in the Bible.
Exodus 23:10-11 – For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield. The seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat…You shall do the same with your vineyard and with your olive orchard.
Many years ago I went on a weekend retreat with 3-4 carloads of men, traveling back and forth across the Central Valley from Fresno to the Pacific Coast and back. The car that I rode in on the way home made a stop deep in the heart of the valley, as one of the men was a scientist and researcher at a lonely outpost station from the UC Davis. We travelled the dusty state highways through tiny towns looked like they were straight out of Mexico, by massive fields with irrigation canals bringing water to these otherwise forlorn and desolate areas. On the particular weekend we were on retreat, the cantaloupe field across from the research station was harvested; acres and acres of very aromatic melons. Because most of the harvesting is done by machine, whatever is not picked up by the harvester is simply left in the field. The 3-4 of us in that car literally filled the back of an old Oldsmobile station wagon with perfectly good melons, and hardly made a dent in the field. We sat on the bumper before continuing our drive to eat several straight from the field, using pocket knives to scrape the seeds out and carve the soft, tender fruit from its skin. Of course I loved melon, but there was no way I could have afforded the dozens of melons I took home to my delighted family that night. It was one of the rare occasions when I literally couldn’t eat cantaloupe fast enough. Selfishly, I wanted to go back out the next weekend, and the weekend after that. I’m sure farm workers and townspeople from the local area took advantage of the leftover melons, and that whatever was not gleaned was eventually plowed back into the earth to nourish it for another future crop.
This experience was reminiscent of the ancient practice described in Leviticus – this intentional practice of harvesting a field in such a way that it leaves a livable portion for the poor. It was a rudimentary care system – as leaders realized that without such a practice the poor – especially the widows and orphans – would go hungry. It was also our tradition’s early recognition that our care and use of the land is tied up intricately with our care of the poor among us.
In the same way, the land was to be treated carefully, allowed to lay fallow every 7 years. Just as we needed to care for one another, we needed to care for the land that would nourish us all.
In an age of exploding population growth and material lifestyles that if continued, will require the resources of at least four planets the size of Earth – this ancient link has never been more important.
In a time when we are straining very stability of the planet through consumption, waste, pollution, and disregard – it is even more imperative that we open our eyes to the truth that those among us suffering the most are the poor and people of color.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
- an additional 40 to 170 million poor people are at risk of hunger and malnutrition this century,
- 1 to 2 billion people already in poor areas could see further reduction in their water supplies.
- More than 100 million people could be affected by coastal flooding.
- In Africa, 75 to 250 million will face water scarcity by 2020,
- crop yields could be reduced by 50 percent in some areas.
- All these changes could quickly produce a refugee crisis with as many as 200 million displaced persons by 2050.
- In US 85% of all toxic landfills are in neighborhoods comprised of people of lower economic means and people of color. In 2007, the UCC Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) conducted a follow-up study to an original study done in 1987. The initial report discovered that the most significant factor in determining the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities in the US was race.
The report released in 2007, concludes that many of these same poor minority communities are still facing the same problems that they did 20 years ago; but now they are facing new problems “because of government cutbacks in enforcement, weakening health protection, and the dismantling of the environmental justice regulatory apparatus.”
We could spend hours listing statistics in all areas of life that would re-iterate the same point – the more we neglect our environment, the more the poor suffer the consequences. Will Allen is the founder of an amazing urban farm in Milwaukee called Growing Power. This farm produces literally tons of healthy food, dozens of jobs, and untold influence on the eating habits of thousands. Healthy food, he notes, is the foundation of social justice. Clean air, tillable land, potable water – are all the foundation of social justice and an environmental spirituality.
One of the practical and spiritual crises of our time is that often those of us who are wealthy have a sense that we live above the land…We don’t have to look to see if there is enough water in the well, to see if our goat has enough milk to share with us, to see if there are enough trees left to provide warmth through another bitterly cold winter, to see if the rain has brought enough moisture for crops.
