Saturday, September 19, 2020 (today’s lectionary)
Blessed are we
During Illinois afternoons on these perfect autumn days, the air is so dry, my nose puckers. That happens all the time in Las Vegas, but not here. Usually my nostrils are humid and sticky, and I can barely pull them apart to breathe.
Harvest begins everywhere next week. The rains have stopped in mid-America, and the fields are as ready as they’ll ever be for the 53,000 pounds-per-axle beating they take every year. Corn and soybeans will pour through green and red combines, giant wagons, long semis, elevators, railcars and ships bound for every country in the world.
A sower went out to sow his seed.
And along the way, at least these days, a roustabout went out to drill the oil, a steelworker went out to build a wagon, and a machinist went out to create a combine. All in all, we think we’re pretty hot stuff, the way we’ve made all this work.
Still, nothing happens without the rain, and nothing happens without the sun.
Some seed withered for lack of rain.
Some seed choked in the thorns.
Birds came and ate some seed, and it never had a chance to grow.
But some seed fell on good soil, and grew and grew and grew.
Paul brings up the idea of the “second Adam” in his letter to the Corinthians.
The first man, Adam, became a living being.
Now the last Adam a life-giving spirit.
The first man was from the earth,
And the second man, from heaven.
We have made a big deal out of the “first man.” Feeding billions of people these days seems to require 53,000 pound-per-axle machines running all over the earth. This kind of glory-in-size makes us feel like gods, at least until the sun burns too hot or the rain falls at the wrong times. What we call “nature” (from natural, Latin natus, “to be born”) forces us to remember the “second man,” from heaven.
Of course this is what Paul calls Jesus, the firstborn among many brothers. Following Jesus, I sow the seed of my life on earth and am harvested (physical death brings spiritual birth) into my life in heaven.
Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one,
We shall also bear the image of the heavenly one.
Forever ago homo sapiens left the fields and forests to improve their lives. Hunter-gatherers committed to farming and learned to preserve their manna longer than a day. Abraham was a nomad, but his know-it-all nephew Lot settled in Sodom. We followed Lot – at first a few, then almost all. Very few hunter-gatherers exist these days in all the world. And it takes a thousand thousand combines to feed the rest of us. This may not be the best of ways to live.
Rich Mullins knew we are not as strong as we think we are. What Wendell Berry describes as the “way of ignorance” takes us down paths we cannot know beforehand and will eventually be unable to maintain. Assuming we have no limits will inevitably make an “ass out of you and me.” The Israelites learned the hard way not to store God’s gift of manna that fell from heaven; already overnight it would rot and make them sick if they tried to eat it.
The risks we take, as farmers and keepers of the flocks, as savers and insurers trying to make the future safe, in all our variations of the “first man,” might not be God’s first choice for his kids, but even now his promise never fails. Regardless of our fears, failures and desperate self-protection, God plants his seed for the “second man” in each of us, and he will make his harvest. Without giant run-over-us machines but instead driven by love, God plucks his fruit.
You rescue me from death and my feet from stumbling
So that I may walk before God in the light of the living.
In the meantime, knowing some of what there is to know, how then shall I live?
(1 Corinthians 15, Psalm 56, Luke 8, Luke 8)
#