As people of both faith and relative wealth, one of the first things we are called to do is acknowledge how easily we are seduced into thinking we don’t have enough; how easily we are convinced that we DON”T need to make connections between our lifestyles and the ravaging of the earth and our disregard for the poor. As inheritors of the Hebrew tradition and followers of Jesus and children of God, we are reminded of the need to counter the widespread cultural and religious messages that we DESERVE to live as wastefully and ignorantly as the average American does.
Our tradition reminds us that
To do justice is to live confessionally.
This doesn’t mean that we beat ourselves up repeatedly, rather it means that we acknowledge that without confession and humility we will continually be sucked into lifestyles that disregard the earth and the poor. To live confessionally is a lifestyle choice, not a onetime prayer.
Like many of you, we have a set of culinary knives that when first purchased were amazingly sharp. It usually happens that when we go to cut the first tomato of the summer, we realize how dull our knives have become. Constant use, cooking, and cleaning in a hurry mean that we don’t take the time to re-sharpen those knives. The more practiced we are at the sharpening, the less likely we will totally squash a tomato because of a dull knife.
So it is with our faith’s call to humility and confession. In our world of wealth, over consumption, and waste – we need repeatedly to return to our Creator and the creation in prayer to seek forgiveness, to listen anew to how we can change our lives, and to take practical steps honor God, honoring the earth and honoring all people.
To do justice is to live in community
The basic and most successful strategies at change involve working with others on the same issues or concerns. While we can support one another simply by sharing in the life of this congregation, we also need more dedicated, focused partners in specific changes. It may be buying clubs, sharing CSA boxes, traveling to legislative sessions together, working on mission trips or work days together, discussing our use of money and water and food and cars honestly and with respect.
Community saves resources and it holds us accountable to the lifestyles we want to live. Watching my wife leave on her bike in the morning and meeting Bob for a run on Saturday keep me running and going to the Y for workouts. In the recipe box we have had since an engagement party 26 years ago, the most worn and used recipes could all be categorized by names – Lisa’s chicken, Liz’s rice, Barbara’s bread, Mom’s Lush Slush, Simon’s turkey, Gretchen’s Dip. That so many of our favorite recipes are associated more with people than food is just a small indicator of a universal truth for us all – community matters because community connects us to the lives we want to lead. Therefore, the wider our community becomes, the more global our awareness is, the more we are equipped to make choices in our lives that support justice.
To do justice is to live interdependently in a way that links our care of the earth with our care for the poor.
I had a short, but wonderful visit with a farmer activist who will be organizing the farmer’s market held in our parking lot this summer on Wednesdays from 3- 7 p.m. Robert is part of this Growing Power organization, and is deeply committed to bringing good food options to people of color and people of limited means. He has received grant money to hire low income youth to work on his various plots in Madison and McFarland. With glee, he told stories of picking a carrot out of the ground and eating it right in front of the kids, who couldn’t believe he was eating something with a little dirt on it. And yet, he said, by the end of the summer – after working and weeding and harvesting – these same kids took great pride in eating the same way – straight from the ground.
He is excited to provide a market – what he calls a community market – right alongside our new vegetable village – and to provide an opportunity for mutual growth in understanding of the relationship between food and the poor. It gave me great pride to know that in this neighborhood, we were literally the only ones who could and would make the space available for such a market – our small way of saying these links matter – we are all better off because we are all eating better food.
It is a wonderful illustration that while great changes are needed in our attitudes and practices across this nation, they begin with small, practical steps that gradually lead to new ways of thinking. And so I encourage us to frequent the market, talk with our neighbors, learn from others about these connections, and to broaden our awareness of these issues as they impact all of us.
May we live confessionally, remembering we have much to learn.
May we live in community, drawing strength and knowledge and wisdom from one another, and others.
May we never forget we are connected to the land, and we are connected to all God’s people and called upon to deepen our connection to both.
Amen
{Much of the information for this sermon came from the National Council of Churches}
